Hey there! Thanks for keeping up with me through my little newsletter. I'm back with some items to share after a few weeks off. I hope you find something to read, listen to, or bookmark for later. As always, holler back my way with anything that's catching your eye or moving your feet. Here is a bit of what’s below:

• Photos from a community beatmaking and DJing event

Hey there! Thanks for keeping up with me through my little newsletter. I’m back with some items to share after an extra week off. I hope you enjoy:

• A creative nonfiction short story that I love so, so much.
• The favorite paragraph from an essay I recently finished writing. I’m not letting go of it no matter what any editor says.

Hey there! Thanks for keeping up with me through my little newsletter. Here is a bit of what’s in store below.

• Some art exhibits from here in Detroit.
• An exercise I made about theories of change in racial consciousness.

Hey there! Thanks for checking out my newsletter. In this issue, I’m trying out a different organization that I might keep moving forward.

• Reading room: Some excerpts from and links to what I’m reading across a whole lot of areas.

Hey there! Thanks for checking out my newsletter. Here is some of what’s in store below:

• Some new tech house music from here in Detroit
• My recent readings on theoreis of change in education research

Thanks for checking out my newsletter. Here is some of what’s in store below:

• Some reflections on an art and video performance I can’t get out of my head.
• The 10-year anniversary of an art piece that went viral. Do you remember it?

Thanks for checking out my newsletter. I’m back after a few weeks off and after reading a bunch of novels on a long overdue personal reading week. Here is some of what’s in store below:

• A short tour of sculptor Chakaia Booker’s exhibit at the MSU Broad Museum. It’s splendid.
• Some ideas from poet and writer Ishmael Reed on work routines.

Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. This is an image-heavy edition with some treats for your eyes: DJ art and seven-inch record sleeve designs.

But it’s not all images. I also connect some dots from a recent interview with Black Thought about his writing process, plus my usual status board about what I’m Enjoy. And thanks to those readers who have been responding and reciprocating with interesting things in your life.

Thanks for checking out my newsletter. I’m back after a few weeks off. Here is some of what’s in store below.

• Cool stuff from a justice-oriented design studio in Toronto
• A tour around Lo and Behold! Records & Books in Hamtramck, MI.

Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. I’m back after a few weeks off. Here is some of what’s in store below.

• My sadness around #DisruptTexts.
• Teena Marie on Cash Money Records.

Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter – which is one day early this time around. Here is what’s in store below. If something catches your interest, message back and let me know, or share with a friend.

• Notes on creativity and constraints
• An excerpt about the body and sound

Photo by Sydney Rae

Photo by Mec Rawlings

Hello! I took a break from this newsletter a few months ago, and now it seems I’m back, at least for the moment, with issue #37. As before, you are welcome to unsubscribe at the bottom if its contents no longer fit your reading preferences. You can also forward it to anyone else you think might enjoy its contents.

Now, on to some material across the spectrum I’ve been working through – plus my routine status board about what I’ve been reading, writing, teaching, listening to, etc.

October marks a year that I’ve been writing this newsletter. I wrote something about this anniversary of sorts over on micro-blog, mainly why I started writing it and what I’ve learned by doing so. A year in, it might have run its course for me. So I think I’ll be taking a step back after this issue. Taking a step back might not feel right, so in that case, then I’ll keep writing it. Or it might need a different rhythm. Or maybe it’s something about this wild season we are living through right now. Either way, thank you for subscribing and reading. We’ll see what happens next.

Now onto some stuff.

The always excellent Heat Rocks podcast had on Dan Charnas to talk about samples in Slum Village’s Fantastic, Vol. 2. The episode is an hour long. I wish it were four hours long.

Dan once sketched for me on a napkin the 90 and 45-degree intersecting angles of downtown Detroit in order to illustrate the overlay of straight and swung time in Dilla’s beats. Imagine squares and triangles – evens and odds – stacked on top of one another.

Alex Dodge is a painter who uses 3D design software to digitally sketch raised patterns of oil on traditional canvas using laser-cut stencils and airbrushed backgrounds. Most of these tools are also used in game development. That’s me paraphrasing of his work. That a design blog would have a feature on his work says something about how he is using these tools. There are more interesting, conceptual details to his work as well, like calling the ghostlike bodies underneath the clothes “autonomous drones.”

Science Gallery Detroit started this week under the theme “design in a time of urgency.” My colleague Lyn Goeringer was commissioned for the piece .

