When I was in sixth grade, in Mrs. Sims’s class, I remember David Elmore talking about what his father chose to give up for Lent. Mrs. Sims had asked which kids observed Lent, about which I knew nothing. David said with a grin that his father always gave up watermelon. Mrs. Sims remarked, “But that’s not in season now,” and David said, “That’s why he gives it up!” And several students laughed. I always felt left out on religious topics, often because I didn’t know it was religion they were talking about, and I didn’t practice any.
I guess my mom, Lynne, (I think I told you her lapsed Catholic story) explained Lent to me when I got home and asked her. It represents the forty days Jesus Christ wandered in the desert (why?), she explained, as if I followed; and so to commemorate that, we give something up for Lent for the 40 days before Easter (which “resurrection” date is still chosen to be the first Sunday after the fourth full moon after the winter solstice/Christmas because Pagan parties rule). Okay?
I asked my mom what she gave up. “When I was a kid, I gave up candy,” she said, since back in the 1930s and ’40s, candy was a penny, so even in relative poverty, kids could usually afford an occasional candy. “But I cheated,” she said, and saved up for Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops instead. “I told myself it was medicine.”
But deep down she knew. I think about why we do these rituals of personal sacrifice when so many people around the world have to sacrifice, with no say in the matter.
Collage in readiness for St. Patrick’s Day, and the St. Pat’s Day for All Parade here in Queens, the real celebration.
When I first started practicing Lent I was in middle school, then, and I gave up Doritos. Later it was all junk food. Lucky child. In my grown years it’s been media of all kinds, but this year I don’t dare give up media as the nation’s democracy collapses daily. This year, I had no idea what to give up. I barely eat junk, or drink, or indulge in anything beyond sleep. I thought I’d give up sloth trying to exercise more.
As if in answer to my dilemma, my friend Tom sent me a Substack this morning, which I very much recommend, because heaven knows I’m not religious, and I found it moving and intelligent and inspiring. Here’s a snippet, followed by the link:
If you feel disoriented, you are not weak. If you feel angry, you are not unfaithful. If you feel grief in your body, tightness in your chest, exhaustion in your bones, tears that come without warning, you are not dramatic.
You are paying attention.
And paying attention is a spiritual practice that this culture actively discourages.
“We are not entering Lent with neat spiritual goals. We are entering Lent with social dis-ease lodged in our chests. With rage we don’t know what to do with. With helplessness that threatens to harden into cynicism. With the terrible knowledge that people are suffering right now, and we are implicated in systems that enable it.
“So how do we hold it all at once?
“First, we stop pretending that spiritual discipline is separate from public life.”
There it is. So this season, I’m paying attention with my whole body, giving up fear and freezing and being utterly selfish. It’s a goal, an attempt at a practice. I wrote and called both senators today, as I do every week, but now it will be every day for 40 days. I will send money wherever it can do good. I will take walks and try to engage more. I’m trying to be of use.
To be of use, should that interest you where our democratic republic is concerned, you might consider doing some Lenten lifting, if you aren’t already, which I know you are. Here’s something to know, by the way, about the SAVE Act (from poet Robert Arnold), which act you absolutely should want to stop, though ironically it will hurt Republican women the most.
There’s much to do. Gather your strength. Have a cough drop.
The title of Marcel Proust’s famous novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, was beautifully translated as Remembrance of Things Past, until some literal-minded academic pointed out that the literal translation, the actual title, taking it word by French word, was In Search of Lost Time. And I say, Is it? Which novel would you take down off the shelf? Exactly. Sometimes literal is not the way to go; sometimes essence gets more at meaning. Today I’m all about memory.
Yesterday I went to see Marjorie Prime at the Helen Hayes Theater on W. 44th St. here in New York. The play has been around since before Covid—my friend Colleen auditioned for it when it was starting a run at Playwrights Horizons, where our playwright friend Tom saw it. That’s how they remember it—an event before Covid. The play itself, by Jordan Harrison, concerns an 85-year-old woman (born in 1977, so we’re about forty years into the future) in the late beginnings of dementia, cared for by an unseen woman named Julia, and visited periodically by her daughter and son-in-law. At the opening, an oddly stiff, handsome young man (Christopher Lowell) is talking with Marjorie (96-year-old June Squibb, who is just remarkable; I first became aware of Squibb in the movie About Schmidt, where she played a Midwestern wife to Jack Nicholson’s Schmidt and was so good I thought they’d plucked an Iowa housewife off the street for the brief but pivotal part. Sidebar: I know he was nominated for an Oscar, but I thought Nicholson was all wrong for the part—it’s one that really belonged to a less complicated actor like Paul Dooley. I digress—and yet remembering our takes on things is also part of what I’m focused on this morning.)
To keep her mother company, Marjorie’s daughter and son-in-law (Cynthia Nixon and Danny Burstein) have purchased her a Prime, an android, this one in the form of Majorie’s husband, Walter, when he was young (as she requested)—so the oddly stiff companion is stiff for a reason. A Prime can be generated into any form, to be filled with whatever memories people give it; as a result it can converse by speaking only in programmed memories and saying comforting things. The play is asking us to consider what a person is. Is our worth, our existence, dependent on what we can remember, even in facsimile, and must what we remember be in terms of other people in our lives? Should trauma remain part of our memory? When we can’t stop remembering trauma, is therapy or forgetting harder the better way? What does it mean to truly live? Ultimately, Are we only what we can remember and who remembers us? For a relatively spare play, it does bring stuff up.
I found myself this morning asking, “Why do we remember?” And more than that, is memory the essence of humanity? It’s the first day of Black History Month, and I think of Alex Haley’s historical novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), where Alex learns about his enslaved ancestor Kunta Kinte (his name and story passed through Haley’s family over generations), when in his research Alex travels to West Africa by the Gambian River and finds a griot, a storyteller who tells the history of all the people of a village, committed to memory, once a year, and it can take up to three days without stopping to do this. But when he hears “Kunta Kinte,” and learns of his capture by slave traders, Alex knows he’s found the complete history of his people, almost unheard of for African Americans (even finding the affirmative mark of a slave on a slave schedule, let alone the name of the ship, let alone the name of the African, as I’ve learned from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and his PBS series Finding Your Roots, is beyond rare).
