The Brooklyn-based artist is working on Stolen, a series of partially filled-in depictions of Black people murdered by police. Each portrait remains incomplete as Brandon only colors one minute for each year of the subject’s life that was cut short. “Aside from being able to give the viewer a visual of the various ages affected by police violence, the timer creates a lot of anxiety for me as the artist,” he says, wondering, “’When is the timer going off?’ ‘Will I be able to finish this eye?’ ‘Damn, I haven’t even gotten to the lips yet.’” In a note to Colossal, Brandon expanded on the project:

Although this anxiety may seem minor in that the consequences for me are very low, it does really have an effect on me. Anxiety is a feeling that black people are far too familiar with, and to experience that feeling while illustrating these portraits allows each piece to feel like a performance. A lot of Black people are forced to live with this anxiety and accept it as part of our every day. But these feelings build up and are exhausting. I shouldn’t have to do a prayer every time I see police pursuing a Black person in the streets. I shouldn’t feel anxious when the police are talking to a person of color. I shouldn’t feel so damn anxious that I remove my hat and jewelry when the cops pull me over. I shouldn’t feel so anxious that I would second guess calling the police if I ever needed to. This series is pulling me in, in ways that art has never done.

“A handful of live Boomslangs from which poison is about to be abstracted for research work.” The snakes of South Africa. 1921.

Paul Newman on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

There’s a fucking pandemic happening.  We have basically no infrastructure to handle such an emergency.  We have to keep going to work and exposing ourselves and our loved ones and our communities to possible infection because we’re all one or two missed paychecks away from starving to death.  Those of us who can’t work are facing homelessness because we can’t pay rent, i.e. we can’t afford the usurous and ever-rising fees that a guy who contributes nothing to society but happens to own a building charges us to be in a building.

Oh, but the landlord might have to pay his mortgage!!!! Bitch I wish I had a mortgage

The for-profit healthcare industry is so determined to not handle the crisis correctly that they are *seriously considering* shuffling life-saving medical equipment away from elderly and disabled people and letting critical COVID-19 patients just fucking die.  There’s no fucking reason to do any of that, except that it’s more cost effective.   Because that’s what The Market demands, is blood sacrifices.

And speaking of blood sacrifices for The Market, they’re also talking about lifting the state of emergency and sending everybody back to work in the middle of a fucking pandemic and just accepting all the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who would be killed by that as reasonable losses in order to make the stock market go back up.  "Hey man, I’m sorry about your kids and I’m sorry about Meemaw and I’m sorry about your friends with respiratory issues, but they’re just useless eaters anyways and we just gotta get that line to point up.“

The presidential election looks like it’s gonna come down to an epic battle between one conservative rapist and another, different conservative rapist.  

Meanwhile the planet is still heating up and we’re still disappearing people into camps in the desert.

Is this the world you want?  Are you just going to accept this?  Are you really just going to say “yes sir, thank you sir” and take this lying down and wait for shit to just go back to normal?  Like a dog?

Or are you going to fight?

Because I got news, man:  It’s not going back to normal.  Not ever.

You need to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself:  Am I going to take this?  Am I going to stand up and fight?  Or am I going to force my grandchildren to suffer the shame of laying a coward’s bones in my grave?

https://www.socialistalternative.org/get-involved/

UK: mutual aid / rent strike

… let me get this straight. The average rent in Houston is $1338 (1 bed: $1148; 2 beds: $1446). Every single month for who knows how long you were paid thousands of dollars x32 and you didn’t save anything?

And yet you expect tenants on a minimum wage to save enough money to pay off your mortgage?

Landlors really expect people to sell their own car and borrow money from friends and family because - in the mist of a pandemic where some people barely have enough money to eat - they feel entitled to your money.

Couple things to remember:

1. These people are fucking cannibals and have no hearts or souls or shame and will not stop until they are stopped

Fight

Fight hard

https://iww.org/projects/gdc/join

https://incarceratedworkers.org/

Just do it