Hello. I missed my self-imposed deadline and didn't send anything in April. I thought about it a couple times, but didn't follow through. Does that mean there will be two of these missives in May? Unknown. I wouldn't count on it.
I just started reading Duchamp Is My Lawyer by Kenneth Goldsmith. Among lots of other things, he is the founder and primary driver behind UbuWeb (https://ubu.com/) - which is a massive open archive of art from the fringes (and not so fringe). It exists on the margins of copyright/IP legality and permission. Everything is free and there are no restrictions on any of the content.
I'm only in the second chapter, but the first chapter already was supremely inspirational to me. It basically laid out the manifesto for UbuWeb and all of it aligned with my way of thinking about all this stuff. The netlabel I've run since 2008 or so, pan y rosas discos, has a similar philosophy - although everything on the pyr label is with the artist's explicit permission. The thing that impacted me immediately in the short term is Kenneth's requirement that UbuWeb be coded in simple html to prevent it from becoming dependent on new platforms that will inevitably be obsolete and fall apart at some point. When I started pyr I did everything with html in a text editor, which got kind of tedious after a few years and I migrated to wordpress and continue to use to this day. However, that commitment to basic html resilience and access jumped out at me when I read it. So, now I'm attempting to build a text only version of the pyr site with the least amount of code that I can. Boring you say? Fun, I say! For now.
April things. We went to Delaware and New Jersey for CPS' spring break and visited family, ate Wawa hoagies and Rita's water ice. We also went to Assateague Island National Seashore. We've been there a couple times years ago, but since we almost always go to Delaware in the summer it is oppressively hot to be out on the sand/dunes for a nature walk. So this was the first time we've gone and actually gotten to walk around for a decent amount of time. Did we see horses? Yes! Lots of them. They all came out to say hello to us. Did I take pictures of them? No! That is too trite.