The number of rabbits that emerge in the night in Providence, Rhode Island hints at the existence of a magic trick that exists somewhere at the intersection of something like a failed magic trick and the rhythm of the tides. A stage musician has fallen asleep next to his stovepipe hat, the mouth of which is left exposed to the world. He might have fallen asleep in his home, on a bench on Blackstone Boulevard, or under the Christmas lights of Ogie’s Trailer Park. He might have attempted to re-summon the spirit of H.G. Lovecraft or Talking Heads from when they were young. But the provenance of the rabbits in Providence doesn’t matter. The impact is the same. The rabbits keep coming.
ON journeys through the States we start,
(Ay through the world, urged by these songs,
Sailing henceforth to every land, to every sea,)
We willing learners of all, teachers of all, and lovers of all.
“So my whole childhood was literally in The Mission near 24th street. And, just, like, the color and the vibrancy of it when I was a child, it was such a fun match. I’m half-Black, half-Salvadoran, and, at the time, [that area] was literally all Latino. Me and my sister, we could walk next door at any point — we were young, too; I was, like, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 — and we could just roam the streets and nobody would bother us … When I came back to The Mission after years and years, it just like, ‘Oh my goodness, this place has taken a complete turn. There’s still those pockets of what I loved about it — the beauty, the culture, and the people — but it’s so different from what it was when I was a kid. And I was like, ‘God, it feels like the death of something. It feels like a death.’ And so I thought of that idea — of personifying The Mission as a person — and, like, what would that look like? And sidewalk funerals are just so iconic of The Mission, right? Like, you walk places, and when I was younger, it’d be like, there’s all the candles of Guadalupe, where maybe someone got hit or got shot or something, so that image of some coming and paying their respects to whatever the person was — I just wanted to toy with the idea of, ‘Let’s pay respect to the place that is still here but not here in a way that a lot of us remember.’" — Olivia Peña.
A cyclist was doing angry laps between Belle Isle and the roads that lined the James River in Richmond, Virginia earlier this afternoon. He said something in a gruff tone to a man who was attempting to jog with his cloud of a husky across the walkway bridge that connected the island and the shore, and seemed to be throwing something of a performative fit as he did the cyclist equivalent of pacing in front of a springtime wedding setting itself up at the Tredegar Iron Works under the lightest blanket of welcoming springtime weather. A few passing young folks noticed this right away and began referring to him as “Mr. Tour de France.”
“The order of things was shaken. A woman would milk her cow, and next to her there’d be a soldier who had to make sure that when she was done milking, she’d pour the milk out on the ground. An old woman carries a basket of eggs, and next to her there’s a soldier walking to make sure she buries them. The farmers were raising their precious potatoes, harvesting them really quietly, but in fact they had to be buried. The worst part was, the least comprehensible part, was that everything was so — beautiful! That was the worst.” — from Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl.