On November 17, 2011, my dear friend Felix Omai was deliberately injured by the California Highway Patrol during an occupy protest.

Omai had clothes-pinned two bedsheet banners that read, “Have you been occupied?” to a fence on the Sprowel Creek Bridge in Humboldt County. CHP officers demanded that she remove the signs. [...]

Often the metaphor of healing is (re)imagined by our colonized minds into visions of a doctor in scrubs with a stethoscope, but as a mestizo (mixed-blood) Chicano with a body that is a living crossroads for all continents, my vision of healing is not rooted in western ideologies and does not regard healing as a product but as a process.

I recognize that there are collectible forms of ephemera (i.e., baseball cards, napkins with brand names on them, keychains, etc), but to read about it as something that applies to trauma opens up new ideas of the impossibility of normative and traditional archive.

Lorna Simpson’s show Gathered, on exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum this summer, interfaces found photographs/objects with the artist’s “experience” of them as icons of identity, memory, and archive. The three-part show consists of two groupings — or gatherings? — of photos on facing walls and one video piece.

Simpson groups found photos in flat [...]

the incomparable james baldwin speaks freely on the hypocrisy of the city in this remarkable kqed documentary entitled /take this hammer/. in the spring of 1963, baldwin paid a visit to san francisco and was guided around the city by youth for service’s director orville luster. baldwin meets with various members of black communities, including [...]

on friday, april 14, homeless transgender youth and their allies staged a protest that included a symbolic sweep of the castro to recall the historic tenderloin sweep by queer youth organization vanguard in 1966.

homeless transgender youth sweep castro.

Betty White, accused of “outing” Cary Grant, has clarified the situation with the help of The bAdvocate: he was only prone to enjoy the “jokes.”

God, I love Hollywood. First of all, who cares, and second of all, can we just recall the scene in The Proposal when Betty White dons a department store poncho and [...]

i visited prelinger library on wednesday at 301 8th/howard. a “wee library,” as a researcher from cumbria, england, calls it. one giant room of stuff people threw away or wanted to throw away, but rick prelinger paid them not to.

some of these boxes contain found photos from rick prelinger’s days fishing test [...]

than to argue w/ kenneth goldsmith at 2am about archiving. his recent essay on the poetryfoundation.org site disturbs me, not only because he conflates the art of archiving to the unconscious digital processes of a computer, but also because he seems determined to reduce the deliberate activity of archiving to a mechanization. a reflex rather [...]

i’ve been wandering the city with particular constraints. last wednesday’s involved following /pink death/ through the city. i’ll post some photos below from this flaneur — mostly from clarion alley, which i consider a queer archive.

i do want to add that on this same day i lost my glasses, my backpack disintegrated, my wallet, [...]