Strongly Connected is a free weekly newsletter by Jen Lowe. Please forward and text to friends and screenshot and share with wild abandon. Thank you for reading.
It was great to hear from so many of you after my last post; if I haven’t replied, you’ll hear from me soon! We’ve made the move here to Substack, and whew it is a formatting relief. Some exciting new and old things are happening behind the scenes here that I’ll be able to share more about in the next few weeks. Right now, I’m trying to get this old heartbeat project back up & running again; the site was hacked years ago and the device I was using to save my heart rate data started scalding people’s arms and was recalled by Intel. (Pour one out for that old Basis watch, which I can confirm was hot as hell, rip.) I thought I’d have to start from scratch, but poking around I found a skeleton of a working site, so now it’s just a matter of trying to find the old daily averages and a new heartrate monitor that has open enough data.
About once a year I start Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. (Truth: I’ve never made it further than week 10.) In week 9 she talks about Creative U-Turns: the abandonment or neglect of a project, or even self-sabotage, after a success. That heartbeat project marked a big creative u-turn for me, and I’m excited to recover it and get it back up and running again. If you are the sort of person who knows about self-tracking devices and can suggest a heartrate monitor that has 24-hr easily accessible data, I’m all ears!
LISTENING TO
This Allison Russell on repeat loud in the car
READING
I’m back to Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, which is just. so. good. and because she’s a poet talks about an erotic relationship with stationery and includes lines like
If reality was a frieze, everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape.
PLANNING
Ran (metaphorically) to sign up for the Prime Meridian Unconference, brought to us by Rasheedah Phillips and Black Quantum Futurism. It’s streaming, hooray! (And also in person if you happen to be near nyc.)
APPRECIATING
I’ve been shopping for a file cabinet.
Kellie Rae Adams “Forever In Your Debt” at MASS MoCA, via @debcha on Insta. From Deb’s caption:
Handmade pottery bowls, each holds about $40 in change. If they were all filled, it would be about $37,000, the average US student debt. You can contribute a bowl of loose change to the project to pay for the artist's labor and (some indefinite number of years from now, appropriately) receive one of the bowls.
Bless Burger King night, Impossible Whopper the only thing keeping our fam going right now.
This Imani Barbarin tiktok. “My political party is disabled people. My political compass is disabled people. My political ideology is disabled people.” SAME. But really it’s her little giggle smirk at the end that gets me every time.
take care out there,
Jen
Email: jen@jenlowe.net or reply to this email
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