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@weird.light

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I've been a fan of Edie McKee Harper for a long, long time -- at least the works of hers I'd seen. So it was super exciting to get a chance to talk to curators at @taftmuseum and Edie's son Brett -- whose work I also adore -- for a feature about her for @cincinnatipublicradio. They were patient with this not-an-arts-reporter and generous with their time; it was so fun hanging out and talking about Edie's adventerous, kind spirit.

I found their insights fascinating, especially as it related to sexism prevalent in the arts at the time and the tensions between Edie's creative drive and her devotion to her family.

“I feel like I owe her a debt, which maybe sounds a little crazy,” Brett told me. “But she gave a lot of her time she could have been creating to myself and Charley, and didn’t create as much art as I think she could have or would have. I think it was a function of society at the time… it’s sobering to think about what was sacrificed.”

Edie did make plenty of fantastic work, though -- the Taft show was selected from about 350 pieces. It's wonderful to see this art get the attention it deserves. I got to see a ton of Edie's art I had no idea about -- including her textile and enamel work -- and now have a bunch of new favorites. The show is up now and runs through January. Definitely worth checking out. You can hear the feature on NPR member stations statewide Wednesday or read it right now at wvxu.org. by @weird.light

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a day ago

Tomorrow! 5-9 pm at 2701 Spring Grove. Hyped for this! by @weird.light

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16 days ago

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a month ago

Guy in lycra asked if I'm "a roadie or a grav guy" and I'm like dawg I'm slide 4 on this IG carousel by @weird.light

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a month ago

It’s easy to feel like the tall signs reaching out for you along the speedy four-lane highways through southern Indiana have always been there. Geologic growths pushed up by the tectonic grind of market competition; the Love’s sign 20 feet tall, the Domino’s sign 30.

But if you follow Rt. 64 far enough, you can abruptly turn off and take little state route 69 further south, further west, where the towering billboards dwindle and disappear. There, cradled by a sharp curve in the wide Wabash River, just before a century-old rusting and closed-off half-mile steel bridge into Illinois, you’ll find New Harmony.

Our collective imaginary of Indiana is pretty reductive, but here its aesthetic presumptions are largely accurate: long, green stretches of cornfields interrupted only by stands of trees and two lane roads with decaying barns and the occasional gas station or diner along them. The village of about 690 people sits in a fairly dense gathering of trees among all of the expansive fields. The contrast makes the place feel either cozy or closed-in, depending on your mindset and the hour you roll into town.

We’re here for the wedding of a couple dear friends. We’ve gotten here at dusk, and there’s only one restaurant open. We check in at our hotel, a collection of 1970s-era soft modernist buildings, one of which has the Ten Commandments prominently wrapped around it. After dark, we walk around the town, which is silent. A two-story gazebo stands empty in a park. The blood red doors into the town’s bright white Episcopal church are unlocked, a sign inviting you to stay as long as you like. A single lit candle sits among its unlit brethren on the votive stand.

The downtown is a bit frozen in time, but which time depends on which building you go into. Many of the structures along its two main streets have the solid brick and stone construction and grand facades of the mid to late 1800s.

One houses a well-worn diner reminiscent of the 1950s, all checkerboard and sparkly vinyl booth seating; another a used record and bookstore you could place easily in the 1990s. Other structures outside the business district are log cabins from an earlier period. An imposing, three- by @weird.light

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3 months ago

Sometimes I sit along our river and think about the absolute maniacs who floated down to “settle” this area or whatever in the late 1700s. They were speculators, not poor folk or searchers in any way, just guys with some money who bought some pieces of paper from a different bunch of guys who made them up, all regular old grifters looking to make some bucks off of a place they didn’t really know about or care about. -->

I definitely get it – the pull of being in motion is almost impossibly seductive, the thrill of seeing something new and unexplored irresistible. To be alone in the woods is a kind of divinity.

But to make the extended trip away from all your loved ones just to place your ownership stamp on those woods is a strange, deluded and deeply unnatural impulse. Especially when there are already people living there. Just bizarre behavior.

The deeds for this particular patch of woods descend from a weird set of violent fictions set up by the fledgling U.S. government and a man named John Cleaves Symmes in the late 18th Century. Symmes did a bit to help bankroll the American revolution, and in return, he proposed the government give him about a million acres of the Northwest Territory, including this corner of Southwest Ohio, around about 1787.

