shoot for the sun, land among the Bowie
a bulwark against despair
I had originally planned to spend the day of Halloween putting together a costume. Two of my roommates were moving out, however, with three new ones incoming. The day prior, right when the outgoing roommates decided to carry their couch outside, a truly Biblical deluge descended. The couch turned out to be two inches too wide for the vehicle and had to be brought back inside, by which point it was soaked through and dripping. And by the time the rain let up enough to finish packing some remaining non-couch items, traffic was terrible because some streets here in Bed-Stuy had flooded.
On the way to the new spot, there was an intersection where a pool of water six to eight inches deep had accumulated across the road. The driver accelerated, muttering c’mon, c’mon at the car in front of us. Water sloshed audibly against the bumper. We reached higher ground and the driver shouted, perhaps inadvertently, holy shit!
After all the weather-induced delays, there was still a lot of work to do, so on Halloween itself I ended up dusting baseboards, scrubbing the walls enclosing the oven, and painting the words TRICK OR TREASURE on a big slab of bark to make a sign for the evening’s trick-or-treaters. Around 9 PM I decided to wriggle into my sequined black-and-gold dress patterned with flames, be-glitter one side of my face, and tell people I was the sun. While I was out, someone asked if I was David Bowie. I’ll take it, I thought. Or, as a friend put it when I told her about the night: “Shoot for the sun, land among the Bowie?”
my birthday collage—strong Leo energy—featuring Half Peak in Yosemite, Karen Oh of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and clippings from Uppercase, a pattern book, an art catalogue, and Nylon
I’ve been thinking a lot about how sun-chasing might be an antidote to what Kate Wagner calls “phoneworld.” She writes that
our collective feeling of futurelessness, I believe, is caused by design. In phoneworld, it’s not just that we’re getting the news. It’s that we’re getting the news, and the knee-jerk reactions of hundreds of people to that news, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, locking us into an eternal present where the time passes in huge slices and nothing changes beyond the movement of the thumb along the glass screen. In phoneworld, politics closes in on us with the sheer repetitive brunt of this hopelessness. — “the eternal present”
I don’t even spend that much time in phoneworld, relatively speaking, and yet I experience the despair it engenders, in part because phoneworld permeates most of the internet (endless scrolling! comments everywhere! bots with outsize influence!).
I think the difference between technocrat-engineered, smartphone-accelerated, government-funded despondence and joyous, tangible political outcomes like Zohran Mamdani’s recent mayoral victory (!) is physical.
Mamdani did deploy a savvy digital campaign, but he also mobilized a historic volunteer canvassing contingent to knock on literal doors in real life. Mamdani’s staff set out to beat the canvassing record for doors knocked in one day (200,000). It’s unclear to me whether volunteers broke that record, but they did reach more than 3 million doors knocked between the June primary and the November election. Shoot for the sun.
The first batch of paid Bombazine subscriber collage postcards, assembled atop a grocery-bag table-protector.
While in Mount Vernon, WA, earlier this fall, I went to Little Mountain Books & Botanica, a delightful relatively new independent bookstore. Chris La Tray’s most recent book, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, was displayed in the front.
I also found an artist’s shop called The Wabash Project, owned by Christine Chaney. She curates exhibits that go with the space and the aesthetic of her work, so it all made sense together. There was a driftwood sculpture suspended from a giant skylight; there were notebooks of cut-up cast-offs from her watercolor paintings; there was a slab wooden table covered with white vases for a ceramicist’s installation; there were strange creatures sewn from antique gloves.
I suppose one could claim, cynically, that it was just an above-average synthesis of gallery and shop, but to me it felt like something else was happening, perhaps because one artist’s taste—one woman’s vision—was manifest across the whole thing. Yes, stuff was for sale, but in this case I think the commerce meant that the scope of her art-making extended all the way from the high-ceilinged architecture to people’s purchases, which she wraps in hand-painted paper remnants.
A mushroom seen on a walk in Dartmouth, MA. The portrait filter makes it look magical.
In New York City, many shorelines consist of human-made concrete barriers. Most of the historic oyster reef was decimated by pollution and over-harvesting in the 20th century. To help restore these coastal habitats, the RETI Center and Thread Collective, both based in Brooklyn, designed hexagonal sea gardens. The RETI Center collects and affixes wine corks to these “salt marsh archipelagos” to keep them afloat. Before I tell you about how cool the gardens are, I have to say that this is the best use for recycled corks I’ve encountered to date—the world only needs so many wine cork bulletin boards.
