I want to know what you think
of all that blue light...
Hello from Suddenly Summer? Regardless of whatever other extreme mood swings the weather has in store for us, we have officially entered Stoop Sale Season, always the most glorious time of the year! It’s one of New York’s greatest delights, and Fort Greene in particular really does it right - you can find the fanciest threads, the rarest of books, the most niche of furniture pieces and everyone is just begging you to take it off their hands for a song.
It also scratches the itch of getting to know your neighbors with the most obvious conversation starter: “Why the hell are you getting rid of that?” Our building is having one tomorrow and we would love to see you!
Matthew Desmond’s article (adapted from his book Poverty, by America) looks into why the poverty rate has held steadily over the last fifty years, despite ever increasing government spending in the richest country in the world. It is a comprehensive look into the real ways in which being poor is insanely expensive: unions no longer exist to protect your labor from being exploited, banks prey on you through overdraft fees, credit scores and bad loans, and landlords can name whatever rental prices they want.
He writes “The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, or every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this?” Ultimately, access to cheap consumer goods doesn’t mean a thing if your basic human rights (food, shelter, medicine) are priced beyond your means and there are obvious, tangible ways to right these wrongs.
I’m halfway through The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees and it’s been nearly impossible to put down. War reporter Matthieu Aikins decided in 2016 to follow his Afghan friend Omar from Kabul to Europe, burning his own Canadian passport to go underground with him on the smuggler’s road across land and sea. He grapples with the ethics of his own citizenship, knowing that at any point he can call an embassy and be rescued, as they end up in a hellish loop of being on the run then essentially incarcerated in refugee camps. It’s a clear-eyed yet empathetic account of our global border policy hellscape.
Jessie is back from her wild adventures in Indonesia and has been blessing us all with her wildlife photography! Komodo dragons, wobbegongs, and best of all - the Proboscis Monkeys. She says she’s reached the end of the slideshows but I still cannot get enough, so this is a general PSA: post pictures of your trips so your friends can live vicariously through you!
The WGA is holding a strike authorization vote till April 17th. If a strike is authorized, they will have about two weeks to come to an agreement with the AMPTP, the entertainment industry's official collective bargaining representative, as the current contract is up May 1. The rise of streaming has resulted in writers working longer and for less pay, since streaming series generally take longer to make but have fewer episodes than network television. Other demands include further protection for the Pension and Healthcare funds. The last strike in 2007/2008 resulted in a major increase in reality TV as a stop gap to fill programming slots… one ripple effect being NBC deciding to resuscitate Donald Trump's reality show, The Celebrity Apprentice.
Kira pointed me to this great Atlantic article by Dana Stevens which shows how the Oscars themselves were invented as a form of union-busting. As the silent era came to a close and the first craft guilds started to establish themselves in the 1920s, studio mogul Louis B. Meyer came up with the ultimate form of distraction - an annual awards ceremony. “I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to hang medals all over them. If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created,” he later said. It also established that Academy members were artists and not unionized laborers, drawing the quite literal line between “above-the-line” (writers, directors, actors, department heads) and below-the-line crew.
The world is a little bit quieter now that Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is gone. I first discovered her beautiful compositions through Garrett Bradley’s stunning documentary Time.
