I am deep in my backyard vision boarding. This happens every year around this time, when buds start to bloom and I have a sudden itch to get back in the dirt and start planting things. In our 7B climate zone, it’s best to wait until after the last frost (around April 15th) so I am trying my best to hold back from raiding Gardel's Garden… at least for a couple more weeks. Gardel has run his nursery for over thirty five years out of an empty lot at 97 South Portland Ave and just reopened for the season a couple days ago. He is one of the most knowledgeable plant people I know and it’s unclear how much longer he’ll be around in this space.
In the meantime, I am loading up on free compost courtesy of Earth Matter and Grow NYC and biding my time. If you are part of an open space project (like a community garden, school, or block association), you have one more week to place an order with GrowNYC's Annual Spring Plant Sale and get their sweet wholesale prices (and you can pick up free sifted compost courtesy of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy).
Architectural mock-ups for luxury condos could have a new life in community gardens as repurposed sheds and greenhouses. The mock-ups are expensive yet short-lived, only serving to test the building facade system before ending up in a landfill. Sometimes that can include what’s called a mob test, where they are attacked with baseball bats (free music video idea, you’re welcome!) Testbeds aims to redirect the mock-ups towards longer lives via community use. Their pilot project is a mock-up of 30 Warren in Tribeca, now transplanted to the Edgemere garden in the Rockaways, which itself is a formerly vacant city-owned lot on Beach 43rd Street on the bayside.
Remember the big announcement “the rats were absolutely going to hate” per Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch? Well it’s here and the rats stay winning. Can we please stop with this charade? They run this city, always have, always will. I remember being on a first date over ten years ago. It was a late night somewhere in the East Village and as we walked out of a bar under a torrential downpour, I slid on something and basically ate shit in the middle of the intersection. I looked back and realized my wipe-out was due to a waterlogged rat corpse. We maybe dated for a month after that (no idea where that man is now) but the sense memory of slipping on a dead rat will haunt me till my dying day.
I loved this read by Marianna Giusti on authenticity and “gastronationalism” in Italy, featuring food myth-buster Alberto Grandi who traces certain Italian classics like tiramisu and carbonara to relatively modern American inventions. Italians are up in arms on Twitter but it actually makes a lot of sense given the early 20th-century mass migration from Italy to the US. Matteo Salvini, the Italian deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right League understands the dark power of food culture purity, and has been weaponizing it as a seemingly innocuous way to reinforce this symbol of Italy’s national identity.
The LA teachers strike worked! The tentative agreement includes a 30% wage increase and a retroactive pay increase. It was a historic show of solidarity across different unions. The walkout was spearheaded by Local 99 (which represents the lowest paid school employees like bus drivers and food service workers) but United Teachers Los Angeles urged its members to join in the strike, which is effectively why campuses were shut down for three days.
I have been an unabashed Wangechi Mutu fan for years now and her show spanning six floors of the New Museum is a celebration of her fantastical creatures. Her sculptures are particularly amazing, and the one that has lodged itself in my brain is “The Glider” (2021). It’s a curved figure, seemingly moving through water, or possibly flying, made from soil mixed with charcoal and paper pulp. Part-human, part-serpent, she is adorned with steampunk goggles and scooped-out scales, with a gourd for a skull.
I recently learned about Pauline Newman and now I am clamoring for more. She was nicknamed the “East Side Joan of Arc”, leading 10,000 New York families on a historic rent strike in 1907 when she was just a teenager. Born in Lithuania, she immigrated with her family as one of two million Jews who were fleeing antisemitic pogroms at the time. At age 8, she started working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, organizing after-work study groups that would become the basis of the women’s unions she would soon head.
The rent strike in Lower Manhattan was the largest the city had ever seen and sparked decades of tenant activism, eventually resulting in the creation of rent control. She went on to organize female garment workers, cumulating in the Uprising of the 20,000 of 1909, the largest strike by American women. She lived with her partner Frieda Miller for over 50 years, raising her daughter together in the West Village as an openly lesbian couple.
I recently rewatched Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a movie that had a big impact on me as a kid even though I couldn’t recall a single thing about. It’s since largely remembered as one of the most epic box office bombs of all time, grossing just $8 million to its $38 million budget. Sarah Polley, a child actor at the time, remembers the experience as being largely traumatic in her memoir Run Towards the Danger, which was pretty apparent in the rewatch. The uncredited cameo by Robin Williams, playing the King of the Moon, remains brilliant unhinged.
Acupuncture has been a huge revelation in my life and I am excited to check out this free clinic/guerrilla academy running every Wednesday from 6-8P through May 31 at Performance Space New York. The experimental music collective Standing on the Corner is behind the Taíno Needle Science Institute: Electric Works Laboratory, uplifting the radical inspiration of Lincoln Detox.
First known as the People's Drug Program, it was started by the Young Lords and members of the Black Panthers in the 1970s at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. They relied on auricular acupuncture to relieve addiction withdrawal symptoms as an alternative to methadone, but were eventually shut down in 1978. The legacy lives on as some of the folks administering the needles are former Young Lords themselves, now “soft-spoken older gentlemen” turned AcuDetox specialists. More community-based alternative medicine!
Till next time,
ASK