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Essay in N+1 by Tobi Haslett about the 2020 protests.
“What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!” Marx gasped in a letter when news reached him that the members of the Paris Commune had repelled the imperial army and abolished the police; he said they were “storming heaven.” And a version of that thought — a degraded, baffled paraphrase — flashed to mind as I saw the masked children of New York slam their skateboards against police vans and throw themselves at lines of officers packing guns and shields and nightsticks; chanting the name of a dead man while sprinting with hundreds down an avenue, I’d never felt an ecstasy more complicated or a freedom less false. On a plateglass window in SoHo, someone graffitied, simply, “GEORGE!” So many of the faces I saw streaking through spring and summer — lit by burning cars and reflected in broken windows, doing victory laps around sneaker stores and bloodied by batons — belonged to adolescents. Armed only with their psychotic courage, they were running, dancing, singing, smashing, burning, screaming, storming heaven: all rapturous varieties of Baraka’s “magic actions.”
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Apr 19, 2024
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plus:
London-based post-punk of the 2010s
The Maoist period of Jean-Luc Godard (1967-1979)
The anti-revisionist leftist movements of the post-1968s American left and 1968 organizations in general
I could go on about all four for hours on end, these are just the most I've accumulated pages of notes and literature about
Apr 5, 2024
Been thinking a lot of this Beuys piece and works from artists created during the span of the vietnam war and the civil rights movement. The optimism that if only there were enough dialogue created with their pieces, you could galvanize individuals to organize and together enact change.
I’m wondering if Beuys were alive today would he still hold onto that same sliver of hope?
(Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me)
Jan 23, 2025
Top Recs from @blipkin
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forget if i put this here already, but this app and are.na are my favorite digital locations rn
brainchild of members of iconic design/art collective k-hole, it’s a place for making connections and shit
it’s like if Pinterest was more design forward and had cooler people and a lot of pdfs
follow me https://www.are.na/ben-lipkin
Jan 6, 2024
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You can dm them something and they’ll upload it! For free!
Dec 21, 2023
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old men named things like “Larry“ and “Bob” will respond with either confusion or desire, it feels more mystical than most religion, and is great fun. write to a friend, or someone you lost, or someone you want
Dec 20, 2023