In 1977, when I was 12, ABC showed Roots, a miniseries based on the novel, that galvanized the whole nation (there being only three major networks and no cable), teaching white America about real enslavement for the first time. To quickly erase (again) that powerful, historically true narrative, NBC countered by showing Gone with the Wind on television for the first time (the “television event of a generation!”), so we could (mis)remember the real story, the glory we lost, I guess. Horrifying when you think about it. And here we are. (I remember my social studies and English teacher Miss Covington glossing past Roots and gushing about Gone with the Wind, her favorite movie, telling us the whole plot—and keep in mind she (no more than 30) could only have seen this 1939 movie once, or twice at most, in a revival at a movie theater, say, this being before VHS, let alone streaming; when she taught us about the Civil War, she minced no words: the North didn’t want slavery, but they didn’t want Black people there, either. I cannot imagine what the Black kids in her classes felt.)
Thinking more about ethnic generational memory, I remember seeing a David Mamet play maybe 25 years ago, The Old Neighborhood, where a Jewish man named Bobby Gould (played by Peter Riegert, who should have won a special Tony for his master class in active listening) who in three scenes visits 1) a childhood friend; 2) his sister; and 3) an old girlfriend. In each scene he says a few words at most, and listens to each of the others talk about the past, the “old neighborhood,” partly a shared history, partly revelations about things he didn’t know. While the play massively bored the three friends I was with, I found it galvanizing—the terrific performances (Patti LuPone played the sister), yes, but mainly the premise, that so much of our time spent with family and friends is absorbed in reviewing the past, our memories. Why is that? Why do we do that? What do we gain, or lose, from that act? In the first scene, Riegert’s character is visiting a childhood friend back in the city, staying at a hotel on a business trip. His buddy reflects at one point, “I could have made it in the camps,” and Riegert says, “You can’t know that,” and the friend insists he could. And that was the first time I became aware of the weight that Jews today carry when they had family die in the Holocaust.
Roots was the first time I had been shown anything about slavery, having grown up with text books that minimized the abuses of enslavement, and in a state with a state song, “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny,” which says, “There’s where this old darkey’s heart am long’d to go.” (It’s credited to an African American minstrel, James Bland (1878), but its roots appear to go back to the 1840s, lyrics by Edward Christy and sung by Confederate soldiers; and in either case, yikes. It was not retired as Virginia’s state song until 1997.) In other words, the truth and memory of enslavement was not part of my white Virginia memory, so here I am in my sixties only now really reckoning with it, what with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed during my first year on earth, a seeming ]course correction. Wow have I been blind.
What am I on about? History—the importance of a shared and factually accurate history, one we learn all our lives, together as a people, revised and reflected upon rationally as new information comes to light. National, personal—all the history defines us. I saw a post by a Black woman—and I didn’t save it and I hate myself—who pointed out that in her view the core issue for white people is that whites have no home. Blacks have Africa and enslavement to root them; Native Americans are the indigenous people. But whites? A culture of constant colonization and conquest, from ancient Rome to the Nordic invasions all over what is now Europe, most whites, especially white Americans, have no real homeland (this term tied to Nazis and white supremacists features on MAGA propaganda posters to bolster their deeply false and hideous American narrative). Everything for whites has been about invasion, genocide, rich man-enforced patriarchal “Christianity,” and repression of The Other to the point that we, as whites, have no roots and no shared memory beyond war and domination and fear. We whites have been trained by the rich elites to stew in hatred or resentment, say, crying on about our disrespected primacy; or, by contrast (it seems to me), we whites may live in bland acceptance of our privilege exercising little agency beyond voting and saving for retirement. How can you root in that?
So after watching Marjorie Prime, where the only value the characters seemed to place on one another was in memory—forcing one shared memory while maintaining the repression of another one, both confining—I got to thinking about memory as a kind of cage, its relation to creativity and forward motion coming into question. The white people in that play were defined by, and at home in, the past, but a murky, unsettling past, often manipulated and limited through the use of the Prime by the stories it repeated, with no clear plans for, or authentic excitement over, a present or a future. Is traveling to Madagascar the answer? (No.) At one point, the son-in-law replaces a dying Ficus tree in the house with another Ficus tree that no one pays attention to, and how is that a useful creative act? He’s the only character trying to reintroduce life into a dead space, and futile though it is, he at least is trying.
Some of the last things I did with my mom, Lynne, involved me asking questions of her life and filming her in very short videos; collecting recipes; she and I sorting a box of linen for me to take, tatting done by her aunt and grandmother. Memories through things, new stories emerging using the objects as a prime. And if we aren’t maintaining and deepening connections to our loved ones and our history, who even are we in the world?
When I look at Minnesotans and their powerful resistance to authoritarian rule, I am struck by this happening collectively and also in winter. Garrison Keillor used to begin his weekly Lake Wobegon monologues on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, “It’s been a quiet week up in Lake Wobegon, my home town out on the edge of the prairie. It’s been cold this last week.” That natural bond between Minnesotans in their landscape was ever and remains the relentless cold, the snow and ice (followed by the muddy springs, hot summers, and the short growing season). Anyone who is brave enough to move from Europe, let alone Somalia, to that unforgiving winterscape would need good neighbors immediately; and it’s that culture that appears to have bound all these people to one another—winter warriors—in an essential goodness and clarity.
My sibling text thread all week has been filled with photos of snow, including a video of my Virginia brother Jeff walking on top of snow, so thick is the ice still.
Dispatch from North Carolina, where three of our six siblings live, with humor.
Virginia just set a record for the most days in a row below freezing—a totally unnatural thing, so yes, Herr President, this is a result of global warming—and I’m thinking that it’s winter above all seasons that makes us reassess, remember, and also be present. Winter is never boring, even if it’s exhausting. Winter does not forgive. You can never let up, chopping wood or shoveling snow or suiting up to keep warm. Sometimes you have to wait for the melt. But waiting is for the old, the Marjorie Primes of the world, and only then if they are looked after. The rest of us still have to get to work.
New York City, in my first decade, always looked like this from December to the end of March. I’m out of practice navigating the street, crossing obstacle courses of walking paths, walking with heartiness, but we all share it and roll with it. And it’s a comfort.
It’s history, people. It’s all about history. Let’s never forget this time, whatever happens, wherever we go from here.
And celebrate Black History Month. Learn all you can. As the snow deepens, as ICE expands, deepen and expand yourself.
