We are not only a register of love and life in the most precious and precarious of ways
we are a register of what is real...
I’m having a Julio Torres week and highly recommend you board the same train! On Wednesday, Mike, Kristine and I went to see him and his friends’ comedy show at the Bell House (Spike Einbinder’s set made me laugh so hard I had actual tears streaming down my face). The next day, Jared and I saw his directorial debut Problemista, where everyone cheered on the most excellent score from Rob Rusli. In between, I listened to the A24 podcast he did with Emma Stone, one of the movie’s producers.
The whole conversation is a delight but one part was particularly shimmering. Torres talked about channeling his OCD at the DVD rental store in El Salvador where he grew up, always renting four movies at a time - one “Hollywood trash”, one he had never heard of before “but the box seemed cool”, one black-and-white and one that he actually wanted to see.
Growing up, we had a physical TV but at some point it stopped being able to play any channels and our parents never bothered to get it connected again. It did have a built-in VHS player and we later hooked up a DVD player as well. Down the street was Vidéosphère, a slice of paradise. We would browse for hours and try to sneak past the beaded curtain that held the closet of porn.
Years and years later, I did a double take at a film festival in Sweden where my first feature was screening. The long-standing owner Frédéric Boyer was there. He had no idea who I was but once I sheepishly introduced myself, he remembered the American family who never rewound their tapes and always collected massive late fines. He has since become the artistic director of Tribeca Festival and in 2021, Vidéosphère shuttered for good. Its collection of 20,000 VHS tapes et 35,000 DVDs went to the BNF, the national library of France and what was once our little movie Mecca is now a medical office.
Kishori’s brilliant essay in the Hollywood Reporter explores the difference between what makes a movie good versus what makes it canon. She articulates the way the best ones make us feel unsafe, because they have the courage to poke at established ideas and explore the darker truths we all hold true — even when we feel like we can’t say them out loud. “Great Art taps into those hidden feelings, offering an emotional space that can’t exist in public life” — splash that on billboards everywhere instead of FYC ads taking up precious eyeball real estate.
What we watch shapes our reality, and we shift our reality based on what we absorb. Now there is a Bechdel test for climate change. The criteria? A story must demonstrate that climate change exists and a character knows it. Of the 31 different Oscar-nominated films in 2024, only three passed and this is how low the bar is:
In the case of “Barbie,” the teenaged Sasha dismantles Barbie’s view of reality by telling her “you’re killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism,” a laugh line that still feels rooted in the real world. “Dead Reckoning’s” Kittridge warns Ethan Hunt about the “war for the last of our dwindling energy, drinkable water, breathable air.” And in “Nyad,” Jodie Foster’s Bonnie bluntly name checks global warming as the reason “the box jellyfish came up off the shallow reef when we left Cuba,” which later becomes a key plot point in Diane Nyad’s quest to make the swim from Cuba.
Pulitzer Prize-winner and data expert Walt Hickey discusses his new book You Are What You Watch, at a time where the average American spends 19% of their waking hours watching movies and TV every day.
Banks still have visible cameras and alarm systems to this day to reassure customers who have seen a million bank heists play out on screens, even though in reality that type of theft no longer occurs. Cop shows continue to proliferate, leading everyone to believe cities are cesspools of crime when in fact crime only continues to fall in urban centers year after year.
On the other hand, only 50% of all homicides are ever solved by the police, which is wildly misleading when officers catch the culprit by the end of every single episode. With the National Guard now posted up in the subway to do bullshit check bags, I was reminded of a passage from Judy Grahn’s poem A Woman Is Talking to Death, written in the 1970s.
I wanted her and me to own and control and run the city we lived in, to staff the hospital I knew would mistreat her, to drive the transportation system that had betrayed her, to patrol the streets controlling the men who would murder or disfigure or disrupt us, not accidentally with machines, but on purpose, because we are not allowed on the street alone—
France inscribed the right to abortion in its constitution and the minister of justice Eric Dupond-Moretti used a 19th-century printing press to seal the amendment in France's constitution at a special public ceremony. I didn’t think I would get so emotional watching. In the US, “solutions” are only getting more and more absurd, like this network of private pilots now flying people across the country to get the abortion access they need and deserve.
