“She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: “It shines like a little diamond”,
“What does?”
“This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.”
-Jean Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

 

Life is a series of moments, many of which we never notice as they pass us by. When asked what we did over a weekend or on a previous evening, often we struggle to recall. While there is much to be said for being mindful in a given moment, there is also beauty in the loss of self within each little fragment of time, abandonment of the burden to remember. Letting go of the responsibility to make memories and to rather just be.

 

Kemi Adeyemi is finishing the first draft of her first book which is a an ethnography of  black queer women’s social dance practices in Chicago. For the book, she interviewed women going to clubs to dance as well as the people who run the clubs. The book is set against the backdrop of Chicago’s corrupt political landscape and examines a tangible politics that plays out on the dance floor. Adeyemi also runs a critical arts writing residency called The Black Embodiment Studio based out of the University of Washington. The goals are to bridge a gap in arts writing due to lack of funding in Seattle while training graduate students in the skills they need to be arts writers. At the same time a big goal is to ensure that those trained in graduate programs have fluid, flexible, accessible writing. To hear more from Kemi Adeyemi, listen to the complete interview.

 

Scott Dolan lives and works in Brooklyn where is is currently working on paintings and drawings which he considers to be most of his artwork. Recently he has been doing paper gouache paintings of a pile of various kinds of pencils he received from a designer who passed away. These paintings represent a change for Dolan who has worked mostly in watercolor. Now working with gouache, he has tightened his style to capture the subject matter. Since 1992, Dolan has been creating Slight Headache Comics which are small scale comics with non-linear subject matter. To hear more about Scott Dolan’s work, including Slight Headache and some of the details of the pencils he’s painting, listen to the complete interview.