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Another SEO blogpost for Youseum, written during the 2020 Corona content scale-down and tonal re-focus

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An SEO blogpost for Youseum, from January 2020

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An SEO blogpost from February 2020, for Youseum

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One of many SEO blogposts written for Youseum

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An example of a Blog Post for Thrive Chiropractic (2017)

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Advertorial for Thrive Chiropractic on DutchNews.nl (2017).

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Miss Timothée act good!

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Timothée Chalamet explains feminism!!

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A Journalistic Piece from 2017

On February 23rd, during a Q&A with the American artist Jeff Koons, graduate student and young artist Layo London stood up and declared: ‘I am appropriating this space, to be sold as a work of art’. The verdant scarf wrapped round London’s head bobbed as she spoke, her voice resounding in the lecture theatre of the Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford. ‘Are you interested in buying it, Mister Koons?’ London asked.

A sea of faces encompassed her, mostly students—all listening, some smirking, others grimacing. Koons listened, too. She handed him a scrap of paper, with a value in pounds-sterling written across it. The scrap was a ticket, and a plea. The ticket was for the narrative, multi-media art piece London was swiftly constructing. The plea was for help, and for recognition: this Black Londoner, the only person of colour in her Art History MSt program, had resolved to relinquish her seat at the University of Oxford. Committing ‘academic suicide’, she planned to direct her own course fees towards the £25,800 necessary to prevent fellow student Gilbert Mitullah’s deportation. In doing so, they might ensure he’d graduate with a Master of Science in Comparative and International Education, the first ever Kenyan to do so.

Gilbert Mitullah is initially soft-spoken. But as one sits, absorbing the force of his person and his passion, it’s clear that a gradual change of temperament is less a warming-up on his part, than a letting-in. He is an educator, a student, a leader, and was voted one of the 100 most influential Kenyansof 2016. Initially, his enrolment at Oxford was to be subsidised by a Kenyan company. But, due to delays in obtaining his visa to study in the UK, the funds earmarked for him were diverted elsewhere. In the last week and some days, the GoFundMe pageset up to keep him enrolled—and in the country—has generated nearly half of its sizeable goal.

Of Mitullah, with whom she’s quickly developed a singular and kinetic rapport (they did not know one another before all this), London says: ‘it is important that he’s not seen as a charity case, which at times Oxford seems so wont to do.’ He says: ‘I simply want to be able to stay’.

The University of Oxford, this year ranked the best university in the world, has struggled with a sometimes reputationfor ‘institutional bias’. During the fever pitch of the fundraising campaign, London remembers an interaction with the principal of one of the Oxford colleges. In a few sentences, Mitullah framed his story for her. The principal paused, nodded, and said: ‘how unfortunate indeed.’ Moving on to London, she then asked: ‘and what do you study?’

London argues that there is a marked lack of empathy in the treatment of cases like Mitullah’s at Oxford. Such cases occupy a contentious and highly political intersection of race, class, and ‘foreignness’—issues which all feature prominently in current national and international discourse. For overseas students like Mitullah entering the University in 2017, annual fees could be as high as £30,540. While maintaining its solvency and reputation as an historical and most formidable research institution, it seems that the university struggles to confront the deeply politicized issues which affect students like Mitullah.

In devising the narrative and performative artwork which has lent structure, momentum, and urgency to Mitullah’s campaign, London has also begun to expose features of a conflicting ideological nexus emerging now at the university. Through her web-videos, which have garnered thousands of views to date, her presence on social media, and through live, extemporaneous performance pieces—like the one in Koons’ presence, in which she offered to sell him the whole work in exchange for Mitullah’s tuition—London has created an ‘imaginary narrative’ and structure of human commodity, not unlike the one, she contends, which the University of Oxford promotes. By appropriating the fame and influence of Koons and of the University, London has turned Mitullah’s narrative, and her indelible role in it, into a postmodern event.