When I got off the 7 train in Queens last night around 11:45 PM, damp and chill after a wintry weather day (I’d gone into the city to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway last evening with a friend visiting from out of town, and all I could think during a scene showing Death Eaters, was “Oh, look, ICE,” but everyone else was just super excited that the grown up Draco Malfoy was being reprised by the movies’ Tom Felton—he was delightful), I crossed the boulevard to a bodega to pick up pita chips and hummus for a late night snack (the show was three hours long, dinner was five hours before). Inside the bodega were an assortment of loud males: one older white guy, very Queens working class; two Black guys around 30-40 years old; and a younger Hispanic guy. They were guys, if you know what I mean—you rarely see guys on television or in movies anymore, and I think this is a shame. Gym-cut, professionally groomed, and models of the self-care craze, actors today really have a hard time being interesting, but they do attract some chicks and the agents, and it’s all about the bucks.
Behind the counter was a young Middle Eastern cashier/manager (not really a guy type, more composed and elegant) staring at this one talkative Black guy standing by the white guy. I found my chips, my hummus, and when I went up to pay for them in this cramped deli area, I was barely noticed by the cashier; you could see that the talkative guy was either on something or off meds, was too-calmly ranting about something, and would not be talked down or moved off topic. I put my purchases up on the raised counter, but the cashier/manager kept his eyes fixed on the talkative guy; the old white guy was trying to be a casual peacemaker, but the cashier/manager said, “I don’t want to talk to that guy anymore,” his eyes wide, a little frightened, because that talkative guy was clearly this close to exploding, and the other two customers were really confused; they all seemed to know each other but it didn’t matter. I managed to get the purchase acknowledged, paid cash, tried to say, “I don’t need a bag,” but the stuff was being bagged on autopilot, eyes never on me, and I simply took it and my long-coming (but correct) change and booked it out the door and up the street.
By the way, for the men reading this, this is what it’s like for women to live in the world all the time: because there is never not a threat of imminent violence, we have to stay vigilant; if we aren’t the targets of violence at a certain moment, it’s because we simply don’t exist (I can promise you not one of those men saw the old lady buying hummus) or there are other women experiencing violence somewhere in the vicinity. Even when women aren’t consciously thinking, “I’m about to raped,” we can’t walk down any street by day or night, or enter or leave our cars or homes, without knowing “this could be the day.” Renee Good’s murder is one of a string of these inevitable events; the officer will face no consequences (unfortunately for us the decent, the martyr role won’t stick, as Good was not only a woman but a liberal activist and a lesbian, and so America on the whole is okay with her murder).
Back to the bodega: if there’s an emotionally charged dispute of some kind going on, not even with yelling—and not one of these men registered the imminent threat except the cashier/manager, who has seen this too many times, no doubt, and me—all anywoman would want to do is escape this. Guys (straight, I’d qualify) are, unfortunately, almost universally unteachable when it comes to these situations if they don’t have high level empathy already (in my limited life experience).
These males in the bodega were at once too blind, too self-involved, and too emotional to figure a way out of whatever this situation was, a situation which suggested at worst drug-addled paranoia, at best bruised ego, rather than any actual injustice. Petty stuff.
This morning, I happened on a post by a woman whose voice I’ve come to value deeply, a fabric artist named Orsola de Castro, who speaks sense on all matters of patriarchy, and today’s post seemed to dovetail with my late-night Queens bodega experience, by way of a totally different subject: AI. This has to do with temperament not just of “guys” up there but of educated “men” in suits. Patriarchy has a common thread of blind ego.
Male inventors, de Castro notes, have pushed women to the margins in the AI field, thinking (dubious word) that they can just throw money and ideas and tech at AI and it will naturally sort itself out, which is beyond stupid. Women are natural teachers; men are not. I’ll let Ms. de Castro explain:
(Meanwhile, as I type this, Microsoft Word keeps popping up to offer to “rewrite” my creative work for me, figuring some male tech guy’s coding can read and render my thinking better than I could. It’s not only tragic; it may in fact prove our annihilation as a species on this planet. This is not a digression.)
And women’s safety as well as freedom comes down to bodily autonomy and human (male) respect for that. In another post, Ms. de Castro uses pop music woo songs to discuss a view on ballad writing to bed women, that all that came about because patriarchy—not women, but patriarchy—put women in towers, in chastity belts, valued virginity over sensuality and then tied themselves, the men, into knots because they had no access to us women. And who’s fault is that?
By extension, as we sit by and watch these out-of-control U.S. patriarchs with no imagination or empathy or real intelligence whatsoever make scorched earth of our geopolitical alliances, we know the women were and have been right about everything—Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris the most recent big examples: men on the whole are too emotional, too limited, too narcissistic, too greedy, too short-sighted to be in power. And the women, as leaders, would have acted with thoughtful decision, which is not to say perfection. No one is that. But women don’t fight the system, they dismantle it and rebuild it. See Jessie Cae on Instagram:
Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), the most recent example, was no sooner sworn in than she acted for the good of all, as per her office.
Something there is that doesn’t love the thought of a woman in power, even from other women, until they see a woman in power and she’s good at it. (Note: Kristi Noem is MAGA’s fantasy of a woman in power, in that she has none, but does the whole sexy swagger fantasy thing for the public at the altar of the Top Dog.)
Another post I saw on Instagram today had to do with what happens when a clueless patriarchal institution reaches out to take a pulse and is freaked by the response, their own work coming back to smite them:
Here’s real power, and power to the purpose: The key is providing what is sustainable. “Sustenance is the root of sustainability.” We have to stop “the eighty men in the one bus” with all the world’s money and return to the politics of caring. According to Vandana Shiva:
“Non-sustainability is violence against the earth,” Shiva says, and when the men’s only response is, “We’ll move to Mars instead,” I want to send them NOW.
Sending love on a rainy cold Sunday in New York during the revolution,
Last night I dreamed I came out of the room where I sleep when I’m at my parents’ house, but it was my bed here in Queens, and my very aged, dead mother sat before a bright computer screen at the living room desk in the dark, her alert face blue-lit and her thin hands wildly flying over the keyboard, flying up and over the keys, eyes focused but expressionless. She was wearing a version of her blue pajamas. “Mom?” I needed to tell her she was dead, she didn’t need to do this, and I pulled myself awake. It was disturbing, seeing that tiny body, so pale and shriveled, working on a computer, which she never did, and so frantically.
