I just finished Feral City by Jeremiah Moss and it’s brought back a flood of memories. His perspective as a 50-year-old trans therapist in the East Village felt so familiar to mine, it was jarring. He kept an intimate diary of the pandemic, through the lockdown, the refrigerated trucks, the mutual aid, the mass exodus, the bike protests, the election anxiety, the plywood-boarded stores, the vaccine rollout, the dancing in the streets.
We must have crossed paths more than once. He was a bike marshal for the Black Trans Liberation marches, led by Qween Jean who I gave a speaker to back when Catherine, Julia and I were providing sound support to organizers. He slept at the City Hall encampment (which then turned into Abolition Plaza) where Steph and I were slinging breakfast to push for the City Council to defund the NYPD by at least $1 billion. Everything felt equal parts urgent, scary and exhilarating. The whole world was crashing and burning but there was an energy that from the ashes, perhaps something new would arise. Something that felt like less policing, more community, lower rents, real food access.
Three years later, the “hypernormals” (as Moss calls them) have all come back with a vengeance, it’s looking like the NYPD will blow past its allotted overtime budget this year by about $366 million per
and Tim sent me a new report that found that in 2022, a full half of the city’s households couldn’t afford to live here, up from 36% in 2021. I still believe some real seeds were planted during our plague years, perspectives shifted amidst the death march of neoliberalism and I feel lucky to have been a pair of hands in the all-hands-on-deck collective.At one point, Moss quotes Marge Piercy’s poem which she wrote in 1973 during the Vietnam War - I went back to look up the whole thing.
To be of use by Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Rest in power Harry Belafonte. What a voice, what a force. Two incredible anecdotes amongst a lifetime of stories: in 1964, he got a call from the Mississippi Summer Project that they would run out of money within the next 72 hours. He brought the cash in person with Sidney Poitier, narrowly avoiding an ambush from the Klan, who tried to run them off the road with a pickup truck. Later that year, seeing signs of serious fatigue amongst the organizers, he funded a three-week trip to Guinea for a SNCC delegation to recharge and find inspiration in the newly independent African nation. The group included John Lewis and Fanny Lou Hamer who said “I saw black men flying the airplanes, driving buses, sitting behind big desks in the bank and just doing everything that I was used to seeing white people do."
In Paris there has been a floating market since 2012 where you can buy produce all grown within 100km of the city. The fruits and vegetables are delivered via a barge that floats down the Ourcq canal (which saves the equivalent of ten trucks from hitting the road). It docks twice a week and is available for restaurants to buy wholesale, as well as locals who can either buy what they need or subscribe to a pre-purchased weekly “panier” or basket.
Also in Paris, 250 teenage migrants have been living in an abandoned school in the 16th arrondissement, the richest neighborhood of the city. They started to occupy the building at the beginning of the month to protest police harassment and sleeping on the streets. Even though they are all minors, they are not being treated as such in the eyes of the French law. There’s no running water or electricity at the school which has been shuttered for two years now. This is the second time the school has been occupied by migrants - the last time was in 2021 and they only spent one night there before the government listened to their demands.
Drag shows were hugely popular during World War II as a way for British and American troops to relieve stress. The Army Special Services created handbooks for soldier shows, known as Blueprint Specials, which contained dress-making patterns, scripts and choreography steps - everything you would need to put on an approved soldier show. The USO and the Red Cross would even ship costuming materials all around the world to make sure soldier shows could go on wherever troops were stationed.
Very excited to be signed back up for the Clinton Hill CSA after a hiatus last year since we were out of the country. When I first met Mike 11 years ago, I knew nothing about CSAs. He roasted my first beets and I was hooked. It’s since expanded from organic fruits and veggies from Windflower Farm to include everything you could possibly want, from grains to mushrooms, eggs, flowers and maple syrup. Everything Thursday evening from June through October we pick up our weekly box. The tiered membership plan allows members with higher incomes to subsidize shares for lower-income households. You do one shift per season, which is my favorite night of the summer. If you’re not in Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, there are so many others all over the city - to find one closer to you, check out this map.
I just learned the word transhumance, a type of nomadism where livestock is moved seasonally from one grazing ground to another. Transumanza in Italian and trashumancia in Spanish, it comes from the Latin trans (across or beyond) and humus (ground). These migratory routes are still in use today, in remote parts of France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and the Tyrol region of Austria and in 2019, UNESCO added transhumance to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Some of the seasonal routes are 1,000 years old.
Michelle called Kishori’s cat Puli “toothless and ruthless” (she indeed only has a mouthful of gums) and it’s a moniker that keeps rolling around in my head as I head over to give her chin scratches. I am equally delighted by the Twitter account @catinthemovie which spoils for you if a movie has a cat in it, with the accompanying screenshot. Girl, Interrupted? Yes. The Graduate? No. Hiroshima Mon Amour? Yes.
I have become hooked on my Shakti Mat, an acupressure mat with tiny plastic spikes that really helps with back pain and general relaxation. It's pretty painful at first but after the first couple of minutes, you feel a deep release. The spikes will leave you with a constellation of pinpricks on your back but if you’re able to breathe through the pain, you will sleep like an absolute baby afterwards. It also feels incredible to stand on, your sore feet will get an instant massage. *This is not sponsored, I swear*
Since 2010, Georgette Spelvin has been putting out YouTube videos as the ‘Possum Lady’. No one knows anything about her, her name is actually a traditional pseudonym long used in the theater world. All of her videos are bonkers, featuring the perfectly coiffed Southern Californian and her rehabilitated possums in a variety of situations (reading a bedtime story, preparing for an emergency, getting a pedicure). A chaotic feral energy we should all be aiming for.
Till next time,
ASK
PS: If you are able to become a paid subscriber, on May 1 I’ll be zeroing out the bank account for this month’s pledges, and 100% will be donated between Laru Beya Collective (for their Summer Fundraiser), Iridescent Earth Collective (for their radical farming project in the Catskills) and Utopia56 (currently helping the exiled teens in Paris).
POSUM LADY!! 🦡🦡🦡