TIME ONLY MOVES FORWARD
On Friday I went out with a group for St. Patrick's Day and while I’ll spare you the boring details that led up to it, we ended up at Gracie's to close out the night. What we didn’t know was that it was also Goth Night. A clash of personalities, a clash of cultures, and a clash of aesthetics – Irish green does not contrast well with black.
I’m ending my weekend watching Anthony Davis look lost on the court — speaking of the Lakers, I noticed Austin Reaves is rocking a low fade. Those bonus checks must finally be hitting the account.
Happy March Madness to everyone watching. I’m just about even on my bets overall. Send yours in, winners and losers.
WHERE I WAS FROM ROAM THE GHOSTS OF LIFE
WHERE I WAS FROM IS WHERE I WILL DIE
Hugo Gellert (b. 1892 in Budapest, Hungary) was a radical force in the history of modern art and an integral contributor to America’s early mural movement. Most notably recognized for his distinct style and prolific works which include prints, paintings, and political illustrations, Gellert is widely regarded as one of the most influential political artists of the 20th century.
Gellert got his start illustrating for underground political magazines, later ascending to legacy publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times. His interest in politics was deepened by the outbreak of WWI and the death of his brother, Ernest Geller, who refused the draft as a conscientious objector and subsequently died while detained in Fort Hancock, New Jersey of an alleged self-inflicted gunshot wound, though the circumstances were suspicious. Gellert began making drawings and illustrations for radical political journals, and in 1916, published his first anti-war art in the leftist periodical, The Masses, also serving on the editorial board of The Liberator and helping found The New Masses. Gellert was a staff artist for The New Yorker from its inception in 1925 through 1946, and his portraits and illustrations occupy many of the magazine’s pages.
Despite his beginnings as an easel painter, he abandoned this “elitist” medium by 1928 in favor of media more widely accessible to the masses. By concentrating on murals, posters, and newspaper prints, Gellert shifted his focus to utilizing his art as a medium to spread the word of the Communist Party.
By the early 1930s, the artist had embraced the left-wing tradition of Mexican muralists, many of whom he had met in 1927 during the Tenth Anniversary Celebration of the October Revolution in Moscow. Recognizing the potential of murals as a political tool, Gellert went on to paint politically agitating murals for New York City’s Workers Party’s Union Square cafeteria, the Center Theater in the Rockefeller Center complex, the Communications Building for the 1939 World's Fair, and the Seward Park Housing Corporation in 1961.
In 1932, Gellert submitted contentious murals for the Museum of Modern Art’s Murals by American Painters and Photographers exhibition. His works, which included deliberately offensive depictions of the country’s most powerful men of the time, were deemed so controversial that they were not included in the catalog.
Passionately political in content, Gellert’s works display stream-lined, machine-age imagery and bold, planar forms. Among his most famous works are Karl Marx’s ‘Capitol’ in Lithographs, Comrade Gulliver, and Aesop Said So. In 1939, Gellert helped in organizing the group Artists for Defense and later became the Chairman of Artists for Victory, an organization that included over 10,000 members.The enduring impact of Gellert’s social commentary, political contributions, and renowned works have cemented his legacy as one of the greatest American social artists of the Art Deco era.
TIMELINES ARE SHIFTING VERY RAPIDLY IN THIS AREA
Spotted this walking into work Sunday morning — intrigued.
DONE ONCE… DONE RIGHT
With the introduction of the new Following tab on Twitter I’ve become subjected to a ton of stuff I wish I could unsee, like the above tweet which is the newfound target of my anger.
The video is, honestly, whatever. Reggae and hardcore have always intersected as reggae is ingrained in hardcore's DNA and that cannot be denied no matter how much you want to try to ignore it or apply revisionist history.
The part I take issue with is the response. I think the societal shift toward a “let people enjoy things” attitude is a net negative.
