About a month ago, Lisa invited me and the kid out to Glassell Park to check out the latest show from painter Aaron Morse. The paintings were interesting, but not as much fun as the review Lisa wrote for Momus. I love when criticism can help you see the thing under discussion more clearly than before. For instance:

I was drawn to the artist’s new exhibition at Philip Martin Gallery in northeast Los Angeles, Lights Out for the Territories, by his attenuated, hyperreal clouds—white, cumulonimbus-wily, stretched, almost pixelated upward—and skies cerulean (or violet, or pitch black, or blood red) that convey his unsettled vision of an expansive, celestial West.

Lisa tries to situate Morse’s work in the recent vogue for “Westernalia” but ends up finding resonances with artists stretching back through mid-century sci-fi zines, ’90s comic books, and even the woodcut artist Tom Killion. She explains, “In layering and drawing these styles together, Morse’s paintings stun the reader into a kind of dreamy present.”

“The first six days of war in Iran cost U.S. taxpayers at least $11.3 billion in munitions alone.” (USA Today)

“The strike, which killed at least 165 people, mostly children, according to Iranian state TV, occurred on Saturday, during the first wave of U.S. and Israeli operations against Iran. Shortly after, several videos appeared showing a girls’ school in Minab largely destroyed.” (CBC)

“In FY2024 (the most recent year for which complete data are available), USAID managed more than $35 billion in combined appropriations…” (Congress.gov)

“As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” (Atul Gawande, New Yorker)

“To partially offset the cost of trillions of dollars in tax cuts, the [One Big Beautiful Bill] legislation includes $186 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).” (Urban Institute)

“33.6 million adults and 13.8 million children — including nearly 2 million children under 3 years old — lived in food-insecure households in 2023.” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

“The 20 richest people in the [U.S.] hold a collective $3 trillion—nearly half of all American billionaire wealth—up from $2.3 trillion a year ago.” (Forbes Australia)

“There are about 33,000 homeless veterans in the United States, about 14,000 of whom live on the streets. Veterans make up around 5 percent of the unsheltered homeless population.” (New York Times)

I haven’t written about it here, but over the last six months I’ve been teaching myself black and white film photography with a sweet little Pentax K1000. I’m doing all the developing and scanning at home. It’s really fun!

Part of why I’ve taken on this project has been to build up my knowledge and skills to eventually tackle using my dad’s old Sinar P. The Sinar P is a 4×5 camera with so many pieces and variables you have to control for. Among those variables is metering. Luckily, my dad’s old Pentax Spotmeter V still works, and I’ve been teaching myself how to use it. My investigations led me to this very specific vinyl sticker that you can place over the Spotmeter V’s exposure calculator such that the readings correspond to the famous zone system of metering. It makes determining exposure and shutter speed much more intuitive. This is the kind of thing that makes me happy the internet exists!

The California state legislature is considering a new law to change management and funding for our state forests. This would be massive news for Jackson Demonstration State Forest, the 48,652-acre publicly owned redwood forest in Mendocino County that is currently managed by CalFire and that continues to be extensively logged—and to generate extensive protests. This law could change all that for the better, prioritizing “biodiversity, fire resilience, tribal co-management, carbon sequestration, and recreation instead of timber production.” I’m taking that summary from a great call to action put out by Mendocino Trail Stewards, which Evan kindly sent my way. The big takeaway here is that public comment closes this coming Monday. If you want to add your voice, do it soon! (And if you’re curious, you can read my letter to the Natural Resources Committee.)

Goodbye foam pear, once my grandmother’s, till I slipped it from her sideboard into my suitcase during a visit to her home, back when she was living in Oxnard, back when she was. Goodbye foam pear with bite marks from my child, who pressed his teeth into it while looking me in the eye, a hunter who has many times been thwarted but now captures his prey. Goodbye foam pear that liked to hide in the fruit bowl, by the apples and kiwis, back when it still looked like something you might slice and have with yogurt in the morning. Goodbye foam pear, nearly weightless memento. Now memory alone will have to suffice.

I recently submitted the following letter to the California State Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee. (Here’s their letter portal if you want to submit your own.) I was inspired by this call to action from Mendocino Trail Stewards.

