Signe’s birthday was the kind of gathering you only ever experience at weddings or funerals, and even then it’s rare for it to really hit you. Unbeknownst to us, she had prepared words for each of the ten friends who came over for dinner at her place. In true therapist fashion, she talked about what she saw in us and what each friendship meant to her. Around the table we remembered how much history we had witnessed in each other - breakups, births, divorces, coming outs, infidelities, family deaths, career shifts… We are a pretty stoic group and nearly everyone was in tears by the end.
Signe’s way of bringing people together is a natural extension of the stellar podcast she hosts with Simone. They’ve interviewed heavy hitters like Esther Perel but the most moving episode for me is with Signe’s stepdad Rich, a renowned therapist who knew how to gather people like no other. He took his life two weeks after they recorded their conversation and we miss him every day.
My friendship with Signe started over twenty years ago, when we were first year college students and alphabetical roll call would get us mixed up. She’s Simon, I’m Simon-Kennedy and our shared last names have always made us both feel more like family than friends. Her birthday was an extension of that feeling, a web of friendships outside of blood ties or romantic links. It’s the first step towards a collective vision Sophie Lewis outlines in her essay Kinship Beyond Guilt:
“A robust care commons, featuring mass canteens and cultural centres, centralized laundries, universal healthcare, free group housing, and intergenerational hubs of decommodified learning, would mean that our kinmaking eventually would take on new, uncoerced forms. Under conditions of unguilty, abundant care, our kinmaking would, slowly but surely, shed the marks of guilt, and take on the shape of freedom. What can we do in the meantime, then, to weave the filaments of a world of kinship beyond blackmail? In the now, we can practice. We can make-believe that we are already free, and experiment. We can begin to refuse the blackmail of familism—this puny ethics that tells us that we only owe care to, and can only expect care from, a private few.”
We make believe we are already free when we :
support the People’s Pottery Project, founded by Ilka Perkins and Domonique Perkins, who were both formerly incarcerated. They now employ and empower formerly incarcerated people at their collective non-profit ceramic business.
imagine new spaces outside of institutions, like former museum director Laura Raicovich who pivoted from twenty years in the art world to open a bar in the East Village called Francis Kite Club. “Museums have a tough time at making social spaces because they come out of a model of broadcasting information rather than exchanging it. The narrowing of imagination and culture is something that I want to reverse, and investing in culture through the bar is a material way of making that change.” It’s a gorgeous space where I learned how to indigo dye this summer!
reframe Icarus:
get creative with our gatherings, like Toast who hosted a “Salt night” at her place where she served salt-rimmed margaritas with pretzels and screened Saltburn followed by the season finale of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.
film our friends like this previously unseen short from Agnès Varda’s trip to the 1966 New York Film Festival where she interviewed Pier Paolo Pasolini.
watch Foragers, a film by Jumana Manna about Palestinians foraging for the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar as an act of resistance. I had the pleasure of seeing it on the big screen last night at Anthology Film Archives and you can watch it online all week on Le Cinéma Club. Jumana Manna writes: “The starting point is the love of collecting wild plants in springtime and the magic of the landscape coming to life, and then the madness of being confronted with a legal apparatus that is so petty, that details where and how much of these plants you’re allowed or not allowed to collect on a land that has already been expropriated and confiscated into Israeli state land. Many of these lands where the foragers are collecting are lands that used to belong to their villages. This is the way the Nakba is the backdrop of all aspects of life, because that’s what it means to live under occupation.”
push back against brain-numbing busy-ness, something that we all had on our mind after watching The Zone of Interest. “When writing the part, Glazer says, he was constantly thinking of the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s description of the Nazis as essentially non-thinking. ‘There was the sense that nothing should stop and no one should stop,’ he says. ‘Everyone had to be occupied with activity all the time, because if you stop, you think. And, if you think, you reflect. With Hedwig, there is no reflection, no consideration at all for anything or anyone except herself. She is constantly, relentlessly busy in order not to think.’” It made me think about Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” with lessons for surviving and resisting America's arc toward authoritarianism. The graphic edition is illustrated by Nora Krug.
read Hanif Kureishi’s
- Tim shared his latest letter with me on the immigrant as eternal boogeyman: “Integration can never continue; there has to be someone shoved off the map. Today it will be him, and tomorrow someone else: the circulation of bodies is determined by profit. The rich buy freedom; they can always go where they like while the poor are not welcome anywhere. But, all the time, by some perverse magical alchemy, those we need, exploit and persecute the most are turned into our persecutors.”feed our neighbors, from a community food distribution tomorrow to meet the humanitarian crisis in the East Village, to a now bi-weekly free hot lunch in Harlem and Bed-Stuy and a public Shabbat dinner at Palestinian restaurant Ayat next Friday
Till next time,
ASK
I had a chance to have an English language exchange with Agnès Varda in the early 2000s but with my confronting a crisis at the time, I missed my learning opportunity. Had Signe's care commons existed, the crisis would have been resolved more easily. I can't wait to see Foragers. Nothing left to forage in Gaza these days. South Africa won it's last three matches of the World Cup of Rugby by 1 slim point each time. I hope the streak continues with at least a 7 judges to 6 decision in favor of South Africa and the children of Gaza.