Mitullah himself is not an artist. He is an educator, and an ambitious leader who hopes to effect dramatic change and educational reform in his home country. In 2008 he founded the African Solutions for Africa program, a youth mentorship NGO. Since, he’s worked as a legal aid lawyer and education reformer, is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers Community, and is a mentor in Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Presidential Digital Talent Program. To accomplish his long-term goals, he will use his talents, his many qualifications, and also the privilege an Oxford degree affords. Meeting his goal would mean ultimate impact upon countless lives. It would ratify the truth of London’s work. It would highlight the deleterious effects of British immigration policy, and it would evidence the desperate need for policy revision and a structural—even long-term pedagogical—overhaul at the University of Oxford.

Prior to all this, London already felt stifled and troubled by the overwhelming whiteness and Eurocentricity of her Art History course. ‘When we teach history from the point of view of the oppressor,’ she says, ‘we not only silence the voices of the oppressed.’ She sips from her tea. ‘We also do a terrible disservice to those lucky enough to receive this education at all, because we rob them of the ability to question, and to challenge what is ideologically enshrined as truth.’

‘There are so many people out there—educated at universities like Oxford—who assume that there’s just one single and unequivocal history to be learned.’

There is no word yet on Koons’ interest in the piece.

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Poem: semes

(This poem was shortlisted for the 2016 Keats-Shelley Prize)

Cetacean

lamp-light bones lie long-ways on a shelf.

Cut, dollies, along the dotted line then paste: 

A to A and B to B

She’d dole out sweet assurance, see

clad in yum-yum appliqué 

to make the gospel concrete, which hangs 

aslant: a sun-bleached kinda kitschy suburban gothic 

Epitaph,

she told them in 19—.

But when her Little John cried on account a he’d

eviscerated all the little lambs and he’s 

streamed pictures a things through the darknet crepuscule,

the torrents “in which a great fish[1] might become ensnared”

—that is, a majestic and splendiferous beast

with legs—

she drove him to Mexico. 

Mu, whaddya hazard became of em? I ask her, busy

loading dice, chilling aspic, sounding in a scalene room

(by that gaudy Romantic frame).

μ: (shrugging, looking sidelong past her darning) ‘Probably dead.’

Stitch. 

μ: ‘Or Antarctica.’

Stitch.

μ: ‘What’s the etymology?’

Stitch stich.

Toothed.

dawn: Herman’s up and asking for you. His hair keeps growing and he can’t keep the medicine down.

The thing itself was a brutal Modernist patchwork

of modern buttress (haunch) and modern brick (vestigial),

and a triangulated façade rippled with concrete striations like ventral pleats;

like baleen, in the gloaming.

[1]“There was no fish: the story is an allegory” (Wikipedia, 20—)

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Excerpt: Academic Essay on ‘Reading’ on Drag Race

Economy refers to the management of resources in the οἶκος, or ‘household’ (OED). Drag Race theatricalises the reproduction of filial bonds in and around drag houses—like the famous houses of Xtravaganza and Andrews—by managing the Read as an identity-forming resource of initiation. Reads cohere as affective exchanges which in turn shape character when narrativized. The legibility of this coherence depends on narrative presentation, which is itself constructed around the manipulation of form and rhetoric. Reads present on Drag Race in a diversity of verbal, visual, and corporeal types, and the show rigorously delimits and conserves the sympathetic character of these types within the circuit of its ideological project—to Read and manage a selfhood and brand.

The second season of Drag Race features the first of the show’s ‘Reading’ mini-challenges, which appear in every ensuing regular and special season. RuPaul introduces the challenge: she holds a book in her hands, and jokes, ‘Hey racers. I want to read you a little story called Drag Fun with Dick and Jane. See Dick. See Dick try on Jane’s pumps. Strut Dick, strut. You better work, Dick. And they lived happily ever after’ (‘Once Upon A Queen’).

