… as i do most mornings, i start with reading the latest from Heather Cox Richardson…

as of yesterday, drug prices got cheaper, especially for seniors, and hearing aids are now an over the counter item, saving consumers as much as $3000/pair… and a historic peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon has been brought to a conclusion with the assistance of the Biden administration…

But all that news got drowned out by the continuing drama coming from the Republican Party. As Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell wrote in _The Bulwark_ today, the Republican Party is facing an “extinction event,” having been taken over by former president Trump to become the right-wing MAGA Party. As Longwell wrote, “In the Republican party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump.”

… i linked the Bulwark article yesterday…

… a really fascinating article on the bōsōzoku, motorcycle gangs of Japan and their portrayal in film and animation…

Wearing boots, boiler suits and bandanas – dubbed _tokkō-fuku,_ meaning “special attack uniform” – they roamed the streets wielding baseball bats and Molotov cocktails on weekends, causing public nuisances and engaging in violent turf wars. Their association with Japan’s notorious crime syndicate, the _yakuza_, reportedly became so pronounced at one point that up to one-third of yakuza recruits were coming from bōsōzoku gangs. In a 2015 documentary by Vice, meanwhile, one former gang member recalled that being a _bōsōzoku_ member was “like being in the military. It was like being drafted into war.”

… the gangs were a post WWII phenomenon now in substantial decline (though juveniles behaving badly is not)… two films, Crazy Thunder Road and the more sympathetic to bōsōzoku His Motorbike, Her Island, have been released for the first time ever outside of Japan by Third Window Films…

… another great article on director Sean Baker and his breakout masterpiece, Take Out. It is worth reading about the process of making the low budget film…

Almost two decades later, amid zero-hour contracts, feverish debates around immigration, and a pandemic that has only served to inflame rhetoric (and highlight our ever-increasing reliance on delivery riders), the questions _Take Out_ raises feel as urgent as they ever did.

… i have seen his film The Florida Project, some years ago now… i remember it, which means i liked it… sad slice of life movie… i haven’t seen Take Out… It’s been restored and re-released by Criterion Collection Blu-ray…

… from Maria Popova this morning… How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

… about the Henry James novella, The Beast in the Jungle… a man spends his life waiting for the thing the universe, he believes, has prepared him for… waiting, never acting… the results are predictable… it hits home too, because sometimes i find myself waiting for the beast to appear, which it never does as i imagine it… still i have tried, as most of us have, to be something, as most of us have…

… this article on Gowanus artsts' neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY caught my attention because i had a studio for my architecture practice there… it was short lived, lasting a year or two… we moved upstate soon after i got it and it became untenable to get to and from it without consuming large amounts of travel time… i loved it though… i loved the industrial messiness of it, the scrap metal yards with their claw bucket beasts moving the metal from truck to yard and from yard to barge…

This year’s Gowanus Open Studios, the 26th and perhaps largest yet, finds the neighborhood at a crossroads. While new attention to the area brings welcome exposure, imminent rezoningalong the waterfront is leadingresidents and local organizations to fear their little corner of the city may soon go the way of Dumbo, Williamsburg, and Hudson Yards. Amid a citywide housing crisis, Brooklyn artists are also realizing the connections between art-world buzz and luxury real estate.

… also…

Six Artists I discovered at Gowanus Open Studios

Inside the studio of artist Ella Hepner in Gowanus, New York (all photos Elaine Velie/Hyperallergic)

… apparently, the new artist “it” neighborhood is Sunset Park… Affordable for Now, Sunset Park Rises as a Buzzing NYC Arts Hub… where the artists go, the creative wannabe’s with money follow… and the artists are, most of them, forced to move on… as are the not wealthy they live amongst… gentrification, over and over and over again… #art #sunset-park #gentrification

… from a post on Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier:

Longing is the ferment of loneliness, the wine that comes from letting it age properly. It’s the bitters in the cocktail, the acid in the marinade, a reason to look up at the stars and make a wish, and it can be the source of wonders. “All planetary exploration to me is a story about longing. It’s a longing to know ourselves. It’s a longing to understand the significance of our own existence. It’s a longing to communicate, to say to the universe ‘We’re here. Know us. Where are you?’”