9.09.2013

A Few Things I'm Excited about: Not Quite Fall Edition




School is in full swing. There are as yet no papers to grade. The late summer light stupid beautiful and golden and I've got two quarts of Number 1 Sons pickles in my fridge and a new episode of The Newsroom on queue. Just try and harsh my mellow.

My students have known each other for about two weeks now, so obviously it's time for them to start dating each other. In October, when the inevitable drama begins to unfold, I will share this genius toddler adage with them: WORRY BOUT YOURSELF.

I spent a little too much time this weekend ogling the rad food documentary site, to cure. This is the kind of food photography I want to take.

In this open letter to her older brother, Dr. Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson has written the most compelling and fascinating gentrification narrative I've ever read. A particularly poignant thing to stumble across while drinking a short americano at the Big Bear Cafe in Bloomingdale, freshly painted rowhouses on all sides:

I've come to appreciate jazz, wine, hookah, and designer pizza. I am sure you would have enjoyed these things too, if it were not for your absence that in part made space for it all.... 

...The park and still-swings that were backdrop to your morning murder are today the spot where first dates go. It's a clean green park where couples with coffee sit on benches and read. Or meander. They unwind and relax where you transitioned. They exercise a luxury of time in the place where you were refused more. Your death spot was my high school bus stop.

My former professor Michael Wenthe and his cadre of comic nerd genius co-artists are running a Kickstarter for Cartozia Tales,  "An all-ages fantasy anthology with all the stories set in a shared world, created by a team of top-notch indie cartoonists". It. Looks. Awesome. So many rad, hand-drawn backer gifts. I'm for sure getting a subscription to share with my 12 year-old sister, Ziggy.

Oh, Internet, first you give me this perfect, perfect, description of What's in Prince's Fridge, and then you tell me it was an April Fool's joke. Nevermind. Leave me alone. I'm too busy contemplating how yak milk can be "freely given" to worry about details like veracity.

1 comment:

  1. "As yet no papers to grade." Music to a teacher's ears! (First batches will be here soon enough, though.)

    Of course the favorite mustard in Prince's Fridge is raspberry! (The kind you buy in a second-hand grocery, I suppose.)

    And thanks for the kind words about Cartozia Tales. I hope Ziggy likes the comics!

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