washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

Culture still eats

By

… strategy for breakfast

I was leaving a voicemail (as I still make phone calls like I did in the late ’90s and early 2000s) last week where I mentioned the culture/strategy dyad, though a more accurate descriptions is the mathematical pair of greater than/lesser than where:

culture > strategy

Then I shared with a friend how a new music video provides me with “some doorways into what the kids, teens, and 20somethings are being and feeling” as well as how Blackness continues to set the precedents for life and in culture. Someone astutely said years ago how new music is not being written and sung for 40 year olds, so new music continues to be a way to learn about and learn from the lifeforce of teenagers and early adulthood, specifically, the culture and politics and outlooks for those who are 13-29.

Later, I read a four year old interview between Mariame Kaba and No Name for the first time, where Kaba says:

For me, PIC abolition is about imagining a new way. And as Ruthie Gilmore says all the time, abolition is about making things as much as it is about dismantling. I love the fact that art and creativity are so much about making things.

Kaba goes on:

What you just mentioned, [as Toni Cade Bambara said] about art making revolution irresistible, is so critical. You attract people to social movements based on a whole bunch of stuff — including aesthetics, including art. All social movements of any sort of import have understood the role of music and song in the collective making of social movements.

A few weeks ago, I was attesting how I am a proponent of library books, library cards, baking from scratch, and longform journalism in a frenetic culture. Part of why I continue these slowform ways of being is as a sort of defiance against dominant culture where smartphone technology is dizzying and relentless, leaving people feeling unsatisfied, if not insufficient with the quality of our/their own lives. There is plenty that is bad in the world, but how we live need not be diminished by the false appearances of social media.