Where to begin? This week has been a flurry of getting film projects moving before the year runs out while welcoming some of our newest neighbors. Hundreds of people are spending the night on the sidewalk in freezing temperatures, just to honor their immigration appointments because bureaucracy kills. Amidst all of this, some other bits and bobs for your perusal:
This song, this music video and the best comment I’ve seen on the internet all week: “If I had been told 20 years ago that the future would be Björk being a martial artist fighting a talented upcoming Spanish artist using deepfake technology to raise money to save the fish... I would have believed it. Everything about it is perfect, the harmony and their voices sound heavenly.”
An episode of “This American Life” where Ira Glass talks to Alain De Botton about how you will marry the wrong person and pick the wrong line of work.
Alain De Botton: I had absolutely no idea about how to love. I hadn't had many relationships. And I literally used to think that the only problem, the only difficulty of love was finding this person called the right person. And they'd come into my life, and then we'd just understand one another totally. We would understand each other without needing to speak. We wouldn't have any arguments. We wouldn't have any arguments over money or practicalities. And I think we had a succession of crises and moments of fear, where we really thought we had married the wrong person.
Ira Glass: Is there a more general rule here? Do most of us make mistakes in other huge decisions in our lives because we don't know ourselves?
Alain De Botton: The other area where we make major bad decisions based on a lack of self knowledge-- and it's exactly the same principle-- is work. Work and love, and the two very similar. Because in both areas, we abandon the field totally to intuition. You're supposed to find your work by a kind of special calling, by a special pull. And in fact, in order to find a job that you can love, you have to understand so much about yourself, your own character, your own nature, let alone the world of work itself.
“Yu-Mex” - a Mexican-inspired music tradition in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 60s. President Tito didn't want to import Soviet or American movies so instead he imported Mexican ones. As the story goes, he had seen Mexican films during his time in Paris and was clearly impressed. Yugoslav musicians began wearing sombreros and charro outfits and singing ranchera music, and this playlist has kept me going all week.
Fleece-lined pants from Uniqlo quite literally saving my whole ass. Teleported me back to my forever white whale, a pair of Gap carpenter jeans lined with fluorescent traffic-cone orange fleece, worn throughout the entirety of 6th and 7th grade. These come close…
Mackenzie describing getting through grief as a family: “it’s like you are all at the top of a mountain but everyone’s bones are broken, so you can’t help each other get down. You have to find a way to get down on your own.”
Another way to get down the hill - donkey nannies outfitted with special saddles to carry newborn lambs down the Italian Alps during the annual move from higher pastures to lower plains.
Learning about bifurqueurs from Kira, young people in France who went to all the right schools but in the face of climate change are leaving traditional careers to find alternative paths.
This #PayTransparencyProject, shared by Kishori, a community-driven database for video professionals to build a more transparent future for our nonfiction industry.
Rabbis 4 Ceasefire lighting the candles for the first night of Hannuka last night and this poem by Refaat Alareer, who was killed with several of his family members by an air strike in Gaza City two days ago.
These words written by Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila on October 20th on a whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries. He was killed by a strike on Al Awda Hospital on November 21st.
Further down the hellscape in the Bureaucracy Kills Department, “asylum does not apply at sea.” Coast Guards are cracking as they have to send back unaccompanied minors who remind them of their own children.
The Gaslit Nation MAKE ART Workshop, where creativity meets structure - a comprehensive guide to kickstarting any new project.
89 year old Peter Schumann slicing and handing out the most delicious sourdough bread and aioli garlic butter, the traditional ending to his Bread and Puppet performances. He founded his politically radical puppet theater in the 1960s and the New York residency is running through December 17.
Field trip(s) !
What: Holiday Market for Woodbine, an experimental hub building autonomy in Ridgewood, Queens.
Where: Gottscheer Hall
When: Saturday, December 9th from 12P-7P
What: Press Play, a weekend-long fair of books, small presses, records, art, ephemera, and publications of all kinds.
Where: Pioneer Works
When: Saturday, December 9th and Sunday December 10th from 12P-7P
Till next time,
ASK