Photo by Jr. Korpa

First, some fun.

A miniature record store for mice popped up in Sweden a few weeks ago. It was the work of Anonymouse, an arts collective known for mouse-themed pop-up art installations. You can see some images from it below, including the mouse-themes flips of many iconic record covers – like four rats instead of four Beatles crossing the famous Abbey Road. And don’t miss those three hungry mice on the cover of the Destiny’s Cheese debut album.

One Long Black Sentence is book of sentences you can’t understand because they are actually architecture drawings. This book of Renee Gladman’s drawings – and a written piece by Fred Moten you can read – shipped last month and looks to be sold out already.

Walk With Me, 2020

Collage may be one of the most politicized aesthetic approaches. This might be the case for the way people often associate it with children. Cutting up old magazines, spreading some Elmer’s on a poster board, and arranging some pieces is how I was introduced to the practice likely in the single-digit era of life. But Sasha Bonét puts the edge back in collage while in about artist Lorna Simpson’s work. Bonét pivots to the end of her piece like this, after terraining through a meditation on Breonna Taylor’s last public writing, Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, and Black futures:

There is a mysterious Russian shortwave radio signal that broadcasts from a swampland on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. The signal frequency is 4625 kHz, but shortwave radio enthusiasts call it The Buzzer for the two-toned saw sound that makes up most of its broadcast. It started near the end of the Cold War. In an excellent BBC article, Zaria Gorvett describes the station, which nobody has ever claimed to run, like this:

Miini-Giizis was a Native event that took place two days ago in Campus Martius, downtown Detroit. You might think of it as the real independence celebration. Less than a mile north, the Freedom March also took place.

A new mural in Milwaukee. Photo by LD.

I’ve been letting by father Kenneth Tanner sink in. It begins reflecting on four Black women who taught him as a child. It ends wrestling with the damage white supremacy does to white people. This piece does so much well in such little space.

Our Lady of Ferguson by Mark Doox, whose art might deserve a longer tour in a future edition.

Photo by Candice Seplow

On November 13th, 1898, a Presbyterian minister in Wilmington, North Carolina addressed his congregation on what was no typical Sunday morning. Three days prior, a group of white supremacists 400 strong overthrew the local government in a successful, calculated coup. They replaced the mayor, the chief of police, and other leaders with fellow white supremacists. They would not be governed by elected African Americans or whites acting in solidarity. They burned the office of the local Black newspaper and posed in front of its ruins. Detailed by David Zucchino in , the coup was violent, killing over 60 Black residents and driving many out of town with the consequence of lynching if they ever returned. Which they did not.

White abolitionist John Brown was born 120 years ago yesterday. His was a life of many failures: fur trader, business man, and – most notoriously – leader of the failed raid on a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, WV. Historians understand him as an abolitionist, no doubt. But also as a madman, revolutionary, terrorist, and fringe constitutionalist.

Here is a tour through some John Brown art.

The New York Public Library has an album of soundscapes for everyone missing the city.

Reykjavík, 2017.

Oakland University’s golden grizzly, masked for the pandemic. Or is it a muzzle?

The House of Soul at the Detroit Heidelberg Project was destroyed by arson in 2013. This fire was one of 12 over a two year period – all arson – that, the last time I checked, have not been solved. I snapped this photo shortly after the House of Soul burned down – a kind of installation/grave site in remembrance.

Sculpture and wall piece from the north end of Saginaw St., downtown Pontiac.

The shore of Lake Michigan, about a week ago.

Photo by Tim Mossholder

Here’s how Blastmaster KRS-One autographs slipmats – not mine, unfortunately, but a friend’s:

I often riff that 1980s Village Voice writing is the scholarly roots of hip-hop studies. The paper’s archives are full of gems. This is often the case because of the close proximity writers had to hip-hop artists and creators on account of being in the same nightlife and social scenes. No need to theorize about hip-hop practices from afar. You can ask creators about ideas, aesthetics, and approaches directly.

Here are some excerpts from old pieces I’ve been digging recently.

A new piece by Zach Curtis showed up downtown Pontiac. It’s directly across from the piece I shared last week. So that makes a fresh dog looking at a group of jellyfish.

Behind Alley Cat Cafe, Downtown Pontiac, MI.

Here’s a brutal take on non-profit organizations from by Paul Kivel.

Jazz drummer and Pontiac, MI native Elvin Jones, painted by at the now-defunct Lyrics on Vinyl, downtown Pontiac. Like Elvin, LOV had a good run. But this piece was painted over all too soon.

