April 14, 2026
Ears:
“Song on the Beach”, Arcade Fire, Owen Pallett
“Waiting for You (Bonus Track), Alex G
“Toxic”, YAWNS, Drippin So Pretty, Cold Hart
“Featherstone”, The Paper Kites
Eyes:
Archives of the Fallen, Charles Merewether
First Information Report, Raqs Media Collective
April 9, 2026
Oops
Eyes:
An Archival Impulse, Hal Foster
A Language to Come: Japanese Photography After the Event, Charles Merewether
Ears:
“Survival Song”, AJJ
“Walk Like Thunder”, Kimya Dawson and Aesop Rock
“Friday I’m in Love” - Live from Glastonbury, Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith
“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn
“My Mom”, Kimya Dawson
Mouth:
Iced caramel madeleine latte from Coffee Lab and Roasters (tastes like a liquid cookie, I dream about it)
April 1, 2026
Ears:
“Kool Aid”, Diana Gordon
“Nepal”, San Cisco
“The Kids Will Be Alright, Eventually”, Sledding With Tigers
“The Summer”, Josh Pyke
“Flower Moon”, Vampire Weekend
“Intersection”, Modern Baseball
“Hindsight”, Family Hahas
Eyes:
Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings, Janelle Rebel
Gerhard Richter, Arias: Das Archiv der Anomie, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
The Model of the Sciences, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix
Politics of Cultural Heritage, subREAL (Cãlin Dan and Josif Kiraly)
Gerber/Hart LQBTQ+ Library and Archives Visit
Last week, as part of a class field trip, I visited the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Rogers Park, Chicago. I went in with little knowledge, not knowing what to expect. I imagined a small grassroots archive, maybe a room lined with books and carefully labeled folders.
When our tour guide and librarian opened the door to the archive’s cold storage room, I was struck by the quantity of shelved materials. The temperature dropped, and in front of me stood stacks and stacks of boxes stretching across shelving units, dense with history, which, if not preserved by them, would likely have otherwise been discarded. Books, videotapes, drag costumes, folders, magazines, binders. The scale was overwhelming in a way that felt intimate. Every box represented countless individual lives that were attempted to be erased and unrepresented, compressed into one large archive.
The Gerber/Hart Library and Archives was founded in 1981 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the history and culture of LGBTQ+ communities, particularly in Chicago and the Midwest. Hearing this mission while surrounded by the physical evidence of it made the statement feel less institutional and more urgent. Many of these histories were never preserved elsewhere. Without spaces like Gerber/Hart, entire networks of community memory might simply disappear.
The archive did not shy away from certain materials in order to be more traditionally accepted; it did not separate the political from the personal, but instead, it revealed how deeply intertwined they are.
The most obvious material holdings, filling up storage rooms from ground to ceiling, were the stacks of pornographic materials.
Row after row of magazines and videotapes, saved and preserved with the same seriousness and care as any other historical document. At first, the presence of so much explicit material felt surprising, almost disorienting within the traditional image of an archive as a restrained academic space, not to mention on a class field trip. We giggled while pointing out the elaborate titles we saw, such as Meat Master, Horny-Assed Virgin, and Prep School Pussy Boy.
Pornography, in this context, was not treated as novelty or scandal but as cultural evidence. It documented desire, identity formation, aesthetics, community networks, and forms of visibility that existed long before mainstream acceptance. For many LGBTQ+ communities, especially in earlier decades, erotic media functioned as one of the few accessible spaces where queer identities could be expressed openly. These materials recorded sexuality, survival, connection, and self-recognition.
This archive sought to make it clear that intimacy, pleasure, and the complexities of lived experiences are ingrained in history and deserve to be recorded and saved. Preservation here felt expansive rather than selective, refusing to sanitize the past in order to make it more comfortable.
I kept thinking about the act of saving itself. Someone chose to keep these magazines. Someone donated them. Someone decided they mattered enough to catalog, box, and maintain in climate-controlled storage. The archive became visible not just as a collection of objects but as a chain of decisions rooted in care.
This collection emphasizes that the knowledge of LGBTQ+ and other underrepresented groups’ histories fosters understanding and social change. Walking through the stacks proved that clearly. History here was not abstract, but tactile, messy, joyful, political, and most importantly, deeply human.