Now something you might have been anticipating is that the U.S. didn’t own this land at the time, not even by the shady logic of made and broken treaties through which the federal government took so much land from indigenous people. We’re still seven years from the Treaty of Greenville at this point, the agreement at gunpoint that stripped the Miami, Wyandot, Shawnee, Delaware and other indigenous peoples of their right to most of the Ohio Territory after General Anthony Wayne’s murderous and drunken marauding across the region. Hell, we’re still a few years out from his predecessor, the bumbling General Arthur St. Clair, getting his ass handed to him in a brutal rout by indigenous forces near what’s now the Ohio-Indiana border. Whether indigenous people will be able to resist the state’s attempts to claim ownership of this land by force is still a very open question at this point.

Nevertheless, Symmes is eager by @weird.light

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4 months ago

This rosebush almost died this winter. With just a couple branches left to pour its energy into, the roses are twice as large this spring, their colors impossibly bright by @weird.light

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5 months ago

Mothers Day big ups to Five Feet of Concrete and Mammaw Gladys, aka Patricia Pickle by @weird.light

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5 months ago

It feels like the flood will sweep us away, doesn’t it? The infinite, incoherent world is an ocean threatening to spill over the floodwall of our minds, ripping away the structures we have carefully built to live in.

But the body can create its own gravity to calm the tide sometimes. A therapist taught me moving both sides of your body can activate the part of your brain that grows, that accepts or finds the courage not to accept, that endures. I am thankful my body is well enough to endure for now.

The real peace comes with riding. Steps are fine, but their one-after-the-other cadence feels binary, choppy, finite. The turn of the crank is one long motion that can take you 25, 50, 150 miles in a day. The circle reminds you that the ocean of noise is not the only thing that can feel infinite if you are lucky enough to have the time and the calories. I would do anything for more of this time.

The long ride is a game. Too fast and you’ll stop having fun. Too slow and you lose the feeling of infiniteness. I have gotten somewhat better at listening to my body, to the hum of the tires on the road, to the wind soothing or slapping me in the face.

At 10 miles in, that high tide has stopped licking the floorboards of your mind. At 25, it is no longer making the stilts holding up your house creak.

The best game is to ride out too far. A small cemetery in the middle of Indiana. An indigenous earthwork. After you’ve spent some time there in the quiet too-far, you turn around. And once you’ve got that crank turning, settled into that pace your body tells you is right, maybe you twist the dial a notch or two. A pace you’re not sure you can keep. Your lungs are bellows and it feels like they’re stoking every cell to a hot glow you can feed with sugar, salt and water.

Mind to body: Are you sure you can get us home like this?

Body to mind: Hahaha I guess we’ll find out?

At 55 miles in, your legs burn a bit and the tide around your mind is calm and placid. It is no more coherent than before, but you are simply floating on it. You settle back into your natural pace.

Overhead, the birds glide and you are gliding too, learning a tiny bit of what they have always known. by @weird.light

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6 months ago

by @weird.light

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7 months ago

Feel like I already posted some of these but I don't see em on here now oh well by @weird.light

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9 months ago

I watched "It's a Wonderful Life" for the first time since I was a kid over Christmas. I guess I'd consigned it to being a pure holiday sentimentality kinda film, but it's really fascinating.

The animating tension of the movie is the question of home. Not just protagonist George Bailey's desire to leave his hometown. But on a more central level, the fact that the small building and loan he sacrifices his travel dreams for allows working-class townspeople to live in decent homes.

Should the building and loan go under, more and more of Bailey's neighbors will have to reside in substandard housing provided by the movie's antagonist, Mr. Potter. (Incidentally, the place where Potter's shacks are is called "Potter's Field" in the film -- a now-archaic term for a pauper's cemetery).

Potter tries throughout the movie to buy up or shut down the building and loan so he can further consolidate his grip on the town's housing. Dialogue makes it explicit what is at stake: the ability of working people to live in (and own) decent and affordable housing.

Should I be surprised that a movie from 1947 -- one of the most beloved American films in history produced and directed by conservative Republican Frank Capra -- is at its core about the struggle for good housing? Should I be shocked that its driving message is against big business ownership of that housing? There's a lot to think about there. I'd like to talk about the film's (likely inadvertent) promotion of the anarchist values of mutual aid and solidarity here, about George Bailey's emotional abuse of his family under the pressures of running a capitalistic enterprise, about how his repeated salvation by his neighbors shows individual dignity and freedom go hand and hand with, not toe to toe against, collective belonging. Oh and about how Mary, his wife, is always leading him into his acts of material class solidarity while setting firm boundaries when he gets on his sadboy bullshit. But I've digressed.

Anywho, the last longform story of this year I did traced one house from four decades of ownership by the couple who lived there through a succession of corporate landlords. Lots of echoes there. Link in bio. by @weird.light

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10 months ago