Happy four year anniversary of going through the portal. Millions dying across the world, even more getting sick with varying degrees of recovery. The last years have felt so disorienting. I constantly find myself bewildered at the utter loss of time.
It’s also been a window of expansion, of reflection. Challenging the status quo, considering the gaps between what one thinks and one does and how to bridge the two. Stances can and do waver. Every single word of Hala Alyan’s new essay is essential reading, but I’m especially holding on to this part:
“The slow, winding work of figuring out what our values are, detangling them from those around us, can be the work of a lifetime. And when people do it, let us try to welcome them, however long we think it took them to get there. Because, often, it took exactly as long as there were hurdles to overcome.”
I thought of that when I learned about a truth window (or truth wall). It’s an opening within a wall that is created to show the layers within. In a straw bale house, it reveals the fact that the walls… are actually made from straw. “Truth windows often take on the role of an altar, bringing gratitude for the sources of our materials and reminding us of the reasons for the choices we have made.”
Palestinian essayist Mosab Abu Toha, known for founding Gaza’s only English language library, wrote this poem when he was about to have ear surgery in Boston. He dedicated it to his doctor.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear BY MOSAB ABU TOHA
For Alicia M. Quesnel, MD
i
When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.
You may encounter songs in Arabic,
poems in English I recite to myself,
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.
When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.
Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.
ii
The drone’s buzzing sound,
the roar of an F-16,
the screams of bombs falling on houses,
on fields, and on bodies,
of rockets flying away—
rid my small ear canal of them all.
Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.
Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.
Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,
my doctor, day and night.
For Women’s History Month, some things:
No equality for working women in any country in the world, study reveals is a headline that makes me scream and scream and scream.
A counter - learning about Gisèle Halimi, the Tunisian-French feminist lawyer who was instrumental in making abortion in France legal, strengthening French laws against rape and abolishing the death penalty. In 1960, Halimi defended Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian woman accused of setting off a bomb during the Algerian war. She was arrested, tortured, and raped by French soldiers, sentenced to death by a French court, but later pardoned and freed in 1962 when Algeria gained independence.
In that vein - “The war against women is brazen and cruel, but it’s the terror of the ordinary we need to watch out for” in a post-Roe world, writes
in“To think of artist-mothers as only suffering or silenced simply reinforces self-sacrifice as the measure of motherhood” writes Ligaya Mishan.
Naomi Klein writes: “Atrocity is once again becoming ambient. (One might see the entire Oscar spectacle as a kind of live-action extension of The Zone of Interest, a sort of Denialism on Ice.)”
Meanwhile, I loved this tidbit from Art of the Title’s Lola Landekic speaking to Vasilis Marmatakis:
If there were an Oscar for Outstanding Title Design, Marmatakis’s work for Poor Things would surely have been nominated. But he doesn’t believe in awards. ‘Ideologically I’m against it,’ he says. ‘It's a bit tricky for me. I mean, I’m really happy for Poor Things and of course I follow the Oscars but overall, I’m against any form of awards.” For him, the stance is philosophical and political. He quotes lines from Against, a poem by Dinos Christianopoulos, translating from the Greek: “I'm against awards because they undermine the dignity of human beings… Getting an award seems to say that I accept spiritual bosses. And one day, we should get rid of bosses from our lives.’ He does, however, take joy when his work is named on best-of lists or otherwise praised, of course.
I recently revisited Blood Simple and remain astonished at how perfect of a screenplay the first Coen brothers’ feature film is. Mike also loved how remarkably consistent they have stayed to their themes: forever fascinated by a bumbling man paying to get his wife offed, the qui pro quos of misunderstandings. Even the incinerator feels like a prelude to Fargo’s wood chipper, M Emmet Walsh (RIP)’s character a precursor to Javier Bardem’s character from No Country for Old Men.
Happy two year wedding anniversary to us! Cotton is apparently the traditional gift, and my Mom gave us new bedding for our queen bed upgrade. The L.L. Bean flannel sheets have been a game-changer, could not recommend more highly.
Housing has been on my mind a lot this week, as I grappled with some new changes here in New York while finishing Paris Is Not Dead: Surviving Hypergentrification in the City of Light by Cole Stangler. He quotes a passage from James Baldwin’s 1961 Esquire essay The New Lost Generation where he talks about the allure of American expats’ freedom in Paris:
In my own case, I think exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: man is not a man until he's able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others ... What Europe still gives an American - or gave us - is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself.
My parents left New York for Paris with two toddlers in tow 34 years ago, for lower rents and safer neighborhoods, but also to fully become themselves and follow their own vision of the world. Since then, both of my home cities have only become harder to survive in. In New York, two separate pieces of news came out that will have potential to shape the future of living here, for better and for worse.
The East New York Community Land Trust has purchased a 21-unit, rent-stabilized apartment building on Arlington Avenue from a private landlord for just over $3 million last month. It’s the first time a land trust has bought a building from a private landlord here. The plan is to help tenants convert to co-op units in the coming years. The residents will own or lease their homes at permanently affordable rates while the nonprofit “land trust” owns the land below. They won’t be able sell for big gains later, so that the next occupants also are guaranteed affordable housing. This is coming at a time when property owners and investors are considering unloading stabilized apartments as they say rising costs and caps on rent hikes are limiting profits and repairs…
Meanwhile, a jarring decision was reached last week that is a blatant human rights violation for our newest neighbors. The 1981 consent decree in Callahan v. Carey made New York the only major city in the country to offer a legal “right to shelter” to anyone within its borders who requests it. Last week it ostensibly came to an end when, after five months of secret negotiations, the Legal Aid Society sold out the migrants as a way to supposedly “preserve” the Right to Shelter.
Now people who have fled horrific conditions and can no longer go home will no longer be able to renew their 30 day stay in shelters (which already have abysmal living conditions). It will turn thousands upon thousands into nomadic wanderers, sleeping on sidewalks and subways, desperate for rest. A friend last night was over the moon to be granted permission to sleep in the crawlspace of a ceiling in a bodega.
The big green statue in the New York Harbor stands for exactly nothing as Marika Dias writes: "Our shelter challenges did not begin with an influx of immigrants and they certainly should not be solved by discriminating against them." It’s worth looking at Paris, which has experienced a similarly manufactured “migrant crisis” since 2015 but with no right to shelter ever in place. It’s colonialism come home to roost there, as the exiled erect encampments that are routinely swept up by the police and organizations like Utopia 56 spring up to meet people’s immediate needs, nationalism be damned.
Like Astra Taylor write: “Laws and social programs not only shape material outcomes; they also shape us, informing public perceptions and preferences, and generating what scholars call policy feedback loops. There is no neutral state to aspire to. Policies can either foster solidarity and help repair the divides that separate us or deepen the fissures.”
Happy spring equinox!
Till next time,
ASK