Leaving the archive, I found myself thinking about accumulation differently. The cold room was filled with materials once considered disposable or marginal. Yet together, they formed an undeniable record of presence. The archive did not just preserve history. It insisted that these lives, desires, and communities were always worth remembering.
I walked out realizing that archives are not neutral containers of the past. They are acts of affirmation, insisting that this mattered enough to keep.
March 29, 2026
Eyes:
Heart the Lover, Lily King
Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: For a Love of Softness, Be Oakley
Mother, We All Have Been Lonely and Lovely Places, Lara Konrad
Ears:
“9/10”, Jeff Rosenstock
“I Wanna Be Sedated”, Ramones
“I’ve Wasted So Much Time”, Enjoy
“Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”, Kendrick Lamar
“Coal Miner’s Daughter”, Loretta Lynn
Mouth:
Banana Bread Latte from Cafe Carranza
McDonalds Hashbrown
March 23, 2026
Took a break from my laptop over spring break, spent some time in DC and Richmond, some memorable consumption… mainly food:
Eyes:
Hamnet, Chloé Zhao (LOVED)
Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell (did not love)
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Mouth:
Stella’s in Richmond- 100000/10- We got the hummus and pita, Yia Yia’s veggie skillet, and the No. 5 Pasta and I haven’t stopped thinking about it
Chewy’s Bagel in Richmond- one of the best breakfast sandwiches I have ever had in my life
Table side carbonara at Botanya in Richmond
Elizabeth’s in DC- very very very fancy vegan dining, first vegan cheese I’ve ever had that was bearable
March 12, 2026
Eyes:
“Meditations in an Emergency”, Cameron Awkward-Rich
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds
& the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside.
I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in
Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart. There's a dream I have in which I
love the world. I run from end to end like fingers
through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.
Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand
on my stupid heart.
From The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion:
“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”
Some brutally relatable quotes from The Novelist, by Jordan Castro:
“My morning so far felt beyond my control, like it was happening to me, not because of me”
“I felt entirely uninterested in reading or thinking about anything; I felt preemptively exhausted at the prospect of being thrust into having to think about something”
“Without an active disposition toward life, or a unifying life-task, I was absolved of my responsibility to step forward, into my own life, and could languish in front of my laptop, thinking, eschewing all else for the sake of my “novel,” pretending that I was engaged in something important and unique, when in reality I was engaged in common cowardice”
“everything a lukewarm soup of fragmented, poetic moods”
Ears:
“Claw Machine”, Sloppy Jane, Phoebe Bridgers
“I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool”, Kate Fagan
“DEATHCAMP feat. Cole Alexander”, Tyler, The Creator
“Kill Everything”, fakemink
“Goodness Pt. 1”, The Hotelier
“Wake Me up to Drive”, Big Thief
March 9, 2026
Eyes:
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Finally got my zine wall up
Lots of found material scanning (some under projects)
Ears:
“Condition 11:11”, Defiance, Ohio
“come around”, Lil Peep
“The One You Really Love,” The Magnetic Fields
Hands:
My dying plant’s leaves crumbled in my hands
Touched Lake Michigan
Collecting as Consciousness and Survival: Holding What Has Been
Collecting often naturally begins with the inability to let go. Memories are held tight, stored on phones, pinned on walls, sealed in boxes, sometimes never opened, but never discarded. Moments linger through images that are forever forgotten to be deleted, but instead are preserved. Grief is attempted to be postponed through accumulation, and mourning acts as a form of hoarding. The archive emerges as a psychological mechanism- as a way to endure attachment, loss, and the fear that everything meaningful now will one day cease to exist.
In this sense, the archive functions as a space of consciousness. To collect is to contemplate on time, to return to what has passed. It becomes a ritualistic act, a portal between presence and absence, between memory and imagination. Objects and images are not kept just to document the past, but to hold on to something deeper, to resist disappearance. Through accumulation, we construct systems of endurance, using memory as both a material and a method of survival.