Dear Chair Bryan and Members of the Committee —

I’m writing in support of AB 2494 and taking action to bring Demonstration Forest management into the 21st-century, and make it work for local communities, for local economies, and for local environmental health. I have lived most of my life on the Mendocino Coast, and now I live in LA but still spend at least month staying with family in the area every year. One of the most notable aspects of life in Mendocino County is that publicly accessible public lands are largely restricted to a thin strip along the coast. (I noticed this recently when visiting my brother in Humboldt county, which has significantly more accessible nature away from the coast.) The lack of public lands is mostly because the beautiful redwood forests by and large belong to logging companies. But it is also because our publicly owned demonstration forest, Jackson State Demonstration Forest, is managed more as a timber harvest operation than as a public good.

In recent years there have been extensive protests against timbercutting operations, yet CalFire continues to manage the lands much as they have in the past: coming up with THP’s, not developing the inland mass of the forest for recreational use, and pursuing a status quo that isn’t working for our communities. It’s time for a change! AB 2494 offers the potential to turn these treasured forests into the public good they always could have been.

I have a story: in 2018 I was teaching poetry lessons in the public schools in Mendocino and Fort Bragg. One day the opportunity came up for me to combine one of my poetry lessons with a field trip the Environmental Studies class at Mendo High was taking to the “Fritz Wonder Grove,” on Mendocino Land Trust land in the Big River watershed. This land is remarkable not because it contains old-growth trees of ancient age, but because it was only cut once and since has grown back truly enormous trees. It demonstrates the incredible resilience of redwood forests, and it makes a great place to help students write ecological poetry. (What we were studying that spring.) It also showcases the way that our forests can serve science, education, and recreation—beyond just supplying so many board feet per acre.

This bill represents low-hanging fruit! We should seize it! The big timber companies are opposing this bill not because it will significantly dent their bottom lines, but because it might show a different way to steward our forests, after a century-and-a-half of systematic destruction. Good!

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, Jasper Nighthawk

As I was introducing my photographs in the last Lightplay, I started thinking about the politics of abstract photography and the ways that the desert, in its bareness, can lend itself to seeming empty, untouched, unperturbed. Wrong ideas, all!

This reminded me of Richard Misrach’s incredible photographic work in the Nevada desert.

Bomb Crater and Destroyed Convoy, Bravo 20 Bombing Range, Nevada

As the Whitney Museum’s accompanying text explains,

For the Bravo 20 series, Misrach spent nearly two years in an isolated northwest corner of Nevada’s Great Basin desert, prompted by a recent discovery that the United States Navy had been illegally treating these public lands as a bombing range since 1952.

I love how these photographs tangle up aesthetics and beauty and politics, rightly making a big powerful ball of them. And how wild it must have felt for Misrach, tipped off by locals, to find the pit where the army was dumping radiation poisoned farm animals—and to find in these carcasses the makings of such a powerful piece of art.

Dead Animals #1

The ongoing destruction of the Washington Post is such a sick sign of the times. I canceled my subscription last March, and since then Jeff Bezos and his flunkies have only grown bolder in their gutting of the paper. I appreciated former Executive Editor Martin Baron’s statement after the complete destruction of the sports and books sections. He knows whereof he speaks when he writes:

The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top —from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity. Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands… Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.

(Found via Ruth Marcus’s excellent New Yorker piece, “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post”)

What is it that makes certain symbols and stories rise to the heights of ubiquity? And what is it that makes certain people adopt them as personal totems, or even, sometimes, as load-bearing parts of their personalities?

This Disney-era Star Wars odd couple—Mando and The Child—has certainly entered the canon. And I get it. The Child is cute! Heck, even my kid has a The Child plushie!

But doesn’t the pairing also have a weird, police state energy? The mask-always-on mercenary and the foundling. Dream-archetypes of violence and innocence, each needing the other to survive a cruel world. (And I know, I know, The Child ends up having superpowers.)

My point is: Raising Arizona it’s not. And it’s a bit intense to cover your car in it.

In case you aren’t paying attention to the ongoing and increasingly dystopian war against trans people, as of today—and with basically zero notice—all trans people in Kansas have had their driver’s licenses canceled. Per Erin Reed’s reporting, they’re being told to go to the state DMV and get new licenses showing their sex assigned at birth. This might sound like nothing more than a bureaucratic hassle, but it’s way more than that. It can lead straight to incarceration in a different-sex prison, and all the perils that entails:

The consequences for noncompliance could escalate quickly. Under Kansas law, driving without a valid license is a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine—though first-time offenders are more likely to face a citation and fine. A conviction, however, triggers an automatic 90-day license suspension. If a person drives during that suspension, they face a charge of driving on a suspended license, which carries a mandatory minimum of five days in jail. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates by sex assigned at birth.

