Eugéne Atget, Café, Avenue de la Grande-Armée Paris, France c. 1924/25

national gallery of art is closed as of tomorrow (10/5), which is too bad because the photography and the black arts movement show is incredible www.nga.gov/exhibitions/...

Ansel Adams, Basketball game at an Internment Camp for Japanese American citizens during World War II

made a Marcel Duchamp fan fic video. Sora’s default tone is so upbeat and schmaltzy. sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dd9d49...

in the Smithsonian archives yesterday, I learned when the Hirshhorn bought Wolfgang Tillmans' Concorde Grid in 2006, they also got an exhibition copy, so they could show it with the lights turned up, like the artist likes it, without frying their 56 fragile C-prints greg.org/archive/2025...

stared at this Richard Diebenkorn gouache-crayon on paper (Untitled #37 from 1981, 23 x 28 inches) for more time than i thought i would

great example of a film that is so much better than the book it’s based on (at least the English translation)

I love this William Claxton photo of John Coltrane at the Guggenheim Museum, 1960 The painting is by Pierre Soulages.

art exhibit poster seen in grocery store in Sausalito, California- IYKYK youtu.be/YQqxWrBHWxM?...

If you need a break from the present, may I recommend these flashback interviews on Fresh Air with Johnny Otis and Etta James. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...

🎂 100 B.B. King, how about this live performance in Zaire 1974 (seen in the classic doc “When We Were Kings”) youtu.be/UOnzDKvn7YI?...

things look pretty dire for the Vaillancourt Fountain, but the Thrasher Magazine skate history video linked in this article is an essential slice of SF culture

if you need something much stronger than a timeline cleanse, this album 🤯

me, a Philly native, reading a positive review of the new Calder space on the parkway...

San Francisco, get thee to the de Young to see Rose B. Simpson’s Tewa-style lowriders.

there’s a good Wojnarowicz documentary, streaming free youtu.be/18X5dBp06Qs?...

Owen Simmons' 1902/03 The Book of Bread tumblr'd by today, and I took a moment to look again at the incredible silver bromide prints of the deluxe edition. s/o @shannonmattern.bsky.social for bringing it up in 2023 greg.org/archive/2023...

this mode of art writing, the attempt to parse an artwork, never reaching a conclusion, while documenting the experience of reading, online digressions, disorientation (complimentary) and second takes feels incredibly relevant, even if you’ve never heard of the artists Greg’s writing about.

The fantasy of running your own independent radio station epitomizes the potent, naive optimism of the early internet in 90’s San Francisco. Rusty actually made it real - running the servers for 25 years! Thank you! somafm.com

share Mark's view that this is perhaps the greatest jazz recording, a pinnacle of 20th century art. and celebrate the miracle that SR is still with us 🙏

Not enough people know about the conceptual masterpiece “Voice of Harold,” in which MS read the lyrics directly from the liner notes on the back of an old gospel album youtu.be/-kkLuSlOE3U?...

"Animation of a lightning event from April 2019 as detected by the LOFAR radio telescope in the Netherlands. Includes three separate flashes in less than 2 seconds. The pulses are colored by age, with bright white pulses fading to shades of blue and purple over time." sketchfab.com/3d-models/li...

fact check: true so good! youtu.be/m1GheMJ59yc?...

Hans Memling, 1483

what were they thinking when they would coat books with thin plastic to give a glossy look (and inevitably peel off)? (Duane Michals: Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Duchamp)

The Hilma af Klint exhibition at MOMA "What Stands Behind the Flowers" is stunning. Allow an hour and be sure to use the provided magnifying glasses! The detail in the work, the technical skill involved, is mind boggling. Feels very intimate, like visiting her studio. www.moma.org/calendar/exh...

in a great example of the blog medium, there’s a bunker hill specific history blog and the author did an incredible deep dive to locate the exact spot this photo was taken bunkerhilllosangeles.com/2021/12/23/r...

picked up Tyler’s “Carleton Watkins: Making the West American” as a bio of a great American artist, but it’s also one of the best histories I’ve read of 19th century California and San Francisco

trying to get into using an e-ink reader, comparing options, figuring these are mature products, but they are both mediocre in slightly different ways. kindle has the amazon ecosystem stink, UI looks bad, even when paying more for no ads. Kobo device feels flimsy and the UI is painfully slow

Hot Pynchon Summer continues on page 180 of Vineland: “…the thousand bloody arroyos in the hinterlands of time that stretched somberly inland from the honky-tonk coast of Now.” I mean, that’s fucking HEAVENLY.

Tina Modotti. Telephone Wires, Mexico. c. 1925.

this excellent piece by @greg.org recalls @jamellebouie.net writing on "originalism" and the courts; here "misdirections, omissions, and speculative fabrications" turn art history into a meaningless slurry whose only purpose is to serve the authoritarian project.

my wife writes one of the earliest food blogs and there’s anxiety about Google replacing recipe searches with AI results. but maybe there’s a moat: only humans taste food and if you want to spend an hour shopping / cooking / baking, or money dining out, you want an actual human source?

There are only five known photographs from Hiroshima on August 6, taken by Yoshito Matsushige with a 6x6 camera. He developed them in a river. He said would have taken more, but he felt people were so ravaged that they might attack him. Despite his own exposure, he lived until 2005 (aged 92).

agnes varda and jacques demy's potato- and lipstick-covered grave at cimitiere de montparnasse greg.org/archive/2025...

excellent mix of: urbanism 🤝 new topographics 🤝 community history

Apollo 15, LM Extraction, Earth, Lunar Orbit

this film isn’t sacrosanct, but if you choose to add clouds and sun that look like this, you might as well use “Dark Side of the Moon” for the soundtrack

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced today that it will shut down next year. Icymi, I made a pilgrimage earlier this week to the LBJ Library in Austin, specifically to consider what that would mean. (This post is free to all for the next five days.)

“he flashes the 8 inside his trenchcoat furtively toward Ernie. It costs a nickel. Ernie does not buy it. “Sesame Street’s” attitudes toward consumerism are skeptical, except in the realm of learning.”

as an (unpaid) subscriber, multiple newsletters I follow moved to beehiiv and I didn’t even notice

where can I buy that perfect “is it a watch cap or a beanie”

in the suburbs: Louis Kahn, Shapiro house 1960, Penn Valley. open house, needs extensive renovation, including landscaping on the one acre property

Oliver Wang has a great new book and exhibition about Japanese American car culture, that includes the story of the fabulous Atomettes, a women's social club that organized roadtrips barely a decade after WWII Japanese incarceration. I write about it for @kcrw.com: email.kcrw.com/cruising-j-t...

growing up in Philadelphia, earliest Duchamp memory is not being “tall enough” to look through the x-rated door, so had to listen to the adults’ reactions to seeing it for the first time, as I stared through cracked glass with random bits. HBD Rrose Sélavy

on the other app, questlove shared a clip of Mangione at Montreux, 1972, with Steve Gadd and Tony Levin. Full hour has a version of “St Thomas” and some jams inspired by Miles/Zawinul of the same era youtu.be/jymB8IZl9nk?...

I interviewed Rodriguez in 2015 and she had so many amazing things to say about why Las Mujeres Muralistas mattered. “To us, it was revolutionary to put women in a mural. To put children in a mural. To create colorful, beautiful pieces.” www.chron.com/art/article/...

the grim fixtures sale at the local Rite Aid. the retail environment was a perfect reflection of our culture, one half of the store was drugs and things to fix problems, the other half was almost entirely junk food. if the food didn’t kill you, the aesthetic would

this exact type of 'young conservative' is somehow ever-present (Diane Arbus, "Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C." 1967)