Quite taken by the poetically titled For the Birds Trapped in Airports, a studio that publishes books in collaboration with arts workers. “This studio is structurally designed to foster relationships between peers that are not based in competition, but rather collective support of one another’s well-being.a resource for the design, production, and publishing of artist books.”
recently wrote in his excellent : “We need to not just react to Whac-A-Mole crises ginned up by fascists, but actually own this notion that our blood is better with the blood of many people in it. Our country is better when more people are here.” He mentioned Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the Sri Lankan-born writer and political thinker who lived in the UK and spoke out against the colonial legacy of immigration. In response to vocal anti-immigrant sentiment, he said “We are here because you were there”. It echoes the incredible essay Wheel and Come Again by Colin Grant, on circular migration to and from the Caribbean.Migration may be good for material wealth, but can the same be said for mental health? Psychiatrists have long concluded that the dislocation and dissonance of migration, whether internal (within a country) or external (from one country to another), has a negative effect on immigrants that can even extend to their children. The prevalence of schizophrenia among young black boys born in the UK to West Indian parents has consistently been shown to be significantly higher than among the general population. Growing up in Luton in the 1970s, hearing accounts of black British children being sent back to the Caribbean by their parents, I asked my mother what was going on. “England mad them,” she said drily.
It also made me think about a line screenwriter Michael Urban said recently in the Sundance class he’s teaching that I’m an advisor for: “When you’re born you look like your parents, when you die you look like your choices”. Great for character development on the page, great lens for the world at large.
A helpful counter: this interactive toolkit to support communities in resisting Britain's racist & hostile immigration system, which is a living, breathing and changing publication. It was developed by a growing grassroots community of migrant organizers to share the collective wisdom from housing justice, NHS Charging, safe passage and voter rights.
If New York is currently overwhelmed, it’s not due to the number of so-called migrants, but the utter ineptitude of political systems. “To call this moment a “migrant crisis” is to let elected federal officials off the hook. But a ‘crisis of politicians kicking the problem down the road until opportunists set it on fire’ is hard to fit into a tweet, so we’ll have to make do.”
Meanwhile Italy continues to jail the people who should really be taking an award home.
And the displacement continues…
from writes about how to help people escape Gaza, working towards a world where freedom exists for everyone.Of course, it is a question of will, not way—and when there is a will to massacre a group of people, there is no way to save them. Instead there are “brokers” who trade in desperation and get rich off of the way that borders that function as prisons, promising freedom for a price. It is the same way that coyotes have long profited from the deadly desert that scorches people trying to cross the US-Mexico border (as planes fly overhead) and smugglers count out the cash payments of refugees who are desperate enough to cross the Mediterranean Sea in flimsy boats that have killed tens of thousands before them. Politicians like Rishi Sunak and Kamala Harris bemoan how “dangerous” the smuggling industry is, and instruct migrants to “stay home,” but the ironic thing is that they seem to have missed the fact that it is their dangerous policies that make borders a maze for some people to cross to begin with, and that by doing away with borders themselves, you could make the smugglers’ business model obsolete.
It’s a point that also comes across in a million different ways in this episode exploring capitalist realism, the idea that capitalism is both the only way of existing and somehow natural instead of man-made. It also explores the very real feelings of overwhelm and distress that come up in a system that asks us to normalize a system that is deeply anti-human.
One excellent tangent on nonprofits upholding the status quo was so well articulated. “The revolution will not have 501(c)(3) status” when philanthropy is the way to maintain the capitalist order by improving just enough material hardship to maintain the illusion of progress while briefly alleviate said feelings of distress.
If you read only one thing in full from this letter, make it this essay, A World Without Palestinians by Devin Atallah and Sarah Ihmoud.
Palestinians are one of the final reminders that a future without colonialism is possible. Right now, we continue to prepare for a future without colonialism while so many powers across the world are preparing for a world without Palestinians. Our presence and persistence reveal a dangerous truth. We are not only a register of love and life in the most precious and precarious of ways, we are a register of what is real. What this genocide proves is how settler colonialism endures in the twenty-first century. Standing up to this terrifying truth, beyond any one category or strategy, our people in Gaza represent the most powerful enactment of enduring love possible today. The fight to end the colonial conquest of our lands and people in Gaza is a fight for the liberation of all peoples.
Till next time,
ASK