My favorite Minneapolitan, M Allen, finally wrote about the occupation, in a piece titled “conceal and carry” about “the weight of a gun in my hand.” The writing is quotable and sharp:

When I send my own dad the paper target, with a cluster of shots in the middle, he asks how it felt. Was I scared? Did I become suddenly more powerful? But it was like most heightened experiences, I watched myself less with feeling than to steady necessary breath. I watched myself divorced from myself, thinking not of a human I feared, but one I loved, and the word necessity. I think of the tools we have used to fight for each other throughout time, a stone, a guillotine, a gun.

There’s a weariness in this writing, together with a sense of resolve. M Allen writes that “The people who are dusty and bedraggled with this integrity, whose eyes are shiny with it, whose voices are hoarse, they are like beacons.”

The essay is ultimately about transformation—but not into an ice-cold shooter, rather into someone who knows that they will do what needs to be done to protect those they love. “It can’t only be me,” they write, “we looked around and saw fortitude in each other, saw strength and it awakened such a hunger to be alive, to be more than labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. To become beacons ourselves.”

Labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. What a damning survey of what our society gives us. I’m hungry to be more than that, too.

M Allen’s writing glows with the intensity and purpose of months on the ground, resisting violent fascism—not an experience one would ever ask for, but clearly an intense and meaningful and even transformative experience nonetheless.

(This piece made me think about an argument I had with a loved one after my note on “diversity of tactics”. He encouraged me to change tack and instead call out and shun any violent acts by folks I otherwise agree with. He said I should not just practice nonviolence as a tactic but actively be “anti-violence.” I see where this view is coming from and can even admire it, but by my lights, moral absolutism is no fit for our time of ascendant fascism. Just as there’s a paradox of tolerance, I see a paradox of nonviolence. If your opponent can and does murder protesters and observers in broad daylight, with impunity, it’s clear that the space for nonviolent resistance is being constrained. I’m not saying give up on nonviolence as a tactic—not at all!—but I am saying I can understand why M Allen and their friends are learning to use guns. Pacifism as a virtue above all others is a dead end.)

How have I never seen these amber snails with Green-banded Broodsacs in their eyes before?

Bryan Pfeiffer wrote about them, and that’s his video I clipped, but I found out about them through an interview with Pfeiffer on the lovely podcast Rumble Strip: Episode #309 - Zombie Snails. I love Pfeiffer’s conversation with host Erica Heilman. In particular, I love the contrast between the guest, a wonder-filled biologist, and the deadpan humor of the host.

“And [birds] pluck the pulsing blue broodsac out of the snail’s eye socket,” says Pfeiffer.

“Oh,” says Heilman, “So now it’s even Oedipal.”

This weekend we visited a dear friend who I am connected with because she and my mother-in-law befriended each other in their early twenties. We’ve stayed with our friend many times—she’s a great and generous host—and one of the incredible things about staying with her is that she has lived in her same beautiful house for my partner’s entire life. Each visit is also a return.

On this visit, I took my child out to the back yard and showed him the orchids. These orchids were given to our friend as a housewarming present by my child’s great-grandmother, half a century ago.

What are we planting today that might bloom and keep blooming, decades from now?

In these days, I think it’s important not to look away from death, grief, and transformation. So I was delighted to get to engage in a wide-ranging podcast interview with Kriss Kevorkian, a thanatologist who holds the distinction of having invented the term “Environmental Grief.” I wrote in my blurb for the episode that “Kriss talks about thanatology, her own work on behalf of the Southern Resident Orcas in the Salish Sea, and how we can harness environmental grief to act on behalf of the non-human world.” A rich vein of thought, and one we don’t discuss enough.

When you ferment, you want things to get funky, but not too funky. Since last time we checked in on the sauerkraut and the pineapple vinegar, each had a moment of seeming like all was lost.

