Magpie being the only creature rumored to have refused the ark
preferring to perch high on the mast & curse the rain...
The freakish floods last week gave way to a glorious stretch of sun and high temps… but lots of damage everywhere. Our upstairs neighbors’ bedroom ceiling caved in, opening what looked like a portal to hell. EVLoves NYC, which cooks thousands of delicious free meals every Sunday, lost fridges, freezers and almost 60% of the clothing donations they had been collecting. Quincy showed Jessie and me the videos he took of the makeshift slides they created. The day of the storm, they were putting cardboard down on the stairwells to slide down thousands of pounds of food for the neighborhood pantry because the Navy Yard freight elevators were shut off.
This city is painfully not prepared for the future. “If you live in Florida, you’ve always known that hurricanes can kill you. If you live in Nebraska, you’ve always known that you have to protect yourself from tornadoes. If you live in California, you know you have to get ready for the big earthquake that’s coming,” said New York City’ Chief Climate Officer Rohit Aggarwala. “New Yorkers have to start thinking about extreme weather in the same way.”
Friday’s rainfall was extreme, but the coastal flooding, or storm surge portion was actually mild. If it had been accompanied by a hurricane, we would have fared much, much worse.
from writes that “It’s been well-documented that policies to adapt the city’s infrastructure aren’t moving quickly enough to adapt to the reality of climate change; despite three devastating hurricanes over the last decade, the city’s aging sewage system and infrastructure remain the same.” We won’t be ready for the next storm either until we can harness the monumental investment of mass political and financial will.I am very excited for Miranda July’s new novel All Fours, coming out this spring. It’s her first in almost a decade, and post splitting with filmmaker Mike Mills last year. As she says in a recent Vogue interview: “I mean, I sort of can’t believe we’re still doing marriage more or less the same way it’s always been done—it’s actually kind of weird. Especially since it was invented for purposes that we don’t have anymore, like land ownership and dowries and someone to milk the cows. There’s no reason it still needs to go that way. It absolutely can be made according to your specific circumstances and desires. But depending on where you sit in the culture and who your parents were, or are, that is either more or less available to you. If you’re like me, reinventing what a marriage might consist of—and as the narrator does in this book—it’s kind of like painting over the Mona Lisa or something. It’s not that hard, it’s kind of exhilarating, but you think you might go to jail for it? Every second, I feel like the guards are coming.”
The Biden administration will waive 26 federal laws and environmental protections to extend Trump’s racist border wall in the Rio Grande Valley. The reality is that no border wall will never be effective — only addressing the root causes of migration will ever change mass displacement. Every single person fleeing for their lives would rather be home… if their homes were safe, and economically and politically stable. Not to mention that the U.S. stands to gain far too much by having a never-ending stream of labor to exploit.
Marcela Valdes writes how and why unauthorized immigration works: “Migrants dream of America because they are an entrenched part of our economy. This is nothing new; America’s economy has always relied upon a mass of disempowered, foreign-born laborers, whether it was enslaved Africans picking cotton, Chinese building railroads, Irish digging coal, Italians sewing garments or Mexicans harvesting fruit. Even today, some sectors in the U.S. economy seem almost reserved for workers who have been deliberately kept vulnerable. When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, establishing a minimum wage, they excluded most farmworkers and domestic workers from its protections. These workers were largely excluded again when Congress passed the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1970. ‘These spaces that were once filled by slaves are now filled by immigrants,” Anita Sinha, a professor of law at American University told me. “They are exploitative by design.’”
I recently reread Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis in anticipation of a new project we’re hoping to get off the ground. It’s such a good primer on what mutual aid is (at its core, strangers collaborating to make the things we need) and how to facilitate collective decision-making process. As Paula X. Rojas writes: “What if, as a tired, overworked, and underpaid or unpaid woman I do not have to add going to this march to my list of things to do? What if, instead, I could integrate my political participation into my daily life? What if there were a “space” where I could build and learn politically with others, a space I could go to that was part of how I take care of myself and others?”
Two students figured out how to circumvent the federal government’s cruel stipulation that hot food can’t be purchased with SNAP benefits. The Community Grocer will have meal kits for sale with raw, uncooked ingredients that customers can buy. They will then take it to a separate area in the building where they will exchange it for a recently cooked version of the same meal. Their model is technically legal, it’s just never been done before. A lot of press is celebrating the hack instead of questioning why SNAP’s absurd stipulation exists in the first place.
I heard Ruth Gilmore speak recently about three different examples of working within the state to reimagine it, building a new world in the shell of the old:
The Abahlali baseMjondolo is a democratic social movement of shack dwellers which began in Durban, South Africa in early 2005. With over 115,000 members today, AbM has been occupying lands to build housing for the urban poor for nearly two decades. They govern their own communities to protect them against the police and make it flourish for themselves.
Brazil's Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Portuguese, is a mass social movement that uses agrarian reform to fight for rural workers’ access to land. They have an estimated informal membership of 1.5 million across 23 of Brazil's 26 states. The group is financially self-sufficient through food production and currently Latin America's largest supplier of organic rice.
National Nurses United is the largest organization of registered nurses in the United States with more than 225,000 members. They came together in 2009 when several nurses’ unions merged, originally to fight for a safer workplace. They have since expanded their lens, joining the call for “Medicare for All” to break up the for-profit health-care system.
Planning a table read for my new screenplay in the coming two weeks and would love to meet some new charismatic New York-based actors — if you know of some good ones, please send their work my way?
I Am Trying to Love the Whole World by Jenny Browne
is such a public display of affection, a flex even,
one the lone magpie staring back from the backside
of a badly shorn sheep finds suspect. I flap my arms
& blink three times. Bad luck to glimpse just one.
Magpie being the only creature rumored to have
refused the ark, preferring to perch high on the mast
& curse the rain. I too keep rewinding this mixtape
of the plague years until I can hear it snap like a tendon
or a tent pole. The world stays busy out there, hammering
itself into softer ground with a flat rock & yet, the sound
of wind softly shaking the stars awake. My world
I have missed your mouth, your morning
breath coming round the wild garlic, your fat
lilacs forgetting to be the flower of death.
September’s donations went to Lux Magazine (a feminist magazine of politics and culture), New York Abortion Access Fund (an all-volunteer organization that provides direct financial assistance for abortions) , EVLovesNYC (a nonprofit focused on food insecurity) and Art.coop (a hub to grow the Solidarity Economy movement by centering creatives making systems-change). You can track where donations have been going here and I remain deeply grateful for all your subscriptions! Every dollar is directly redistributed on a monthly basis and you can give what you wish, either as one-time payment or a recurring monthly subscription.
Field trip!
What: A concert by Molly Burch
Where: Bowery Ballroom
When: Monday, October 9 at 7:00P
If I were in LA I would be going to:
What: A party (with manicures, tooth gems and snow cones)
Where: Suay Sew Shop
When: Saturday October 7 and Sunday October 8 from 12:00PM-5:00PM
Till next time,
ASK