So many comings and goings! Arrivals: Jessie, Kishori and Signe home to roost, new faces at our food distributions, black-and-white alien profiles from friends’ ultrasounds. Departures: a sister with a new 07 (France having exhausted the 06 of our youth?), a friend packing up a beloved apartment, a whiff of fall crisp in the air that’s made me put socks on for the first time in months. I’ve been spotting an abundance of butterflies amongst the pollinator gardens. Everybody is on the move.
Jordan Salama wrote a thorough and compassionate piece on the migrant families selling candy on the subway. They are mostly young Indigenous women and children from Ecuador’s rural central highlands, who have gone through hell to get here and are in debt from their journey north. The reporting is really sensitive and Andy Zalkin’s accompanying portraits are remarkable. Most of all, the folks who opened up and shared their stories are beyond courageous.
One of the biggest reasons why: “Voces Latinas uses what it calls the “promotora model” in its outreach. In both Latin America and Latin American communities in the U.S., promotoras are peer advisers who offer information about social services. Especially in rural parts of Central and South America, promotoras form a much needed link between communities and the institutions that can provide support. On several of my visits with the candy sellers, I was accompanied by Voces promotoras and staff, some of whom were undocumented themselves and brought an added level of trust to the conversation.”
writes the great newsletter and in their conversation with Raechel Anne Jolie, they get into Barbie, the inevitability of hot takes and backlash, the exhaustion of hypervigilance and where to go from here. “I want to offer some ways forward, for how we might move beyond the binary of (righteous) critique or (problematic) joy and occupy a place in between. Because we need critique and we need joy. Both are vital to our social movements and our individual lives. We recognize our limitations. We’re not yet living in the queer, anti-capitalist utopia of our dreams. It’s very likely possible that I will not see it in my lifetime. There is much grief in this realization. And it is this grief that propels me forward. We’re not yet there, and we can still find joy in where we’re at right now. We can create little moments — and even big moments — of living in the world we dream of — however fleeting they might be.”The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders is a restaurant in Tokyo that only hires people with dementia, who may or may not get your order right. The condition will affect one in five people in Japan by 2025. The pop-up restaurant is the brainchild of Shiro Oguni, a Japanese TV director, whose aim is to change the perception of dementia and celebrate its quirks. It also radically shifts the dynamic, the customer taking care of the employee instead of the other way around.
It reminded me of
’s great words from her most recent post How To Keep Fighting The Forever Battles: “Because at the core of oppression is the idea that our value as human beings can be decided by others, and that some of us are worth more than others. And every day that we decide to take an opportunity to fight - even if it only benefits one or two people - we are chipping away at that idea. We are saying that every person in this one workplace has value, that every child in this one classroom has value, that everyone in your neighborhood has value. And that value is not tied to money, productivity, ability, appearance- it is immense and immutable simply because they exist.”Somebody recently dropped “risk it for the biscuit” casually in conversation and the expression has been ringing in my head ever since. It means daring to do something big for the chance of a reward — hard to gain anything without taking a chance. Two possible origin stories: the first is that it comes from a 1970s slogan for Swisskit chocolate muesli bars. The ad read “I’ll risk it for a Swisskit” (Swisskit pronounced like 'Biscuit' but with a 'Sw'). The second (and in my opinion, better) provenance is from a 1966 headline in the Drogheda Argus and Leinster Journal. The article was about a 16-year-old from Dundalk, Ireland who broke into the delivery truck of Jacobs biscuits while his friend was keeping watch. Suddenly the van drove off, taking him all the way to the Garda Barracks to be handed over to the police. The case was dismissed and the young lad was freed.
Nikola Bašić, a Croatian architect, built the Sea Organ in April 2005. It’s on the tip of Zadar’s Old Town peninsula. The sea decides the tune, its ever-changing composition coming from the air pushed through the 35 pipes fitted into the stone steps.
Sophie Lewis is someone I can listen to endlessly. She’s the British feminist writer behind the book “Abolish the Family”, a call to expand the notions of the nuclear family to collective forms of care. Instead of clinging to the false shields of exclusivity and austerity, what is our birthright as people together? In her recent conversation on KPFA she talks about “surthrivance”, an upwards utopian spiral towards a proliferation of relationships.
I recently took a writing workshop with Darius Simpson and he reminded me of this poem by Kyle Carrero Lopez that I deeply love but hadn’t thought of in a minute.
I grew up spending a lot of time on rue Charles Fourier (hi Charley!) but never really knew who he was. His name came up recently and I went down a real rabbbit hole — what a wild visionary. He was a French philosopher and utopian socialist, born in 1772, who envisioned a post-work society that allowed for great abundance and luxury. His new world order was deeply invested in pleasure - for food, for play, for language and number games. He was also the first to invent the word “feminist” in 1837.
Activist and writer Naomi Klein uses the fact that she is often mistaken for (extremely different author) Naomi Wolf to explore doppelgangers, blurred identities and what she calls “an attempt to grapple with the wildness of right now – with conspiracy cultures surging and strange left-right alliances emerging and nobody seeming to be quite what they seem”.
Cailin turned me on to William Castle, a director and producer whose bonkers publicity campaigns were often as notable as the films themselves. The man rigged buzzers under theater seats, got an inflatable skeleton to fly above the audience on a rail and posted an ambulance outside the marquee as a B-movie marketing pioneer. His film “Homocidal” (1961) included a “fright break” timer right before the climax, where the audience had 45 seconds to leave and get a refund if they were too scared. When people caught on and started leaving in droves to get their money back, Castle upped the ante. According to John Waters, a huge fan:
“William Castle simply went nuts. He came up with ‘Coward’s Corner,’ a yellow cardboard booth, manned by a bewildered theater employee in the lobby. When the Fright Break was announced, and you found that you couldn’t take it anymore, you had to leave your seat and, in front of the entire audience, follow yellow footsteps up the aisle, bathed in a yellow light. You passed a nurse, who would offer a blood-pressure test. All the while a recording was blaring, “‘Watch the chicken! Watch him shiver in Coward’s Corner’!” As the audience howled, you had to go through one final indignity – at Coward’s Corner you were forced to sign a yellow card stating, ‘I am a bona fide coward.’”
I can’t promise you promotion tactics, but in the writing department, I’m advising for Sundance again, this time for their self-paced screenwriting course. If you are looking for structure and accountability to start writing your screenplay, there are still spots available till September 24.
Now onto a triple decker of field trips! When it rains, it pours!!
What: Rhodora’s 2nd annual end of summer block party, all funds go towards Sky High Farm and Food Education Fund
Where: 197 Adelphi St, Brooklyn, NY 11205
When: Saturday August 26th from 1PM to midnight
What: An outdoor party celebrating the music of Michael Jackson and Prince hosted by Spike Lee and DJ Spinna (back after a 4-year-long pandemic break)
Where: Fort Greene Park
When: Saturday August 26th 12-7pm
What: A vintage & handmade item sale for Survived & Punished, a collective dedicated to ending the criminalization of survival.
Where: 36 Avenue C (@ NE corner of East 3rd / Loisaida Ave)
When: August 26 and 27 from 12-6P
Till next time,
ASK