Familiar Strangers

A coworker today told me a story: every day she walks the same way to work, down Mass Ave between Porter and Harvard Square. Every day she sees the same man, a sort of skinny Santa she says, and they give each other the little eye lift hello as they pass. But she recently changed her route and hadn't seen him in a while. Then, today, she ran into him in an entirely different place. She smiled and he burst into laughter. The familiar stranger.

In a small city like Boston, sometimes you think you know it all. You've met the major players and you get it. Then you get an email like this:


To which you respond:


And, like the concept that Tim Devin tells me about when we meet a week later, we are familiar strangers, interacting in a city, looking at each other's work on the web, and only when we see each other outside of that context, do we begin to converse. Though unlike familiar strangers, it isn't jarring but reassuring that there are people here I'd like to work with and get to know.

Tim's most recent project is called "i left this here for you to read" and is a publication that might work like a Temporary Autonomous Zone from Hakim Bey in that it momentarily changes the way you think about others and changes your space. It, like Tim's other work, is romantic and cares about revolution on a person to person level. Unfortunately, I can't tell you more than what I think of the project based on what I've read about it because I've never seen the publication. Short runs of 50 copies are distributed across the country with a diverse pool of objects, writings, artworks included for the happenstance audience to find. These zines are left on park benches, doctor's offices, buses, you get the picture. Upcoming issues will include the likes of Reverend Billy, Steve Lambert, and 14 year olds from Florida. I look forward to coming across these on the streets!