But still, archives operate beyond the emotional realm. They work as a way to shape public truth, identity, and justice, often standing at the center of legal battles, reconciliation processes, and historical reckonings. What is preserved, in turn, becomes what is believed; and what is excluded faces the threat of erasure. Archives possess histories of their own, built through purposeful selection and omission, framing the narratives that will be remembered, and what won’t. Archiving and collecting is an act of devotion and defense, an intimate practice with profound cultural consequences, shaping time, memory, the struggle over truth, survival, and collective meaning.
March 6, 2026
Eyes:
“A Short History of Photography”, Walter Benjamin
The Novelist, Jordan Castro
Ears:
“David”, Lorde
“Citibike”, Blaketheman1000
“Mis”, Alex G <3 <3 <3
Mouth:
Genuinely one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my entire life at il Porcellino. Speechless. Pictures below. Garlic bread loaf, ravioli al forno, and fusilli pesto genovese
March 2, 2026
Sick day
Mouth:
Granada and lemon refresher from Q’bo Latin Cafe
Sudafed
Zinc tablets
Eyes: (I have also decided to start sharing some really great and interesting quotes that I find influential when I feel like it)
“Blindness and Deafness as Metaphors: An Anthological Essay”, Joseph Grigley
This essay is a collection of quotations from contemporary texts in which the words “blindness” and “deafness” are used as metaphors and arranged into a narrative that functions both as an anthology and a critique. It explores how cultural values are embedded in everyday metaphors, while also examining how this type of language, commonly circulating through publications such as The New York Times, reveals broader attitudes toward disability in Western society and the ease with which these metaphors are used and normalized.
“I think that one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people's awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful. Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being. But the artist cannot be deaf to the call of truth; it alone defines his creative will and organizes it, thus enabling him to pass on his faith to others. An artist who has no faith is like a painter who was born blind.” Andrey Turkovsky
“By getting people to accept the nature we find around us - the everyday ant, the familiar butterfly - as the same 'nature' we are told we should protect and revere, we can turn appreciation into action.” Adelle Caracanos, The New York Times
“'Becoming depressed is like going blind, the darkness at first gradual, then encompassing: it is like going deaf, hearing less and less until a terrible silence is all around you.'“ The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon, 2001
“Whites sometimes ask why we continue find it necessary to invoke the past. They do not want to be blamed for the sins of their fathers, and they exhort us to move on. But this is a story that has not ended. Cultural exclusion continues today - and in some ways it is getting worse. Our entire society is paying a price for this cultural blindness.” Peggy Cooper Cafritz
“All of a sudden we may find ourself wondering what it is that links us to a particular set of objects, or an environment, or a project, and, in response, altering the way we used to look at all the others.” Nicolas Bourriaud
“Working Through Objects”, Susan Hiller
Essay on collections and archives, both personal acting and what gives them value, what gives them meaning at all. Argues that objects carry personal and collective memories, acting as tools to process unconscious thoughts and experiences. So, engaging with them by collecting, arranging, and reflecting becomes a way to explore identity, memory, and emotion.
“The only value these things have is that I have assigned some kind of value to them.”
“I am trying to seek immortality and meaning through objects.”
“So by putting the remnants that I collect into these boxes, I'm using the box as a frame to draw attention to something placed within it.”
“Of course I didn’t know what the resonance was. I just knew that I was somehow stuck with these things and I never wanted to throw them out. So, I started to look into what the resonance of each thing might be for me, and then each got its place in a box and eventually I added appropriate contextualizing material, a title, an annotation and date like a real collector would, and that is my collection”
“Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae”, Renee Green
This essay examines the silences in archives, what is missing, overlooked, or excluded, and how these shape our broader understanding of history and culture. She speaks about how archival silences reveal power dynamics and the fragility of memory.
“The compulsive activities demonstrate the lack of definitiveness…. yet allude to the fascinating possibilities for further searching which following these ordering systems can generate.”
Ears:
“Plea from a Cat Named Virtue”, The Weakerthans
“Right Ahead, You Sailor!”, Right Away, Great Captain!
“doing all the things i used to do with people, part 2 (acoustic/ rooftop version)”, teen suicide
“Orange County (feat. Bizarrap, Kara Jackson, and Anoushka Shankar)”, Gorillaz (NEW ALBUM!)
