It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us
There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore...
In an interview Cooper said “I have an echo from my childhood, I think, because I was a kid during World War II in England. And the long, dark nights were the nights that brought the Nazi bombers over, when we would be sitting in our air raid shelter underneath the back lawn with mum reading books to us by the light of a candle. And when the bombs came closer, the candle would shake. And it's the obviously subconscious echo that, I think, has gone all through my writing life. And in this poem, particularly in this book, the line at the end of the book, people carol, feast, give thanks and dearly love their friends and hope for peace. Don't we all?”
Hope for peace right now in the darkest month looks like shutting down the Holland Tunnel, Williamsburg Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge during the Monday morning rush hour. A coalition of organizations staged this act of mass civil disobedience and released the following statement: “By blocking the city’s exits, the protesters created—briefly, imperfectly--a physical analogue for the situation in Gaza, where there is no getting out.”
It also looks like giving thanks to hot baths and Ellen Bass:
It also looks like accompanying families with children who have been getting evicted from shelters starting this Tuesday. Undocumented Women’s Fund, Mil Mundos en Común and Bushwick Ayuda Mutua are pairing volunteers with families.
writes: “‘Volunteer’ is also what gardeners sometimes call a plant that planted itself, that just showed up: a tomato that grew in the place where last year’s tomatoes rotted, a squash whose seeds survived the compost pile. Out at the garden, there are two peach trees that volunteered to grow in my compost at home and survived transplanting. Once I’m sure there’ve been enough cold days for them to go dormant, I’ll go out and prune them. Probably. I know that they are waiting—not for me necessarily, but for someone who cares about them and has learned what they need—to show up.”Keep showing up while our libraries, parks and schools see their funding cut as a way for the Mayor to get leverage. From Gothamist: “Mayor Eric Adams told at least one member of the City Council he would restore cuts to their favorite programs if they agreed to vote against a police transparency bill the mayor and NYPD officials vigorously opposed, according to four people familiar with conversations in the Council.” An anonymous donor stepped in to save the city's composting system, which, were it to be axed permanently, would only save the City 0.04 percent of a $7 billion budget gap.
Meanwhile asylum seekers, always the easiest scapegoats, are the ones being blamed while their budget is being cut too. Comptroller Brad Lander’s report “Facts, Not Fear: How Welcoming Immigrants Benefits New York City” tries to set the record straight while two more shelters are getting set up in our neighborhood… If they are filled to capacity, they expect 1,700 children who will all arrive with 60 day eviction letters. Our latest clothing distribution is happening this Sunday if you’re able to help with a shift, please sign up here and share around.
Eight Mountains directed by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen was my favorite watch of the week. Be patient with it and you will be handsomely rewarded with a delicate unfolding of male friendship over thirty years (and breathtaking views of the Italian Alps). It’s a very faithful adaptation of the Paolo Cognetti novel it’s based on. As Bruno and Pietro build their cabin in the mountains, they forge two very different paths for a meaningful life, one as a cheesemaker, the other as a writer. The camera placements alone warrant the big screen treatment but the way it expands on the novel’s meditation around nature and work is visually mesmerizing.
Kishori and my mom both sent me the Scott Frank profile and it is indeed a great read. He’s an incredible screenwriter, notably the highest paid script doctor in Hollywood ($300,000 a week, woof). But the profile I’m itching for next? “For the past two decades, Frank has worked with a researcher named Mimi Munson, who lives in Maine. Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola and Elmore Leonard, both of whom employed full-time researchers, Frank hired Munson to help him explore broad areas that he might want to write about, or to answer highly specific queries on deadline. Munson told me, “He’ll say, ‘I have a soldier and he needs to be very sick. But it can’t be an illness that’ll definitely kill him—it has to be something that might kill him. And it has to have a psychological component, so people might doubt he is compos mentis. And it has to go away. And I need it in forty-five minutes.’”
Patrick Radden Keefe who penned the profile also wrote “Frank periodically sent me an updated version of a document titled “My Stuff”—an ever-evolving list of twenty or so active projects.” Cailin and I just updated our Bicephaly slate and we’re topping out at fifteen hatchlings: ten narrative features (three horror, two comedy, two period dramas, one musical, one sci-fi, one doc hybrid), four TV series (two documentary, two dramas) and one documentary feature.
More writing begets more reading and I am deeply loving my birthday present from my sister Kira - a membership to Bluestockings with a monthly book subscription. It’s a gem of a space, a radical bookstore, café, and activist center in the Lower East Side established in 1999 and worker-owned since 2021. It’s also currently facing eviction for giving away Narcan kits.
