shield your eyes

I work here. You can find more of my Internet stuff on that other thing. I write real things sometimes. Email me at gillian.reagan at gmail. _uacct = "UA-3578928-1"; urchinTracker();

[gillianmae]

Never forget about Paula Perry

[buzzfeedlgbt]

One Photographer Showcases Mexico’s Gender Defying Indigenous Community

[gracklesong]

I keep seeing this reblogged uncritically and there’s a couple of things that should be addressed. Some muxes also identify as homosexual men, and some as trans women. Some do not co-identify with any Western identity, because there is no Western equivalent that encompasses all the same nuances “muxe” does. Muxes predate European colonization and, and they survived the violent suppression of similar identities across the New World. At the same time, the culture has had to adapt to the imposition of Catholicism and rigid European gender roles. There are a lot of articles about muxes that contain little or no commentary from muxes themselves. We should be very careful about blithely taking Western authors at their word, especially when they use phrases like “men who take on the traditional roles of women”, which demonstrates a shallow, racist, cissexist and colonialist approach to a facet of indigenous culture Westerners are poorly equipped to understand and reliably describe.

[spring-steens]

[gillianmae]

Glory Days, Yeah they’ll pass you by…. Happy 64th Birthday, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen! (23 September 1949)

[dayan]

A visit to a Gristedes grocery store—most Manhattanites, at least, have had the experience—explains something about both Catsimatidis’ campaign and its advertising. The stores are lit like the sequels to The Matrix and crowded with marked-down items hours from their expiration dates; higher-end items are marked up punitively, mid-range items marked up only slightly less so, and lower-end items appear to have been kicked all the way from warehouse to shelf. Cashiers text. Lines stagnate as managers try to reason with elderly customers wielding expired coupons. Someone has opened a jar of Ba-Tempte pickles, eaten a few, then re-screwed the top and put it back on the shelf. (I’ve seen it.)

CATS for New York, now and forever | Capital New York (via dayan)

[gillianmae]

Some news

Capital was bought by POLITICO owner Robert Allbritton. I'll be the managing editor in the next stage of the site, responsible for many new projects on the horizon. It has been a long, hard road and I appreciate everyone who has supported me and the team along the way. Very excited for what's next. Thanks, and please stay tuned. 

[gillianmae]

Many awesome things happened this past week in Oregon. Kathryn's stick and poke tattoo is probably in my top 5.

[friedcheesegoddess]

"It’s a weird feeling when people always assume you, in all of your blackness, know exactly who the fuck the “Bad Brains” are, as if they are the only black punk band to exist on the face of the fuckin earth. It’s a weird feeling when you start a band and the only permissible comparison allowed is the “Bad Brains”.

[gillianmae]

"It’s weird when you are at a show that some of your white friends invited you to, but you really can’t tell if some of the bands on the bill are white power. It’s weird as fuck when you are at a white power punk show but the only reason they don’t fuck you up is because you are punk first, which magically erases your color. It’s weird being black and alone in a place where the freedom to be racist and fucked up is granted without a thought."

[jadedpunk-blog]

What I Learned From DJing An Emo Night

A girl came up to the DJ booth while ‘Boxcar’ was playing and asked who sang it originally because she only knew the Ataris version. At this point, I realized I’d made a huge mistake, not just in agreeing to DJ an emo night but with my life choices in general.

Read More

[bmichael]

Because Syria is no longer Syria. It is a nuthouse. There is the Italian guy who was unemployed and joined al-Qaeda, and whose mom is hunting for him around Aleppo to give him a good beating; there is the Japanese tourist who is on the frontlines, because he says he needs two weeks of “thrills”; the Swedish law-school graduate who came to collect evidence of war crimes; the American musicians with bin Laden-style beards who insist this helps them blend in, even though they are blonde and six-feet, five-inches tall. (They brought malaria drugs, even if there’s no malaria here, and want to deliver them while playing violin.) There are the various officers of the various UN agencies who, when you tell them you know of a child with leishmaniasis (a disease spread by the bite of a sand fly) and could they help his parents get him to Turkey for treatment, say they can’t because it is but a single child, and they only deal with “childhood” as a whole.

This piece, “Woman’s work: The twisted reality of an Italian freelancer in Syria" by Francesca Borri is incredible. The paragraph following the above grounds the extraordinary in the terribly mundane:

But we’re war reporters, after all, aren’t we? A band of brothers (and sisters). We risk our lives to give voice to the voiceless. We have seen things most people will never see. We are a wealth of stories at the dinner table, the cool guests who everyone wants to invite. But the dirty secret is that instead of being united, we are our own worst enemies; and the reason for the $70 per piece isn’t that there isn’t any money, because there is always money for a piece on Berlusconi’s girlfriends. The true reason is that you ask for $100 and somebody else is ready to do it for $70. It’s the fiercest competition. Like Beatriz, who today pointed me in the wrong direction so she would be the only one to cover the demonstration, and I found myself amid the snipers as a result of her deception. Just to cover a demonstration, like hundreds of others.

