I'm screaming
How I’m feeling:
I’ve felt creeping anxiety over months of isolation & am itching for togetherness again like a lot of people. I’ve stayed busy with work since the thing that is happening started happening which is a good thing I guess but like everything and like life itself it could disappear at a moment’s notice. I guess negotiating precarity is something everyone is used to now.
My body has felt tattered lately & after time-traveling to 2020 from 1982 through the process of aging I’ve concluded that aging is mostly your body asking you to do more nice things to it & you deciding if you want to cooperate. Also humidity does stuff to your bones / or / something.
I know everyone is anxious about the election but for some reason I am not, yet. In 2016 I had an anxiety attack & depression post-election & the only thing that cured me was reading “Hope In The Dark” by Rebecca Solnit. I think it’s important to remember that one of the processes that is happening right now that is provoking anxiety, is something like, the unspooling of society, which will likely to continue to happen after the election, but we will soon have a better sense of the pace and scope with which it is unspooling and whether we can knit together our own networks of care at a comparable pace.
I intend this newsletter to be a workbook with sketches of articles I’m working on, books I’m reading, stuff I’m thinking about, shows I am watching and music I’m listening to. Really just a niche newsletter for Roshan Abraham fans. ;( “House of Tomorrow” is the working title of a non-fiction book project I have been working on but lately I’ve just been watching cartoons to escape reality so today’s newsletter will mainly be about that.
Watching
In the past few months I’ve been watching almost entirely children’s fantasy animation. I was watching I May Destroy You but it was fucking with my head and my therapist said “you know you don’t have to watch it if you don’t want to,” and I was like oh yeah.
I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time - it was really as good as everyone said it was. The fights were beautifully choreographed it was like ballet. I thought a lot about the character of Prince Zuko, who (spoilers!) probably has the most thorough and convincing redemption narrative that I’ve seen on screen. He apologizes profusely & also cites specific things he’s apologizing for. More importantly, his apologies are not initially accepted and he has to prove himself, individually, to each member of the group before they gain his trust. Of course in “real” “life”, no one owes anyone forgiveness, and personal healing should not be contingent on external acts of contrition, but it’s nice (and dramatically satisfying) to have something approaching a model of redemption in a fantasy series.
I watched the Dreamworks She-Ra series, which was probably the best romantic comedy I’ve seen in the past year. I watched Kipo in the Age of Wonderbeasts which had a really endearing use of music as part of its world-building. (I also liked that virtually the entire main cast is non-white )I watched Hilda, a series about a good-hearted but solitary girl who moves to the big city with her mum, in a world where fantasy creatures and magic are a quotidian part of life. I thought it was a genuinely quite endearing, funny, well-written show. It manages to tell compelling adventure stories without the use of fighting or real villains, which is an impressive feat for a fantasy series. (It seemed odd at the end of Avatar when Ang seems to position himself as a pacifist after three straight seasons of non-stop fighting!)
Books I’ve Been Reading:
Carceral Capitalism - Jackie Wang
Love and Rockets: Maggie The Mechanic - Los Bros. Hernandez
MegaHex - Simon Hanselmann
Podcast: Lost Notes 1980 hosted by Hanif Abdurraqib
Music I’ve Been Listening To:
Soul Jazz Records Presents Space, Energy & Light: Experimental Electronic and Acoustic Soundscapes 1961-88
Junglepussy - JP4 (2020)
YG- My Life 4 Hunnid (2020)
Chloe X Halle: Ungodly Hour (2020)
Arthur Russell - Calling Out of Context (2004)
Hiroshi Yoshimura - Green (1986)
Da Baby - Blame it On Baby (2020)
Beverly Glenn Copeland - Keyboard Fantasies (1986)
Princess Nokia - Everything Sucks/Everything is Beautiful (2020)
What I’m Working On
I’m an Equitable Cities Fellow at Next City where I have been trying to write about harm reduction and community-based approaches to care across the United States. Here’s a story about funding for syringe service programs in California, a state jobs program for people who lost their jobs to Covid in Alabama, and an anti hate crime initiative in New York City that was defunded by the City Council.
I’ve been covering voting in NYC for City Limits. I’ve also been working for the past year on an investigative story funded by Freelance Investigative Reporters and Editors, about healthcare in prison, that I am hoping will run at some point after the election.
The world will be transformed in some way by the next time I send a newsletter so I will see you on the other side of the house of tomorrow that we are building/ together/across generations and for the sake of our safety & imagination.