Hope this missive finds you rested. If not, this is your sign.
Close your eyes.
Take a deep breath in.
Exhale.
Reopen your eyes.
A mini nap, if you will.
There are caterpillars growing in my office - words I have never typed together in a sentence before! Mostly because I’ve never had an office before that wasn’t either Cailin’s living room or the desk in my bedroom. Kira introduced me to some folks starting a co-working space down the street from me, which used to formerly house a mushroom farm. My officemate (!) was shooting time-lapses of the mushrooms growing and is now attempting to capture caterpillars turning into butterflies. A couple days ago they were crawling around their little jar but now the three hairy buggers have become cocoons, sealed up in a chrysalis with all the nutrients they need to transform.
It’s been making me think of this great interview with muralist Bunny Reiss on the pandemic: “When a butterfly gets inside a cocoon, it completely dematerializes, it has no form. It’s goo, and a scientific name for it is bug soup. Then it rematerializes into its next form. As a caterpillar, it goes in, it dissolves, it rematerializes and comes out new. As people, we also have this opportunity to always lean into whoever we’re going to be. It takes so much courage and it’s really hard. We’re in a complicated world. It’s not going to get any easier. This is our world now and it will shift again.” The whole interview is magic.
Mike had never seen “Alien” before, so we had a special Thanksgiving eve screening. It’s still a perfect movie, front to back. In the credits at the end, I learned that the Alien was played by Bolaji Badejo. It was the only role of his life. He was a Nigerian design student who was spotted in a pub in London. Studying tai chi and mime to figure out the creature’s movements, he then spent the four month shoot inside a heavy latex suit that had to be applied in 15 separate pieces. After the film was released, he returned to Nigeria in 1980 to run his own art gallery. He died in 1992 at the age of 39 from sickle cell anemia.
Over the weekend, I was walking through the farmers market and ran into my friend Lourdes Bernard. I first fell in love with her work when we were residents at Yaddo in the Before Times (aka 2019) and this bump-in was our first time reuniting since then. A lot of her stunning art centers hidden stories within the Dominican diaspora.
Her family migrated to the US in 1965 and her last show featured gripping portraits of some of the thousands of untrained civilian women that fought for freedom during the US invasion of Dominican Republic in April 1965. I hope her work blooms into a graphic novel or an animated film in the not-so-distant future.
Saeed Jones’ crystal clear note on Colorado Springs murders : “What I’m trying to say is that, even as I function and go about my business, I’m outraged and heartbroken. And I’m scared in a way that, frankly, feels ancestral. Some fears are blood inheritances and I believe this is one of them. If you’re also haunted by what you’ve come to understand about this country, this is just a note to say that I think your grief is righteous and your rage is reasonable.”
In Prospect Park I saw a Korean woman on her knees foraging for goutweed. She explained it was to help her mothers’ knees. In addition to being good for gout (as the name would have it) it’s also used to treat arthritis and rheumatism. It was her first time in the park and she was amazed to find so much of it untouched, ripe for the picking. When I looked up goutweed later, all the articles I found were about how to get rid of this invasive species- apparently it’s so difficult to eradicate that certain states like Massachusetts and Vermont have put it to their ‘Prohibited Plant List’.
The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu is about to become the world’s “first digital nation” by creating a virtual replica of itself in the Metaverse. Rising sea levels mean the island nation could be underwater within the next hundred years. The islands and landmarks will be moved to the cloud, so that cultural knowledge will be preserved and its borders maintained and recognized internationally, even if the islands themselves are submerged. The foreign minister Simon Kofe, said it was so that they can remind their “children and grandchildren what their home once was”.
Descendent will make time and space collapse for you. It's a documentary about the legacy of the Clotilda, the last known ship to carry enslaved Africans to the U.S. It follows the descendants of the 110 survivors and ripples out from inherited trauma to memorial design to environmental racism. The film opens with Kamau Sadiki, a diver with Diving With A Purpose, an organization committed to resurrecting the stories of slave shipwrecks. He said before the first Clotilda dive, he came up with the following prayer: “Your voices and memories are lifted now from this wretched wreck through us, and we welcome you to speak through us. Our connection will never be broken. We are because of you. Thank you for reaching out to us. Blessings to your spirit, always.”
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
I have realized my ideal writing playlist is just one long uninterrupted stream of wordless tunes. Enter Radiooooo, you pick a country, music, decade and mood. Organizing music by time and space has been delighting me to no end. You can mix and match multiple countries if you go into Taxi mode. 1950’s Morocco & 1920s Brazil have been recent favorites.
Josephine Baker performing “Je Pars” and doing the twist on Italian TV in 1962. That’s all.
Till next time,
ASK