(via bmichael)

[drawpizzaeveryday]

by Ira

[gillianmae]

#drawpizzaeveryday

[gillianmae]

[capitalnewyork-blog-blog]

Hi friends, Join Capital New York editors and writers at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe TONIGHT to celebrate the release of our first e-book, Making the City: A selection of stories from Capital New York, featuring reporting about the world of violence behind Chinese food delivery, homeless hustlers, a Palestinian falafel king, political infighting, football heroes, and much more. Download it here! http://www.amazon.com/Making-City-Selected-stories-ebook/dp/B00DEOWWXC/

It’s FREE!! Starts at 7 p.m., and there will be beer and books for sale! We’ll be hearing more stories about this both hard to describe and endlessly describable city from: This American Life contributor Starlee Kine MSNBC host Steve Kornacki Deadspin editor Tom Scocca Playwright and film writer Sheila O’Malley Film writer Steven Boone Writer and co-founder of The Li.st. Glynnis MacNicol Capital co-founder Tom McGeveran Capital politics reporter Azi Paybarah hosted by Capital public editor Gillian Reagan.

RSVP HERE!

[ynannarising]

Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists. They were abortionists, nurses and counselors. They were the pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs, and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.

Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, “Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers” (via sacredcreatrix)

[capitalnewyork-blog-blog]

Dear friends, 

We are excited to announce the release of our first e-book, Making the City: Selected stories from Capital New York. We chose 16 stories, published during the past three years, that we feel reflect on our mission to investigate, explore, question, and explain the messy city of New York to a knowing community of readers and participants.

»>You can buy it here on Amazon or on iTunes for $4.99.

You do not need a Kindle or tablet to read our e-book. You can read it on your desktop, or send it to your iPhone with the Kindle app.

Let us know what you think!

Also, join us for a release party, Reading the City, on July 2 at 7 p.m. at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, featuring readings of New York stories by Capital co-founder Tom McGeveran and writers Starlee Kine, Azi Paybarah, Sheila O’Malley, Steven Boone, Steve Kornacki, Glynnis MacNicol, and more, hosted by Gillian Reagan. (Stay tuned for more details!) 

Here’s the introduction to the book, written by editors Tom McGeveran and Josh Benson: 

A Palestinian food-cart vendor with a secret recipe and a Chinese family struggling to earn its living with a takeout restaurant in the South Bronx; an ambitious young politician with a knack for working the press and a police chief who’s better at politics than his boss; a character actor trying to break into opera and a hip-hop group from Philadelphia that has made its way to the top of the late-night television pyramid; a famous woman who would challenge the supremacy of The New York Times and a self-deprecating man who would be its shining knight; the street hustles of the perennially homeless and the street photography of a fashion icon.

These are some of the characters we’ve covered at Capital New York over the last three years, since we began publishing from a cluster of white melamine Ikea desks in a windowless room in Soho in June 2010. The story subjects are a diverse group, but they have in common a desire to fix their fates against the roiling reality of life here. They’re famous, infamous, unknown, or invisible, but they’re all part of the same messy project of New York City.

This place is both hard to describe and endlessly describable. It’s a city of disparate instances, and it’s in the disparities that the engine of the city becomes, barely, visible.

E.B. White, that inescapable and comforting shadow under which anyone who wants to think or write about New York City must work, knew only some of these varieties of the New York experience, in fact. But he in turn knew what he didn’t know, as he wrote in his 1949 book, Here Is New York:

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go — this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.”

It’s a city of stories. Telling them in their specificity, and smashing them all together without an overweening concern for their comfort or compatibility, is the only real way to tell the story of New York. It’s an endless project that’s so rewarding because it’s a project that can never go away. It’s what we’ve tried to do with this website: To tell some of these stories, in their utter specificity, as a way of getting at the big stories that defy the keystroke.

This is a selection of articles we’ve published over the last three years, and not a collection, because with writers like ours, as passionate about their subjects and as determined to get the story right in its utter specificity, there can’t be a final anthology. Which is why we are so thankful for the last three years of Capital, and for the time to come. And which is why we hope, if you find these stories as compelling and immersive as we do, there will be ample occasion for more selections like these ones.

Buy Making the City: Selected stories from Capital New York on Amazon or on iTunes.

[gillianmae]

This and things.

[gillianmae]

TOYIN ODUTOLA All these garlands prove nothing XII, 2013 pen ink and marker on paper 14 x 17 inches 23 1/2 x 26 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches framed TO13.006 Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

[gillianmae]

My mom's cheatsheet of names for my niece and nephew's stuffed animal friends. #latergram

[monoire]

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (via monoire)