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Photographer Bob Greenspan

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A Word On Community

I’ve been hearing and reading a great deal lately about community. Having been a part of truly supportive communities I understand why people want us to engage each other in a way that makes us feel like we are a part of one. However, much of community these days is about social control and is rooted in customs that make people feel uncomfortable in not only their expression but even their own autonomy. This is why so many people report feeling uncomfortable enjoying and engaging activities in their community alone.

Neighborhood « leaders » often push a brand of community that is insular, harassing, intolerant, and unwelcoming. If you aren’t « down » you are OUT. It does not matter what your character, racial or gender make up is. This can be can be a disorienting, harrowing experience leaving many to feel outside of society at large—which I believe is its intended effect.

In my neighborhood, who you don’t fuck with is just as important as who you do. Principally I can’t align with criminals, at-large folks, and institutions that I KNOW don’t value my existence and would like to end my presence. In NYC that person often lives right across the street, down the block, around the corner, or Nextdoor.

I do not mean to suggest at all that community is not important. We should be actively trying to fellowship positively with our neighbors. But sometimes, the best thing you can do for your neighbors is to make them feel welcome and let them be. To me, that is much more genuine than all this forced engagement and all these performative displays of community I see on a daily basis.

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in Mali, photographed by Maggie Steber

for Beyond The Horizon  published by National Geographic Society, 1992

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Zouzou (1934)

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Jouez!

Montréal, 2025

Photo by me.

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When I die

There will be no celebration.

There will be no tears.

My death will be recognized

and noted in a ledger

I will be #147292 an assigned designation at birth

Born on a day

Died on a day

There will be no mention of when I lived.

Or if I did at all.

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Happy Birthday Malcolm! 

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Do not be afraid to speak up and take up space, babe. 💞

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I don’t feel the need to be digestible. Choke.

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Thank you Brooklyn.

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The best movie I’ve seen so far this year.

Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role:

Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction? There was a war on. And yet is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived. They remain there still in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed. But my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube's shoreline.

Adrian Brody as László Tóth in The Brutalist (2024, dir. Brady Corbet)

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ATCQ

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WORD

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