you are loved

me looking at my raspberry frappe: “i know you are there, and i am very glad about it.”

Hand Fan, from the John and Carolyn Grossman Collection. C. 1900

Do you understand how much poorer our whole species is because of it? Can you imagine where art, religion, and science would be if we still had these vast bodies of knowledge? The stain of the colonial project will never be fully washed clean. We owe more than just the land to those we stole from. We owe them a whole future, a future that could have been brighter for all of us. If only greed and fear weren't allowed to rule this land.

William Mitcheson Timlin

Bob Cronk

Rae Kelin

Elihu Vedder - Psyche and Cupid

many heads for my many conflicting aesthetics

Farida Khelfa in The Agony of Marguerite Gautier by Jean-Paul Goude, Paris, 1992

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

i interpreted this as being about the conflation of politics and/or "being a good person" with specific aesthetics and social modes, such that a lot of people are imagining a utopia in which there would be no space for certain real people who agree with them politically but just don't enjoy the same things they enjoy. we are not at the level of "how do you handle the continued existence of people whose beliefs you find morally repugnant?" here, we're at the level of "can you learn to tolerate the fact that the person sitting next to you at the activist meeting doesn't like the outdoors or folk music and doesn't agree with you that technology has brought nothing but evil into the world? can you imagine a better future that includes them without them having to fundamentally change who they are as a person?"

You were my goal during my teenage years. Photographs by Rahi Rezvani 🖤

— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis