Happy Weekend! I thought I would share some essays/hodge-podge that I’ve really enjoyed reading lately. These completely unrelated drawings of Joan Didion and Vendela Vida talking are by Wendy Macnaughton.

The Vital Importance of the Top 10 Korean Pop Songs, by David Cho. a funny writer who’s Korean explains the almost hysterical importance of pop music in Korea. You get to hear more about Girls Generation, that group of nine Korean girls that is apparently enormously, and economically influentially, popular.

Walking Dead recap, by Starlee Kine. I’m linking to a month old recap because I don’t actually watch the shows, I just read the recaps. Grotesque violence is so much fun to read related in a candid, distant tone. Here’s an amazing moment I experienced this week that reminded me of this recap: I’m sitting in a Bible study with free childcare (a big reason why I was there) and an older, very nice and soft-spoken woman, starts explaining connections between the passage and The Walking Dead episodes. Clearly not another woman in the place had ever watched a show, but this woman was a huge fan, and wanted to relate how much the scenes reminded her of the verses we were studying. I tried to nod along empathetically, but I was in the back row and I’m sure I was drowned out by the agape mouths that surrounded me.

A Rough Guide to Disney, by John Jeremiah Sullivan. (or, as I pitched it to Joe, “Dads finding nooks in which to smoke pot while at Disney.”) I saved the best for last! I’m reading a collection of essays by JJS right now, and I’ll just casually share that NPR suggested he might be the best magazine essayist alive right now. This essay is not in the book, but it is free to read online, and it so good and about so many different things at the same time, and illustrative of why you might want to add his book to your Christmas list.

dear xobreakfast reminded me it might be nice for a follow-up about my class.

I’ve only had two so far, but I am loving it! The first class we went over what all those curious buttons meant. Of course I didn’t remember everything the first time but after they were explained once, it’s about practicing and slowly creating habits of what works.

For the first class the homework was playing with the fstop and experimenting with depth of field.

I decided to take a note from Garance and write all over my photos in fluorescent colors. If you click on any of these photos, they will suddenly be huge in your browser.

like the pros, I must tell you what camera I have. It is a Canon 20d. I bought it because Chris Glass used to have it, and said he liked it.

Because this model is rather old news these days, (it doesn’t even know what the word video means) you can buy it used for a relative steal online.

Taking a class is lovely because it gives you an excuse to haul your camera everywhere, and annoyingly break-off mid-sentence to snap photos of artsy doorways.

Next assignment: portraiture! This is intimidating because it involves playing with lights and whiteboards, and those types of things. Hopefully I will have something pretty to show you next time.

I loved the flippancy of this headline alongside the poignancy of the photograph. Might be true, but she’s still beautiful. (and, as we later listened via Spotify, very good.)

I think the teenage fashion blogger Tavi is a folk art genius.

“I am a big advocate for decorating and writing in books and lending and giving them to people. This one had a nice letter from the person who gave it to me on the inside that I didn’t find for months until I started reading it, which was quite a nice surprise, and I support stickers of any kind on anything. The last time Ella and I did the Ouija board I needed somewhere to write the answers, and I like having them on the inside of the back cover.”  –read the whole oogum boogum post here

Svpply founder posts a few photos of his boys.

This one made me miss swings, hammocks, yards, and suburbia.