Morning Hank, it's Wednesday! Special surprise bonus video that I might delete later...

So for me, one of the great pleasures of being alive is being a fan of stuff, especially being a fan of stuff made by people you care about. Loving the loves of your loves is for me at least just a wonderful source of joy and connection, and I offer all of that as preface before saying that over the last year Sarah has been making collages, and I love them SO much. Like, I adore 'live play love ugh' with every fibre of my beating heart. Or, this sideways hat and car telling us to 'be the women in our life'. So what Sarah does is comb through old magazines, many of them ones that were marketed to women in the 1960s and 1970s, and then take images and words from them to form these wonderful collage poems. 'Ask anyone. Now be any one.', or 'any room is the room.', or here's a woman spinning through the air: 'Do this it. Works.'. Like, I don't wanna get too deep here but just the phrase 'it works' is so fascinating when re-contextualised like this, right, like 'it works' can either refer to something that is effective or effortful. And who among us has not felt vaguely twisty of late? I mean, acrobatics, both physical and otherwise, are alternately wondrous and terrifying, and at times both, which feels like now to me. All of Sarah's collage poems are like this; the more you look the more interesting they get, and that is my favourite experience with art. Or to put it in collage-poem form, 'the important thing is, now you can see'. Another thing I love about these collage poems, they use old imagery but they are utterly contemporary. Like, take this one where an old Nikon camera lens contains within it an even older image of the barmaid in a famous Manet painting. Sarah made a fascinating art assignment video about this painting and what makes it so art historically significant. But by placing this barmaid in a new context, we see a very contemporary image, right? The reflection of a human face in a camera lens, which by the way is what I'm looking at right now. It's also what we do every time we take a selfie, and every time we hold our phones up to our faces so that facial recognition technology can save us the trouble of having to type in a password, and so on. Truly, the picture of the week. Sarah's collages remind me a little bit of Sister Corita Kent's alphabet series, where she created collages around each letter of the Latin alphabet. Like one of my favourites is the letter 'E', where she quotes Camus: 'Should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.'. And like Kent's work, I think Sarah's collages are both beautiful to look at, and ethically challenging, and also wonderfully interesting to ponder. Like in this one, images and smells of the so-called natural intersect with the so-called artificial, and that which cannot be bought intersects with that which can be bought, and 'now you can own positive vibrations'. But they never take themselves too seriously and they're often very funny, like, 'Magical thinking. There's nothing finer.', or 'confidence in your tiger', or, one of my all-time favourites, 'I want you to know the VCR broke down. There is only one. I give up'. Many of these were created as projects for awesome (?) perks, but Sarah has just released some as a collection of note cards through DFTBA with all the proceeds going to charity. And they are lovely, and my favourite cards to write thank-you notes on, and if you order them before December 3rd in the US they will arrive before Christmas, link in the dooblydoo. Or, you can just look at them on Instagram, there are so many more on Instagram. I just love them so much, not least because they remind me that 'magic can be small'. 'Magic can be small', that is so beautiful and so true.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.