dedicated a post to her work, writing about the 99 year old pianist: “Born in Addis Ababa in 1923, she studied violin and piano abroad and then returned to Ethiopia, where she became ordained as a nun. From the ‘60s through the ‘90s, she composed and recorded tender, sui generis solo piano pieces. In 2006, 16 of these pieces were collected on Ethiopiques, Vol. 21, bringing her works to a wider audience. Sister Guèbrou left us a foundation dedicated to musical education for underserved communities.”The best bite I had all week was when Kira made us 炸酱面 or Zhajiangmian (noodles with fried bean sauce), from Francis’ mom’s recipe. Here’s how you can do it too:
- about 1 pound ground pork - 3 or more garlic cloves - 3 or more green onions (cut into small pieces) - 3 heaping table spoons of soy bean paste - 3 heaping table spoons of sweet soy bean paste - 2 table spoons of soy sauce - 1 table spoon of corn starch, mixed with a cup of water
Then…
1. heat up some oil, stir fry the pork, drain and put in a bowl
2. heat up some oil, stir fry garlic and onion until fragrant (about 1 minute) then add the pork, fry about a minute
4. add the soy bean pastes and the soy sauce, stir until mixed evenly
5. add the corn starch mixture, stir until thickened
6. lower the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, stir occasionally
Serve with thick wheat noodles, top with sliced cucumbers, carrots, tofu and/or egg! Bonus points if it’s a cold starry night, and you inhale two bowls in front of a roaring fire.
Sabrina Imbler’s Atlas Obscura piece on trans/gender variance in the Wild West is both obvious (queer people have been everywhere since the dawn of time) and perceptive (a woman passing as a man could be a survival strategy in a land dominated by men). The breadth of her investigation is pretty astonishing, as cross-dressing for both men and women was pervasive at the time.
That history was subsequently erased, forming our current collective memory of rugged cowboys and dainty ladies. She instead paints the American frontier as a time and place where people could reinvent themselves wholly, including their gender construct, “which may have enabled more people to live according to their true identities.”
As the proud daughter of sardine aficionado Joan Simon, I am living for this golden resurgence of tinned fish and any related paraphernalia. I had never heard of sardine forks and lifters but now I am scouring the entirety of eBay for the perfect one. It’s a squat fork, wide enough to lift a whole sardine from the tin without it flaking and falling apart on you.
From the New York Historical Society: “Sardines became a fashionable food after the Civil War, and thus an opportunity for silver manufacturers to craft specialized flatware. Because canned sardines were costly, they were viewed as elegant fare. Linked to the nineteenth-century rise of American consumerism, this specialization coincided with the increasing commercialization of American weddings.”
I have yet to see John Wick 4 (or 1, 2 or 3) but I loved reading Kyra Wilder’s poem.
John Wick is so tired, but he can still throw a hatchet and hit a guy dead in the face
he can just split other people open with anything, with a pencil
because he knows what it’s like
because he’s tired and loves dogs and he’s cracked right open too and
I want to tell you to
look at his feet when he runs
the way they turn so delicately in
the way they’re listing slightly, his black shoes
the heels of them
their heartbreaking glissade hush-hushing across the hotel tiles
just look at the way he’s slipping
even before he soaks the floor with other people’s blood
I want to do push-ups like John Wick does in the morning
so I won’t just be sad but sad and also ripped, like
sad with muscles that stand out all obvious in desolate relief
sad where it looks like I eat clean and have expensive taste
I want to be sad but with a cut six-pack and
to drink thimblefuls of espresso out of impeccable cups and
I want to tell you to wait and be here and look
at me and also at the way John Wick is leaning
into those people that he’s stabbing
how he gets so close to them and just holds them for a second
how he’s so tired but he knows he has to let them go
and I wish you would be here and
we could watch John Wick together
and we could put our ruthless arms around each other and if we looked
out the window it would be all California
and I would lean in close and tell you that John Wick kills women like
he’s read feminist theory
which is to say I think he’s familiar with the philosophy of care and
you would laugh and
wait, look now, John Wick is riding
that black horse like he knows just what grief is
like he knows sometimes it’s killing and killing and
sometimes it’s just slipping in your shoes and
I want you to be here and
wait, now the camera’s right on him, just all cool colors and diaphanous mood and
it looks like his hand hurts like his knuckles are a little swollen but
he’s not saying it and
I want to know what you think
of all that blue light
The behind-the-scenes of its writing is also pretty great, especially the end of her interview. “Once I got the poem to the point where, when I looked at it fresh, there wasn’t anything I wanted to change, I sent it off and left it for dead.”
Till next time,
ASK
I don’t seem to have received this one in my inbox? 🧐