Welcome to my brain! It's a sieve.
Desperately need to close some tabs/trying to hold on to a digital trace of what's caught my eye this week...
So glad to have you here. I’m grateful for your eyeballs! I hope you’re reading this somewhere cozy.
This newsletter is a new way for me to channel everything I absorb, online and off, and pan it for gold. Writing and directing is what I love to do, mainly because it forces people to be together for hours on end. But projects take time and in between them, there’s the glow of screens and just so very much to take in.
The pandemic made me take a major step back from social media. At the same time, my hours spent online have jumped to frightening levels. I miss being able to share what’s caught my eye and lodged itself inside my brain. My sincere hope is that this gives you something to chew on as well…
In that spirit, a little context on the banner image, which is the same one that has been on my Facebook page since 2016. It’s a picture of Roxie Laybourne, the world’s first forensic ornithologist and a national treasure. As a woman during the Depression, she wasn’t allowed to go to aviation school. Instead she became a feather detective, using the collections at the Smithsonian Institution to identify birds involved in collisions with planes.
She changed aviation safety forever, while helping solve crimes for the FBI on the side. In a homicide case, she matched the feathers from a victim’s down jacket to the ones found in the perpetrator’s van. Maybe best of all, “she drove her little sports car like a bat out of hell,” according to Smithsonian historian Pam Henson. A Renaissance woman if there ever was one.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers, one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems.
D Day, a new short story from Rachel Khong about two friends at a crossroads about to make a life-changing decision. The opening line is a lightning bolt: “And on the 2,556,750,000th day, God reconsidered what he had made and decided that the world would be better off if human beings were other animals entirely — if there were no such thing as human beings at all.” Think The Lobster, but for everyone, with a worldwide deadline. Since reading, I keep going back and forth between being turned into a macaw (longevity, ability to talk) or a muskox (collectivity, Arctic fur). What about you?
“Sperm is busy”, just one of the many perfect lines uttered by the brilliant Cori Bush - so why aren't we regulating it? “If I get pregnant right now, I can’t turn around and get pregnant by somebody else three months later — I’m pregnant for the rest of the year. But sperm can get 12 folks pregnant in a day.”
In the meantime, abortion pills by mail are the imperfect workaround in a country where state lines now determine whether you get life-saving care or not. “The closest historical analogy, however imperfect, for the coming clash may be the conflict between Southern and Northern states over fugitive slave laws in the 19th century. “There are genuinely significant differences between slavery and abortion, morally and legally,” says Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University. “But it’s a reasonable starting point for understanding why it’s a problem, in a nation that wants to hold itself together, when individual states are allowed to make policy about basic rights that people feel extremely strongly about, on both sides.”
The abortion pills, mailed from a distributor in India, echo the stocks of estrogen a group of trans women smuggled back to San Francisco from Mexico some fifty years ago. From this crucial Baffler read by Jules Gill-Peterson: “As feminists and trans activists struggle against the liquidation of the right to privacy, digging into the connections between DIY transition and DIY abortion is instructive. Both reject how medicalization and the state collude to restrict people’s autonomy. And DIY history suggests that one of the core lessons of trans feminism is that you can steal your body back from the state—not to hold it as private property, but because the state power that polices and punishes your body, just like the doctors who execute its arbitrary policies, is fundamentally illegitimate. DIY treats legitimacy as arising from the people whose lives are most affected by resources and care, not from the abstract power of the state or medical gatekeepers.”
Fran Lebowitz on the cover of Outside Magazine, July/ August 1983 issue. The whole piece, “Why We Camp” by E. Jean Carroll would be my platonic ideal of a slice-of-life biopic.
The 60th New York Film Festival and being best bud Cailin’s +1. The movies so far have been a mixed bag, but the director quotes have been stellar. Kelly Reichardt on Showing Up: “Giving and resenting giving… [long pause]. That’s a thing. [another long pause] It’s there. I don’t know what to say.” Park Chan-wook on Decision To Leave: “There are no scenes with violence, so don’t worry. There are no scenes with nudity, so don’t get your hopes up. There are scenes with humor, so don’t hold back your laughter.”
My bloodthirsty neighborhood block association emailing about their spotted lanternfly bodycount. It’s a war out there and we are all foot soldiers for the cause.
Julia Lee Barclay-Morton on the relief at being diagnosed with autism at the age of 57, while holding gratitude for the ability to mask all those years in order to “pass” as allistic in a neurotypical world. “When we were young, had we been diagnosed, and as girls that was almost impossible, we could have been sent to horrible institutions or given treatments that are sadly still done today to make us “seem” less autistic.”
Learning that there is no British word for soft serve… it’s all just called ice-cream. There is something called a 99 Flake or a 99, which is specifically a vanilla soft serve with a chocolate Cadbury wafer on top. Lots of (false) theories online about why it’s called that but my favorite stems from the majority of ice cream vendors in the 1950s England being Italian. The King of Italy at the time had 99 bodyguards protecting him at all times, hence the name.
This life-changing bread recipe, which involves mixing all the ingredients directly in the loaf pan and requires no kneading. It’s gluten-free and grain-free if that’s your thing but most importantly it’s the closest approximation I found to the loaf of Danish Rye Rugbrod I bought at a farmer’s market in L.A. last month and haven’t been able to shake since.
So inspired by Kadeesha Williams talking about community and urban farming. Join me in helping Iridescent Earth Collective, a Queer, Black & Latinx-led farm group growing food upstate for mutual aid. They are on target to reach their goal of distributing 10,000 pounds of produce to the Bronx!
Till next time,
ASK
"Sperm can get 12 people pregnant in a day." Hey, I love sex, but that sounds like too much work for me — and painful. Now that I'm in my eighth decade, I hear stories about guys my age who have gotten together with much younger women, hoping to raise a family. One guy went to a fertility clinic to check his sperm count and make sure he could deliver. The nurse gave him some pornographic magazines and a sample jar and sent him to a private room. When he didn't come out after half an hour, she knocked on the door. "I'm not ready yet," she heard him say. Fifteen minutes later, she tried again. Still not ready. Finally, after an hour, the man came out of the room and said to her, "It's no use. I tried with my left hand... I tried with my right hand... I just can't get the lid off this jar."