This week, I finished reading What My Bones Know, an intense, beautiful memoir from the journalist Stephanie Foo about healing from Complex PTSD. Thoroughly researched and impossibly lucid, the book is a great service to the mental health profession and field, to all those suffering from complex PTSD, and to anyone in love, community, ...

I always had the impression Paul Verhoeven's 90's movies were glossy, entertaining, yet thoughtless schlock (e.g. RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers). A friend however recently insisted that I give Showgirls (1995) an honest, earnest watch. I ended up being swept off my feet by a movie that I felt was, ...

The Wacky and Wonderful World of the Westminster Dog Show Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Inside Light @ the Park Ave Armory: a reverent & meditative 2.5-hour snippet of a 29-hour opera. I hope to one day experience the opera in full 🌅 8:16pm in Connecticut on one of the longest days of the year A ~70-year old copy of Struwwelpeter, an early G...

Ballet class playlist, 30 songs I remember from a time in my life where I was in a ballet studio pretty much every day 🩰 This week, I had to write something for an old friend whom I first met when we did rather intense ballet together as children/teens. To get into the mindset of our old ballet memories, I searched for some nice playli...

Very Disco In 2004, when my brother went off to college in faraway Boston, he came back his first winter break a changed man. Always cool, he was somehow cooler and even more knowing, and I was desperate to be anything like him. He endowed upon me a hard drive with the following mysterious cultural gems, offered as small clues to his c...

~+70 years Engagement 🎉 a wine that supports auteurist filmmaking 💯 Twigs+Graham+PickleShirt+LadyWong @mahima Unwinged Victory of Samothrace Nest Qanoon videodrome The wide range of typographies, designs, and impressions people made with Chinese seals (A Square Space Incised with Emotions) Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Forever...

Thinking of the mothers who want the very best for their children, whatever that means and however they show it. Thinking of the mothers who want a better world for their children, and who extend that desire to all the world’s children. Thinking of the mothers who want to share a sense of identity, home, culture, history with their chi...

The above is excerpted from a Columbia professor/instructor's anonymous response to the question, “What are your students learning from all this?”. In full: “They continue to be reminded that older generations do not understand the violent world they’ve grown up in. Furthermore, they now believe the adults don’t care to understand.” Fo...

Beautifully shot, scored, paced; a blistering political-visual essay on the unyielding human will for dignity and self-determination. An inspiring call to continue to fight for liberation, no matter how unrelenting the oppressor and its systems and machines. An assertion that liberation is a hard-won, yet certain feature in the flow of...

I experienced a total solar eclipse on Monday (⌐■_■) A time of cosmic & geological overwhelm This rock was our viewing spot. 10 minutes before totality I knew things would ~get weird~, I knew the light would be nightmarish, I knew people often faint, scream, and cry during, but I was not prepared for: • How suddenly the world went from...

Required reading: https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/total-eclipse-annie-dillard Made our way to Saranac Lake to experience the ~path of totality~

A year ago March 28, Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away. I primarily know his work through the movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, where he stars alongside David Bowie in this heart-wrenching, gorgeous film about humanity in wartime. The movie depicts the spiritual torture of realizing the humanity of your conflict-defined enemies, especial...

In Oppenheimer, we never understood why there was such a glaring typo as “trian crossing”. On my 3rd watch (!!), I realized the sign reads “pedestrian crossing” Versailles Rolo’s Calumet Can never get quite enough sleep The brilliant Ivo Dimchev NYT museum Clockwise: - an alternate NYT front page on November 9, 2016 - a letter explaini...

https://www.nypl.org/speakout Last week, leaders of NYC's three public library systems (NY, Brooklyn, Queens) launched a campaign against Mayor Eric Adams' and the NY City Council's proposed budget cuts in the coming FY 2025; these cuts would be the highest proposed budget cuts to the libraries in over a decade. If you're a NYC residen...

Bravo, bravo to Oppenheimer tonight, for its 7 wins, which included Best Picture. For me, it felt like the first time in a while that the Oscars have awarded cinematic achievement, for a movie that deserves to join the canon. Over the summer, there were early critiques of the movie that it didn't show what happened on the other side of...

