Friday Linkage

It’s the end of the week, so here’s some linkage that I’ve been sitting on all week (or even longer):

::  Urban explorers of Buffalo. I read this article with great interest, as it combines a bunch of interests of mine: photographers, old buildings, and the sense of adventure in getting the shot. These are people who venture into abandoned buildings, sometimes skirting legality to do so, in order to chronicle the ongoing decay of many buildings in the region. (No, I haven’t done anything quite like this, but…I’m not sure I completely rule it out.)

::  The money is in all the wrong places. This is about the gigantic financial imbalances in creative fields, but that sentence that forms the headline–“The money is in all the wrong places”–really sums up a huge amount of what’s wrong with our economy today. The money is nowhere it needs to be, if we’re going to have more widespread success and general welfare.

The money produced by art has not disappeared. The issue is not that the people of the world value television less than they did in the 1990s. The reality is that the people with the most money have devised, at every turn, new and more bulletproof ways for them to make and keep more money, and for the people who make things to make less. This is the eternal story of labor and management; it just has hot people in it, in this case.

I’ve been waiting for decades for Americans to finally get angry enough about this to do something about it. And no matter how bad it gets, it seems that there is a permanent critical mass of Americans who will still believe that the rich earned every penny they got and nobody should ever do anything at all to force them to part with any of it. It’s a depressing reality.

::  On the “Man or Bear” debate. If you have any presence on social media at all, you’ve seen this whole “Man or Bear” thing cropping up, mainly several weeks ago. It seems pretty obvious to me that the whole thing was an analogy designed to hopefully jolt some men into seeing how wary women have to be in our presence, but boy, did a lot of men react powerfully against that suggestion. And so it goes. Anyway, this is a good article.

I first read about this debate on my phone while camping in a field in my tent. It captivated me in a way that internet debates rarely do. Slowly, I realized why: for me, “Man or Bear” is not hypothetical. I’m literally a woman who left mankind behind to live in nature with bears. This is my actual life. 

::  Have I recommended cartoonist Cassandra Calin yet? I don’t think so. She writes and draws comics drawn from the challenges of her own life as a self-employed young woman, and her work is utterly delightful. She also has a new graphic novel out now. My personal favorite installment of her regular strip thus far is about shopping for clothes. Why do I like this particular installment? Oh, no reason….

::  TrikeLife: the YouTube channel of a local woman and blogger, Val Dunne, who has adopted a tricycle as a way of getting around Buffalo and pursuing her interests while battling multiple sclerosis. Val’s a good egg!