It feels good to be back and typing on a freshly repaired laptop, lightly discombobulated from the jetlag. Signe and I agreed it’s the best direction, going from Europe back to the US, because you suddenly find yourself to be a morning person (aka a superior being who rises with the sun). It lasts about a week, but every time you think it’s going to stick and you’re now an early bird. It feels good to be tickling the ivories again, after a hiatus where I skipped the last two editions of this (supposedly) weekly newsletter. Less screen time! More sun time! Something I wish for all of us in the hemisphere where summer is incoming.
I’ve become mesmerized by this image of Charlotte Moorman performing Ice Music by Jim McWilliams at the International Carnival of Experimental Sound in London in 1972. His verbal instructions were for her to make a cello out of ice and play it, using a piece of clear Plexiglass as a bow, until it melted. She only wore a garland of flowers around her neck, which slowly wilted as she played. The way she made the cello was by filling a soft cello case with ice cubes and convincing a nearby ice cream store to put it in the freezer until the cubes fused together. She taped pads to her left hand and knees, took an antihistamine to prevent frostbite, and played for about an hour until the cubes fell apart and started to pool into water. She performed Ice Music six more times, but for her later shows hired ice sculptors to carve more realistic ice cellos.
Mother’s Day this year was especially sweet since we got to spend it with Sasha, Rachel and baby Mirah - our collective family reimagining. I was especially taken with activist and writer Brea Baker’s words on Mother’s Day and her radical optimism. Her “pie-in-the-sky” dream encompasses mandated paid parental leave, UBI funded by regulated AI and tech, and community leaders paid to sit on stoops as violence disrupters. The comments are even better, ranging from “Seniors and children can be a sources of joy because nobody misses out on being productive when they care for them” and “Free, accessible, and frequent public transit that renders cars obsolete.” Second best Mother’s Day read was about going “camel mode” (or identity as parent, where the goal is “everyone is quiet and disaster is averted”). Skip the comments section on that one.
We met up in Vienna, a city I’m excited to get to know better. This deep-dive into its self-sustaining social housing is illuminating. It’s a roadmap for how a world-class city can be affordable, beautiful, livable. Meanwhile over here, “the problem with housing in the United States is that it has been locked in as a means of building wealth, and building wealth is irreconcilable with affordability.”
The secret sauce was the increased housing supply built by the Social Democratic Party from 1923 to 1934, during a period known as Red Vienna. American politicians considered the same policy at the time, but instead focused on broadening the base of homeowners. Mortgages essentially became the U.S.’s version of subsidized housing. “The key difference is that Vienna prioritizes subsidizing construction, while the United States prioritizes subsidizing people, with things like housing vouchers. One model focuses on supply, the other on demand. Vienna’s choice illustrates a fundamental economic reality, which is that a large-enough supply of social housing offers a market alternative that improves housing for all.”
Kira turned me on to this story about itinerant filmmakers during the first half of the 20th century. Across the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, they would go from town to town, making the same movie over and over again, each time with a different cast of new locals. After auditioning, anyone who was cast would pay a small fee to appear onscreen, which is how the filmmakers made a living. After the film was developed and edited, it would screen at the local movie theater where everyone could come watch themselves on the big screen. One of the most prolific filmmakers was Melton Barker, who remade his film The Kidnappers Foil hundreds of times over the course of 40 years. He unintentionally also ended up creating a record of regional dialects, thus preserving mid-century life in rural America.
I joined Michael on the picket line yesterday and his iconic sign got a lot of love. As a hopeful future WGA member, it’s been a wild time to navigate what’s going on. I’ve been loving reading the Substacks of TV writers
, and if you’re looking for more insights. The most troubling issue of the contract proposal feels like the use of A.I., which the studios refuse to put guardrails around. Currently, they are only agreeing to “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology” which means exactly nothing. It’s a bad omen for all creative industries, and Alena Smith wrote a great piece titled “The AI Apocalypse Is Coming for Hollywood, but Don’t Robots Rule Us Already?” She really nailed it when she wrote: “At a base level, a large language model is a tool designed to select the word or phrase that’s most likely to come next, given the statistical distribution of words in the public corpus. It is a machine for plagiarism. A machine for cliché. Think about it: Do you really want, say, female characters generated from the existing data set of what has been said about women in the past? Are we going to let the robots tell us who we are?”Visually impaired women in India are being trained as “medical tactile examiners”, turning their perceived handicap into a gift in order to detect breast cancer. Braille-marked adhesive tape is placed across the patient’s chest to delineate different zones and using the first two fingers of both hands, the examiner palpates each breast, searching for any lumps. She then sends a report to a physician if further diagnosis is required. It’s especially crucial in rural areas where there is little access to healthcare. The examiners consistently have higher precision rates than the doctors.
The best movie I saw at Cannes was The Delinquents, a movie from Argentinean filmmaker Rodrigo Moreno with a 3 hour runtime. It features the slowest moving bank heist, by two employees who question the notion of time under capitalism. One cashier steals $650,000, the equivalent of both of their wages till retirement. He forces his friend into a deal: he’ll turn himself in, serve the 3 year jail sentence while his friend holds on to the duffel bag of money. When he’s released neither of them will ever have to work again. It’s a numbers game - work a mind-numbing job for the next 30 years or go to jail for 3? It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, but a get-free-slow improv/meditation. The runtime itself as leisurely as it gets, and really forces the question both in style and substance: if we didn’t have to work for money, what pleasure would unfold with all of our new-found time? You don’t want to be rich, you want to be free.
New York City, epicenter of the pandemic, released its first survey on the loss of life due to Covid-19 and it is devastating. About 1 in 4 New Yorkers (nearly 2 million residents) lost at least one person. More than 1 in 10 (almost 900,000 residents) lost three or more people. It’s hard to sit with the magnanimity of these numbers but it’s helpful to understand why the city still feels so unmoored despite everyone’s insistence on moving on.
Ada Limón is so nice, we get her twice. She’ll be the first U.S. poet laureate to serve a second term and will keep the title through 2025. I finished reading The Carrying before I left and earmarked nearly every page. Right now, she’s collaborating with NASA, writing a new poem that will be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft which will explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa next year.
Jenny Odell’s interview is a treat, but her answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” is so deliciously exquisite I am copy/pasting the whole thing for you here, to save you a new tab.
The closest thing that I have to an answer is that I want to be in contact with things, people, contexts that make me feel alive. I have a specific definition of alive, which is I want to feel like I am being changed. Someone who’s completely habitual, is set in their ways of thinking and doing, that type of person is liable to see days in a calendar as being pieces of material that you use to achieve your goals. There’s all kinds of degrees between that and someone who’s so completely open to every moment that they’re dysfunctional or something, but I want to live closer to that second pole. I think about things that are enlivening to me, and they tend to be encounters, conversations — that “My Dinner With Andre” type of conversation where you and your conversation partner are changed by the end, you’ve covered new ground, you are both now somewhere else. But it’s also encounters with nonhuman life that is growing and changing, and realizing that I am also changing and evolving. To me those are the reminders that, yeah, I’m alive, today is not the same as yesterday, I will be different in the future, therefore I have a reason to live, which is to find out what that change is going to be.
Till next time,
ASK
Gorgeous and illuminating -- thank you, thank you, thank you.
Also: “collective family reimagining” ♥️♥️♥️