A Torchlight Shining at the Bastards
Every showing is full of secrets. –Julian of Norwich, 1373
James A. Reeves
James is a writer and designer in the Middle West who makes midnight mixtapes and writes about highways and the search for god.
Latest posts
Thirty Years of Monsters
The announcement came over loudspeakers: There would be another thirty years of monsters. We would be stuck in their muck while they battled and it would be painful. But we could fast-forward if we chose. You could pay to see what you'd be like in the future
Air Conditioning
Kimchi adds tension to any situation. Become yourself by holding yourself.
Open the Door of the Cosmos
The ability to find beauty, both backwards and forwards, is something I’ve learned from tonight’s Very Special Guest, my friend Earl Carlson.
Byung-Chul Han
The Agony of Eros was my first encounter with Han's philosophy , and I was especially struck by his argument that, despite being a trendy thing to say at dinner parties, capitalism is very much not a religion. Every religion operates with both debt (guilt) and relief (pardon). But
The Shimmer
Some theories about beauty.
The Age of the Holy Spirit
"An age so fragmented that there’s a weird emergent new form of unity."
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird begins as an austere fable in the vein of Woman in the Dunes or Never Let Me Go before it unfurls into a uniquely strange creature. Centuries pass. New modes of consciousness emerge. “My brothers, my father, my
Dream Theory
Painting is incredibly hard.
Gustav Klimt - Judith I
Klimt’s masterpiece is this rendering of Judith with an expression so seductive and relaxed it's defiant. The glint of her teeth electrifies the picture; the severed head she cradles becomes an afterthought. Flat and graphic, entirely modern—soaked in mythic atmosphere but frighteningly alive.
Star Demon
Why do some encounters alter our perception while others leave no trace?
Tobias Pils
Figures hunch in the murk. One looks like a two-and-a-half legged woman. Some squeeze their hair and others fondle eggs. But the blank spaces in his roomy pictures does most of the work because these tormented bodies are all Pils wants us to see.
Crocodile Eye
C. and I were walking through a museum that might have been Versailles or the Vatican in the year 3000. Baroque galleries. White cubes. Abstract paintings at precise intervals. We agreed, quietly and with some pride, that we were lucky to live in a society that could build such a
My Spiritualized T-shirt
It's so soft. And I already have "Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space" tattooed on my arm.
Cildo Meireles - Babel
At the Tate, a mammoth tower of twentieth-century radios fritz and skip through stations. Meireles was concerned with the cacophony of the modern world. He built  Babel  in 2001. I wonder what he would build today. When I encountered the tower, the radios were tuned to Journey&