"The gaps between who we are and who we take ourselves to be"

For the last post of the month, I’m going to share a round-up of sorts, some art I’ve seen things and things I’ve read. I’ve been enjoying squirreling these away! This one includes art from January and a little bit of the end of December. Enjoy.

Dispatches and Discussions on Minneapolis

As we all are, I’m watching both the violence and inspiring resistance in Minneapolis. Here are a few resources about what’s going on there: Author and Organizer Autumn Brown’s report on the How to Survive the End of the World podcast; from crimethinc, a breakdown of Minneapolis’ rapid response infrastructure; an emergency rent fund for workers; an essay from author Dobby Gibson at Lithub:

Finally, from Margaret Killjoy, her podcast episode and her essay “I've Never Seen Unity Like This.” She writes:

Imani Perry’s South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Imani Perry wrote one of my favorite books, Looking for Lorraine, her elegant “third-person memoir” biography of Lorraine Hansberry. I loved following her through South to America, her history/memoir hybrid. In each chapter, she brings the reader through a region of the South, describing its contemporary texture, people, and politics, while excavating its histories (often buried by white supremacy). Her prose is extraordinary, bridging poetry and rigorous historical scholarship.

Perry encounters the past and present violence with a profound liberation theology. For example, speaking about a bigoted white woman who drove her around in an Uber in Virginia, Perry writes, “…as usually is the case, I prayed against the cruel violence of dominion and diminishment. And armed with the belief in things unseen and miracles alike, I prayed she might be swayed to love the God of slaves.” I wrote this down in a little book I keep on an altar, full of poems and prayers and writing prompts. I would like to pray, as much as I can, against the cruel violence of domination and diminishment. I would like to believe in things unseen and miracles alike.

Another passage that made me gasp, on trees and tobacco:

The Testament of Ann Lee, directed by Mona Fastvold

The Testament of Ann Lee is a dance film that believes in the divine. The story of Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers, this film depicts ecstasy and devotion through embodied, haunting, striking music and dance. Amanda Seyfried is a weird little freak with giant eyes, cast quite perfectly: her trajectory from dumb-but-funny-mean-girl-whose-breasts-can-predict-the-weather, to turtleneck-wearing Silicon Valley bilionaire grifter, to utopian religious leader is oddly sensible.

Dance is increasingly my favorite art form to see; feelings seem too large for Artistotilean plotlines these days. I didn’t know a film could use dance this way: it isn’t a musical, but the spectacle of the music and dance creates the spiritual arc of the story. Without that spectacle, the audience couldn’t join Ann’s dramatic religious visions and experiences.

The film made me want to learn more about the Shakers’ role in the colonial project: they are colonizers, and they were persecuted by the colonial state. They decried slavery as a sin against god and advanced a utopian project of egalitarianism across gender and race. Similarly, their rejection of the nuclear family and their rhythmic, embodied worship marked them as other. As Elizabeth Freeman writes, “The Shakers may have been the United States’s first ‘off-white’ people, against whom normative whiteness could emerge.” The film touches on these questions, but tangentially: Upon arriving in America, Ann Lee screams “SHAME” at people auctioning off an enslaved person in New York; an Indigenous person helps the community build their first structures; the final act of the film features lingering shots of an unnamed Black woman who is part of the community. I long to know more—and I wish I could learn in the films ecstatic, embodied language.

“How Gaza Broke the Art World”, by David Velasco, in Equator Magazine

David Velasco is the former editor of Artforum, who was fired shortly after October 7th for publishing an open letter in support of Palestinian liberation. This exquisite essay details his naívité around his field’s progressivism, how it felt to hold his integrity amidst backlash and threats, and how Israel’s genocide in Gaza revealed the violent and reactionary core of the industry. He uses vibrant metaphors, for example describing the upsets and uprisings that happened during his tenure at the magazine (#metoo, protests against the “tear gas bienniale” at the Whitney museum, the pandemic, the 2020 uprisings, and more) as history’s “quickening”; or he describes propoganda as “the version of history that floats undisturbed through the technocratic ventilation systems, a malevolent spirit seeking new host bodies.”

