some extraordinary functions
of tape & tongues
Back in April, likely due to Eid al-Fitr, no kids showed up for a volleyball class I was supposed to teach, so I had extra time. In that gym, the tape marking the court was ragged. I found some line tape in the closet. There wasn’t much left on the roll. I thought about it, then decided maybe I’ll just do one of the ten-foot lines.
So I peeled up a dingy line, clumped it into a tape amoeba, and stuffed it in the trash. Then I started unspooling and pressing down the new, satisfyingly crisp tape only to realize with mounting horror that there was only enough for about a quarter of what needed to be covered, that the old tape had left an extremely tacky residue, that a definitively main part of the court was now terrible to dive on, and that the next class started in fifty minutes. I sighed.
There was no getting out of what had to happen next, so I stuck my arm back in the garbage to pluck out the ball of tape, which had attracted some dust, hair, and detritus during its time in the trash can, and pried off a strip. As I crawled around the court, reapplying bits of sticky, dirty tape to sticky, dirty floor, a situation entirely of my own making, I considered, wryly, whether it was a metaphor for my life in New York City. If this isn’t misdirected overachiever energy, I thought, I don’t know what is.
This anecdote is a long way of saying that I’m looking for a job. Well, another job. I already have anywhere from three to many gigs (aside from the school, club, and company where I coach volleyball, I’ve done web design projects, tutoring, graphic design, earring-making, tutoring, sweater mending, this newsletter, garage sale planning & execution, occasional other paid writing… I’m also a professional public speaker. One time I gave a talk about finding gigs, which was maybe the uber-gig?)
So, let me know about openings among the people & organizations with which you are familiar that might suit a writer/editor with well-developed people skills who would like to keep living in Brooklyn. As long as the company does not frack oil, make weapons, or sell tobacco products, I’m open to it. Bonus points for educational, sustainability, or justice components, but you know what? I’ve been surprised by most every job I’ve had (except, perhaps, all this coaching volleyball—apparently, when a coach said I might be good at it, back in tenth grade, I was receiving a prophecy); the ideas I have about the future don’t necessarily align with job titles.
photo from an excellent Daði Freyr concert I went to this spring: a full circle moment, given that Daði Freyr came up in the first ever Bombazine from the beginning of quarantine. I had watched many videos from that year’s canceled Eurovision competition and then sent an email to a bunch of people about what I’d been listening to and reading and thinking about, which honestly is still how I approach Substack, except this way things look prettier. And you consent to receiving the emails.
There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly. —Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
The last time I attempted to read The Lonely City, based on a recommendation from a classmate, I couldn’t get through it. The first few essays meander through both the writer’s loneliness when she moved to New York City and that of various famous, sometimes doomed-seeming artists. I picked it up again this spring, and perhaps because I was reading the stories with better geographical (and at least some emotional) context, and perhaps because I got a little farther along and noticed how the essays reference and build upon one another, I breezed through the rest of the book and delighted in gems like the paragraph above about how art has “some odd negotiating ability between people.”
Me at Bushwick Repair Fest, wearing earrings I made from the rings on Gatorade bottles, some super-darned socks and re-heeled once-so-far shoes, and working on the sweater from last edition. Photo by Ember Phase Photography.
Pure Polish, based in Bend, OR, offers shoe polish and leather care products without petroleum that actually smell good.
Textile artist Sarah Neubert has a clear and thorough donation-based/free Woven Upholstery Mending tutorial i.e. how to darn a couch!
Rareform makes colorful vinyl bags (totes! cross-body zipper pouches! coolers!) out of old billboards. That is, they’re taking a nearly-impossible-to-recycle material & turning it into useful objects. Two birds, meet stone.
I’ve had the same pair of headphones for about a decade now, and the ear cushions had started deteriorating. Sometimes I’d find black flecks of artificial leather peppering my cheeks, which I was willing to tolerate until the foam on one cushion fully popped out, green and a little obscene. So I ordered replacement ear cushions. This was more difficult than it should have been—V-moda, I’m looking at you—because I had to browse a long list of vendors and open about 20 tabs (the Fight to Repair newsletter has an edition about this exact difficulty!) to find a nearby shop that stocked the cushions, but the end result was so satisfying. These parts were much cheaper than new headphones, and I’m listening to Ludovico Einaudi as we speak, sans facial debris.
For those of you in western Washington state, Booktree in Kirkland is one of very few independent bookstores on the Eastside. Based on the tone of their website and their GoFundMe (as well as the sheer existence of a GoFundMe), it sounds like they could use more business. I am not saying you solve systemic problems by supporting your local bookstore (see Elizabeth Cline on the fallacy of voting with your dollar.) But I *am* saying that if you wish to purchase a book, do not buy it from Amazon. If you’re ordering online, perhaps use bookshop.org and select an independent bookstore most anywhere in the country to receive a portion of the sale.
I stopped buying things from Amazon about six years ago. 2018 was a big year for me: I left my home state for Montana, a place that etches its initials on the underside of your table when you’re not looking. I went on a giant trip to Yosemite National Park, Taiwan, and Whistler, Canada, in that order. A two-year relationship ended and four-year one began. I stopped shaving my armpits. I started graduate school. I stopped drinking. I deleted my vestigial Facebook account and darned my first sock.
Here I started to write a miniature treatise on rules, black-and-white thinking, and the scourge of Amazon, but I think that might need to be a zine. In the meantime, consider this exception I’ve made because it’s a little subversive: Amazon can be an excellent [last-resort] marketplace for hard-to-find replacement parts.
As one of my friends puts it, New York summer is something you love to hate. It’s humid. I feel too warm or remarkably sweaty 2-7 times per day. And yet I still have this pressing urge to go dancing, to be out. I’ll leave you with a music video triptych that captures this energy:
Rihanna gives a buzzcut to dancer Mette who then busts it out in an empty department store in the crackling video for “Lemon.”
Mette, who has since started making her own music, poses and bursts through “Mama’s Eyes,” a kaleidoscopic, ecstatic video.
On first view, Ariana Grande’s video for “yes, and?” was mildly intriguing (she dances clean, but it’s not exactly electric). Upon re-watching and considering the premise—it’s a light-hearted but firm rebuff to critics—I am obsessed with the spirit of the thing. “My tongue is sacred,” she intones, “I speak upon what I like.”
May you, too, consider the ways in which your words are sacred.
In solidarity,
Abby