I do think everyone should feel entitled to enjoy whatever, whenever (within reason) but that enjoyment is not sacred or indisputable and everyone should, in turn, feel just as entitled to their own opinion on it. Oh, you make positive content? That’s great but your positivity doesn’t make your reggae cover of a Grammy-nominated hardcore band cool or interesting.
Modern society has become so consumed by Puritanical fantasies and plagued by hyper-individualism. There’s a fetishistic fervor for positivity content, saccharine background noise, media that is explicitly affirming and morally unchallenging. The outlook for us is grim.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
HOW I DAY DREAM OF A LIFE FREE OF WORK… FREE OF WORRY… FREE OF PAIN
File this under the clout bombing allegations. I don’t think I can handle this anymore.
AM I CRACKIN UP OR AM I GONNA LOSE IT THE WORLDS GOTTA CHANGE MAN AND I AINT THE ONE TO DO IT
Age of the Femtroll, or the Based It GIrl flashart
Oh boy – let’s talk about it.
There are two things I usually find distasteful – someone obviously coping with the fact that they are unlikable by hiding behind irony-poisoned contrarianism and those who try to champion the proverbial middle class by writing weird essays about shit that no one in this middle class gives a shit about – not one single person in the real world cares about your art gallery or your podcast.
FACE TO FACE, SIGHTLESS SOLITUDE
Comment card from a test screening of David Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME 1983.
A DIMENSION NOT ONLY OF SIGHT AND SOUND BUT OF MIND
Last Monday marked the 26th anniversary of the Phoenix Lights, a series of unidentified flying objects observed in the skies over Arizona and Nevada in the spring of 1997.
Between the hours of 7:30 PM and 10:30 PM on March 13th, lights of varying descriptions were reported by thousands of concerned onlookers from southern Nevada, Phoenix, and Tucson, 300 miles south.
Some witnesses described seeing what appeared to be a huge “carpenter's square-shaped” UFO containing 5 spherical lights. Two different events occurred during this incident: a triangular formation of lights seen moving over the state, and a series of stationary lights observed in the Phoenix area.
At approximately 7:55 pm, a witness in Henderson, Nevada reported seeing a large, V-shaped object traveling southeast. At 8:15 pm, an unidentified former police officer in Paulden, a small town near Prescott, reported seeing a cluster of reddish-orange lights disappear over the southern horizon. Shortly afterward, there were reports of lights seen over Prescott Valley. Tim Ley and his wife Bobbi, his son Hal and his grandson Damien first saw the lights when they were about 65 miles away from them. At first, the lights appeared to them as five separate and distinct lights in an arc shape, as if they were on top of a balloon, but they soon realized that the lights appeared to be moving towards them. Over the next ten minutes, the lights appeared to come closer, the distance between them increasing, until they took on the shape of an upside-down V. Eventually, when the lights appeared to be a couple of miles away, the family said they could make out a shape that looked like a 60-degree carpenter's square, with the five lights set into it, with one at the front and two on each side.
Soon, the object with the embedded lights appeared to be moving toward them, about 100 to 150 feet above them, creeping slowly across the sky and hovering silently, passing over their heads and maneuvering through a V opening in jagged heights of PIestewa Peak in the Phoenix Mountains, toward the direction of Sky Harbor International Airport. Between 8:30 and 8:45 pm, witnesses in Glendale witnessed the light formation pass overhead at an altitude high enough to become obscured by the thin clouds. Amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley in Scottsdale also observed the high-altitude lights "flying in formation" through a telescope.
At approximately 10:00 pm that same evening, a number of people in the Phoenix area reported seeing "a row of brilliant lights hovering, or slowly falling, in the sky". Photographs and videos were taken by onlookers, many of which still exist, prompting author (and noted UFO skeptic) Robert Sheaffer to describe the event "perhaps the most widely witnessed UFO event in history."
Whether it was a “military training exercise” or Phoenix’s own extraterrestrial visit, we all were together to witness it. What a time to be alive.
HOW CAN ANYONE POSSIBLY KNOW HOW I FEEL
If you ever want to discuss anything featured in these dispatches, please email me hello@tylerhasagun.com