Category: social commentary

leaving instagram

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

Instagram never cared much about what my friends were posting until I stopped using Instagram. 

A large part of my decision to take a break from both Instagram and Facebook was specifically because I wasn’t seeing posts from my friends and family anymore. Just before I checked out from both social media giants, I did a few counts of exactly how many posts in my feeds were from people I actually knew: on average, out of the first 30 posts, there were only two, three at most. The rest were advertisements, suggested strangers, gag reels, and random politics. I found myself scrolling through a lot of unrelated and unwanted content longing for something from the people I know and love. 

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something real

Jim KempsterLeave a comment
An imageless black square, often used to indicate the subject is somber or not for interpretation.

Airbrushed Ashley’s puffed lips 
ask to be my Meta-friend, daily.
Josh-bot phones me on the hour
about my Medicare A and B.
A.I.’s six-digit hands scramble history 
in Pixar-colored newsfeeds
where my friends used to be.
And, junk pollsters survey if I’m mad
enough to donate more and more.

This old historian 
and humanitarian 
vacillates 
between setting the record, 
comment-by-comment, 
or retreating 
to a good book and 
the dog on my knee.

But I know isolation,
like soulless contact, 
breeds despair, 
and Nero fiddles 
with tariffs
while America burns 
out.

So, I join the struggle,
to write 
something real,
wondering
if the algorithms
will expose 
or bury me.

trepidation

Jim KempsterLeave a comment
An imageless black square, often used to indicate the subject is somber or not for interpretation.

Restaurants, 
comic clips, 
cats and dogs,
don’t make it
to the feed
right now.

I open the news
in trepidation. 

Who have they 
terrorized 
today?
Whose fear 
brought them 
pleasure?
Whose distress 
made them feel 
powerful?

How can the 
church lady 
post 
Disneyland pics
while her heroes
destroy
her neighbor

as herself?

2020 hindsight: how restaurants saved new york

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

On a warm August evening in 2020, Bob and I sat at a table on the uneven sidewalk outside Union Square Cafe (USC) for the first time since the pandemic began, watching the patchwork staff somehow making it work. USC’s new Chef Lena Ciardullo was back in her kitchen, but so was Chef Tom Allen from the Modern, who was serving as her sous chef until whenever his restaurant would reopen. Denez Moss, who’d left Manhatta to become the new general manager at USC only a month before lockdown, was pouring drinks, and Halle Murcek, now Guest Experience Manager for the entire restaurant group, was waiting tables. Together they managed just about everything at the front of the house (or should I say out in front of the house) with the skeleton crew they’d assembled.

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my new york manifesto

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

I wrote the following comment on a friend’s LinkedIn post earlier this morning and then spent the rest of the day on the streets of my City:

I came to New York in 1989, met my husband within two weeks of both of us arriving for art school, and have called this amazing City home ever since — to the point that I cannot imagine living anywhere other than this tiny cluster of islands. The brief time we lived away from the City confirmed that, and we got ourselves right back here as quickly as we could.

I’ve watched the City change so much over the past 31 years, sometimes for the good, sometimes not. Lived here through 9/11, hurricanes and nor’easters, blackouts, financial slumps, service strikes, and now a pandemic, and watched a resilient community return time and again.

The real estate developers will tell you glass towers and shopping malls full of franchised boutiques are what make NYC better and better. But, to me those are what dumb it down, homogenize it, and make it too much like everywhere else in our strip-mall-paved world. And those glass towers and malls are most failing to do anything for the City through this pandemic.

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nyc recommendations

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

img_9871I was asked recently on Instagram for my NYC recommendations. They aren’t what you’d expect:

whatsup.tony
Hey jimkempster! Are you based in the NYC?? 🙂 I’m heading there to make Facebook videos and was wondering if you have any recommendations?! Thanks!

jimkempster
@whatsup.tony Recommendations?

Explore every minute you’re here. Eat whatever smells good. Attend anything hosted by artists or groups of artists.

Come up with the most idiosyncratic list of unique, bizarre, exotic, uncharted, beloved things you’re interested in and then Google them with “NYC” attached, and you’ll have 100 days worth of things to do.

It’s all here. Continue reading “nyc recommendations” →