I have dreams like that quite a bit since my mom died, unnerving dreams at times. And it’s easy to feel confused then, and afraid.
This evening on YouTube I caught NPR legend Terri Gross on Colbert talking about her husband’s death and a dream she had about him, in which she turned to him to remind him he was dead, and he vanished. Stephen then told Terri about a dream he had after his mom died, where he told her a similar thing, “Mom, why are you here?” and that she was dead; she also vanished. Stephen’s mother’s dream words before she vanished were, “Oh good. It’s the only way you’ll stay awake.” Terri asked what he thought that meant, and she suggested that his mother’s words meant what her husband’s presence meant in her own dream: you need to live life. By that I gather, when you admit the death, when you face that loss, you can awaken to your own life again. It was a wonderfully tender, adult conversation between two artists, two humans, one I hope everyone, somehow, can see during this horrible week. I needed it.
During their exchange, I found myself teary, and the dream I had last night came back to me. What was my mom telling me? I think my mother was telling me to write my life. Lynne had no interest in my acting, my teaching, or my writing. “That’s your thing,” she’d say. But here she was in death telling me, maybe, or showing me, that I need to keep writing, and even writing about her. Maybe it’s a better dream than first appeared, maybe. Nothing to be afraid of, and in fact quite the opposite.
As I do when it’s on demand on TCM, I watched Now, Voyager with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid for the many, manyeth time, and the feelings I have about it change over viewings and years, but whatever qualms or critiques, I can’t help loving Charlotte’s journey as Camille. Unconventionally, Charlotte Vale finds a purpose for her life, waking out of years of emotional abuse to become her own woman. Her most important moment of self-discovery comes during a renewed fight with her mother, when Charlotte is able to say honestly, “You see, Mother, I’m not afraid.” In addition to Max Steiner’s score, her guide out of the sanitarium and into the world was that Whitman quotation, presented to her by Dr. Jaquith. She can sail forth to seek and find; she can do anything she wants now. She can become. “I’m not afraid.”
When I saw the new footage today of Renee Good in her car via the “body cam” or phone of Jonathan Ross, the ICE “agent” who shot Ms. Good in cold blood in the face at least three times through her windshield as she left the scene, something became plain to me: that Renee Good, who by all accounts, including her wife’s, was nothing if not kind, “pure sunshine”—that the only thing Good did wrong was be true to her name and her Christian faith.
She was not afraid.
She said kindly to the officer, “It’s okay, I’m not mad at you.” And Ross opened fire. “Fuckin’ bitch!” he screamed.
I saw an interview with a pastor who was arrested by ICE and was asked over and over again, “Are you afraid?” “Are you afraid now?” And that (true) follower of Jesus said simply, “I’m not afraid,” and you could tell it was driving the ICE thugs to murderous rage. To what end? What do they think this rage at good people gives them?
I look at all the people posting, all the people protesting, all the people still out in their neighborhoods. We aren’t afraid. We are grieving, we are traumatized, we are experiencing all this horror together, we’ve all known loss, been visited by death in dreams, and we aren’t afraid. You know why? Because, whatever our faith or origin, we know who we are. And we are learning more all the time. We seek, we find, and it’s interesting to note that the Bible quotation as we know it doesn’t stop there. Let me close out with a little Gnostic Gospel of Thomas who said, “Seek and you shall find. When you find, you will become troubled. When you are troubled, you will be astonished, and rule over all things.” I’m not a Christian; I study all the faiths, and that feels universal to me.
I hope you have the dreams you need tonight.
Sending love,
Miss O’
P.S. A few words from Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense was published in January of 1776. This later reminder from Paine, when the rebellion seemed its most hopeless, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” via Heather Cox Richardson:
When I take my evening walk about in my Queens neighborhood, and maybe I’ve written about this before—this is the age, but I sort of marvel that I’m of it.
I can’t help marveling that for a truly odd woman, odd since birth, who never really belonged anywhere or with any group for as long as I can remember (and lucky enough to find loads of friends just like me), I have still managed to make a life in a range of locations, learning through walking, greeting everyone I make eye contact with, with “Hi.” I’m not stupid, but my experience has been that as Anne Frank said in her diary, most people really are basically good.
It’s hard to feel like that today.
Trigger happy white men are freely enjoying acting our all their Nazi fantasies, their blood lust, on ordinary sweet Americans, and they know they can do it with impunity. It won’t matter if anyone is charged for the murder of the Minnesota poet/wife/mom whose van was in an ICE agent’s way, because Trump will pardon him. This is America now. Until these men rape, kill, pillage, torture, torment, destroy everything human and decent to the point of over-satiation, they won’t rest. And they won’t stop, not really, ever, because their rage is superfueled by their increasing cruelty.
I remember seeing footage of the earliest days of the war Russia has waged on Ukraine, where confused and under-equipped Russian baby soldiers pointed weapons at and were utterly baffled by old people walking out of their houses to shoo them away, like flies, and they went. That didn’t last long. Three years later, the war is no closer to ending.
America will soon be under siege, too, I guess, by its own kill-happy MAGA citizens. It’s so hard to fathom how quickly it all went to hell. And how long we will have to endure this is anyone’s guess. General Stephen Miller all but came all over himself on CNN the other night as he talked about raw power, how he had it now, and would never give up that “raw iron” he was, in his dreams, holding in his pants.
Even harder to reckon with is the fact that we have absolutely no Democratic leadership to meet this nation’s defining moment. Not even a retired military official will break protocol. Trump has zero real opposition outside ordinary citizens doing their best to keep democracy going. It’s lonely and it’s terrifying. And now, deadly.
So here I was this evening, after a half hour of wracking sobs, making myself dress well and go out into the world in search of dinner to bring home, marveling at the sky.
And I began remembering other skies, the seasonal skies of many walks, from early adolescence on, when you start going outside yourself—the wild Virginia sky of my childhood neighborhood after a hail storm; a playground sky of Biblical proportions, the light coming down from behind the clouds, as I played basketball with middle school friends; windswept blue drama during Hurricane Andrew in the eye of that storm in rural Central Virginia; half blue, half black clouds with rain to dodge walking across the Virginia Tech campus; an otherworldly dark orange sunset in Vermont during summer in graduate school; the still-light sky of London at 11 PM in summer; the perfect dusk of summer parks in Oxford; so many skies.
