Hi there,
How are you adjusting to this new season?
The temperature drop has me flipping back through one of my favorite cookbooks of all time. RIP Saltie, home to the Scuttlebutt, the best sandwich that’s ever passed my lips. Pickled vegetables, tons of herbs, lots of capers, a thick slab of feta, hard boiled eggs and whole olives squeezed between expert homemade focaccia - just the deepest experience of love on a plate. Extremely messy, requiring your full two hands to lift and many napkins in between bites. Elizabeth Schula, Rebecca Collerton and Caroline Fidanza ran a tight ship, right next to the BQE entrance in Williamsburg.
It closed in 2017 after a glorious eight year run and I still miss it. Mike continues to rock their T-shirt like it’s from a vintage band. Theirs was particularly excellent, featuring Scott Lenhardt’s Twenty Four Hour Woman, working the counter, nestled deep in the tiny sliver of the nautical shop. It’s nowhere to be found anymore but he has other dank merch available.
Rothaniel, Jerrod Carmichael’s startling comedy (?) special has been impossible for me to get out of my head. It came out when I was out of the country so I’m a little to the party, but definitely here to stay. It’s a tight hour, stripped down and unflinching, about the toll of secrets - worked out in front of a live audience. He’s completely riveting the whole time and the moment where he loses his self-deprecating facade is such a gift. His willingness to lead with unsteadiness and feel his way through it all is pretty mind blowing. It had me thinking about vulnerability and intimacy, but also how complicated it is when you make your personal trauma currency.
Reading Mehran Karimi Nasseri’s obituary was quietly devastating. He was an Iranian refugee who lived inside the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for eighteen years, “trapped in a legal twilight zone”. He was also the inspiration behind Tom Hank’s character in The Terminal. Nasseri finally got his papers but still insisted on staying in the airport. It was where he died - he had been in a nursing home but had returned to live in the airport since September, where he had a heart attack.
The cruel irony of being stateless, trapped in a place where all other travelers are just passing through, must have been a hard kind of purgatory. It made think of Sam Edwards’ essay on Algerian migrants trying to find meaning while stuck in one of Spain’s “temporary” migrant housing centers. Bureaucracy kills in our “imbalanced, unsustainable, racist system of global movement” according to Vik Sohonie, who writes about passport privilege (and is the founder of the incredible Ostinato Records, a record label that reveals the untold stories of Africa's past through music.)
I recently reread Rebecca Solnit’s essay “The Mother of All Questions” and it’s still the perfect rebuttal to anyone feeling like parenthood is the only path to leading a less insular life. An excellent sentence, amongst so many others: “But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”
Hearing (child-free) Angela Davis talking with Patrisse Cullors about how the disability movement informed the abolitionist movement was illuminating. In the 1970s there was a sweeping call to do away with asylums but no thought was put into creating new structures of care in their stead. Davis talks about how we got rid of the institutions but did not create new compassionate agencies for people with mental health issues. Her bottom line “don’t just say abolition, also imagine something else” is a rallying cry.
She mentions Trieste in Italy as being a radically progressive mental health city. When the city's main psychiatric hospital shuttered in 1980, it was replaced with a publicly funded community system for people with mental illnesses to live with dignity. Franco Basaglia, the father of the anti-psychiatry movement, promoted social inclusion, instead of criminalization.
The old hospital now houses a radio station, a café and a library alongside other workplaces throughout the city, all staffed by people with mental illnesses who belong to a social cooperative called La Collina. Sadly, this model is now under attack by the right wing government who is slashing funding and trying to privatize everything.
Aftersun is such a gentle movie, I didn’t expect to find it lingering inside of me so many days later. It is Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells’ first feature about a woman looking back on a family vacation she took in Turkey with her father when she was 11 years old. It’s a tonal poem about what shards of memories feel like and how you only ever can catch fragmented glimpses as you grow older. One shot perfectly encapsulates the movie - at dinner one night, the father and daughter chat and the camera drifts away from them, to focus on a Polaroid of the two of them as it slowly develops.
The secret language of bees revolves around the waggle dance, “the most complex symbolic system that humans have decoded to date in the animal world.” Understanding their dance holds the possibilities of several futures - using them to survey the landscape for conservation, or weaponizing them as military monitoring devices. Here’s hoping we choose kinship over dominance.
Liz Weil’s essay How to Live in a Catastrophe is a lightning rod for anyone who is feeling intense paralysis in the face of climate change. She charts the courses we have in front of us - violence, love or both and more, because we’re going to need to play together with “this jazz sense of chaos.”
That conversation echoes the one health justice scholar Beatrice Adler-Bolton had with historian Jules Gill-Peterson about needing visions of a better future. Thinking beyond the overwhelm, the backlash and the austerity towards “a powerful articulation of desire that leads directly to concrete material politics.” Every word is a miracle.
For some hands-on giving of thanks, EVLovesNYC is looking for more volunteers to help with food prep and distribution and Crystal Hudson’s team needs help distributing free turkeys.
Till next time,
ASK
PS: Mystery solved from last week! Anne, the painter whose work I loved, actually found my newsletter through our mutual friend Sabrina of
, a fellow French-American creative who writes a really excellent Substack called Seven Senses. Sabrina sends out thoughtful recommendations each month to engage each of your senses (think a podcast for hearing, a recipe for tasting). Highly recommend subscribing…
🥰thanks for the shout out Ani 😘