I really can't believe it's been 20 years. I still remember the shock of the TV images of water pouring into the city. I learned so much from this disaster about the corruption of various levels of government and the economic/insurance systems that have, predictably, led us into a darker future.

Honestly, I can't help but read the ongoing hostile stance of the university toward student workers—their refusal to bargain in good faith since the Obama era, and their apparent current intention to cut most grad student preceptorships—as directly related to their acquiescence to GOP bullying.

Summer News I: Technically spring news, but my "Between Galapagos and Archipelagos: Institutional Tensions in Japanese Contemporary Art," came out in "Verge: Studies in Global Asias" in March! dx.doi.org/10.1353/vrg.....

Every class I teach, I ask students what they get out of it. The answers I've received include "learning to observe and describe more accurately so I can be a better nurse," "learning how unequal access to certain archives shapes histories," and "understanding how to make a compelling case."

The past six months are essentially as if venture capitalists swooped down and sold off anything of value that remained in the US. Just as all those healthy businesses were bankrupted by venture capital firms, the US is being pushed into a grand unnecessary depression that it may never recover from.

Bait and switch is the tactic of a warmongering coward. If he was serious about protecting the US, he would have used his two-week self-imposed limit to work on negotiations. But he's never legitimately negotiated a thing in his life. Bullied, yes, but not negotiated. So we get the bully's solution.

Judge: And so given all those factual findings, I'm going to exercise the discretion I have to ORDER THE RELEASE of Mahmoud Khalil

#booksky #writingcommunity

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders? With a handful of exceptions that usually still don't cover the full cost of labor, artists don't get paid for their time preparing for museum exhibitions. If anything gets covered, it's usually just production costs.

I figured there'd be some Stephen Miller callouts at No Kings Santa Monica and I was not disappointed. Guy next to me said his kid disliked Miller in high school. One sign said Santa Monica High rescinds Miller's affiliation. The sign shown here was the only one I managed to remember to photograph.

The downside of living near a theater: when they have a violently loud performance that includes going out of the building and banging and cursing from outside, you get to hear it on repeat several nights a week for weeks on end.

After listening to a Japanese news analysis on the Nippon Steel deal (which seems a pretty bad deal for Nippon Steel), I decided to see what the English language press was saying and it seems like it's all spin and very little discussion of the actual deal? What is this mess of a news cycle?

proposing Elon Musk as the savior of the subways, creating (then abandoning) a fake "women's equality" party, using the IDC to keep republicans in charge of the state for years, and more greatest hits from the guy who "can get stuff done" nygroove.nyc/a-list-of-50...

Screening in LA! "Asia is One" Directed by Nihon Documentarist Union, Japan, 1973, 16mm transferred to digital format, 96 minutes Fri June 6 2025, 6:30 pm Dodd 147, UCLA, Open to the Public In Japanese, Chinese, and Atayal with English Subtitles by Keung Yoon Bae, Kimberley Sanders, and Mayako Liu

Read the statement by Sara Nadal-Melsió—associate director of the Whitney Independent Study Program—regarding the Whitney’s cancellation of “No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance.” www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/nadal_...

When speaking of the Whitney Independent Study Program, the former Whitney director Adam Weinberg emphasized the “independent” part. Now under new management, the ISP is being so surveilled by museum staff that the curatorial and critical cohorts are cancelling their end-of-year events in protest.

This has got to be the funniest product photo I've seen yet: kids 12-color painting set supposedly being used to create a thick impressionist-style en plein air landscape.

Reading a bedtime story, and the supervillian in one section turns out to be Elan Mollusk. Fitting.

Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will. The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.

Professor friends: Everyone should read this. Also, we must understand the importance of us collectively resisting anything and everything that is unjust. www.chronicle.com/article/what...

academeblog.org/2025/03/20/a.... Extremely important statement by Constitutional law scholars. Please share if you can.

"Among those detained was Ernesto Campos, a U.S. citizen and owner of a Bakersfield landscaping company. Agents stopped Campos’ truck and slashed his tires when he refused to hand over his keys." Many, many documented examples here. Excellent piece.

Yes. If DHS can barge in, say your visa was revoked, be told you have a green card, say it's revoked too, and then disappear you so that neither your lawyer nor your family can find you, then all the guardrails are gone. There is no policy, practice, or law protecting anyone.

Ok, so that was a longish quake... #LAearthquake

Don't know why it took me so long to understand my visceral hate of "The Last Samurai": it's essentially "Last of the Mohicans" set in Japan. White dude thinks he's more Japanese than the literal Japanese people around him. He has to "teach them" the importance of their "dying traditions."

God almighty what absolute BS is this?! Forgot to turn off AI Overview on one of my browsers and a search for "Nauru" and "Transfield" rendered the following "analysis" that stretches all possible euphemistic meanings of "welfare" far beyond any ties to reality:

"[Musk] is trying to gut everything good in America for his own private profit. This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about...the fusion and the capture of the billionaire class of our democracy." - @aoc.bsky.social with @fedworkersunited.bsky.social today #SaveOurServices

Wishing US Media was a lot more explicit about parallels btwn Trump's GOP and Putin's Russia. Reviewing art biennial controversies, I was reminded that a bill was imposed in Russia on June 30 2013 banning "the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors." Where will we be in mid-2036?