In all my walking in places as disparate as Woodbridge, Blacksburg, Appomattox, Vermont, Oxford, Spriggs Road, California, Iowa, London, and New York City, alone as I always am, I’m of it. Always of it. The sky never lets me feel abandoned. And so it is that I seem always to be from places, eventually, regardless of my oddness.
I’m too deeply, darkly sad to write anything else tonight.
As if on cue, my friend Tom sent me this:
Yes, they are.
I’m sending you these:
Once at the beach around midnight in Nags Head, North Carolina, a few decades back, I heard a mother, probably the same age as the Minnesota ICE murder victim, say to her eager child on just arriving, “Let’s not gather shells at nighttime. Look at the moon.” And what a moon it was.
Look at the sky. Don’t let the fucking fuckers take away your sky.
This New Year’s evening at 12:01 AM, newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani will be sworn into office by New York Attorney General Letitia James. I cannot recall the world watching a New York City mayoral election before, but then, America has not been engaged in a civil war since 1865, this time with a transparently corrupt U.S. president trying to break up the union, smashing it into pieces using a Bible as a cudgel.
Mayor-elect Mamdani will swear in on a holy Quran, and our treasured Under the Desk News correspondent V Spehar explains what you can say to your MAGA community as they freak out:
Following her list of all the various volumes politicians have chosen to swear in on, V asks us what we would swear in on, and there is no question that I would swear in on my boxed edition of Truman Capote’s personal story “A Christmas Memory.” I can’t imagine a more American story, centering on a young queer white boy in Alabama, abandoned by his divorced mother and being raised by evangelical relatives. The one true protection he has is his cousin, a much older woman, a bit balmy and childlike, who truly loves and cares for young Truman, known to her as Buddy.
The memory set around Christmas, from the baking of fruitcakes to the finding of a tree, couldn’t be more Hallmark on its surface, but far less shiny and much more emotionally complicated, particularly the details of abject poverty that most Americans would fail to understand today. Back then, and this was my parents’ time, being poor was nothing to be ashamed of (though what would be familiar is the forces of corporations doing everything possible to keep Americans as down as was possible and still get them into the factories and mines to work, but this isn’t part of the story).
Below is a selection after the baking has commenced (with whiskey for the soaking obtained earlier in the story from Mr. Haha Jones, a Native American riverside cafe owner who sells moonshine illegally (this being Prohibition), Capote casually revealing more complexities and hypocrisies of life in the United States).
Strangers “seem to us our truest friends.” That, to me, is a kind of American ideal, born out of the hatred too many of us experience from those closest to us. Connections to distant places, gratitude to presidents and knife grinders and passers-through equally, Indian or Black or white—all the people of their lives, accepted and shown appreciation, despite the despotic rule of the Christian relatives they try to forget. And their little dog, Queenie, is unforgettable, too.
It’s a beautiful, human story, focused on love between friends. Every year for many Decembers, my friend Barry Hoff would stage “A Lovely Little Reading” of this story, complete with fruitcake he baked himself, for a gathering of friends on the third floor of the now closed Hourglass Tavern on W. 46th Street, shuttered by extortionist rent, something we are counting on Mayor Mamdani to address for the good of all of us.
I always took for granted the tradition of swearing on a book, a bible, though I never realized I could choose what book I wanted (I hope you watch V’s video). Were you to take office, what book would you swear on?
“The only photo we ever had taken”: Truman Capote was friends with Nell Harper Lee, a neighbor, who used him as model for Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, and helped Truman do his research for his classic true crime story In Cold Blood.
Sending out love and high hopes this New Year’s Eve, as I fittingly watch a Marx Brothers Marathon on TCM, the absurdity of which satire is all too contemporary,
O, I have suffered With those that I saw suffer. (Miranda, The Tempest, Act I Scene 2)
I read this week that the tech bruhs, so called in current parlance, see the world as being divided into two classes of people: the thinkers and the scrollers. While they, the Thinking Class, devote themselves to higher learning, philosophy, and deep work, affording the same wealth of life experience and cashflow to their offspring, they themselves are engineering the planet so that the rest of us, by which I gather they mean the 99% and our offspring, are relegated to the Scrolling Class, those who work as drones and merely consume whatever they, the Thinkers, put out for profit.
It’s all very Brave New World, a novel I read in high school and can’t shake. Will you be made into an Alpha or an Epsilon? Will you even know? And even if you are an Alpha, watch out if you forget to take your soma (“the opiate of the masses” that replaces religion) and have an original thought. All hell will break loose, and the only antidote is a rebel copy of Shakespeare.
My library was dukedom large enough. (Prospero, The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2)
This week the Trump Administration, illegally as usual, dismantled the U.S. Department of Education, spreading all the allocated funds around (which legally only Congress can do, but Republicans) to different departments, so K-12 education is now under the U.S. Department of Labor. Huh? In a seemingly unrelated development, the Trump Administration also demoted a bunch of educational degrees to “nonprofessional,” meaning people pursuing nursing, say, or teaching, will not be able to take out unlimited loans to attain a degree. Not only were the listed degrees for women-dominated professions, the professions listed were those whose members are legally bound to report suspected child abuse. If no one is educated to take those jobs…
Are you following? The Pedo-in-Chief is terrified of the release of the Epstein Files, and his Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, whose husband Vince McMahon was set to go on trial amid accusations of child sexual abuse until a Chicago judge paused the case last December when Linda was announced as Trump’s pick for her new position. Meanwhile, Trump’s former “spiritual advisor” was arrested for child rape and plead guilty. In a call-in show I heard a snippet of this week, a caller demanded to know what was “wrong” about child rape.
The cumulative effect of all this during a single week has made me a bit of an emotional wreck, but it was an independent journalist on Instagram who formally linked all these pieces for me. From Love Ethic Yoga:
Moving K-12 education to the Department of Labor while red states are removing child labor laws & dropping the age of consent to 12 or 14 is a calculated move. The leaders of these departments are pedo📁files or pedo apologists. This is NOT coincidence.
Uneducated children are easy prey. Hungry children are easy prey. Homeless children are easy prey. Unaccompanied minors are easy prey.
These predators are baiting the water. They’re creating the proverbial “fish in a barrel”. Yes, privatization is part of this but we cannot forget how many pedos are in this current admin. We cannot let them get away with this.