The piece is narratively anchored around Nan Goldin’s 2024 protest at her career retrospective in Berlin (one in which the museum censored all works about her activism against the genocide). Goldin is both an artistic and moral anchor for Velasco: He describes her as “one of our greatest living artists in any medium”, but he also says, “I’ve found myself in trouble alongside Nan before, trying to change things that seem impossible to change until you do, and I feel bonded to her.” For him, Goldin—who has not only used her voice to speak out against Israel, but also successfully stripped the opioid-manufacturing Sackler family of their names on gallery walls—is a model of how to use an artistic platform to make change:

“On Hunger Strike” by E.S. White, in The London Review of Books

A months-long hunger strike from members of Palestine Action (a UK-based activist group imprisoned and banned by the state) yielded a victory: The UK rejected a $2.7 Billion contract from Elbit (an Israeli weapons manufacturer). One hunger striker, Heba Muraisi, hadn’t eaten in over 70 days and was very near death. In December, weeks before the strike would end, E.S. White wrote this deeply moving discussion of hunger strikes:

“Statement on the Successful Boycott of PEN America” from Writers Against the War on Gaza

Another much-needed victory: After almost two years of pressure against the literary organization PEN America, Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) successfully won all their demands. In 2024, after months of silence about the genocide in Gaza (despite the mass slaughter of writers and journalists and the organization’s mission to “defend writers, artists, and journalists and protect free expression”), PEN America hosted an event featuring outspoken zionist Mayim Bialik. When members of WAWOG disrupted the event, PEN America dragged Palestinian-American writer (and longtime PEN member) Randa Jarrar out of the event. For two years, WAWOG mounted a pressure campaign, calling on writers to boycott the institution. Through this campaign, they achieved some massive wins: the resignation of a Zionist and Islamophobic CEO, hundreds of thousands of dollars sent directly to Palestinians, recognition of the assault on Gaza as a genocide, calling for an arms embargo, and highlighting the violence against Palestinian writers, journalists, and culture. This victory is a blueprint for organizing against other cultural institutions. The organizers write:

Come from Away by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, at the Seattle Repertory Theatre

Musical theatre is a blunt instrument, but an effective one. I really like it despite myself: my inner thirteen-year-old is insatiable, but I’m also jealous of those of you who channeled your young angst into punk instead of Rent. I entered this tenth-anniversary production of Come from Away both jaded and excited. I left quite moved despite my cynicism, and I think this is a solid show for (often conservative) regional theatres to program during this cultural moment.

Come From Away is a lovely musical about a small town in Newfoundland that came together to care for over 7,000 stranded people during 9-11. I found myself in tears by the second number, where dozens of people dropped everything to assemble food, shelter, water, and care for thousands from across the globe. It milked emotion from me in the way musical theatre particularly excels.

The play’s director’s note talks about the play being about how we’re “better united than divided,” a sentiment that is quite common in the theatre, which I usually find politically milquetoast. In many ways, I think the play’s politics are fairly naïve and surface-level. However, as Raechel Anne Jolie says in her review of Barbie (echoed in her review of One Battle After Another). “Hollywood will not make radical films because Hollywood is not radical”—the same can be said of Broadway or regional theatre. I found myself anticipatorially bristling at the play’s politics: It’s challenging to separate the tragedy of 9/11 from the nationalism and imperial war it inspired. The show skirts this line (its heroes being Canadian dilutes the patriotism a bit), but I rolled my eyes at some red, white, and blue lighting design. And I think the show ends a plotline about Islamophobia with a much-too-tidy closure.

However, Jolie continues: “I do not turn to the movies for revolutionary guidance; I turn to the movies for pleasure (entirely valuable on its own) and, sometimes, the opportunity to engage in thought, collectively, on how we could dream bigger than the visions allowed on our screens”. In this, I think the show is wildly successful: It helps us dream bigger visions. Come from Away stages a massive, successful mutual aid project. In a moment of climate catastrophe and fascist violence, I think this is a crucial vision to dream together. The show made me think of Margaret Killjoy’s podcast series on Catastrophe Compassion, the people blowing whistles and blocking cars to stop ICE, the neighborhood emergency-preparedness hub my mom helps lead. There are so many stories of people coming together to care for each other during disasters, and we’re only going to face more disasters.

More Art I Loved This Month

• P.E. Moskowitz’s Breaking Awake: a deftly and empathetically researched memoir about drugs and mental health. Fun to read before going to a rave!

• R.F. Kuang’s Babel: an anti-colonial page-turner I stayed up ‘til 5 AM to finish.

• Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: a masterpiece of a memoir, with an in medias res opening scene that broke my heart when we returned to it at the end. “Two miles from all those promises and three minutes from our last cliché, I will understand that no meaningful promises are made or kept in casinos.”

• Marty Supreme: stressful and…fine.

• Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo: written almost entirely in sentence fragments, a tender novel about what makes life worth living

• Keely Hazell’s Everyone’s Seen My Tits: a funny and smart memoir about sex, feminism, and class. Great audiobook.

• Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurao and The Secret Agent: detailed, ambitious films about resistance to domination and state violence. Bacurao, in particular, was mind-bending and visually incredible.

• Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism. A favorite piece: