BEEF

 

This is really good. Like really, really good.

By fully capturing a recognizable So Cal Asian American world, that very specificity becomes a moot point and the story transcends place and culture, becoming both universal and deeply human.

The show tangles with heavy hitting ideas: 

What we oppose, we perpetuate. In hiding what we find monstrous within ourselves out of fear of losing connection, we ironically deny ourselves the vulnerability necessary to experience our own worthiness when it comes to receiving love. Each and every one of us is nuanced shadow and light.

Gristle between teeth. A freighted viewing pleasure.

Child's Play

"We are basilisks walking on water." 

- Benjamin Wilder Horn, age 5

Untitled

nanna, this time is for us

(communion

two jewish ♀)

i am a candle, lit

vaporizing wax

i am a tree, cut

sap glistening at the wound

i am an oyster, shucked

briny tang of another world

i am a woman, whole

do you know the sanskrit word

kapalbhati?

i shine for you

you shine for me

B. 1977

 

I just finished this beautiful book about friendship, collaboration, and the creative process:

The author was born the same year I was and calls our age group the Oregon Trail generation. That rings true for me. 

As a marketing gimmick, the publisher made a video game from the book. 

Appropriate.

Recently a handful of friends, 45 year old women all (myself included), reached out within the span of a week to share about independently purchased hot tubs and wide toed shoes. 

Never would have called that. 

What a delight, these mid-life surprises!

Montreal

i gingerly descend the steep, sweeping staircase to the door.

a pharmaprix umbrella. i set out along sainted streets, all of them men (unlikely).

i pass the same woman twice (unlikely) pushing her child in a stroller, protected from snow and rain.

tarnished mirrors reflect fig leaves. a laptop (not mine) balances on a jenga tower. bathroom walls a bilingual conversation.

churchbells compete to toll noon. carmelite nuns beyond stone walls. an intermittent wail of sirens.

hydrangeas in the snow. back alleys spangled in graffiti and murals.

the 747 to the 55. head canted against the window. people (drunk, homeless, mentally ill) at the gates of chinatown. 

patches in the night air smell of good scotch. vegan sushi, a converted ferry. i filch cucumber water.

hibernating public compost barrels. a dedicated space for friendship awaiting strangers. parks laid bare in winter.

so many miles (kilometers) for this return to self.

Wrestling With God And Self

 Marilynne Robinson's insights in her essays on faith illuminate the heart of Judaism, reframing the Old Testament as the private act of a people striving to make sense of themselves and the world around them...

Even pious critics seem never to remember that, in the Old Testament, the Jews were talking among themselves, interpreting their own experience to themselves.  Every negative thing we know about them, every phrase that is used to condemn them, they supplied, in their incredible self-scrutiny and self-judgement.  Who but the ancient Jews would have thought to blame themselves for, in effect, lying along the invasion route of the Babylonians?  They preserved and magnified their vision of the high holiness of God by absorbing into themselves responsibility for their sufferings, and this made them passionately self-accusatory, in ways no other people would have thought of being. This incomparable literature would surely have been lost if they had imagined the use it would be put to, and had written to justify themselves and to defend their descendants in the eyes of the nations rather than to ponder their life in openness toward God.  By what standard but their own could Israel have been considered ungrateful or rebellious or corrupt?  Granting crimes and errors, which they recorded, and preserved and pondered the records of for centuries, and which were otherwise so historically minor that no one would ever have heard of them – how do these crimes compare with those of other peoples, their contemporaries and ours? The grandeur of the Old Testament, and the fact that such great significance is attached to it, distracts readers from a sense of its unique communal inwardness.  It is an endless reconciliation achieved at great cost by a people whose relation to God is astonishingly brave and generous.  To misappropriate it as a damning witness against the Jews and “the Jewish God” is vulgar beyond belief.  And not at all uncommon.  It is useful to consider how the New Testament would read, if it had gone on to chronicle the Crusades and the Inquisition.

The artwork of Gerald Chukwuma, a contemporary Nigerian artist, beautifully captures for me what it means to tangle with history and self understanding.

If I Wanted A Tombstone

 ...[I don't], it would read: 

Corpse pose was always her favorite.