I got ill—I mean, Trump and his people are transparently, openly constructing a world where child sexual abuse is normalized, institutionalized, and unstoppable. These “men” want all young women and girls (40% of whom between the ages of 15-44 want to leave the United States, I saw in a recent poll) under their complete control in order to force-breed children, for either labor on behalf of or the sexual pleasure of (white Christian) men. Once the children “age out,” a term I learned on Law and Order: SVU, they will be, one presumes, forced to push through their trauma with slave labor, living in one of the concentration camps being constructed all over the United States.
Utah’s planned mega-shelter should be like a jail for homeless people, one widely embraced group says
This is the Brave New United States of America, friends.
It’s more than hard to take—it’s impossible. This insanity has to stop. We need to see handcuffs and prison bars on the right people, and soon. We know this.
I can’t take in everything—you can’t either. So while I know there’s Israel’s defiance of the ceasefire, and Russia’s wish-list labeled a “peace agreement” by Trump and Rubio (rejected, thank goodness) by Zelensky; protests in Charlotte and Raleigh over ICE raids; so much, so much, my god, it was the children and their protectors I focused on, “offloading” the rest, more or less.
This week on a work Zoom call, a colleague mentioned that there is always work or training or something that we simply have to “offload.” It’s not a term I knew—but I got it. You just pass that conceptual understanding to someone, maybe a spouse who gets plumbing or a coworker who is good at Excel, and you don’t worry about trying to learn that thing, much less master it. You only have the capacity for so much, and recognizing that is not a bad thing. (That said, we all have to trust in our capacity to learn new things, and try to do that, even though in my early 60s I’m finding that I have to immerse myself with the focus of a monk to his devotions to do something as complex and unintuitive as Jira (if you don’t know, don’t ask), say, but it’s reassuring to know that I can still do it, if more painstakingly.)
Speaking of offloading: I no longer have a creative life in the recognizable sense. I’m sorry about it, but between taking care of family, holding grief, learning new things on the job, and this fucking administration’s atrocities, I had to let something go, and that was it—and it’s no great loss to the world, obviously. That out of the way, I’d like to celebrate the achievements of women artists whom I know as friends. In a world, and more specifically a nation, that doesn’t value women, children, innocence, creativity, or truth, here’s some art you need.
Read Amanda Quaid’s debut poetry collection No Obvious Distress, which explores her (still) young life with Stage IV metastatic mesenchymal chondrosarcoma (learning the pronunciation of which seems to be more trouble from some people than her years of treatment, so say the name) in all the ways;
Read Anna Citrino’s fourth collection, Stories We Didn’t Tell, which explores the unspeakable hardships and abuses of her American prairie women ancestors, based on the poet’s decades of research, in rich language;
Watch Patricia E. Gillespie’s documentary, The Secrets We Bury, which I saw at IFC here in New York in its premiere screening this week, about a true crime, told with love and empathy and not sensationalism;
Listen to Patti Smith’s Horses (1975). (Envy me my Row X seat at The Beacon Theater on Broadway Friday night in New York City to see Patti Smith and her Band play the shit out of Horses in its 50th Anniversary Year, plus encores of classics. Patti also spat, twice, and it was glorious.)
So lest you think Miss O’ has given up on art, I haven’t, and I hope you haven’t either. There is nothing on this earth as satisfying as a creative act, something you can point to and say, “I made that.” There was nothing, and now there’s something, and I did it. And the world is more colorful and right and full than it was before you created that thing, however small, even making a smile happen on a stranger’s face in a notebook store, which I did on Friday night before the concert. I did that. That thing, there? You did that. Not AI, not engineered by some tech bruh, or ordered on you by some basement-dwelling podcaster or a bottom feeder in Washington. You. Just you.
Let’s stop scrolling together and get seriously radical in creative community. Take a moment to read. To be quiet. And then connect.
Here’s Mr. Rogers on the value silence from Charlie Rose, which is a clip I hope you watch. “My, it’s a noisy world,” he says, and it is. There’s more he goes on to say from his 1994 book, You Are Special, including about his professor, Dr. William Orr, who told him, “You know Fred, there is one thing that evil cannot stand, and that is forgiveness.” Take a minute with that. As a reader, Rogers says that the white spaces between the paragraphs are more important than the text, by which he means that if you aren’t using silence to reflect on what you are reading, you are missing the point of the endeavor. You can see more clips of Fred Rogers here. “A great gift an adult can give to a child is to let the child see what you love in front of them.” Whether it’s car repair, lawn maintenance, playing cello, fixing things, reading, singing, cooking, telling stories, dancing, whatever it is (note: what you love, not what you exploit)—that is the gift. I think I try to do that in life—to show love of life in greeting others. It’s tiny—I’m not a worldwide creative power like Patti Smith—but really it’s about being present, as Rogers says, moment to moment (and it’s the most important work in rehearsing a show, as shown me by director Maureen Shea). Doing things even a little larger than ourselves, then, in presence, is the point. Mr. Rogers only cared to be recognized if it made a child feel special—Fred Rogers liked “not the fancy people,” but regular people, and he aspired to “be the best receiver I can ever be—graceful receiving of what someone gives us; we’ve given that person a wonderful gift.”
Miss O’ most gracefully received.
The play I’ve been quoting here interstitially, The Tempest, is my favorite Shakespeare play; in some ways it’s like a compilation reel of all his best ideas, and his final play and only original plot, his retirement play. I’ve seen four productions of it—at the Globe in London, with Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero (it was awful); at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C., directed by Garland Wright, which still ranks as the top theater experience of my life (even after seeing Hamilton and Gypsy with Patti LuPone); one at Classic Stage Company downtown, with Mandy Patinkin (okay); and the fourth at St. Ann’s Warehouse, an all-women cast set in a women’s prison, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, with Harriet Walter as Prospero (fantastic). The most famous speech of the play, by Prospero, comes in Act IV, and I always think of it when eras end, as well as even a simple good thing, and especially a life:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on: and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (Prospero, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1)
In the final act of the play, Prospero’s daughter newly in love sees all the possibility of life, and this is from where Aldous Huxley took his dystopian novel’s title:
O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t. (Miranda, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1)
Sure, love is wildly naive, but it’s the beginning of everything. There’s a new world to be made. Let’s stop the fucking fuckers and do that.
Sending love, philosophy, music, poetry, creativity, all the good church,
Miss O’
The People Have the Power: Patti Smith and her band, The Beacon Theater, NYC, 11/21/25, the 50th Anniversary of Horses. Photo by LO”H. This was church.
