The Grape Zaven

I was wondering if birds enjoy flying and I found this story when I searched.

Image description: two screen shots of a Quora question and answer.

Text reads: Do birds feel a thrill or happiness when flying? Basically, is it fun for birds to fly?

Answer by Bob Cormack, Ranch kid, engineer, mountain climber, flyer, ex-adventurer

I have observed ravens in the Grand Canyon that I believe were just playing. I was hiking down the Tanner Trail from the S. Rim and there was a wind from the north. These ravens were soaring up the canyon wall on the updraft created by the wind. When they reached the top, they would fold their wings (sort of like a stooping falcon) and dive to the bottom at very high speed. When they got to the bottom, they would soar up again.

There didn't seem to be reason for what they were doing except play.

But there's more:

The people with me started cheering and clapping as the ravens dove past. One raven in particular, seemed to respond to this and always came directly overhead on the dive to the bottom. After a while a raven (the same one?) started pulling out of its dive right overhead and shot over the canyon. Then (and I have never seen this before) the raven folded one wing and did what, for all effects, was a "snap roll".

That set everyone off on cheering the raven on, and it preformed this stunt 4 or 5 times more.

If this raven wasn't having fun and showing off (for humans, even!), then what was it doing?

I also took some pictures of the library in use! Rover is getting some assistance from yours truly, Savannah is working on homework while she babysits Hornsby, Mabel is #chillin, Blathers is browsing the stacks, Celeste is doing some research, and Kicks is checking out the bulletin board.

NES godzilla (for visuals)

this tweet is such a perfect encapsulation of what the brain trust on twitter considers activism at this point, i swear to god

she was a child

she was a child trapped in a legendarily abusive studio contract where she was being pumped full of drugs and sexually abused by producers

what is the point? “think about this the next time you watch the wizard of oz”? and do what? this tweet is so pointless

not for nothing but she was also a lifelong advocate of the civil rights movement and held a whole press conference to denounce white supremacist terrorism after the 16th street baptist church bombing

there are politicians who did blackface in office right now

In a similar vein I would also recommend the Marlon Riggs documentaries Ethnic Notions, which covers anti-Black stereotypes in popular culture from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights movement, and Color Adjustment, which covers the representation of African Americans on television from its advent through the 1990s.

in regards to the last comment above me: how do people think these relatively affordable houses in the city became available to artists and store owners in the first place? it’s often because the previous, marginalized population has been forced to move out due to being unwanted (contributing to a ‘bad‘ city image). another reason is that occurs in various cases is that cities relies on a certain industry that has been abandoned over time, which results in these hip industrial places (factories, ports) with multiple restaurants and galleries and such in them. there had thus been a working class population at first which did not possess this position of aestheticizing and gentrifying an area; artists were the first to have a role in this, even if the average artist is financially poor. TLDR; artists can both be key players and victims of gentrification and are not per se exclusively not or the other.

there are countless of interesting articles that have studied gentrification in urban areas and looked at general patterns across cities and there are various explanations for way gentrification takes place with class and race, indeed, being a common factor. however, to suggest that the process only starts once corporations capitalize on creative spaces (as the comment above me does) overlooks how much larger the overall process can be.

here are some articles that i’ve read that i suggest looking into for the points i named, as well as some other things relevant to gentrification and creative cities. and they’re all available on google scholar without needing to connect to a uni library it seems.

Cameron, S., & Coaffee, J. (2005). Art, gentrification and regeneration–from artist as pioneer to public arts. European Journal of Housing Policy, 5(1), 39-58.

Casellas, A., Dot-Jutgla, E., & Pallares-Barbera, M. (2012). Artists, cultural gentrification and public policy. Urbani izziv, 23, S104-S114.

Glow, H., Johanson, K., & Kershaw, A. (2014). ‘More Yuppy Stuff Coming Soon’: Gentrification, cultural policy, social inclusion and the arts. Continuum, 28(4), 495-508.

Mathews, V. (2010). Aestheticizing space: Art, gentrification and the city. Geography Compass, 4(6), 660-675.

Pratt, A. (2018). Gentrification, artists and the cultural economy. In Handbook of gentrification studies. Edward Elgar Publishing.