With the sauerkraut, one day I checked on it and found that the water level had fallen far enough that a layer of cabbage was no longer submerged. And this layer was developing a suspicious white mold. Oh no! I carefully removed the weights and then even more carefully removed all of the bad cabbage, erring hard on the side of removing too much. Then I carefully cleaned the sides of the crock with paper towels, scrubbed the weights with soap and hot water, and added more brine. I packed it all up and set it back on the shelf, worried that the mold would re-appear and I would have to discard the whole batch. But the mold never came back, and another week later I tasted the remaining kraut. No off flavors, no sense that anything had gone wrong. Instead, just deliciously sour sauerkraut.

With the vinegar, I strained out the chunks of pineapple skin after a week, leaving a cloudy liquid. It first turned to wine (it tasted sharp and wild), then started developing lacy white foam on top. I worried this meant it was somehow infected, so I carefully skimmed it all out. Then I realized: doesn’t vinegar need to grow a “mother” to really ferment? So I stopped skimming, and sure enough it grew a leathery little layer of bacteria and yeast on top—and shortly thereafter it started tasting like—you guessed it—vinegar. Strongly pineapple-scented, wonderfully funky (in a good way) vinegar.

This was my first time making my own vinegar. I found it empowering, getting to track the process from beginning to end. Previously, vinegar was just something I found in the condiment aisle at the grocery store. Now I know how it’s made. The simple mystery (where does vinegar come from?) has been replaced by deeper mysteries (what’s really happening in there? what makes great vinegar great? what else can I transform like this?).

Related: an account of evolving tactics in “Fighting for the future in occupied Minneapolis” by Pranay Somayajula. Loved this bit in particular:

My comrades and I often make reference to the idea of “developing mass protagonism,” a concept with roots in Latin American Marxist thought that expresses an understanding that successful organizing means helping people see themselves not merely as passive subjects of history, but as active agents with the collective power to bring about revolutionary transformation. I have become increasingly convinced that rather than asking people what radicalized them — a familiar question for anyone who has spent time in left activist circles — a better query would be: what protagonized you? Over the last several weeks, whether or not they realize it yet, thousands of people across Minnesota have found an answer to that question.

One of the great tricks of late-stage capitalism is to convince the mass of us humans that we are powerless in the face of the machinery of state power and capital. But in fact it is nothing more than our collective decision to believe in authority and numbers in a ledger that allows these systems to persevere! As Ursula K. Le Guin famously said,

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality… We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Another way I like to feel connected to other people is to root for a sports team. Being a fan means sometimes giving yourself over to ecstatic celebration, other times sharing in a collective sorrow. If you do it right, you care inordinately about a game defined by arbitrary rules, played by people you’ll likely never meet. The key is doing it together.

As a fan of the Golden State Warriors, the past decade has given me plenty of sports nirvana (four rings!) but also some gutting setbacks (Durant’s Achilles tear, Klay’s ACL tear, Draymond’s nut-shot and punch, James Wiseman, etc.). I’ve shared all of these ups and downs with my brother, with my partner, and also with the writers and commenters on the many fan-blogs I follow. Whenever a big piece of Warriors news comes out, I’m immediately curious how other people reacted, what they thought, how they felt.

Two weeks ago, our second superstar, Jimmy Butler, (for whom I was ecstatic that the Warriors traded) tore his ACL. This has mostly sunk our chances to make the playoffs, let alone win a championship, this season. And with Greatest Warrior of All Time Steph Curry now 37 years old, it may mean the end of what has been a glorious run.

To process this, I of course turned to my two favorite blogs: Golden State of Mind and Dub Nation HQ. There was plenty of openhearted, thoughtful writing in both the blog posts and the comments. I especially appreciated this meditation by a guest blogger named Riley Gaucher. Gaucher writes openly about their own tendency to be a fair-weather fan, riveted when the team is winning and tuning out when they suck. (Honestly, same.) This leads them to some deep places:

Mortality. For me, watching athletes get injured always makes me confront my mortality. If this whimsical escapism with wholly artificial meaning can be threatened by reality, what does that say about my real-world life? And what is the point of giving so much of my time and energy and hope to something that hurts so bad and now seems so hopeless? Without any realistic chance to compete, how do I keep the same passion for this team and sport? Will I be able to defeat my fair-weather tendencies or will I let the Warriors be a smaller part of my life now?

