The Tumblr Edition

Greetings from Nairobi.

If asked, I don’t really know how to describe what I generally post about. Sometimes it’s personal musings or updates, sometimes on photography in various ways, sometimes my music endeavors and various resistance-tech fixations. All are me trying to process life and ideas and share it out in ways that are hopefully interesting, relevant, and that respect your intelligence. To me, all have an undertow of mindful, art-based resistance, even if it’s not explicit.

Who knows if I’m doing it ‘right’? Maybe I should stay more focused. Or, maybe I need to mix it up more.

How would it look if I collected a couple weeks worth of stuff I’d normally post on social media and put it here? (That’s sort of what I was doing with my former Viaduct Arts newsletter, for those that subscribed to that. Viaduct was usually a compilation/digest of recent FB posts with a note from me at the top.)

What if you didn’t have to doomscroll on whatever platform to come across each individual post randomly, instead it all plopped as a bundle into your email on a Sunday morning?

It’s not a perfect experiment. Images seem to work best. I’m already discovering what wouldn’t work well in this space, like links, reels, anything not ‘evergreen’ enough to last more than a day. And of course it means you can’t comment or like the individual items.

There’s not as much to choose from since I like many others don’t post that much anymore, though FB is one of the few places I do. I barely look at Instagram, though it’s the only way to keep up with my Kenyan photographer friends. I dipped back into Threads the other day and it’s still way livelier discourse than Bluesky, which to my chagrin I’m beginning to give up on but I’ll leave that for another post.

In general I think the model of sharing broadly with strangers may be nearing a close. If there was a better way to share with friends and family that didn’t require wading through FB’s dreary AI slop or IG’s reels I’d sign up in a second. Otherwise I’m feeling a bit done. Anyone feel the same?

I’m more interested these days in what I’ve heard called the ‘cozy web’ - newsletters, groups, blogs. I’m liking good ol’ email, highly recommend Proton for the encryption. I’ve tried leaning into corresponding more substantively with a few friends via Signal, it’s been good. We’re so used to messaging being for quick hits, why not think of it like writing a more thoughtful letter or postcard?

Of course, I think many people are starting to remember that nothing beats in-person, real life interaction. And that might just be what saves us.

While on the subject of platforms, this is required reading about Substack. While it’s a place for valuable and interesting independent voices, it’s also a Nazi bar of sorts, comfortable enabling various creepy-crawlies:

Substack’s extremist ecosystem is flourishing


How about more Tumblr-style? Just throw things out there. I know times are dire but maybe we are feeding the beast by focusing on it to the exclusion of all else. There has to be more to life than Wordle results and end-times fascism (aka ‘political’) news. Which I guess eliminates much of what I (and probably you) post on FB. Let me see what else I got.

A better idea than the real thing, though there are certain people I wouldn’t mind being flung into actual space.

Remember magazines? The late Stockholm New was an amazing once-yearly (!) culture/art/fashion mag that I used to collect in the before-times. Didn’t know there was a ‘best of’ book. (Though I’ll admit that cover image sure lands more toxically these days…)

It had beautiful minimalist design that I used in my Publication Design class. I sent it recently as inspo to a Kenyan friend who I’m helping develop a Nairobi art magazine.

I think mags like Kinfolk and Cereal were pretty heavily influenced by Stockholm New.


I’m onboard with ‘clanker’ as a slur for robots and AI.

Cool micro art shop in Haworth, England. All work by the artist-owner (no I didn’t take this pic, just came across it).

Samples from my World Landscapes print gallery.


Wet Leg. Hell of a band (and band name). New album Moisturizer is the finest rock record I’ve heard in a while.

I had been reading good things about Superman. Ok, I saw it in French, which didn’t help. A lot I didn’t like but mainly methinks the director took the ‘let’s up the stakes by making him vulnerable’ thing too far. He spends the whole movie getting his ass kicked or crawling out from under the big thing that landed on him.

"Personally I am very pessimistic. But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making." - Hayao Miyazaki


This just in before I hit publish today, I’ll leave you with Robert Reich’s thoughts on Vaclav Havel and not letting the times suffocate us:

Havel had become politically active as poet, playwright, and dissident after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which put him under the surveillance of the secret police. He was repeatedly jailed, the longest from 1979 to 1983. (In 1989, his Civic Forum party played a major part in the Velvet Revolution that ended Soviet dominance, and he was elected president shortly thereafter.)

While in jail, Havel wrote something that seems particularly relevant for us in these very dark times:

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is a not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

Ramble On

Ok, yeah, Led Zep reference. On a side note I’ve been revisiting them recently, what a weird and interesting band beyond their hard-rock debauchery. Robert Plant is such an unusual singer. A precarious relationship with pitch and his voice goes rough in odd places, but there really is no singer quite like him. Jimmy Page and John Bonham are so heralded (rightly so) but John Paul Jones might be the real glue. They have a reputation as gods of thunder, but so many songs are acoustic and even on bangers like Immigrant Song the guitar is actually barely distorted. For a band whose better-known songs like Kashmir and Stairway to Heaven are over eight minutes long, Immigrant Song is surprisingly short, clocking in at a mere 2:26. Their dabblings in Druid and Norse mythology should be ridiculous but somehow manage to be evocative.

For such a famous band they are sturdy but pretty unpolished and off-grid by today’s standards. Pretty damn refreshing if you ask me.


Syrian refugee from car window, Paris, 2016

Anyway, this was supposed to be about rambling. It’s been a strange ride lately. In March I was still ensconced in Nairobi in our house with two doggos. In April I was back solo briefly in the Republic of Takoma Park, seeing my mom, reconnecting with friends and fam, moving soil in the garden, and trying to help save the US republic-if-you-can-keep-it.

Today was my first morning waking up in my in-laws’ apartment in a suburb of Paris, where circumstances have brought me for an undetermined period of time. Not complaining (or bragging), it has been that old dilemma of stability/security vs freedom/change. Certainly lacking the former at the moment but I feel privileged to be gaining plenty of the latter, especially as a man of a certain age.

Not sure how much I’ll photograph here, we’ll see. Paris is a challenge since it’s one of the most photographed cities in the world. If I do find a theme, I hope it will at least surprise. As I often say, I don’t try to make places look good or bad, I’m looking for something truthful. So many people, photographers included, fall into the trap of idealizing and romanticizing Paris, as if it was still the 1950s Paris of their mind’s-eye. Not me. While I do like it, I find the reality of the City of Light a somewhat grittier and complex everyday experience.

With that said, for now first things first. I set out in the cool rain early this morning, jet-lagged but determined to get my fix of proper croissants and baguettes. That’s something I do cherish here. On the ten-minute walk there, I reminded myself (as I would remind my former students) to at least look around, to open my bleary eyes to new surroundings.

It’s a bit like in 2013 when I had two days (really only one full day) to photograph in Tallinn, Estonia. I needed a hook, so I decided to not even shoot the famous Old Town at all, I only worked in the surrounding Soviet-era areas - with a bike and one small camera - to see what ordinary life was really like. My idea was when can a post-Soviet country move on, start being post-post-Soviet? The set actually won an award and were part of an exhibit at Nat Geo, here’s a different edit including a few I haven’t shown before:

Rambling on. More soon from Your Man Near Paris.

News - Kilmar Garcia case

Jennifer Vasquez - wife of Kilmar Garcia, who was deported to an El Salvador prison in error - arrives at the courthouse in Greenbelt MD for a hearing Tuesday, April 15 about her husband’s case.

Normally I consider myself a lapsed photojournalist but felt the urge to be there.