At the Fishtank

A few hours ago, Dustin and I stood before this fishtank in a beloved Brooklyn dive bar at 4 something in the morning regarding the crudely-rudely moldy-grouted in-tank plexiglass divider whose purpose he will have to explain to me again at some point.

Encountering this shameful hack job of aquarium alteration with my aesthetic ally, I confessed somewhat conspiratorily, something like, "Uggchhh! You see this? This is what I originally thought my aesthetic revoultion was going to be: ridding the world of shit like this."

Bless his heart, he scoffed even as I hurriedly began alluding to how my work is happily about so much more than "good design" already, and offered up this gem of insight and recognition, "No. No. No. Somewhere, this is beautiful precisely because it looks like this. Your revolution is about the fact that this is beautiful in a way you're not seeing. Your revolution is about awakening people to all forms of awe and beauty."

Indeed.

Beautiful like a Movie

Watching Miranda July's film, Me, You and Everyone We Know tonight, I wept several times, panicked and forgetful wondering where all the beautiful moments were in my life. Then I remembered a fully transcendent hour I spent diving for plastic stick-on gems that had fallen off swimmers one summer.


I was a camp counselor, she was a little camper kid. She found the first one, then lost it in the hectic pool. I dove under to help her find this tiny sparkling speck in the huge and sparkling pool. After the miracle of finding it and the accident of finding others as we searched, we continued on like that for what thankfully felt like forever.


We glorified a fad and made treasure of debris. We made time wait and were nameless. We were young and old pirates and mermaids together.

Thanks, Sunshine. It's been six years since then, and it can be harder at 13, but I hope you're still having beautiful afternoons like that one.

image credit Tim Laman

Aesthete Guilt at the Movies

Two-thirds of the way through Open Water, I noticed the gorgeous Caribbean seascapes where the couple is dealing with their life and death decisions and desperation. As the skies became saturated in pinks and reds and the striking silhouettes of the clouds sharpened, beauty was again put in its place. Not once mentioned - aesthetically powerful yet irrelevant in light of the present human drama.