I gave my first ever commencement speech to the graduating class of 2012 at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
I think I told them everything important that I knew about going out into the world and being an artist, so I may never need to give another one.
Amazing commencement address. Absolute required material for anyone who creates.
(Source: vimeo.com)
Our real first gay president
The new issue of Newsweek features a cover photo of President Obama topped by a rainbow-colored halo and captioned “The First Gay President.” The halo and caption strike me as cheap sensationalism. I realize airport travelers look at a magazine for 2.2 seconds before moving on to the next one. I grant that this cover will probably get Newsweek a 4.4 second glance. I also understand that Newsweek is desperate for sales. Nevertheless, I doubt that the Newsweek of old, before it was sold for a dollar, would have pandered as shallowly.
The caption is a superficial way to characterize an important development of thought that the president — along with the country — has been making over recent years. It is also entirely wrong. Like the mini-furor a couple of months back about the claim that Richard Nixon was our first gay president, the story simply ignores that the U.S. already had a gay president more than a century ago.
There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.
Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:
I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.
Wow. I never knew this about Buchanan!
A distant relative of mine. (My paternal grandmother was a Buchanan.) FWIW, Family legend confirms.
As an interesting side note, James Buchanan was descended from those Buchanans, which means my family is responsible for three civil wars—Scottish, English, and American.
Never give me a civil service job, is all I’m saying.
Neat.
Over on his blog, Scalzi offers a resonant metaphor for Straight White Male privilege:
Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the…
Thinking about this, brewing response to OP.
47 
Scott Bakal
Most of my work over the years deals with current events and is largely based in some sort of reality. Jobs that come from a fantasy and fictional point of view are sometimes a nice relief to that. It gives me the chance to get lost in a world or visual that can go anywhere - like a girl sitting in a bathtub moments before she explodes the tub…with her mind! I loved the story, ‘At the Foot of the Lighthouse’ written by author and game designer Erin Hoffman. It was written with such wonderful visuals so it was easy to pick a powerful and surprising moment in the story to illustrate. Please visit Tor.com and give it a full read.
Very cool to see all the reblogs of Scott’s wonderful art.
(via epentesis)
A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it’s hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman — or more likely a robot — of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult.
What a perverse fate for one of our kind’s greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you’re an adult you’ll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we’re talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe — mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together — beyond, around, and within us. It doesn’t just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** — as deep in us as any of our urges.
Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Out of the Labyrinth
Confession time
I totally owned and coveted various folders and such with this guy’s art as a kid. Because I totally needed 3 different folders with pictures of light haloed dolphins- y’know, for school!
Hmmm.
So I’m just going to quick talk about what happened tonight, 30 April, 2012, on the eve of the May Day 2012 General Strike. I don’t know everything yet, and I’m too busy getting ready for tomorrow to really sit down and do homework. You’re getting my on the ground observations and you’re getting…
85 Mom: wat
Reg: What?
Mom: numbers?
Reg: Timed mission.
Mom: y
Reg: [sudden realization] MOM YOU HAVE TO SAVE TALI
Mom: who
Reg: STOP TEXTING ME AND SAVE TALI AND DO NOT PICK UP THIS PHONE UNTIL YOU HAVE SAVED HER.
[several minutes pass]
Mom: so android gril
Reg: Tali is my homegirl, Mom. You are not allowed to trash talk her.
Mom: but shes an andrid
Reg: She’s not an android. She’s fabulous.
Mom: k
Mom: i leik her hoodDAMN RIGHT YOU LIKE HER HOOD, MOM. Tali is my homegirl. ;;w;; I love her so much.
In case you haven’t seen this hilarious blog. Note possible ME spoilers.
President Obama in North Carolina today on why Congress has to act to prevent interest rates on student loans from doubling (via barackobama)
(via kateelliottsff)