“I Know The End”, Phoebe Bridgers
“Banshee Beat”, Animal Collective
Feb 26, 2026
Eyes:
The Hull House Museum and Archives
The Traitors Season Finale
Summer internship application hell
Doomscrolling Facebook Marketplace
Ears:
Big Cloud, Radiator Hospital
Blue Hair, TV Girl
The Love Club, Lorde
hangar, 8485
God Only Knows, The Langley Schools Music Project
Beginner’s Mind, Bright Eyes
Mouth:
$3 slices and vodka sodas at Big Gay Sal’s Pizza
Cheesy scrambled eggs on sourdough toast with a drizzle of honey!?
Curiosity as Care: Early Practices of Collecting
Long before museums, databases, or digital clouds, the urge to collect was already shaping how memory could materialize itself. Objects were gathered, studied, and arranged as a way to understand the world, but also a way to situate oneself in it. During the Renaissance, this impulse took physical form in the intimate spaces known as studiolos and then cabinets of curiosities. These early collections were carefully constructed expressions of identity, curiosity, and longing. They reveal how collecting emerged as both a personal and cultural practice, one rooted in the desire to organize and commemorate experience, narrate the self, and give permanence to fleeting encounters with beauty, knowledge, and the unknown.
Apothecary Calzolari's Cabinet of Curiosities
During the Renaissance, the studiolo acted as a private study room designed for reading, reflection, and retreat. These rooms stand as one of the earliest forms of the personal archive. This is where scholars and nobles would carefully curate an assemblage of books, works of art, antiquities, scientific instruments, and rare objects. Each item in these collections functioned symbolically and contributed to a visual language that worked to present the collector’s intellect, virtue, and worldliness. The studiolo became a space where objects spoke of class, education, taste, and engagement in classical heritage and global exchange.
Collecting within the studiolo was a creative practice where the owning scholar aimed to present to the world how they wanted to be perceived. Objects were chosen for what they represented about history, scholarship, or philosophical reflection. Eastern artifacts expressed worldly curiosity, libraries demonstrated intellectual authority, and artistic fragments signified timeless ideals. Through carefully curated selections and arrangements, the collector shaped a cohesive portrait of their identity through an environment where material culture became narrative form.
An example of this appears in the Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio, where intricate cabinetry frames representations of musical instruments, scientific tools, armor, and symbolic emblems. Painted images of books mirror a renowned library, blurring the line between the real and the represented, and emphasizing that the studiolo was not just a container for objects, but a space of intellectual performance, an archive used for self expression and invention.
Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio
By the mid-sixteenth century, this instinct to collect expanded into the cabinet of curiosities, also known as the Wunderkammer. Unlike the studiolo, the cabinet presented a more encyclopedic and diverse scope. Common objects included natural specimens, minerals, taxidermy, ethnographic artifacts, scientific instruments, devotional objects, and artworks that coexisted within these dense displays. These collections were organized less by discipline and more by wonder and curiosity. The Wunderkammer aimed to present the world through fascination, spectacle, and juxtaposition.
Cabinets served as early public/private spaces of learning and fascination. They functioned as precursors to modern museums, though without the classificatory systems that museums often impose. Here, order existed beneath chaos: objects were sometimes grouped according to categories such as natural versus artificial or sacred versus scientific. Yet the overwhelming density of the displays resisted clarity, inviting discovery and curiosity rather than control.
In these cabinets, one could often see signs of disarray, such as a casually placed note or an object out of alignment, suggesting that these collections were not static archives but evolving ones. Cabinets invited continuous revision, being constantly re-shaped by new acquisitions and shifting interests. Symbolic objects linked to mortality, including preserved remains or memento mori, often punctuated the displays. These reminders anchored the pursuit of wonder to the inevitability of loss, presenting collecting itself as a response to time’s passage.
Together, the studiolo and the cabinet of curiosities reveal a shared human impulse: to gather, order, and preserve as a means of understanding both the world and the self. These early archives were not just repositories of objects, but a method of actively shaping memory and identity. What was collected gained importance, as what remained outside the collection disappeared from the narrative. Archives became systems of meaning, tools for constructing histories and defining whose experiences endured.