This monologue apes the grammar of mid-century Anglo-American primer texts for children like Fun with Dick and Jane, rhetorically queering that text by offering a reading that departs from a metonymic vocabulary of books and children as emblems of hetero-reproductivity. This new reading also bodies a new affective stance and character through idiom: ‘strut’, ‘you better work’, Dick (euphemistic) wearing pumps; ‘happily ever after’. RuPaul winks at the form, style, and historical instability of certain genres of literature (children’s, pedagogical) and television (reality, documentary, soap), and lends this reflexive ethic to the form and structure of the show as it develops narrative, character, and conflict. The implied unwitting viewer is teased—or Read—for an inability to completely grasp the recherche idiom and references, but is also invited to attempt to understand—to read—through a cultural initiation didactically facilitated by the show.

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SEO Blog: Amsterdam-Based Life Coach

‘Ten years ago I felt fit. I felt like I knew my body, and it knew how to accommodate my needs. Two kids later, I’m wondering: how can I return to that place?’

Getting fit, staying fit, and managing long-term wellness. Attaining these is often a challenge. As a fitness and life-coach with 20 years’ experience, I’ve seen so many people—clients, friends, family—get close to negotiating their personal long-term answers to wellness, but then something delays the process, holding them back. People buy equipment, change diets, and adopt new exercise plans, but without the tools necessary to self-actualize and sustain a lifestyle shift, sometimes the New Year’s resolutions don’t stick, and the people, frustrated, ask me ‘Why not?’

The answer is often a combination of tools that aren’t quite right—an exercise plan that’s either too ambitious or too simple from the start, for example—and a lack of trust in the individual’s potential for success. It’s my job to help my clients see how good it can be once they—like so many others in the same position—make it to the other side of these initial hurdles. 

Our work together begins with a process of goal-setting and temperature-taking, and involves a shaking-up of all the patterns which can keep us from enjoying the best bits of the bodies we’re in, and prevent us from learning how to manage and improve the use of the parts of our bodies which can be frustrating. The trick is learning to trust that certain momentary frustrations will pass. Having prioritized wellness for yourself, and having set fitness as a goal, don’t doubt these commitments to yourself! If you’ve told yourself once that you want to improve, take yourself at your word.

Trusting the link between your mind and body—and this link’s capacity to move you to do something good—is a foundational ingredient of wellness, and exercising this link is crucial. The writer Gretchen Rubin says that ‘what you do everyday matters more than what you do once in a while’. This means a consistent (but not necessarily constant) level of exercise incorporated into your weekly routine. This often means physical exercise—the kind which moves your body, its muscles, limbs, and joints, raises your heartbeat, and activates the systems which support life. Adopting and maintaining new routines is a form of behavioral change which has positively impacted the lives of so many I’ve worked with. But when taking on this exciting challenge, if in the beginning you can’t break a sweat every day—that’s okay too! Because exercise means activity, and meaningful physical activity can only take place if that mind-body link is also activated, by trusting in and working towards your full potential. It’s possible to be good to and with your body—to be comfortable and well.

Here’s where my work comes in. I help clients develop a trust in their potential. Three workouts per week is all that’s manageable right now? Let’s do it. Can’t make it to the gym because the kids are at home? Well, we’ll design workouts which you can do at home, too. Love to cook, so it’s not worth eliminating certain ingredients? Okay, let’s figure out what works. The secret is that wellness only comes when you’ve properly planned for it—and punishing yourself, in any form, in day-to-day life is never a sustainable route towards personal success, or fulfillment.

Fitness guru Jane Fonda has pointed out that today we are living, on average, over three decades longer than our great-great grandparents did. Sure, this is due in part to advances in health-care and medicine—but it also inspires me, because it suggests that our bodies, these beautiful, complex, secretive (and sometimes frustrating) systems, have potential we’ve yet to unlock. With my clients, I work to overcome the initial hurdles of a journey towards lasting wellness. Together, we establish fitness-practices and routines which suit the individual’s rhythms and needs. In doing so, we re-discover the potential of the mind and the body to sustain a self-chosen kind of lifestyle, and we invariably uncover new possibilities, which only reveal themselves with time, trust, and self-actualization.

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A.L. Smutt reads another poem

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A.L. Smutt remembers Ezra

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Timothée Chalamet gives a masterclass

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Dawn Macintosh discusses hubby, Todd

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Dawn Macintosh does ASMR