Narcan is a life-saving medication that reverses the effects of opioids if someone is suffering from an overdose. “Last month after work, Espasande was around the corner from the store, administering Narcan to someone who had overdosed, when a person walked by and said something to them as he passed. “Nice community you’ve got there,” Espasande recalls him saying. “That really, to be frank, fucked me up for a week,” they said. “I don’t know how to talk to people who walk past someone trying to keep someone else alive and think it’s time for a quip about how I’m causing issues in the neighborhood.” The spray is very easy to use, here’s a training video we made three years ago. I’m not really allowed to share since the institute who commissioned it technically owns it. But information is power and too many lives are being cut short so the password is “ncbh”.
David, Kishori, Cailin and I had a meandering afternoon through the Brooklyn Museum two weeks ago. Suneil Sanzgiri’s two channel video installation Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) is a stunner and closing next week, so hurry! It weaves stories of the mutual struggle in India and Africa both in solidarity against Portuguese colonialism during the 1960s and 1970s.
The Spike Lee show is a bounty of movie posters and sports jerseys. It had me thinking back to his 2015 musical crime comedy drama film Chi-Raq - it doesn’t all work but the sheer energy is undeniable. David Ehrlich sums it up best: “clear-eyed, playful & pissed as hell. long, but a long time coming, Spike Lee is always at his best when it's an emergency, and this is a *god damn* emergency.”
It sent me down an Internet rabbit-hole of sex strikes throughout history. There’s been a real resurgence in the last two decades, a surprisingly effective strategy for political change. More formally known as Lysistratic nonactions, they’ve happened in Colombia in 2006 when wives of gang members launched La huelga de las piernas cruzadas ("the strike of crossed legs"), cross-pollinating waves across Liberia, Togo, Kenya, and the Philippines.
Maureen Shaw writes “It’s true that the organizers of the aforementioned sex strikes likewise focused on heterosexual, cisgender women—but these were localized efforts among community members who already had relationships with one another, as opposed to a broad national strike.” Each movement had specific demands and concrete goals. Erin Tansimore goes further into its thorniness: “But analysis of this idea raises questions: Why are women’s bodies considered to be taboo in particular contexts? What structures do we need to address to understand why a woman’s body can be blatantly disrespected to the point where using it as a protest strategy gains widespread attention?”
Mike and I can’t stop showing each other the picture Sasha and Rachel sent us of Mirah in a little baby straightjacket, to stay pinned down as the surgical glue on her forehead dried after she took a tumble. She’s A-OK but it’s a fun reminder of how being child-adjacent is also riddled with adrenaline in its own way. Our hearts don’t live outside of our bodies the way our parent friends’ now do, but we’re still bound up in each other’s roller coasters. I thought about
’s killer evergreen advice as Dear Sugar to a man undecided about whether or not he wanted kids. She wrote: “I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”This week the trial by the Greek Supreme Court began for sixteen humanitarian activists who used WhatsApp to coordinate rescue efforts to save refugees from drowning at sea. One of them is Sarah Mardini who lives in Germany and was previously barred from entering Greece to be present at her own trial. She is an asylum-seeker from Syria who traveled to Greece in 2015 with her sister Yusra who swam for the Refugee team at the 2016 and 2020 Summer Olympics. When the engine failed, they helped save others on board by swimming and keeping the boat afloat. During college, she return to Lesbos as a volunteer with the search-and-rescue group and was arrested in 2018 when she was about to fly home.
from interviewed Séan Binder and Madi Williamson who are also being criminalized for diving in and rescuing people. From Human Right’s Watch: “Binder, a German national, was arrested the same day when he went to the police station where colleagues said Mardini had been taken. They were detained for 106 days. Other defendants include Nassos Karakitsos, a trained rescuer, and Panos Moraitis, the founder of the search-and-rescue group, who were also held in prolonged pretrial detention in 2018, forcing the group to cease its operations. There is currently no search-and-rescue organization active on Lesbos.”
I know we said no resolutions last week, but Tilda Swinton’s advice for radical living is great wisdom for any given year:
Make friends with chaos
Let things shake
Forgive human frailty
Champion second chances
Defy unkindness
Reverence fellowship
Listen to the quiet
Respect the young
Seek growth
Trust in change
Treasure learning
Inspire faith in evolution
Reach beyond the binary
Be wary of the doubtless
Honour the brightheaded
Grow plants
Be electric
Cherish language
Dance daily
Sing into pain
Challenge assumptions
Follow the wind
Look upwards
Face forward
Read history
Open your ears
Drop your shoulders
Bend your knees
Raise the roof
Keep breathing
Be trustworthy
Take care of yourself
Believe in goodness
Head for the light
Till next time,
ASK