Mike and I have been going through a bit of an apartment revamp now that we are on year 7 of living here. Nell has a great saying that people either have “house energy” or not. I would say we fall in the latter category but occasionally we get a major spurt.
Jessie and Julia have been our senseis, coming over to guide us through what can stay, what can go, what can be repurposed and what can be replaced. It feels great to suddenly see our home with new eyes. We have been on quite the tear and last night we went to see Perfect Days with Toast at BAM. The three of us absolutely lost it.
This is the story of a man who has the simplest of routines, cleaning public toilets in Japan, but also listening to tapes in his van, marveling at the tree shadows on the walls, spritzing down his plants every morning and reading on his single futon before going to bed every night. It’s a life of simplicity and delight, finding contentment and beauty in the world. It made me think about Kimberly Drew on the podcast Vibe Check talking about how she strives for a “soft life”.
She says: “There's a way to have softness that is not encouraging everyone to nap or encouraging everyone to bathe. When I think about the soft life, I think about dance. The rhythm of it, where it is building out the choreography of your life such that you can float through it. It is the rigorous work of setting boundaries. It is the rigorous work of committing to your craft. I don't think of people who are living at a certain socioeconomic level and therefore makes such things accessible. When I think about soft life, it is really about having a really hard audit of how you're doing things and orienting them towards conditions that allow you to float through them as best as you can.”
Here’s what got caught in my sieve this week as I floated and collected for you the big bits that remained as all smaller ones fell through.
Related: Slow Down.
“While we’re worried about whether a film sold at Sundance or not, or whether our equity investors will recoup without any output deals at Netflix anymore, the rest of the world is burning down around us, and we’ve got much bigger problems than the “gatekeepers” of the field, or the state of the market.”
Yegane Moghddam’s Oscar-nominated animated short Our Uniform, painted directly on the cloth used for making school uniforms.
Rewild all the golf courses! “The United States has more golf courses than McDonald’s locations and also has more than any other country.”
Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers.
on the best way to order a paperback, ranked:(Best for the writer and the literary ecosystem, that is.) By far the best way is to preorder (before the book is even out) from an indie bookstore, or to get it right when it comes out. And you can do this online if you don’t have a local one. The second best is to get the book from said indie after the pub date. (Tied with these two—but this isn’t about paperbacks—would be preordering or ordering the audiobook from libro.fm, which gives your money straight to the indie bookstore of your choice, or ordering the ebook via Kobo, which does the same.) The next best is a larger brick-and-mortar store. The next best is getting your wonderful local library to order it. The next best is funding Jeff Bezos’s penis rockets. The next best is buying some weird pirated version. The next best is walking into a store and actively talking everyone out of ordering it. The last best is joining Moms for Liberty and destroying the fabric of our country and its free speech and educational system.
A new center of food, literature, and global Black cultures, coming to Bed Stuy (with your help).
Best $5 I’ve spent in a long time.
100 small acts of love (95% acts of service)
on cuánhé, 攢盒, or a tray of togetherness.Till next time,
ASK