A week after Butler’s injury, the Warriors’ plans were again thrown in disarray—but this time it was because of our increasingly fascist moment. They were scheduled to play an away game against the Minnesota Timberwolves the same day that federal agents murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The league ended up postponing the game by a day.

This was a small disruption, in the scheme of things. But not knowing what else to do, I checked the sports blogs. And I found that the post about the postponement was offering a vital space for the site’s regular commenters to share their grief and fear.

One comment in particular struck me as one of the smartest, and scariest, warnings I’ve seen about the wave of authoritarianism that’s currently breaking against our political system and communities and neighbors’ bodies. It came from the commenter ScottWarrior, whose comments I’m very familiar with. ScottWarrior posts on Golden State of Mind after almost every game. He’s opinionated, informed, and verbose. He often engages in back-and-forths with other commenters, engaging in spirited conversations about which players deserve more or less playing time, coaching decisions, moments that swung the game, etc. I always appreciate reading what he has to say. So I was interested to know what he would say here.

The whole comment is worth reading. It offers the perspective of an emigré from an authoritarian state—Belarus—discussing how that regime operates and answering the question “How does it work so that the people of Belarus can’t get rid of him for so long?” The part that most interested me was about how the security services work:

At 18, the male half ends up going to the army instead. All male population has a compulsory 2 year army service. What do they do after that? The options are going back home, stay in the army in some capacity or get a job with police. Police and army are the top priorities by the dictator. He builds free accommodation for them in the cities (get a job - get a flat in the capital), pays top salaries, have their retirement age at 45 y.o., etc. No special skills is needed and any village boy can have an above average life in a city. But the most important thing is that no matter what the policemen do, the dictator never throws them under the bus. They kill opposition leaders on his behalf, kill protesters on streets or torture thousands of them in prisons, but they know one thing for sure - as long as he is in power, they won’t be ever brought to justice (the court is under his control too, obviously). Per capita, we have 10 times more police than the neighbouring Poland. Dictatorship always needs armed protection by loyal forces.

Protests have no chance because it is always unarmed people, a lot of them, against armed police and sometimes army. For the protest to have a chance, one needs at least a small part of armed people, police or army, to change sides or at least refuse shooting people, but it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen because the police is part of the regime. You overthrow the regime and 90% of them would lose their jobs. They know it and they also know that they don’t know how to do anything else to get another job. For some, mostly the top officers, the situation is even worse as they would get to prison for what they have previously done as part of the system.

This is bleak stuff, and I feel real sorrow especially for the people of Belarus. It also feels crazy to find some of the more coherent political analysis going down in the comments of a basketball fan blog. But then why would that be so crazy? Community is where you find it, and we can find our best comrades in our regular haunts.

We went to see Fuzz play a rare hometown show at the Bellwether. In response to their technically hypercompetent, psychedelia-inflected punk stylings, the crowd exuberantly moshed and crowdsurfed. With everything happening out in the world, it felt good to be out with everyone else, earplugs in, rubbing shoulders together, all moving with the music.

(Also, check out Ty Segall’s kick drum. More of this, please!)

Lisa has been wearing this t-shirt for a decade now:

Over the weekend, the kid asked what it was a picture of, and we both realized that we didn’t know. Was it the silhouette of a real portable library or was it just a fantasy of one, à la Moose’s Book Bus? Lisa had been following Feminist Library on Wheels on Instagram for many years but had never seen a picture of anything that looked like this glorious, bike-core contraption. So we scrolled back and back and back—and found the sacred machine!

Vincent Poturica writes in to share his own encounter with a tiny book, which happened to coincide with reading my essay on “The Zen of Tiny Books”:

I’m in NYC and, yesterday at The Cloisters, took a couple pics of an astounding, tiny prayer book (from a Dutch Middle Age artist) that moved me to tears.

This “diminutive Book of Hours” was made by Simon Bening circa 1530-1535. It measures about 2½ by 2 inches. The catalog text goes hard on its enchanting tininess:

It was a reminder of the omnipresence of God, meant to be attached to its owner, or stored with precious possessions. There is a special magic achieved by Bening’s exceptional skill at creating a miniature world. The miniatures follow standard convention, but Bening consistently tweaks the presentation, making this manuscript exceptionally poignant and affecting.

I wish I was in New York…I’d go visit this book that so moved Vincent!