For anyone at #CAA113 I am co-chairing a 2:30 pm workshop on Censorship, Precarity, and Diversity! Come join!

Having trouble processing grief. A friend overseas just a year or two younger than me passed away suddenly in January, right as I was dealing with the fires here in LA. Now an artist I met with a number of times and just finally published a paper on last month has passed away.

I’m going to talk about pages 11, 12, and 13 of this brief in depth, because that is the part where the Trump DOJ tries to defend the Trump Executive Order. The lawyers here so deeply misrepresent some of the cited material that it should be cause for sanctions in any just world. (Thread)

"Harvard University has laid off its staff in the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, the unit of its $100 million Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative tasked with identifying the direct descendants of those enslaved by Harvard affiliates."

One of kiddo's spelling words this week was 笑顔 which gave me a reason to introduce Takahashi Yu's song, and then realize this might be an appropriate song to counter this week's maddness. Sharing it in case you need a moment to breathe: youtu.be/uUT0CLa6KWo?...

POV: you've been assigned to take an emergency preparedness course as part of your hiring process, but it apparently takes several weeks to get notification of this course, so you only learn it exists after the emergency has already occurred.

To begin with, I didn't like the trailer for It Ends with Us. But I might have given it a try until that director started acting IRL exactly like his loathesome character in the trailer. And I don't follow entertainment news so the fact he keeps showing up in my timeline is doubly offputting.

Taking a break from work pushed back by the fires, I make the mistake of opening Facebook to learn another friend has died. I dunno, 2025, so far you really suck.

So, I moved in August. The reality of my situation is that everything is temporary for the time being, and so is my housing. I'm still registered for emergency alerts at my previous address because I can't figure out where to unenroll, and that previous address was provided by the Getty...

Day 7 of my 2024 year in review! Today's post is as much an announcement as a roundup! I'm so excited that my first peer-reviewed article to come out is part of this issue December 2024 issue of Leonardo, organized by Helena Shaskevich to focus on image processing! #arthistory #2024inReview

Day 6 of my 2024 year in Review! Last spring, I was honored to receive an invitation from the University of California, Riverside's Art History Graduate Student Association to deliver the keynote address for the 2024 iteration of their annual graduate student conference! #arthistory #2024inReview

Day 5 of my 2024 in review! Aside from writing, teaching, & curating, translation is also central to my practice. Since 2021, I've been privileged to translate texts by artist Idemistu Mako (buff.ly/40aLf2y) and art historian Kokatsu Reiko (buff.ly/3BKpu0k) for Art Platform Japan... #arthistory

Forgot to post yesterday, so I'll be posting twice today. Day 4 of 2024 year in review! In July, I was invited by the San Antonio Museum of Art to give a talk on teamLab in conjunction with their exhibition of “The World of Irreversible Change,” on loan from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

Day 3 of 2024 year in review! This really covers both 2023 and 2024, but I was fortunate to be selected as a 2023-24 Getty Postdoctoral Fellow for the Art & Technology theme. I primarily worked on new research around my book on Video Hiroba... #GettyReserchInstitute #GettyScholars #arthistory

Day 2 of my 2024 year in review! Last December Millennium Film Journal asked me to review Japan Society's "Out of Bounds: Japanese Women in Fluxus." What was a standard review somehow blossomed into a long review. @japansociety #fluxus #womensart #film #videoart #mediaart #performanceart

Thrilled to finally get the catalogue of Tate Modern's "Electric Dreams" in the mail! I'm so grateful to curator Val Ravaglia for the chance to contribute a piece on Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, a major figure of the Japanese media art world who is under-recognized abroad. #TateModern #arthistory #videoart

We stand with Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, in pleading with the international community: Do not remain silent as Gaza’s healthcare system is systematically destroyed. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/12/humanity-must-not-look-away-a-call-to-protect-gazas-healthcare-system/ …

We’re being dispossessed of our indigenous languages by waivers, copyright, and other intellectual property laws. Indigenous erasure is happening right here and right now in the present.

Japanese universities need a reality check. I just saw a posting for an Assistant Professor position w/ reseach and teaching responsibilities at a top university in Tokyo with a listed salary of 3-4 million yen per year. My pre-doc research funding 7 years ago was 5.5 million yen per year.

Looking for some film-related holiday week reading? Check out Millennium Film Journal issue 80! There are some great articles and reviews in there, and you can check out my review of Japan Society's 2023-24 show "Out of Bounds" to boot! millenniumfilmjournal.com/product/mfj-...

Looking for something to do tomorrow? Are you in the NYC/NJ area? There's a great show of the East Asian feminist collective Tomorrow Girls Troop opening up at NJCU Galleries tomorrow evening, 4-7pm! I wish I could go, but I'm on the other coast, so go there for me! www.njcu.edu/community/ev...

Ooooh... I just realized this is my first West Coast election. I'm so used to having to stay up all night waiting for the polls to close, but w/Hawaii and Alaska only two hours off, it'll be well before midnight here. So confusing for someone who spent 80% of their life in the Eastern Time Zone.