Fall is so close, I can practically taste it. Gi texted “this weather is changing my brain chemistry” and I could not agree more - the gears are turning again. What a time to be alive: ringing in 5784, apples in the CSA, temperatures dropping but sun still shining. This week I’ve been pondering three separate things (a book, a movement, a talk) that feel related, linked by a feeling I’ve been having a hard time articulating so please bear with me on this one.
This morning I finished Stay and Fight, Madeline ffitch's debut novel, about a queer feminist family living off-the-grid in Appalachia. A snake invasion turns their isolated, ramshackle life upside down as they realize a pipeline is headed for their homestead. It’s remarkably clear-eyed in how all of the (deeply flawed, heartbreakingly human) characters are, and how they must reckon with the system (law enforcement, Child Services, capitalism) in addition to their own interpersonal conflicts.
The best part of mutual aid for me is its horizontal structure, which requires some serious brain-rewiring in a world where we’re raised to look for leaders and experts. But it’s tricky, balancing how to keep up this survival work, while not losing sight of the wider demands for social change. Holding on to one or the other is hard, let alone both at once especially when at times it feels like we’re just patching holes in a sinking ship. Calling it quits is always the easy way out when tensions inevitably arise. Regrouping, taking the time to talk things out and most of all, not letting urgency and efficiency overtake the real work of deep care has been a game-changer.
Last night, Steph, Kristine, Jessie and I went to hear Sarah Leonard, editor of Lux magazine and Emily Janakiram, writer and organizer of NYC for Abortion Rights, talk about abortion strategies from around the world. Both of them had such clarity around never losing sight of two ongoing battlefronts, the immediate issues and the strategic long view. Defense and offense.
On one hand, in the face of bans, it’s crucial for everyone to regain a sense of agency — which can look like clinic defense, pill distribution or learning how to self-manage your early abortion at home. But concurrently, it’s just as necessary to not accept these bans as the new normal and remember to keep fighting these unjust laws that are imposed by minority rule. That means demanding that we all have access to safe clinics with trained medical professionals, pushing that abortion funds be state-funded and fighting for universal health care that explicitly includes abortion care.
Not “safe, legal, and rare” thus stigmatizing people seeking out the procedure, but rather taking a page from Mexico’s Supreme Court which entirely removed abortion from the federal penal code. They stated, “Criminalization of abortion constitutes an act of gender-based violence and discrimination, as it perpetuates the stereotype that women and people with the capacity to get pregnant can only freely exercise their sexuality to procreate and reinforces the gender role that imposes motherhood as a compulsory destiny.”
The utopia is not some libertarian fantasy where we are all self-sustaining survivalists, where we take all matters into our own hands. But we cannot trust a system that fails us by design, where police escort the anti-abortion extremists right to the doors of the clinic, where the pipelines that poison our waterways are the only well-paid jobs in town, where goods and money can flow globally but human beings are barred from the same freedom of movement. We all hold so much more power than we currently realize, and many hands make light work.
Other bits and bobs taking up real estate in my brain this week, some related, some not to the above:
Varnish La Piscine, a singer-songwriter from Geneva Kira turned me on to, now on repeat.
“You have to be so laser focused on conquering these systems and knowing what you have to do to be together if there is a way forward for you” - the excellent
by about modern romance in the crosshairs of global immigration, merging her personal experience and her work as a journalist.The utter charm of Gael García Bernal, an absolute delight as luchador Cassandro who rose to fame as an exótico, a wrestler who dresses in drag. The biopic is sweet, but Marie Losier’s documentary Cassandro, The Exotico! is so much more colorful, in all of the ways.
Beginning September 25, you can order four more free COVID-19 rapid tests delivered directly to your home.
Amidst resumed talks, looking beyond the strike to reviving CalCare, a universal health care system for California. As Alex says: “I think every union in California needs to work together to pass comprehensive health care that is just as good as the health care that we get through our union. If we can remove that from the bargaining table, we can bargain for more.”
The richness of British painter Cecily Brown’s work, now on view at the Met. It’s her first full-fledged museum survey since she made New York her home. “One of the things I love about painting is its ability to embody more than one thing at once. Especially in the last five years or so, there’s almost been an amalgamation of imagery where something will be both a hunt and a shipwreck in a garden with a nude and I’m kind of really enjoying juggling with those things because in a way the impulse is the same with all of them.”
coming in with the best take on the "parent vs. childfree" binary, zoomed out to include systemic issues, beyond personal preferences and shortcomings. Best summed up in a single line: ”Our policies and cultural norms pit us against each other.”Despite what both Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul say, the influx of more than 100,000 migrants in New York since last year is not unprecedented. “Ellis Island processed 100,000 immigrants in just a single month in April 1907, when much of the legal framework around modern immigration did not exist.”
Field trip!
What: NYFF Premiere of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson
Where: Walter Reade Theater
When: Saturday September 30, 2023 at 3:30PM
Till next time,
ASK