I was off last week for a wedding and a few days away from work. I hope you didn’t miss me…but guess what? I’m back and WORKING this week. You take a few days off and come back to a mound of stuff you knew would be there but were powerless to put off. But enough of the bad, last week I got to witness a beautiful wedding, see some dear friends, enjoy The Bay, and scoop a new camera to play around with. This week, we’re reporting live from hot-ass LA. Me Now 110, a long read on one of my favorite living artists, drops Monday.
I need to ask a question I hope no one I know really knows the answer to: how popular is Hello Kitty? As part of my extended week of birthday celebrations, I found myself at Dodger Stadium for Hello Kitty night. It was, relatively, packed. Fans—fans of Hello Kitty to be clear—showed up early for the plushies and hats the stadium gave out, filling Dodger Stadium well beyond my expectations for a Monday night against the Mariners. In case you were wondering the answer to that opening question, in 2021, according to Statista Hello Kitty was the second highest grossing media franchise in the US: $84.5 billion.
The recent Los Angeles Review of Books issue features an article where a series of writers discuss the group chat as a form. As a private, reserved, introverted, quiet, whatever-you’d-like-to-call-it person who find any group chat with more than 3 people immediately overwhelming, I found Jamie Hood’s blurb (right up front if you’re scrolling-averse) really resonant. I also want to plug the Sarah Thankam Mathews bit too, this time near the end.
For three weeks now, I’ve apologized each morning to H and C before proceeding to record my sorrow. For three weeks now, they’ve reminded me that they want to hear about my life, that it has matter to them, that our daily conversations remain daily conversations because we care profoundly for one another, and that care is unconditional, is adaptive, that care shapes itself around the trouble of present circumstance, regardless of how painful. - Jamie Hood
I haven’t listened to the most recent Ka album, but I find Ka albums to be rewardingly dense works and am mostly waiting for the right moment to listen. Matthew Ritchie helmed the review at P4k and it’s a good review. Of note is how long it takes before Ritchie actually remarks on how the album sounds, much of the review deals with the lyrical content of the album. I’d be hard-pressed to find another artist whose albums deserved that much lyrical attention before you even get to the sonics. (This review also serves as another reminder that the Mano-era of P4k seems ok for now.)
When was the last time you scoured the Urban Outfitters website? I specifically mean the furniture/home section of the website. Why was I? Well, I occasionally crack it open and scroll for the sole purpose of sussing out the vibes in home decor. Urban Outfitters(dot)com offers interesting shapes and funny descriptions of colors, names weird furniture and utterly wasteful types of fabric. A good Urban Outfitters scroll makes me more discerning in thrift and discount stores. On my most recent scroll I noticed not the products being sold themselves, but the embellishments of taste wedged into nightstands or propped up on coffee tables that Urban Outfitters product designers use to signify coolness. The story they tell about trendy books and en vogue colors reflect a culture fixed on navel-gazing. Cool people want to see themselves identified in cool things. Coolness becomes a self-replicating act of thievery (I’m taking the idea of stealing here from a recent shefly editorial I found interesting) called trend-spotting. Virgil Abloh remains the easily accessible holy grail of coffee table books. Slim Rupi Kaur poetry collections signify folks in touch with their feelings. Every ashtray sits unabashedly adorned with a smoldering joint.
We are exposed to more images and artistic flourishes than any generation of people ever. We see far more images, are marketed to with graphics, and confront more pieces of non-word things than any other group of people to walk this planet. (Can you tell the copy of Susan Sontag’s On Photography I finally picked up threw me into an existential crisis?) Generative AI threatens to blow the lid off it all, making it easier to produce graphics and harder to determine the real from the fake. We are about to have to learn, quickly, what happens when we’re confronted not necessarily with faked images all the time, but are decidedly placed in a world where any image might be fake. The idea of a populous riddled with even more undeserved skepticism terrifies me. Two recent articles speak directly to this new reality with lucidity and an ample dose of fear.
This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after. - Sarah Jeong
Everyone, in other words, has been granted license to choose which images they will and will not believe, and they can elect to unsee an image simply because it doesn’t confirm their priors: the mere possibility of its algorithmic generation opens it to suspicion. - Sonja Drimmer
(Editor’s note: these links read almost as correctives of the preceding Urban Outfitters links…maybe there’s something there)
A note from the article club I said I’d start a few weeks back. We discussed a few issues from Hammer and Hope’s Issue 4, and I want to specifically point to this Kholood Eid piece. Eid’s photography and words commit to finding beauty in a place and time and topic where we so seldom see it. To see a child playing with their mother in connection with a long lineage of activists, organizers, and protesters is a particular kind of beauty that offers hope that this world will not end. At least not without a fight.
With that we’re off. As always if you have a link, share a link. If you have a thought, share a thought. If you want to start a Hammer and Hope reading club, bang my line. Peace.
gentleman and the tramp not saying who's the tramp. (I would be down for a hammer and hope bookclub)