pretty nutty stuff

#gathering at the #hearth Over 800,000 years and still going strong Thai agricultural pamphlets and textbooks used to comment on the use of #chickens in farms as objects under womens' care. So the domestication of chickens in SEA? that's almost 8000 years of women's work right there. (But i think industrially bred hormone-pumped & grounded chickens are another hi/story) Ref Walker and Farrelly: #thai #environmental #knowledge in #knowledge #handbooks A little bit of #social history to go with #natural #history #naturalhistorymuseum #dc #southeastasia #wanderinguterus #bodymatters (at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo9QwBNH2R3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ajtkzpo454t2

#gathering at the #hearth Over 800,000 years and still going strong Thai agricultural pamphlets and textbooks used to comment on the use of #chickens in farms as objects under womens' care. So the domestication of chickens in SEA? that's almost 8000 years of women's work right there. (But i think industrially bred hormone-pumped & grounded chickens are another hi/story) Ref Walker and Farrelly: #thai #environmental #knowledge in #knowledge #handbooks A little bit of #social history to go with #natural #history #naturalhistorymuseum #dc #southeastasia #wanderinguterus #bodymatters (at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo9QwBNH2R3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ajtkzpo454t2

We never know where we are going in life. Things of the last few days have reminded me why I do what I do, and how matters of emotion are so closely tied to all our struggles to make beauty out of the pieces we find. This song by Angela Aki often surfaces for me when I need reassurance, in times of comfort or anguish. It saw me through some thorny years. I gave it to someone dear many years ago when he was disappearing, who has today grown back to fill out the body and life he has. May it also bring others some peace and love. 手紙~ 拝啓15の君へ~ by Angela Aki 'A letter: dear 15 year old you' EN: "Everything in life has meaning/a reason; And for all you know, it/you might be nurturing your dream (right now)." You can find it here: https://youtu.be/siQJhIp-UTU (Also the best MV dedicated to this song I've seen)

It's been such a crazy 6 days at #DINACON and now that I'm back in the city, I want to go back again! This is the one conference I've been to that gets better with age - even after you've left it. So much fun to think about projects that keep evolving as new people come in. Such an awesome little growing bacterial community of people! @digital.naturalism.conference

WIP for a friend 

Peering at different scales... Kamin Lertchaiprasert's work at Gillman has a melancholy air to it, the feeling of beings trapped and who can't be set free of their frames, or the order in which they are stacked. I usually like his work but this felt fenced in, glass-boxed, on display... they don't at all look out of place in Singapore. #gillmanbarracks #kaminlertchaiprasert

Watching as the last petals fall but the stem and 🙅‍♀️ remains - 🏴 Something in me triggers a reaction to a neighbour when she asks if I have been going to Third World (read: poor) countries, to work, and her husband had also asked if I were doing social work. “I”m not doing humanitarian work,” I tell her, watching my inner seethe begin—she has no hint of my inner condition except a certain bluntness to my tone. She is bemused. “I don’t see the work in that way.” 🛃the act of love, applied with best intents, can strip people of their sovereignty. Doesn’t the coo-ing over poor adults and children reduce people not only to material lacks, which may be real or a matter of poverty policy/rhetorical framing, and to spiritual and emotional lack, but also reduces them to an inability to care for one’s people? Thus failures of leadership, long-term thinking, good executive decision-making, and other qualities associated with functional adulthood. Humanitarian aid built on uneven ground is flawed from its foundations... 🚸 〰️It is made for the powerless in exchange for their bodies and their future〰️ ...foundations that frame people so that the “population wearing out in the space of ordinariness becomes a figure saturated with emotion that is said to have been generated by a lack of or need for the responsibility of the still seemingly sovereign privileged classes.” (Berlant, 2008, 101) Poverty porn functions after all, as a rhetorical device that frames and encloses people into essentialised recipients of affective (love, care), and monetary donations. In humanitarian aid we find people continually making the subjects of aid “rhetorically radiant with attention, compassion, analysis, and sometimes reparation” (101). They are wearing out, worn out - Not only from their everyday living, but the very rhetorical guise of being helpless, forlorn, and love-starved, that we ask them to carry. 🛂 And from the eternal line between hope and subjugation ... possibility and probability ♾ #appadurai #berlant #humanitarian aid

Big bird piñatas, bookstores and indie design stores that occupy pasar senta have kept a growing client base, even if other shops there have begun to move out. A less hyped hipster scene is not necessarily bad; a more mature and flashy #gudangsarinah ekosystem might have more people but fewer thick ties between groups; and a lesson from groups that have lasted: love your community and show it, grow the young, and lock flexible hands with a peer group so work is spread out rather than limited to oneself - or it will die with you. #pasarsenta #Jakarta

Getting used to being in Singapore again isn't hard, just costly. The apartment cat understands the cost of having assets. Having no house but an entire block of homes to himself, he walks the streets (elevators) and rests where he pleases. 😽

- See more at: http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/113952898358/erasure-methods-by-annie-ostlund-recommended-by#sthash.1MhPnxI9.dpuf

  But perhaps this is less contradictory than it seems. Perhaps what is happening on the interpersonal front is but a prefiguration of the collapse of property regimes and growth of a commons.

If people can see this collection as a product of their collective making, and not demand that it be made into the sole property of a company or organisation, then perhaps it means the freedom of ideas has gained currency as a public good, rightful part of the commons.

first written early Nov 2014