The Red Cedar river runs directly through Michigan State University, separating north and south campus. A series of walking bridges allow people to cross on foot and not have to swim. There is one section of land and corresponding bridge I like the most for what it might symbolize or even ask. If you stand in the middle of the bridge and look south, you see the football stadium backside and massive spartan logo.

If you spin around, turn your back on the stadium, and look north, you see the back entrance to the library.

One of the most beautiful books I own is Christian P. Acker’s Flip the Script: A Guidebook for Aspiring Vandals & Typographers. The book sits right in the groove between tagging and typography. A tag is the foundational, stylistic display of a graffiti writer’s name. It is the gymnast’s handstand, the chef’s fried egg, the poet’s haiku. Simplicity and constraint reveal mastery. Flip the Script illustrates different regional styles of tagging across the country through writers’ own words and markings. It is at once oral history, art manual, and underground almanac: the most meticulously researched book I own.

Walk with me on a short tour of art through a parish hall in Rochester Hills, MI.

One of the things that does not suck about marrying someone from another country is spending the holidays in Nassau. Typically, when the semester is out, we’re also out!

As island folks, my spouse’s parents have a relationship with land very different from my own. When my father-in-law first saw the small backyard behind our house in Michigan, his eyes opened big, and he started naming all of the things we could grow. I came home the next day to find him digging up patches of dirt along the side of the house in preparation to plant. At the end of the week after we planted herbs, vegetables, and a blueberry and raspberry tree, I saw him quietly saying a prayer over each plant before putting away the spade.

There’s one cilantro plant that has grown back every year since. Never replanted. It just sprouts up every spring letting us know it’s still strong, still here.

I took my #BreakBeatLit class record shopping last semester. Actually, we didn’t go record shopping; we went digging. I told them that digging is a competitive, archival practice through which hip-hop DJs and producers discover source material for making music. They search basements, flea markets, record stores, and other locations for vinyl records they can play or sample to make hip-hop music. This practice extends back to Jamaican soundclash traditions where rarity, scarcity, and secrecy translate to cultural capital. It encapsulates a crucial ethos of hip-hop culture: search and discovery. Lucky for us, there is a record store right across from campus.

By going digging, the class practiced this longstanding hip-hop tradition. We sought to hone the skills that make up this larger practice: listening with the eyes, inferring about sounds from artwork, examining the grooves of the record for possible drum breaks, tuning into the names of musicians on the back covers, and listening not only for what the break is but what the break can be. Of course, many of these skills parallel and even surpass in complexity the archival work of the formal academy. (Maybe no accident there’s a record store called Academy Records in NYC.)

Indiana has a problem. The Crossroadians of American are not happy with the exam they use to test aspiring teacher into or out of the profession. They are in a situation many states find themselves: contract with test company Pearson to build a test around your state’s specific standards and goals for teachers. The problem? The test likely has a poor design since it hasn’t been piloted and refined through use across other states. The other option: contract with Educational Testing Services and get a test that has been refined to at least some degree through use across multiple states. The problem here is that the test isn’t built around the standards and goals driving teacher education in your specific state. This is the corner states back themselves into when they rely on high-stakes, standardized exams for teacher quality control.

Status Board

Reading: Marlon James says in the Acknowledgments of that at some point while writing, he didn’t know who’s story it was: scenes out of place, half and fully-formed characters – “no spine” as he called it. Then a friend asked him, “What if it’s not one person’s story?” And then the novel came info focus. I’m a sliver into this nearly 700-page tome and enjoying the weigh of each page. On my weekly quest to unbreak my brain, the focus a novel of this length and form will demand is much welcomed.

I’ve been trying over the last year to unbreak my brain. By unbreak, I mean recover some of the focus, depth, and concentration that dings, pings, and rings have taken from me. Just like the way my brain got broken in the first place, I didn’t set out to fix it intentionally. A co-teaching colleague, on our walks back to the building after class – aren’t those talks always the best? – kept talking about infinity loops on smart phones and how to create the “distraction-free smart phone.” Okay. He got this idea from Make Time. My 76-minute commute mos def affords time for audiobooks, so I grabbed it, fell down a bit of a rabbit hole, and listened to each of these:

Deep Work by Cal Newport Make Time by Knapp and Zeratsky The Shallows by Nicholas Carr Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport Indestractable by Nir Eyal and Julie Li