Hello from across the digital realm, where this disembodied message will travel beyond the time and space from whence I’ve typed and live, pixelated, for all of eternity, on servers far, far away.
I hope you’ve had a chance to recover from Halloween, otherwise known as my favorite time of the year. I think I love it so hard because I grew up in trick-or-treat-deprived France. We had a whole school vacation in “La Toussaint” (the contraction of “Tous les Saints” or “All the Saints”) where families visited the graves of their loved ones on November 1, but no candy or costumes. The last fifteen years or so of New York living have been an exercise in making up for lost time.
Ironically, the tradition actually began in Europe over 2,000 years ago with the Celtic festival of Samhain. People would light bonfires and burn offerings of crops and animals. They would celebrate the end of the year by dressing up as evil spirits, believing as we moved from one year to the next that the world of the dead and the living would briefly overlap. To ward off the demons roaming the earth again, you would wear a costume, usually made of animal skins, to fool them into thinking you were one of them.
To celebrate the end of this current harvest, come Saturday Nov. 5 to the community banquet at the Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx. Local foragers like the brilliant Candace Thompson are concocting witchy brews and there will be dancing, music and free veggies. The Bronx has some of the most awe-inspiring gardens like Morning Glory, which started out by squatting on city-owned land and is now a fully licensed garden space offering free and sliding scale harvest boxes to the community.
Two very different pieces about the clarity on life and death, both equally heart-bursting. Rachel Handler interviewed her grandfather-in-law about ending his life through voluntary assisted death. Ellen Meyers started ketamine therapy after losing her husband, daughter and father in the span of one year.
The estate sale of Joan Didion, high priestess of grief chronicling, is now online. Her collection of 26 shells and beach pebbles currently has five bids.
RIP Mike Davis. RIP Takeoff. RIP Julie Powell. Your words shifting something inside of me.
The Victorians had a custom of posing for portraits with their dead relatives, especially their children. It was a way for their loved ones to see them as they were before burial, as people couldn’t travel great distances quickly. One way to identify these post-mortem portraits is by the lack of blur. Given the long exposure times when taking the photographs, the dead were often sharper than the living due to their lack of movement.
In another grief ritual, this time in post-revolutionary France, a subculture of bals des victimes, or victim’s balls emerged. It has since been debunked by scholars who have found little evidence of the macabre dance societies but the urban legend is still delicious. Allegedly, it was the most exclusive invitation in all of Paris. To enter the secret ball, you had to be a close relative of a guillotine victim. Instead of bowing, guests jerked their heads sharply downwards to imitate the moment of decapitation. Women wore red chokers around their necks to mimic the appearance of having been beheaded, and both men and women had their hair cropped short at the neck. The coiffure à la victime was inspired by what was done to the victims before execution to ensure the blade would sever the head cleanly. The last guillotine execution in France was in 1977. It was officially abandoned in 1981 when capital punishment was abolished altogether. May we see the same in the U.S. in our mortal lifetimes.
Learning about the dress code of these clandestine dances took me straight back to Carmen Maria Machado’s extraordinary short story “The Husband Stitch.” It was originally published online in 2014 and the first story in her acclaimed collection Her Body and Other Parties. Every sentence is darker than the next, a true emotional roller coaster.
These are the last days to vote and help people get to the polls. Democracy worldwide is hanging on by a thread but I feel newly invigorated by Lula’s narrow victory. I was in and out of my pollsite in less than ten minutes, thanks to early voting and Soft Power’s guide. They also advise to vote on the Working Families Party ballot line “when possible for the sake of party diversity in New York. WFP (& all parties) must obtain 2% of the vote to continue to appear on NY ballots. Some candidates will appear on BOTH the Democrat and Working Families Party line on your ballot. In these cases, go with WFP!”
Last but not least - Final Screens, juxtaposing the opening and closing shots of movies.
Till next time,
ASK
Funny I posted about La Toussaint on IG today! I actually prefer the more introspective honoring of the dead vs. the commercialized version of Halloween 🎃