We’re really in it now. The hot trash. The bullshit catcalls. The afternoon naps. But mostly, the blender life. It’s still No-Chew Summer over here, currently staring down a fridge of various sauces, smoothies, dips and cold soups. My latest home-brewed remedy has been drowning myself in gallons of switchel aka Farmers Gatorade. Water, ginger, apple cider vinegar, lemon, salt, maple syrup - pick your own proportions and start guzzling.
While I wait for temperatures to cool, I am delighting myself in the Twitter (X?) account @whatsylviaate, which plunges the depths of Silvia Plath's love for food and cooking.
combs through her entire body of work looking for references and today’s treasure: “I cooked the last big orange fillets of our Yellowstone trout and had them with corn niblets, a tomato and lettuce salad and milk. This renewed us. 7/28/59”. A perfect summer menu (minus the milk).Gina (who wrote the incredible food travel memoir Feasting Wild) is renovating an old adobe house in Santa Fe. It will one day be an artist’s residency - “a place where artists, writers, scientists, justice workers, and chefs can retreat, create, rest, and nourish themselves.” To get it done by the end of the summer, she’s crowdsourcing lenders or you can donate to her directly.
A historical biopic I would watch - the true story behind the Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. In total, 124 actors with dwarfism were hired to populate Munchkinland. They were paid $50 a week, less than half of what Toto the dog and his trainer were making. But the unprecedented gathering inspired the creation of the advocacy group Little People of America (originally called the Midgets of America). Today there are over 6,000 members.
About thirty of the Munchkins were cast from a troupe of performers called the Singer Midgets. They were a popular vaudeville attraction and their name came from their Jewish manager Leo Singer, a showman from Vienna. Many of them were Bavarian (present-day Austria and Hungary) and they took the film as an opportunity to escape the Nazis. Their voices in the film were dubbed, as many of them weren’t fluent English speakers, and in post-production made to sound even more high-pitched. The troupe disbanded in the mid-1940s, some returned to Europe and others staying in the United States, joining traveling carnivals.
The only reason the world’s top industrial sectors are profitable is because they don’t pay for the natural resources they consume… or the public health issues they cause. “In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.” If they paid for their ecological materials (like clean water) and subsequent damages (like greenhouse gases from coal burning), they would actually be spend $7.3 trillion a year or 7% of the world’s GDP.
On a long car drive back, Toast gave me a masterclass on the life and times of Stevie Nicks, who I knew nothing about her (beyond her temperature-controlled shawl vault). She pointed me to this devastating performance of “Silver Springs”, a song she wrote about her breakup with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham. She was inspired driving past a sign for Silver Springs, Maryland, imagining what could have been if they had stayed together. The song was left off the Rumours album but twenty years later the band reunited and the song made it to the set list. I dare all the hairs on your arms not to stand up.
At Tilden last weekend, the water was perfect for swimming out to the submerged sandbar. Suddenly you could stand, far from the shore, with the water only waist-high. There were no lifeguards but we were patrolled by cops from all sides — by air from helicopters, on foot and on horseback, they were inescapable and wholly unnecessary. This week marked a historic settlement as the NYPD will pay out $13 million to 1,380 protesters who were attacked during the 2020 uprisings. It has set the record for the largest settlement for a class-action lawsuit in the United States. Meanwhile last month Mayor Adams and the City Council allocated $5.53 billion to expand the NYPD’s budget this year. It is the largest police budget in the country.
Rest in power Sinéad O'Connor, singer, activist, truthteller, visionary. She wrote in her 2021 memoir Rememberings: “Everybody wants a pop star, see? But I’m a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.”
I Barbenheimered thanks to friends who are great movie planners & gatherers (MB & Cailin). Barbie worked best for me when it was about nostalgia, contrasting the blissful wonder of childhood versus the adult wariness of knowing too much.
nailed it when she called Oppenheimer “a cinematized Wikipedia page about someone the movie tells us is an unimpeachable genius.”A hidden history for each: in 1992 a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization hacked the dolls, swapping the voice boxes of the talking Barbies and GI Joe figures. Post-surgery, they then restocked them on shelves with “Barbie saying things like “Vengeance is mine,” and “Dead men tell no tales,” while Joe became the one who struggled with math” according to
writing in her excellent newsletter .The ranch-land Oppenheimer called uninhabited in the film was not actually an isolated area. Nearly half a million people lived in the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico, within a 150-mile radius of the detonation. The morning the test bomb was dropped, the area was not evacuated. Residents described ash falling from the sky for days afterwards. Since then, generations have continued to develop rare forms of cancer, caused by the radiation which contaminated the air, water and soil, as well as the local uranium mining which was required for the bomb’s construction. In 2005, Tina Cordova co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium to demand government action but to date, the Trinity downwinders remain ineligible for financial compensation.
I can’t stop thinking about touch points, a new term I learned reading an article about private jets. “Given their escape from the confines of mundane reality, many high-net-worth individuals prefer to avoid unnecessary contact with unknown humans. A big selling point is the ability to minimize what are known as “touch points”: the individual micro-interactions that take place as we move through the world, like saying hello to a gate agent or asking a fellow passenger to switch seats. “When you fly commercial, there are more than 700 touch points,” says Alexandra Price, brand communications manager at the jet-charter company VistaJet. “When you fly private, it’s just 20.” As someone who craves as many touch points as possible in my life, especially since the pandemic, I remain beyond baffled.
The best thing I listened to this week was the episode “The Word For Man Is Ishi” from the podcast The Last Archive. It starts out in 1911, when a Native American man, the last survivor of his community, meets the newly formed Anthropology department at UC Berkeley. It shape-shifts into a radio drama when it ventures into moral stakes and how it ended up shaping the history of science fiction…
Kokomo City is a knock-out — so unfiltered, so moving. D. Smith’s first documentary follows four Black trans sex workers from around the country. It’s a riot, crackling with energy, and the black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous beyond belief. At a time when everyone is lamenting runtimes, this one is a tight 70min and it’s opening at IFC Center tonight.
Two field trips for the price of one, both happening tomorrow!
What: A coalition of stoop sales (ours is all going towards Clinton Hill Fort Greene Mutual Aid)
Where: Carlton/Willoughby in Fort Greene
When: Saturday July 29 from 10:00AM-4PM
What: An outdoor screening of Wade in the Water (2023) by David Mesfin
Where: Arverne Cinema
When: Saturday July 29 at 8:30PM
Till next time,
ASK
Honored to be in the same newsletter as my friend Rebecca Brill!
I was delighted to be mentioned here, but even more delighted to discover a fellow Stevie Nicks fan, a thoughtful film reviewer, and another damn newsletter to subscribe to!