Jen Myers

Ohio

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Growing up as I did in northeastern Ohio, May 4 has only ever meant one thing. Kent State was the closest state university to where I lived and many, many people I knew had studied there. On May 4, 1970, family members of mine were on campus, as were several of my high school teachers. That day was an open wound that a certain large segment of the surrounding community pretended had only been a superficial cut, even when it was evident how deep it went.

I have a clear memory of one high school English class when it came up that the teacher had also been on campus, although not involved in the protest. She shrugged the incident off. It was just a thing that happened. Regrettable, but she thought it strange that people still made such a big deal about it. Despite the fact this is often how May 4 had been described to me—regrettable, but those kids were causing trouble, things happen, let’s get over it—that day I was finally old enough to recognize the gap between what I knew to be true and what someone in authority was telling me was true. I knew what happened at Kent State. I knew there was no justification for it. And I knew that anyone who said there was could not be trusted to tell the truth. Even twenty-five years after the fact, my physical proximity to the Kent State massacre meant that event still had the power to define my relationship to authoritative truth and, more to the point, my reaction to anyone who would try to define that relationship for me.

Six years ago, fifty years after May 4, 1970, Jerry Casale wrote about his experience as a witness and how it reverberated to the present moment. He was right about everything and, six years later, everything’s even worse. This is a good day to remember we owe it to everyone, including those four young people murdered on May 4, to know truth and to speak it.

Robert Henri The Art Spirit

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“There have been periods when the world has thought much of human beings, we knew more about them then than we do now.”

— Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Mandy Brown Automation Conformity

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Fromm and May here posit that when we make this trade, when we adopt those cultural patterns, we give up our unique selves in exchange for a relief of anxiety. In the light of our current drive for automation, I will make a counter proposal: we give up our unique selves in the hope that it will bring some relief, but that relief is ever deferred. For at present, becoming an automaton nearly guarantees that you will be left out to dry, as the promise of so-called AI is that the more you use it, the more it uses you. Such that in the act of becoming automatons, we bring ourselves that much closer to the thing we really fear: being left alone, without any of the care or materials we need to survive. We give up our individual selves for the appearance of security, without any of the conditions that can actually create it.”

— Mandy Brown on anxiety and automation conformity

Abigail Larson Yellow Wallpaper

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abigail Larson, Yellow Wallpaper—Creep by Daylight (2026)

Recently: 12 April

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reading/Watching/Listening

I read Patti Smith’s most recent memoir, Bread of Angels. Beautiful and illuminating.
I just began David Byrne’s How Music Works but it’s already fascinating.
A month or so ago I randomly came across a book in a St. Louis used bookstore I had never heard of before, by an author I had never heard of before: A Phantom Lover by the late Victorian writer Vernon Lee. So I picked it up and found it is an incredible feminist ghost story. A natural pairing with “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
It’s been a good season for films from my two favorite working filmmakers. The first is Christian Petzold, whose most recent film Miroirs No. 3 is now in theaters. No one creates cinematic exteriors from the depths of characters’ emotional and mental states quite like he does.
The second is Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose 1998 film Serpent’s Path is currently playing as a double bill with his recent short film Chime, which has been almost impossible to get a hold of. Serpent’s Path has a lot in common with his most recent feature, Cloud; I like them both but not nearly as much as his straight horror films. Chime is more in the vein of the latter and calls back to the themes of Cure matched by his evolved, polished style.
More Patti, forever and always:

Herman Melville Moby Dick

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.”

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Rachmaninoff Isle Of The Dead

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This morning the classical music radio station is playing my song on the Saturday 8am listener request hour and I feel like I’ve unlocked an exciting new level of Old Person.

Not only do I particularly love this tone poem, I love that Rachmaninoff wrote it inspired by a black-and-white print of artist Arnold Böcklin’s painting of the same name. So Rachmaninoff also sat around and imagined things about his favorite strange and bleak paintings. We have so much in common.

Nick Cave On Songwriting

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“These are the questions that ring out like a final hollow bell tolling at the end of a civilisation, where the last threads of meaning have been severed and discarded. Notions of artistic struggle, of striving, of triumph over adversity, personal pride, desire, delight, inspiration, and resilience are dismissed as mere obstacles or indulgences on the way to the new and gleaming product – the AI-generated song, perfect in its cynicism, magnificent in its emptiness.”

— Nick Cave

Hello World

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, world, from Orion

Patti Smith Bread Of Angels

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“In the shedding what remains is honor. We evolve, we falter, we learn from our transgressions, and then repeat them. We plunge back into the abyss we labored to exit and find ourselves within another turn of the wheel. And then having found the fortitude to do so, we begin the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go. There is a brilliant calm, akin to natural light. All about us is debris, and yet we step lightly so not to tread a waning silhouette, our own primordial skin.”

— Patti Smith, Bread of Angels