Ted, who runs Windflower Farm (which provides the veggies for our Clinton Hill CSA), had some dire news in his letter this week: “We’ve had 15” of rain since the beginning of June, more than half of it since the beginning of July. Last year, we had about 4” in the same period. Ponds, creeks, and rivers everywhere are swollen and brown with runoff. Lake Champlain has risen an incredible 26” in the last two weeks.” As a result, the garlic crop has been wiped out and downy mildew is threatening the rest with no effective organic fungicide available.
He thinks we may need to move in the direction of the Netherlands in the future, where everything is grown under cover. What has been less promising from the Dutch recently is their government coalition collapse. Differences regarding immigration policy was the cause. Far-right parties will keep capitalizing on refugees as an issue, in Europe and elsewhere, while climate change will drive more and more people to flee their homes.
Signe, Jessie and I were trying not to spiral into climate doom as we ironically got caught in a tropical downpour. We took shelter under the tents at the Cortelyou Greenmarket, eating blackberries and plums, diving deeper into our ongoing conversation around our work - what exactly are we all doing with ourselves as the environment becomes more and more hostile? Meanwhile, August remained utterly delighted, floating his toddler-sized sandals in various puddles.
The intersection of labor and climate are reaching a fever pitch and the conversations feel like their own tipping point. We know what the real solutions are (universal healthcare and housing, universal basic income, food for all) for what it will take to truly prioritize wellbeing over economic growth. When even the Financial Times is stating “capitalism won’t deliver the energy transition fast enough”, you know the currant dominant culture has to shift. The planet won’t care either way. But in the meantime let’s all keep pushing for transformative public policies (and starting our own Test Plot).
Erin Remblance writes about this re-imaging in other tangible ways: “This could be any of a number of things including chatting with our mates about the systemic changes we need, forging ties with labour unions, organising general strikes, partaking in civil disobedience and direct action, using our voices in person and on traditional and social media, holding town hall events, building local economic democracy, running for parliament, supporting someone who has science-aligned policies to run for parliament, creating community gardens and sharing libraries and other initiatives that shift the culture towards sufficiency rather than consumption, working towards full decolonisation, and so many more.”
RIP Jane Birkin. It’s always a good time to revisit Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988). The fantasy/documentary took place over the course of a year as Birkin was turning 40. It’s an inspiring ode to friendship and play.
In the strike department, the WGA and SAG are still going strong. While their issues differ, it increasingly feels like both are aligned in an existential stance against capitalist greed. I keep thinking about
’s line: “Are we just cogs in a giant machine? Irrelevant and replaceable? Or are we fuel?” He was writing about drawing in relationship to social media but it feels remarkably apropos.Every strike in Hollywood has been about technology according to Jonathan Handel, writer of Hollywood on Strike!: An Industry at War in the Internet Age. “Changing technologies that, in most cases, resulted in disagreement on what sort of residuals should be paid and how they should be calculated” - the last dual strike in 1960 was over whether movies played on TV would generate residuals. It not only cemented the concept of residuals into the system, it also resulted in the achievement of a pension plan and a health plan… which the following year the DGA (directors union) and IATSE (the crew union) also negotiated for themselves. May this current strike be as victorious.
The world’s first trans clinic was started in 1919 by Manus Hirschfeld, operating out of a Berlin villa he had bought and named the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Research). The first gender-affirming surgeries took place by 1930.
The space also housed an immense library, office rooms for feminist activists, a printing house for sex reform journals - its purpose was to be a place of “research, teaching, healing, and refuge.” The Nazis destroyed the institution on May 6 1933, troops burning an irreplaceable collection of 20,000 books. It was the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Hirschfeld fled to Paris, then Nice, dying of a stroke in 1935.
Folkstreams is a collection of nearly 400 hard-to-find documentary films about American folklife, founded in 2000 by filmmaker and farmer Tom Davenport. Everything is free and you will get lost in gems like bird taxidermy, gandy dancers, a Canadian snowshoe competition and the Mohawk Indians of Kahnawake who built the Manhattan skyscrapers.
Kishori sent me this interview with Joyce Carol Oates, making the case for creative work above all: “People are seduced by the beauty of the close-at-hand, and they don’t have the discipline or the predilection or the talent, maybe, to say: “I’m not going to go out tonight. I’m not going to waste my time on Twitter. I’m going to have five hours and work on my novel.” If you did that every day, you’d have a novel. Many people say, “I’m going to pet my cat” or “I’m with my children.” There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things. Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, “I don’t have anything.” A lot of things that had meaning are gone, and you have to start anew. But if you read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal.”
Oumou Sangaré was stunning in Prospect Park last Friday. She’s a pioneer of Wassoulou music from the Wasulu region of southern Mali where her mother was also a singer. She started singing at age 5, to help support her mother and siblings after her father left the family. Now at 55, her U.S. tour is taking her next to San Diego and Los Angeles - West Coasters don’t miss her!
For this week’s field trip, see you at…
What: An outdoor screening of Kokomo City (2023) by D. Smith
Where: Fort Greene Park (Myrtle Lawn)
When: Tuesday, July 25, 7:30-10:30 PM
Till next time,
ASK
…and immortal. Looks like you have a community that sometimes meets up at your chosen event each week. That’s a special result of your work.