Howdy! (like my Mom says, flat palmed, half-salute)
Hope this finds your airways clear, your nasal passages unobstructed & your lung capacity at an all-time high.
The StoopSoup™ has been in full swing. Steph sent over turnip mushroom when I had RSV. I brought some over to Kira, along with some lentil soup, when she was down and out. Rosa got butternut squash, Kristine got chickpea kale when they both came down with Covid. Sarah taught me how to make congee that Jessie and I ferried over to Signe’s and her new baby Liam.
A Sisterhood of the Traveling Soups if you will. Please drop your favorite (portable) soup/stews in the comments because people are dropping like flies over here and the repertoire is running thin!
I have not been able to get two works of staggering genius out of my head, to the point that they almost feel like they’re in conversation with each other. “All The Beauty And The Bloodshed” is Laura Poitras’ documentary on Nan Goldin. She alternates chapters of Nan’s wild life with her present-day activism taking on the opioid epidemic. Sarah Polley’s book “Run Towards the Danger” is a collection of the personal essays around trauma, illness and the film industry.
Both are deep acts of unvarnished truth-telling, letting the chips fall where they may, no blinking, no bullshit. They confront the darkest experiences and their heaviest memories of them head-on and it is what allows both of them to remake themselves completely. The openness to their pain and the activism that weaves through their lives and their art has blown my mind.
In the case of the documentary, it’s a testament to director Laura Poitras that she was able to get Nan Goldin to open up to the extent that she did. In an interview, Poitras said “it’s not easy to access the real deep stuff, the real memories. As you get older, those memories keep coming back to you and they can take you by surprise because you don’t know when they will come back. And, unlike stories, you can’t tie them up in a tidy ending.”
Sarah Polley found the title of her book “Run Towards the Danger” when a doctor told her to seek out and embrace the discomfort from a debilitating concussion. She said “there is just this messiness to the human experience that’s extraordinarily inconvenient if you’re trying to tell one story about it. As I get older, I’m realizing it’s OK for stories to be messy or go down circuitous paths that don’t lead anywhere.” We’re so accustomed to clean narratives, it has really rocked me to take in two completely different pieces that don’t attempt to do that in the slightest. Go read, watch, feel.
In a time of backlash where abortion rights are under attack everywhere, some countries are running towards the danger. French feminists are pushing to solidify and enshrine abortion rights in the country’s Constitution, which would protect them from judicial overreach - in direct response to the U.S. overturning Roe v. Wade this summer. One poll reveals over 80% of citizens support such a move. There’s also a movement to add one line to the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights: “Everyone has a right to safe and legal abortion.”
Yalla! Party Project is the most celebratory night of dance I’ve been to in a minute. At the intersection of queerness and MENA identity, it’s an arts collective that I first encountered at the Brooklyn Museum and will now follow to the ends of the earth. Until their next party, I’m tiding myself over with their playlists.
As someone who has owned a Christmas tree exactly once (because a tree on our block had a sign that said “Free, take me home!), I read this behind-the-scenes account of the savage NYC tree business with horror and glee. Come for the cutthroat turf wars, stay for treeman-turned-writer Owen Long’s devastatingly hilarious lines.
Moses Ogden was a folk artist, who came back from the Civil War and started carving strange figures and animals out of the gnarled wood he collected around his Angelica, New York home. His enigmatic sculptures retained the spirit of the trees. Soon they overtook his garden, covering his house, in what he called “Moses Ogden's Wonderland”. It was one of America’s first folk art environments and before he died, Popular Science magazine wrote “Where the ordinary person sees only a knot of wood Mr. Ogden sees a queer-looking dog with an owl’s head, or a gnome true to story-book description, or something else uncanny.” His objects were eventually scattered but his art was rediscovered when a group of his sculptures was found in an attic in the 1980s.
I just learned about agrivoltaics, a symbiotic relationship where solar panels and crops benefit by helping each other. Putting solar panels on farms and elevating them allows plants to grow underneath them. The panels act as shields against extreme heat so the crops need less watering and have a a higher yield. They in turn actually make the panels more efficient by lowering the temperature beneath them. This system would create more food and jobs while reducing water use and carbon emissions. Farmers would get paid for their increased food and their ability to generate electricity, bringing more prosperity to rural communities.
Rachel Syme beholds her favorite winter image/photographs of a marriage: Danish explorer Peter Freuchen and his third wife, a Vogue fashion illustrator named Dagmar Cohn (later, Dagmar Freuchen-Gale) shot by Irving Penn in 1947.
The sunset yesterday in NYC was at 4:28PM and today it will be at 4:29PM. Every little minute counts…
Till next time,
ASK
https://www.101cookbooks.com/ribollita-recipe/ I have made so many versions of this with substitutions and served with tons of fresh lemon juice and any shaved hard cheese.
I would expect that sundown time is getting earlier each day as we approach the winter solstice, but this is not the case. The sun must be rising later each day. Only one week until the days get longer!