The floating gardens grow sea marsh grasses on top. Below the water’s surface, the gardens have algae aquaculture, mussel ropes, and oyster baskets. The garden anchors are purposely porous and made from a biophilic concrete mix (invented by architect Evelyn Tickle) imbued with calcium carbonate to attract and speed up oyster growth.
Oysters and the reefs they build are important. Oysters sequester carbon, improve water quality, and mitigate coastal flooding and erosion by absorbing wave energy (wave attenuation). The more oysters, the better.
And all of these species—the grasses, oysters, mussels, and algae—create a home for crabs, small fishes, and birds.
Note: The Billion Oyster Project collects shells from restaurants across NYC to use as substrate for restoring oyster reefs. There are two drop-off sites in Brooklyn where members of the public can drop off clam, oyster, and scallop shells for “recycling” into this work.
Cards I made for my high school team before a playoff championship game out of index cards, a magazine advertisement, washi tape, secondhand ribbon, and charms I found in an inherited jewelry maker’s stash while visiting a friend. Instead of making a normal fist, my eleventh-grade club volleyball team made the ‘rock on’ symbol in the huddle before a cheer, and I’ve been doing it ever since, whether the people assembled are a team I coach, a team I play on, or a group of strangers at open gym. Unrelatedly, it turns out the horns are also an Italian good luck symbol.
SOFi Products (soon to be called “Nothing”) makes these incredible triangular, plastic-free, compostable AND recyclable cups for hot drinks with a built-in lid and spout. Seriously, take a look and then tell your local coffee shop owner about them.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research is sponsoring research exploring the link between smell loss and brain disease. You can contribute to this work by requesting a scratch-n-sniff test here.
In March of this year, workers at the Park Slope, Union Square, and West 82nd St. Barnes & Noble stores in New York City became the first B&N employees nationwide to secure three-year union contracts. The ratified contracts required converting a closet into a break room for Union Square employees, an immediate $4 minimum hourly wage increase followed by one-dollar-per-year increases, anti-slip mats in cafés, and employee healthcare through the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. Source: amNY
The Wild West Access Fund helps abortion seekers in Nevada, an increasing number of whom are traveling to Nevada from other states because abortion is still legal there. Donate here.
Last week I revived a dingy fitted sheet by dyeing it. I also made a bunch of metallic mailers by flipping Whole Foods delivery cold storage bags inside out and cutting them to size. You can honestly tape any paper grocery bag into a mailer, but these ones have the benefit of being both silver in color and more water resistant than a plain brown bag.
Nuthatch sells “upcycled” almond butter. First they soak, strain, and blend almonds to make (and sell) almond milk. Then they dehydrate, mill, and sift the leftover pulp to make (and sell) almond flour. The sifting process removes oily bits (technical term) that they roast to release and melt oil that becomes almond butter!
“Retrato de Francisco” cross-stitch on produce bags by Gloria Martinez-Granados. I saw this piece at an exhibit called “Obsesión! Labor as Pleasure” at apexart.
My friend Emen, a multilingual Brooklyn community leader, runs several international mutual aid projects based on friendships she’s developed while abroad. Because it’s easier both geographically and politically to send aid to Lebanon from the EU than from the US, she has secured shipping containers in Germany to fill with basic-needs items purchased wholesale. In January she will travel to Lebanon to distribute the contents to Palestinian refugees and displaced Syrians. Help her with this project here.
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day last month, a group of indigenous artists unveiled an unsanctioned augmented reality exhibit at The Met called “ENCODED.” The group created new art that’s projected, or digitally superimposed, over existing pieces in the Met’s American Wing. Visitors can use a smartphone or tablet to see the interventions.
“For his contribution, the Shinnecock photographer Jeremy Dennis transposed the White House on top of a painting of the Parthenon, showing the same disregard for Western sacred sites that has been shown to Native ones––such as the defacing of the Black Hills to create Mount Rushmore. Priscilla Dobler Dzul digitally enrobed Thomas Crawford’s sculpture Mexican Dying Girl (1846-48) in a florally embellished funerary big cat skin, head and all.” — an Art Newspaper article about the exhibit
Maybe it’s ironic to finish a newsletter about the dangers of phoneworld by celebrating an augmented reality project, but I think in this case it’s not so much augmented reality as alternative reality. And alternative realities have alternative futures.
In solidarity,
Abby