~ the blind Hamm after blowing his whistle, greeting the entrance of his servant, Clov, Endgame by Samuel Beckett
The characters in Beckett’s Endgame, which I saw Saturday at Irish Arts Center here in New York, presented by Druid, a theater company based in Ireland, are in an apocalyptic waiting game in some kind of shelter, starving, without painkillers, waiting for death. Hamm’s blindness and lameness keep him confined to a lounge chair, while his parents, Nagg and Nell, are confined to separate rusty garbage cans, waiting for death like their son.
It’s a funny play, and compelling, and of course, sadly, perfectly appropriate for the American moment. I look at Trump of the shit-filled diapers, bloated and slurring, demented and wobbly, barking orders to tear down the East Wing and kill fisherman at sea and send $40 billion of our taxpayer dollars to bail out Argentina even as he bars the release of any of the $6 billion in reserve for SNAP in case of government shutdown and oversees the tripling of our health insurance premiums, causing millions to lose coverage. His spending so much waste, the Republicans so much garbage.
“You pollute the air,” says Trump of our nation’s workers and immigrants and women, as he orders the dumping of toxic East Wing waste onto a public park golf course outside D.C., to prevent regular people from golfing, and distracts from the Epstein files, so shocked was he that his best friend of 15 years, Jeffrey Epstein, kept files on his best friend Donald J. Trump.
SNAP benefits are set to expire November 1, and without a deal from the Republicans, all working Americans will struggle to afford not only food but also any health insurance at all. To provide help for this coming starvation and health apocalypse, your Miss O’ wants to encourage you to donate to your local food pantries, if you can, whatever you can afford. Here in New York City, where I can only hope Mamdani wins the mayoral race, I gave a bunch more bucks to the following organizations. You can check your local areas for similar opportunities, if you want. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
City Harvest
City Meals on Wheels
Bowery Mission
God’s Love We Deliver
Sunnyside Community Center
While visiting my dad in Virginia a couple of weeks ago for the first time since my mom, Lynne, died, I gathered up all her clothes, shoes, and accessories in the closets and drawers, and Bernie (who was so sad looking at them) and I donated them. We do what we can, whatever our griefs.
I haven’t published on WordPress for some time—I haven’t been of a mind to play the role of teacher, each day being the next level of crazy in America. I’m sickened and lost most of the time. It’s hard to imagine Thanksgiving and Christmas, let alone my favorite, Halloween, what with ICE agents throwing teargas at children in a Halloween parade in Chicago. How is any of this happening? It appears that the Washington Post is this close to shuttering its print division, hastened along by owner Bezos, the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” turning out to be a promise. After 60+ years as a subscriber, my dad sees his morning paper razor thin, formerly robust Metro, Sports, and Style sections combined into one slender one, few ads; his delivery lady has gone from dozens of deliveries, to ten, to two in our entire neighborhood since Bezos took over the paper. This seems to be intentional: Bezos’s lost 75,000 digital subscribers, too. It’s just a matter of time now, the owner ready to light his big cigar with the last of the masthead as he boards his newest yacht.
The billionaires are the 1% that are bringing our country, our world, down. Full stop. Blackout the system, give to your food banks, save all your pennies, tighten the belts, hunker down. It’s gonna be a long, hard winter.
But you know what? We can do this. Bernie and Lynne were born into the Great Depression. We always cut our toothpaste tubes in half to scrape the last of the paste onto brushes, had leftover night on Fridays, lived on peanut butter and jelly when we had to. You can do it too. And you can have laughs and play cards and read books rather than use power on devices. And say grace. The real kind.
Love your neighbors through this crazy Republican endgame.
I started this missive sitting in my Queens living room, hours after the Big Beautiful Bill passed the House, again, and for all time; windows open, ceiling fan going, storms on and off, listening to The Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, Bruce Springsteen live in Manchester, May 14, 2025. God I love this artist, wobbly voice and all—all the artistry is fully there, the heart, the defiance of authoritarianism, the humor, the joy. Bruce is all that is good in America, or was, or can be. Can you imagine anyone—any sentient working American human choosing to throw their lot in with a monster like that whiny nepo baby Trump poser president over a true American like Springsteen, son of working class Irish and Italians, creator of some of the greatest songs of the 20th and 21st centuries, who is living out a true and mythic American Dream—rock star—through his own talent and hard work? I really can’t.
And here we are.
I know I’ve written about this before, about the importance, culturally in America, of The Ed Sullivan Show. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Ed presented an hour-long weekly variety show that had it all—the ridiculous magic tricks and comedy of low vaudeville to Broadway musical moments, opera, and popular music all the way to the Rolling Stones; the performers were whites, Blacks, Hispanics, young and old, men and women, everyone. It was a total melting pot of America, and it was in all the living rooms of anyone who could afford to own a television set and all their visiting friends who couldn’t. Common culture. Sure, there was the KKK and horrific shit all around, but no one really looked down on or was suspicious of anyone for loving both Johnny Cash and Leonard Bernstein. There was room and respect for both.
And no one, or few, back in the day, really didn’t want their kids to get an education. Thanks to public education, I read, the literacy rate was 80% by 1875. And that is an extraordinary achievement. All that advancement, one we have taken for granted, now could rapidly change.
Look, I know there are snobs all around, hurting others’ feelings, from Meryl Streep’s dissing wrestling on an awards broadcast to Donald Trump’s hatred of anything culinary beyond fast food. But the thing is, the free radio and the free television allowed equal access to all the art, so-called high and low—regardless of where you came from, you were allowed to discover and enjoy cartoons and classic films, sitcoms and crime dramas, bluegrass and jazz and opera. Whatever. Libraries made books free to read. Schools had kids do art shows. Everybody could go.
The shame of “high art,” as it’s often framed (as it were), from painting to classical music, is that all the plush carpet and crystal seems designed to make viewers and audiences either of it or not of it. The maestro Leonard Bernstein, a Jewish bisexual composer and conductor and communist, wanted to open up all that classical music to everyone, and did so with his New York Philharmonic family and children’s concerts, radio broadcasts, and a television variety show, too.
Sure, some music feels right in symphony halls, some on back porches; some art is best encountered while in the care of a museum, and some art fits just right on the wall of a bar. I want to live in a country where all of that is okay with everyone, and everyone enjoys access.
