It’s been a funny week, filled with various emotional swings as I clear the midway point of a page one rewrite (aka starting from scratch) on a newish screenplay. I’m trying to sustain the momentum while the frenzy of summer sets in. My fuel? Something I have dubbed Perpetual Pesto. It’s the hot weather equivalent of forever soup (always replenished, ever-simmering). It involves taking a big jar or takeout container and layering with the following building blocks: any type of greens (radish tops, cooked broccoli, kale, Swiss chard) + any nut/seed (walnuts, sunflower seeds, pepitas, pistachios) + any cheese (Parmesan, pecorino, feta, goat).
Dowse the whole thing with tons of olive oil and take an immersion blender straight to the jar (or use a blender/food processor/mortar and pestle). Blitz that baby up then drag any crunchy vegetable through it, slather over bread for sandwiches, add to any pasta or grain, dab on any kind of fish or meat if you are of the fleshy persuasion, or spoon it straight out of the container, trough-like. The most crucial component is to keep replenishing so the sun never sets on your jar of pesto. Italianos, I understand this is culinary heresy.
Run, don’t walk, to the Brooklyn Museum for “Africa Fashion”, a show about the politics of cloth — or what happens when an entire continent rejects colonial rule over the course of 70 years, emerging as 54 countries each with a distinct identity. Exquisite and exuberant, the show also covers music, film and photography, placing traditional textiles alongside radical remixes from diasporic voices. I deeply loved a two-channel video by Godfried Donkor called The Currency of Ntoma (2012) where his Ghanaian mother discusses the meaning of the prints from her collection of Dutch Wax prints. On the other screen, a young women and girl unfold and present each cloth as she describes its meaning. One has a single upside-down tree toppled over, illustrating the saying “A forest of trees can never be uprooted by the wind.”
If you need an instant pick-me-up, look no further than The Show of Delights. I dare you not to smile to yourself when you hear the four minutes of joy where a five-year-old waits to ride the school bus for the first time.
Mike turned me on to George Bernard Shaw’s rotating writer’s shed, which was where he wrote some of his most notorious plays. It was located at the bottom of his garden and built on a revolving turntable, basically a lazy Susan. He could give it a push to follow the sun and get the best light all day long. He called it “London” so that if someone asked where he was, whoever answered wouldn’t be lying when he was in fact in his countryside backyard.
“Je pensais que la France, c’était le pays où on ne meurt jamais.” On June 20, World Refugee Day, police brutalized hundreds of young migrants who have been demanding humane living conditions after occupying an abandoned school in Paris. Now an officer murdered Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager and tonight will be the third night of ongoing protests.
Historian and writer Hugh Ryan’s article on queer indifference is brilliant. He also zeroes in on how homophobia will lose in the long run, as it always has, despite periods of intense backlash. He draws a direct line of perspective shifting, first through urbanization and now the internet.
The Lubi Art Residency has announced their first cohort of six artists who will be making carbon-neutral work exclusively from materials found on Kopiat Island in the Philippines. Their public art, which will be completed by the end of the year, will eventually deteriorate over time. Rachel Rillo who co-runs SILVERLENS, the gallery behind the residency says: “In Southeast Asia, our lives revolve around the environment: storms, earthquakes and volcanoes. There is respect for nature, because we are the first hit. Because we live in the islands, we know that nothing is permanent. Things will degrade, they will rot because of humidity and storms or the heat of the sun. Things will eventually return to nature.”
We got to the bottom of the planet’s largest gravitational anomaly! For years, scientists have been trying to figure out why a large part of the Indian Ocean’s seafloor has a deep depression to it, forming a “hole” nearly 100 meters lower than the global average sea level. It turns out the Earth is not a perfect sphere but a rather lumpy ball and when the continents broke up, the prehistoric Tethys Ocean disappeared. Its slabs of sea floor plunged deep into the Earth’s mantle some 30 million years ago, forming this particular dip - the only remnants of the ancient ghost sea.
As we wait to see if the Screen Actors Guild strikes or not, the movement for actors to get paid for their auditions is steadily gaining traction. It’s absolutely labor and has actually been a provision in the SAG contract since 1947! Vanessa Chester (unforgettable in A Little Princess) gives a clear account of her thirty-year long career and how much residuals have shrunk in that time.
Where is the Rachel Carson biopic? She was the biologist and writer behind Silent Spring, the seminal book showing the negative effect of humans on nature. It took her four years to write and when it was published in 1962 alerted the world to the dangers of synthetic pesticides, particularly DDT. It is one of the works that gave rise to the modern environmental movement but at the time, she faced tremendous backlash from the chemical industry who tried to discredit her as a hysterical spinster. She testified before Congress, while battling breast cancer and raising a son she had adopted after her niece died. She died at the age of 56, having never had a chance to see her full legacy. The Environmental Protection Agency credits Carson for its creation, and ten years after her book was published, DDT was banned in the US.
Last week’s field trip was a hit! Thanks everyone who came out and made Yao Collaborative’s 10 year anniversary so special. They’ve now launched their Kickstarter to publish their first book, and if you pledge this week you can get your copy at a discount. This week, see you at…
What: An outdoor screening of House Party (1990) by Reginald Hudlin
Where: Fort Greene Park (Myrtle Lawn)
When: Thursday, July 6, 8:00 - 11:00 pm
Till next time,
ASK