7 August 2020
"In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy."
This Week
Paid subscribers, you’ve got an essay about getting older, accumulating stuff and everything as process. I hope you like it.
Here’s a few moments of a restless Lake Michigan at sunrise.
Links
“Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar.” How the pandemic defeated America.
Many Americans are convinced crime is rising. They’re wrong.
The Indigenous suffragists of the early 20th century.
Lilly Wachowski talks about The Matrix originating as a trans story.
Defining the 90s music canon. With visualized data!
“Our task is to remain patient and vigilant and to not lose heart — for we are the destination. We are the portals from which the idea explodes, forced forth by its yearning to arrive. We are the revelators, the living instruments through which the idea announces itself — the flourishing and the blooming — but we are also the waiting and the wondering and the worrying.” Nick Cave.
Reading/Watching/Listening
While Nia DaCosta’s Candyman is stuck in pandemic limbo, and her just-announced Captain Marvel sequel is in the future, you can watch her debut Little Woods on Hulu, and I highly recommend doing so. A deeply-felt character study of women caught in the trap of poverty and struggling to get free. So well done it might trigger some difficult flashbacks if you have experienced a similar struggle.
Late to this one, as it came out in 2016, but also on Hulu is Colossal, an uneven film about a hot mess manifested as a real-life monster that ultimately is clever and sincere enough to work.
For the Muppets fans: Muppets Now on Disney+ is so far fairly promising. Better than recent reboot attempts, at least.
Lately it’s been Alice Coltrane. She transcends.
On trend: Expending the absolute minimum amount of energy for a while. Try it out.
Love,
Jen
Connections
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Today’s quote is from Rainer Maria Rilke: “In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.”