Hello from a flooded backyard… and kitchen. All towels on deck and lots of work to get done before some dear friends touch down for the weekend. A tight newsletter incoming!
I had a longer thing in the works about our beloved clothing swap, now in its 13th year (!), but will shelve for later. It’s where 90% of my wardrobe comes from at this point and is an endless source of joy in a world where nothing is sustainable. For now, a nugget from Extinction Rebellion: “Unplugging ourselves from consumerism means living more enriched lives and waking up to the things that really matter … What could be more threatening to an industry that thrives on making us feel we need more?”
Following this (very loose) fashion thread, a stunning conversation between poet Ocean Vuong and fashion designer Peter Do for Cero Magazine around how good things take time. They’re both Americans with close roots to Vietnam and mothers who did nails. So many gems but one in particular from Vuong: “I don't know if I feel at home anywhere. But I realized that the idea of the imposter is such a beautiful idea, the idea that someone can disguise and sneak in the back door with their head down and just do the threading work and then one day, put their head up and there's a fashion house or a book under their name. It reminds me of when you talk about repair and recycling, it reminds me of when the French and the American occupational forces left Vietnam, and we would cut the tires off of military vehicles and make sandals because the rubber was so strong. The strength and innovation of a military meant to destroy us was salvaged into footwear.”
Also from the Fashion Department: these glowing terrarium dresses Japanese fashion designer Jun Takahashi sent down the runway. The show took place in a car park in Paris and you can watch the whole thing here — it’s the last three dresses at the 11 minute mark.
I have been soaking up all the episodes of Remember the Future, a podcast by ART.COOP. One short and sweet standout is with Maddy Clifford, aka MADLines, who says: “So with [her song] Solidarity Economy, I really talk about a lot of the myths similar to the starving artist and the tortured artist tropes. There's a lot of stories, right? We talk about the danger of a single story. I have a quote up right now which says ‘Bad storytellers make spells, great storytellers break them.’”
Solidarity and picketing won! The writer’s strike is officially over but what lies beyond?
a great illustrator who writes : “I see now as a time when humans are really stepping up in defense of what it means to be human, from 2020 onward. What might look radical to some is often decades of overdue anger: People fighting on behalf of their souls, on behalf of their purpose for existing on this planet. A smashed window or a work boycott symbolizes years of taking on too much and receiving too little. This is breathtaking to witness.”Only a couple essays into Sabrina Imbler’s memoir-in-essays How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures but I’m so hooked. Each story is about a different marine animal and its capacity to survive and adapt. They draw parallels between each creature and their personal experience as a queer, biracial science writer. In “My Mother and the Starving Octopus,” an octopus who brooded her eggs for four and a half years without eating becomes a metaphor for the writer and their own mother’s struggles with disordered eating. “I realize now that my mother’s wish for me to be thin was, in its way, an act of love. She wanted me to be skinny so things would be easier. White, so things would be easier. Straight, so things would be easy, easy, easy. So that, unlike her, no one would ever question my right to be here, in America. I just wish I could tell her I’ve been okay without those things, that I’ve actually been better without them. I wish she would stop wanting those things too.”
The great Astra Taylor, interviewed by Molly Fischer for the New Yorker: “I try in my writing and in my films to give people a taste of curiosity. Some people write poems that are supposed to move you and make you feel wistful, and some films are funny or scary or whatever. I’m always going after the experience of epiphany—to give people a glimpse of that intellectual pleasure that I think we’re really hungry for.”
On Ron’s recommendation I watched Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati (1963). It’s currently streaming on Criterion and Jared and I were teleported to the dance halls, salt mines and power plants of Italy. It’s a tender story of two fiancés whose relationship buckles when the man is transferred for a new job. The structure is non-linear, a puzzle of recollections from the man’s perspective. Olmi himself stated: “There are not flashbacks, at least not in the traditional sense. They are close to that ‘cinema of memory’ that is now coming into being, that goes beyond the conventional paths of film narratives in order to reach a multi-directional narrative […] freed from time and space.”
Paula X. Rojas is a midwife and organizer who I recently heard speak on a panel (also a longer subject for a later week!) She spoke about needing to start practicing things in order to move beyond our current life - keeping up the intellectual imagining of our radical futures but also work tangibly in community with our own hands. She personally chose midwifery but extended it to all necessary labor from artists to cooks, electricians to teachers. She believes the transformation of the state is possible but it’s a long road ahead that will require creating cracks in all aspects of our current life, so as they grow and spread, the whole edifice will crumble, making way to a new framework organized around collective care and communal life.
This is from a few months ago but I have not been able to get it out of my head since then, so it warrants some real estate in the newsletter: the girlbosses are now making jam.
Field trip!
What: Album release party for “Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)),” the final album by the late trumpeter and composer jaimie branch and her quartet Fly or Die. A portion of the proceeds will go to the jaimie branch Foundation.
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue (Corner of Third Avenue)
When: Monday, October 2 at 8:00 pm - A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
Till next time,
ASK