Peter and I are engaged to be married !! Peter proposed with the help of my best friend Reid, and his family of talented musicians. At the end of a warm, wonderful folksy house concert featuring Cricket Blue and Bold Forbes, Bold Forbes announced they had a final song and began playing Perfect Day by Lou Reed. By the second chord, I kn...

Happy Lunar New Year 🧧 It's Year of the Dragon! From Wikipedia, dragons are: “intense and powerful individuals capable of great good, who make great leaders but are rather unpredictable. [They] are said to be intelligent, magnanimous, charismatic, charming, authoritative, confident, eloquent, and artistic, but can also be manipulative,...

Sophomore year of college, I became close with a group of boys. I had just gone through my first breakup, and was feeling desperately lonely, unloved, and seriously unhappy. This group adopted me and often made it their weekend mission: Operation Cheer Claire Up. In a sea of dehumanizing frat boy behavior, these boys loved me as friend...

Some people were frustrated/angry this week (example and example) that Barbie's Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were not nominated for acting/directing Academy awards, even though the movie was nominated for 8 other awards (including Best Picture, where Robbie is nominated with her production company LuckyChap). The overwhelming sentime...

HNY 2024 + rose parade 🌹 —Marie Antoinette “Language-learning app Duolingo has been steadily firing contract writers and translators, replacing them with artificial intelligence, in one of the most high-profile instances yet of a company getting rid of human workers in favor of AI.” Trying to spend less on eating out, so trying to make...

Favorite movie(s) released in 2023 A tie: Oppenheimer and May December Oppenheimer: A brilliantly-paced, three-in-one movie: Midnight in Paris for physicists, heist flick, courtroom drama. A beautiful film to look at, with a thrilling score. Most importantly however, a movie about how a group of men convinced themselves they were simpl...

“If I got rid of my two copies of Powers of Horrors—even though I know I'll never read either again—it would be as if I were rejecting my younger self, saying to my younger self I never really valued you. —Dodie Bellamy in "Hoarding as Écriture"” While hoarding is generally viewed shamefully, this reflection from Bellamy honors for me ...

For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, For love and friends, For everything thy goodness sends —Ralph Waldo Emerson

https://5calls.org/ iPhone app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/5-calls-contact-your-congress/id1202558609 If you're interested in calling your representatives in the US government to voice concerns, raise an issue, or make your stance as a constituent clear, I started using the 5 Calls iPhone app this week, and I highly recommend it ⭐⭐⭐...

————————— Live long and prosper 🖖

a play: Jaja's African Hair Braiding This play was so much fun, it made me wish it was a movie so I could watch it over and over again. Though without the stage experience, we wouldn't have gotten the crackling, cackling atmosphere of Jaja's salon. A character that stuck out to me was Bea, a woman who is an interpersonal disaster: she ...

Earlier this week, someone was telling me about a lovely celebrity run-in she had: she was walking on the High Line in the early morning, and was enjoying the way the morning light was lighting the walkers' faces. As she stared at people, one person in particular responded with a wave and a delightful smile. It was Wallace Shawn: Which...

The Wailing does what my favorite horror movies do best: it ruminates on and reflects our world back to us in a kaleidoscopic, creepy funhouse. There's something about entering a universe that looks like ours, but has exaggerated features in the form of horror symbolism and imagery, that makes the commentary on our world oftentimes mor...

Help is on the way when the rhythm is glad there is nothing to be sad sasha ❤🔥 Montreal for Dom & Josh: Big in Japan Bar with some tips from the bartender, Dandy's Maple Butter Tart, and poutine of course ziggy peke meets ziggy peke ice packs, electric hand fans, and shade-seeking dainty little true indigo ❤ ziggy & nellie ❤ After init...

One cold weekday afternoon in 2012, I went to a show at the Asia Society for an artist called Sarah Sze. I had the gallery entirely to myself, and as the afternoon passed, I had the sense I was convening with something truly special. I felt awe and wonder at the intricacy of her pieces, at how spontaneous, yet carefully-constructed eve...