A few years ago, I bought some art by my talented friend Jodi Chamberlain. One thing she suggested about her current work, and which I passed on to my friends for whom I’d bought her pieces as gifts, “My art does really well in kitchens.”
And it really does. It’s a very cool thing to recognize about one’s work. You might think all art belongs in a curated living room, but really a kitchen is a totally wonderful place to have art. It’s underrated as a location.
Julia Child by Jodi Chamberlain, ca. 2022, collage, ink, color on paper.My friend Richard with his new art, perfect for dishwashing contemplation.
The arts are and ever were the great civilizers, with civilization coming from the Latin root, “civilis,” meaning “relating to a citizen,” and also, “courteous.” Hence, civilized. There’s a thought. At some point not long ago, the National Endowment for the Arts became a Republican cudgel, the arts being blamed for all of the problems of a world that included (gasp) everyone. Sesame Street was radical in teaching all children letters and numbers, Mister Rogers too kind and loving. You know, un-American. Unlike blood sucking billionaires, who paradoxically fund a lot of the arts, so there’s that.
Back in October of 2020, when Trump (whose idiocy had killed some one million citizens during Covid) was running for re-election, Bruce Springsteen read Elayne Griffin Baker’s poem on his radio show, the poem that begins, There’s no art in this White House, and his reading is as important as Baker’s words:
There’s no art in this White House.
There’s no literature, no poetry, no music.
There are no pets in this White House, no loyal man’s best friend, no Socks the family cat, no kids’ science fairs.
No time when the president takes off his blue suit red tie uniform and becomes human, except when he puts on his white shirt and khaki pants uniform and hides from the American people to play golf.
There are no images of the First Family enjoying themselves together in a moment of relaxation.
No Obamas on the beach in Hawaii moments, or Bushes fishing in Kennebunkport.
No Reagans on horseback, no Kennedys playing touch football on the Cape.
Where’d that country go?
Where did all the fun, the joy and the expression of love and happiness go?
We used to be the country that did the Ice Bucket Challenge and raised millions for charity.
We used to have a President that calmed and soothed the nation instead dividing it, and a First Lady who planted a garden instead of ripping one out.
We are rudderless and joyless.
We have lost the cultural aspects of society that make America great.
We have lost our mojo, our fun, our happiness, our cheering on of others.
The shared experience of humanity that makes it all worth it.
The challenges and the triumphs that we shared and celebrated.
The unique can-do spirit that America has always been known for.
We are lost.
We have lost so much in so short a time.
– Elayne Griffin Baker
Art is where it starts, where life starts, where civility starts: without a love of the arts, there is no love of humanity. Without an appreciation of human craftsmanship, there’s no respect for any human endeavor beyond destruction. Wrecking balls are easy—the toys of little boys.
And once again, in 2025, we are lost; not only lost, utterly unmoored and alone out at sea, morally, ethically, practically. It’s horrible.
Bruce Springsteen is my favorite kind of artist because his music can reach anyone; he can play dive clubs, massive stadiums, and Broadway with equal facility. All the great artists can do this. And great artists want all the audiences, every cross section, to join in. In Putting It Together, James Lapine’s memoir of the creation of the Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George, one of the actors recalled seeing Johnny Cash in the front row of one of the previews, and they all were excited and also worried he’d leave after intermission—and so happy when he didn’t! I love that. Thinking of that musical—one of everyone’s favorite movie scenes is the Art Institute of Chicago montage of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, featuring the pointillist painting on which Sunday in the Park is based. Art, as director John Hughes knew, really is for everyone; in an interview, Hughes called that museum his “refuge” as a kid.
You know who doesn’t want everyone to engage with art? The autocrats, the controllers, the fascist creeps. They will do anything they can to prevent you, the people, from knowing about, engaging with, or being moved by art. Because they are afraid of it. Books, drag shows, finger painting, Broadway. The autocrats are terrified of art, I think, because they might have a feeling they cannot name or control, and there won’t be a starving refugee nearby to take it out on when they do.
I have this fantasy of rounding up all the MAGA leaders and the Heritage Foundation cultists and the architects of “America First” redux, putting them all in Depend diapers, tying them to lounge chairs, muzzling their mouths, and forcing them to watch and listen to loads of cultural things that would both expand and nourish their souls, like all day and all night. Bruce Springsteen live, obviously; David Bowie singing “Fame” on Soul Train; Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake; Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach; maybe the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the classic film Casablanca, James Baldwin on Dick Cavett; so many singers and musicians, surely Nina Simone; Hamilton. There is just SO MUCH joy to be had. I might open with Mister Rogers talking to them all from his old shows, telling them about love, to look for the helpers. Close with Johnny Cash’s video “Hurt.” On a loop until their hearts explode.
Their empire of dirt, indeed.
I just watched again the American Masters episode on Janis Ian, whose song “Society’s Child,” written at age 13 about an interracial relationship ca. 1962, was a revelation to me. Ian toured Apartheid South Africa in the late ’80s with an integrated band and demanding integrated audiences and hotels—and she got them. Though punished for two years by the United Nations, she said she didn’t believe in cultural boycotts because who knows whose heart might be changed by the music. Apartheid ended in 1994, and who’s to say her art didn’t help that along?
Too many in America fear information as well as art. It’s important to remember that art is not about information, it’s about wonder, about contemplation, reflection. Mister Rogers talks about that. All the noise of this world. There’s such meanness, too. Art can be such a restorative. Why can’t people focus on all that beauty and wonder and just leave poor immigrants alone? Because we know, don’t we, that if these malcontents and malicious assholes had art in their lives, they might be less afraid of learning all kinds of things, and they’d be more peaceful, maybe. All I know is that all my circles of friends and family love cultural things, and we are fun and kind people who never ever think of new ways to kill and cage “other” people. Go, us.
So on this Independence Day, perhaps our last, I’m going to meditate on a way of life that makes me happy, filled with art and music and funny people. Art takes you outside yourself as a way of going back inside yourself, only deeper, and you come out again, only different, better. And then you do it again.
Art by Jodi Chamberlain, ca. 2022, Covid times tourists, NYC
Remind your friends, art is everywhere, at all kinds of prices, and you can put your art finds anywhere you want. Go get some art. Move it around. Try out all the rooms.
The Miss O' Show (Teacher's Edition) 