Ours is a period of dislocation. Not of absence, not of presence, but a period of time characterized by the dull sucking thwohk of a ball joint being pulled from its socket. It is in the vacant space that trauma has opened up that we can  function. We are in excruciating pain, sure, but the dislocating moment is one of supreme flexibility.

I think it is good idea to understand the current Havana Biennial according to cold war jargon. Our paranoid society, with the public sphere almost under complete control by an ever-diversified surveillance system, is a direct consequence of the Cold War and all its infinite gadgets.  So maybe art has the ability to explain why, if ideology is dead, all of its byproducts are still very alive.

Riding high on the endless potentiality of beloved book communities, I am ushered into the rare book room. It is a sparkling treasury of retinal stimulation. Standing in the midst of the collection is overwhelming. The books sit in temperature-controlled glass cabinets, a full rainbow spectrum of discoloring aged leather.

On the occasion of The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, a traveling exhibition originating at the Nasher Museum of Art and currently on view at the Miami Art Museum, where it was organized by Rene Morales, artist Nicolas Lobo discusses the intersection of objects, sound and history with artist and audiophile Jay Hines, fictitious funk and soul recording artist Mingering Mike and the show’s curator Trevor Schoonmaker.

While I was in Wynwood, Miami for the opening reception of a friend’s one-person exhibit at Nina Johnson’s Gallery Diet, Nina’s husband, the artist Daniel Milewski, invited me to give a reading at his venue Lester’s (the neighborhood’s equivalent of fin-de-siècle Paris’s Deux Magot or, for that matter, mid-’90s Williamsburg’s L Train Café).