Monday, August 31, 2020
Calling all outraged creatives!
Help @thecreateresist visually document 1,000 Outrages that have happened during the Trump Administration. We are looking for artists/designers/illustrators/animators to create with us - we provide the fact checked outrage, you provide the amazing art.
🌈 BIPOC/LGBTQ+ creators are a must, but all are welcome.
💰 There is an $50 honorarium for every graphic posted. Multiple submissions accepted up to 10 pieces.
🗣 Let's raise our voices and end this insanity in November.
🗳 Campaign Signup: 1,000 Hours of Outrages
👩🏽🎤 Please share with any activist artists or creative collectives who want to contribute internet-sized art to end the outrage.
Thank you!
Reading
✊🏽How Chadwick Boseman Embodies Black Male Dignity by Reggie Ugwu for NYT.
“In a pop taxonomy of black male nobility, he is cut squarely from the mold of Barack Obama — generally cool-blooded, affable, devoted to unglamorous fundamentals — a figure whom he is doubtlessly on a shortlist to portray in an inevitable epic.
Boseman told me his method of humanizing superhumans begins with searching their pasts. He’s looking for gestational wounds, personal failures, private fears — fissures where the molten ore of experience might harden into steel.”
💬 TikTok Comment Dictionary by Michael Goldstein for In Media Res.
Vibe check.
If someone ‘passes the vibe check’ it means they’re cool, impressive or chill. Often ‘vibe check’ comments are found on aesthetically pleasing videos that present a mood without a specific storyline.
👉👈
This is an emoji to represent nervousness, often posted with a vulnerable video where the poster is putting themselves out there on Tik Tok. It is derived from Anime symbolism.
Main character
‘Main character’ refers to the tendency of people to believe that life revolves around themselves. Crucially this is always used ironically with self-awareness. What makes this comment interesting is that it makes fun of the narcissistic culture incubated by the millennial IG generation. Tik Tok is about amassing views of content, not followers of personalities, so naturally Tik Tokers like to make fun of being a ‘main character’.
☎️ What Phone Calls Have Given Me That Video Chats Won’t by Jessica Gross for NYT.
Terry Gross conducts most of her interviews remotely: “I find it to be very intimate talking to somebody you’re hearing in your headphones. I mean, they’re really being mainlined right into your brain.”
🐅 How Much of These Hills is Gold: A Novel by C Pam Zhang. The Gaysian Book Club pick for Summer 2020, a fictional reimagining of the wild American West from the perspective of two orphaned Chinese siblings — Lucy is civilization, Sam is wilderness — on a dusty, muddy, treacherous journey to bury their father Ba.
The one-word chapter names evoke the bare elements that make up the story: “Salt,” “Plum,” “Water,” “Mud,” and “Gold.”
It mines the American mythos and novels that give voice to long-forgotten ghosts: from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to Toni Morrison’s Beloved — mixed with fantasy tigers, spirits, staccato poetry, and the historical truths of Chinese immigrants arriving for the Gold Rush in the 1800’s and fighting to survive in “a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians… its birds and its green and its living.”
A cherry on top: reading in the Acknowledgments that one of Zhang’s writing perches for the novel was at the Hungry Ghost on Flatbush Avenue, my neighborhood coffee shop.
Watching
💀 Scary Movies For When the World is a Fright. A continuing theme of watching horror movies to make the “real” world comparatively less horrific.
Listening
The Michelle Obama Podcast, Episode 5: “The Gift of Girlfriends with Denielle, Sharon, and Kelly” (44 mins) I’ve been listening to Michelle Obama to calm myself down in those moments of first waking up, or going to bed, mainlining her voice into my brain for calm, cool, collectedness.
I especially appreciated this episode with her besties and the bond they formed, and yes it’s a special bonus to hear My Forever First Lady say “This is why I love Sharon” and “I appreciate you so much Sharon” and I just might edit a supercut of Michelle saying positive mantras to me (er, her bestie, Dr. Sharon Malone) as the perfect motivation mixtape.
Dope Stuff for Your Desk
Know any helpers? Put a bright spot on their desk with this lovely Helper Card stationery from Montague Studios in west Tennessee. 60 lb matte stock, blue raspberry envelope. $4
From the Mixtape
🍄 Psilocybin Research. Meditative mushroom music. (h/t @rebel_remixlife)
Take care ‘til next week,
SP
From the desk of @hellopanelo: queer nerdy Filipina, strategist, and radical optimist.
Monday Memo #13: 1,000 Hours of Outrage