That impulse continues today, as archives now exist more widely in traditional spaces such as museums and libraries, and also in non-traditional settings such as personal collections, family albums, social media timelines, and cloud storage. They operate across physical and digital realms, shaping how memories are curated, edited, and remembered.
What is chosen for preservation?
What is allowed to fade?
And how do those decisions shape personal and collective identities?
It is within these lingering questions that the archive continues to evolve as both a space of storage and a site of meaning, memory, and becoming.
Feb 23, 2026
Eyes:
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Oscar Vuong (ik im late)
In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl
Ears:
Down By The Water, PJ Harvey
Nothing Came Out, The Moldy Peaches
uuu, Field Medic
Missing Out, Maya Hawke
At The Beach, In Every Life, Gigi Perez
Mouth:
Iced salted jagger caramel latte and breakfast sandwich from Swadesi Cafe (the hashbrown in it is like a samosa YUM)
Feb 22, 2026
Eyes:
Funny Weather, Olivia Laing
The Heuretics of Deconstruction, Gregory L. Ulmer
^“I've never been sure about the need for literary criticism. If a work is immediate enough, alive enough, the proper response isn't to be academic, to write about it, but to use it, to go on. By using each other's texts, we keep· on living, imagining, making, fucking, and we fight this society of death.” Kathy Acker
Mouth:
A homemade, perfectly proportioned iced caramel latte (photo attached)…. Update TWO lattes
Feb 18, 2026
Eyes:
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Andy Warhol
The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, llya Kabakov
The America’s Next Top Model Documentary
Ears:
Dying for You, Charli xcx
White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter, Lana Del Rey
California, Joni Mitchell
Mouth:
Chocolate covered angel food cake muffin from Beatrix (what makes a muffin count as a muffin?)
Hands:
That one stubble of hair growing back on my chin I can’t stop trying to pluck with my fingers
Nose:
Salt and vinegar potato chips somewhere
Feb 16, 2026
Ears:
Weird Little Birthday Girl, Happyness
Should Have Known Better, Sufjan Stevens
Roses, Kanye West
Fable, Gigi Perez
Stubborn Love, The Lumineers
Call Me By Your Name audio book read by Armie Hammer (creepy but once you get past it dare I say… steamy)
Eyes:
On Photography, Susan Sontag
Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman
and tbh Summer House and Love Island All Stars
Nose:
The smell of 60-degree weather gracing my sinuses
Some breakfast place frying food in the distance
Today I saw a smushed rat, then a decapitated bird
It’s not going to be a good day
I want to avoid it on my walk back home, but it’s too cold out
My friends have asked me if I am superstitous and sometimes I don’t know the difference between superstition and OCD. For example, if my coffee in the morning is bad, I assume it is going to be a bad day, and it usually is. Yes, I am aware I am psyching myself out and setting myself up for failure.
Sometimes something happens that makes me feel a feeling I have felt only a couple of specific times before, and brings me back to that moment
Teleportation
The thing that triggers this could be an incident, it could be a certain smell, a sound, a vision. But it teleports you forcefully into whatever hazy memory you have left from those previous moments
Your brain is always trying to chase your heart. Follow your heart, your brain will catch up
If you follow your brain, your heart won’t survive!!!!!!!!!!
Why do I sometimes feel nostalgic for how I used to feel during a certain time, even though it felt so horrible? But I miss having access to that feeling. I miss those days still even though I was miserable?
Intro
I am sitting in a cafe, eating the most flaky, crumbly croissant falling apart everywhere. It is a 45-degree sunny day in Chicago, which, after this winter, has me feeling like maybe there is a God after all.
I have recently been inspired to start a blog-type-style-page-thing to start and materialize the chaos overwhelming my brain. I have been procrastinating this idea for years because of deeply rooted imposter syndrome and thinking who the fuck cares, but I am working on not caring if you don’t care!
My goal with this page is to share things that I have encountered or consumed that inspire me, or enlighten me, or make me feel something at all! I assume that this page will lean towards playlists, art criticism, rants, lists in general, things I’ve learned and found interesting, and completely incoherent thoughts.
I have been thinking about making this on Substack and linking it here, but my indecisiveness has stalled me from creating anything for too long, so we are moving forward.
