Conductivity

Running, disco playlists and social distancing

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CONDUCTIVITY*

The so-called ‘four on the floor’ beat was probably invented with dancing in mind, but it works for long-distance running equally well. The steadiness of it is reliable and propelling. Even if you are not a dancer, something about it forces your feet to move. Recently I have been running almost strictly to the sound of a disco playlist I assembled based on memories of a mixtape I last heard a decade ago. I’ve put in my time running to old favorites like Iron Maiden or more contemporary infectiously-energetic-yet-not-boring alt picks such as Fugazi. You can really do a lot of damage to that barreling sound of Steve Harris’ baseline, preferably from Maiden’s golden era somewhere between Number of the Beast and Powerslave. And you can really feel like you have a reason to keep going while Ian MacKaye yells about setting himself on fire. Later, I got a lot of miles out of Bi-Mental and Dirty Computer and ‘Cuz I Love You, but they all had just a little too much content and not enough of the relentlessness you get from a succession of Donna Summer, Boney M. and Patrick Hernandez. Distance running is all about steadiness, about small but frequent steps, about not keeping your elbows too high or swinging your arms too wide. You want your foot to land toes first and spare your knees and heels. You want your back to stay flat and your shoulders relaxed into their sockets so you can settle into your body as your legs keep working. The form basically begs for a strong, cheerful, undying beat.

***

Running in Brooklyn, sufficiently far from the parts of the borough where some more affluent and business savvy peer of mine might want to move, the crowds you weave through are clad in tracksuits and snicker at you in Russian. It always feels a little like the opening credits to a movie, like a very white-washed Rosie Perez dancing in front of a Brooklyn brownstone. And, for me in particular, it feels like the odd mirror-world in that William Gibson way where all is familiar and yet somehow wrong. The air smells of summertime family gatherings back in Croatia more than fries and cheeseburgers (familiar) and the seagulls bickering on the dirty blue water are replaced by swans (utterly wrong). As I run, I’m listening to a disco cover of the Doors classic Light my Fire. The sun is in my eyes so everything in front of me is a golden blur. I’m listening to the song loudly enough to not be able to hear whatever a group of teenagers is laughing about as I run between them and the neighborhood Applebee’s (now serving breakfast). Everyone seems to be outside, with their kids and their dogs and their grandmas. Three miles in, I cross paths with another runner and start to feel less like a weirdo. I wonder whether all these people on the wood-paneled path encircling the small bay think I’m just some fitness-crazed American. The other runner is holding their arms too high and I judge them for it. My watch keeps track of my body then talks to my phone which then talks to me. In a voice that is neither accusatory nor congratulatory, it informs me that my pace has slowed down. I blame it on a slightly mellow Boney M. take on Rivers of Babylon. I try to re-focus on my movements, check-in with my one knee that always hurts a little, and forget about everyone else who had been drawn out by the unseasonably sunny weather and the anxiety that is now very much in the zeitgeist.

A few hours earlier I am sprawled on a mildly uncomfortable blue lawn-chair in my in-laws’ living room, balancing my laptop somewhere between my knees and hips and turning it around every few minutes to show my husband various disease spread simulations. They had started to inundate the newsletters in my inbox and messages in my social media feeds. People I pay attention to have started talking about some or another thing “in the time of COVID-19”. My husband and I have been debating about traveling to a neighboring state by train all day. In one animation I am pushing into his face, the infected person is represented by an orange dot in a sea of heathy blues. When you click on it, the dots start moving and changing color when they touch. Soon, orange completely overtakes the screen. A bar graph on top of the animation traces out a sharply peaked curve. I am reminded of a quiz I distributed to my students a few weeks earlier – everyone had done badly because they confused an exponential curve with a normal distribution. At the bottom of the same webpage another animation shows a much flatter curve take shape after most of the dots are frozen in place when the simulation starts. Currently, running past a flock of pigeons and slightly terrified by the feathery debris they leave behind because someone once cautioned me about their being dirty, I imagine myself turning orange. If this really were an opening to a movie the camera could move away, zoom out and show us all from above, until everyone surrounding the zig-zag of my route, avoiding a young couple with a stroller now, an older couple with a small dog a few feet later, turned orange as well. I return home soon and ungraciously descend to the living room floor for some wobbly push-ups. My husband is on that blue chair now and my mother-in-law reclines on the couch, debating the situation with a friend on the phone. On the other side of the line the friend is loudly worrying about having to go to a doctor’s appointment. I crunch through the portion of the conversation about a relative’s teacher having tested corona-positive and fall out of every attempt at Bakasana because a ten-minute workout is somehow just long enough for a panic to set in.

***

It’s sort of ironic that disco was introduced to me by my father, a self-declared life-long metalhead who always goes out of the way to point out that he had only ever frequented discotheques back in Yugoslavia to ‘find out how the enemy lives’. Off-color dad jokes notwithstanding, for one New Year’s Eve he made a disco mix tape that later became a staple of many family car rides. My mom always wanted us all to dance on New Year’s, especially when my brother and I were too young to go out and my parents too kind to outsource our entertainment to a relative or a television screen. I don’t think I ever danced to this particular mixtape, but I quickly memorized the order of the songs and could mouth every word from the backseat as we traveled to our cabin in the woods or some work-action at my grandparents’ vineyard. Eventually my father started worrying out loud about having played me too much of Amii Stewart’s Light My Fire and not enough of the Doors’. Re-creating his playlist years later, clicking around on a computer screen rather than messing with an actual tape, I put the song somewhere around mile one, where its boost and slightly berating lyrics are very welcome. My dad’s tape ultimately met its demise in a way that now seems so typical of a time when we did cling onto physical objects for reasons of utility rather than manufactured nostalgia (as I do now with vinyl): someone forgot to roll up the car window one night and an unexpected rain caused water damage to all the tapes we had had in rotation at that time. Of course, when he caught the .mp3 bug much later, my dad did recreate the mix-tape too, but hearing the songs still makes me feel like the ground is moving beneath me, not because I want to dance but because my body expects the soothing whirr of the car. Maybe it’s no wonder that I’ve repurposed muscle-memory into the motions that make up a steady run.

It is not surprising that the perception of disco in Yugoslavia (and then later Croatia) was divorced from many of its cultural and political ties that were more prominent in the United States. I heard about The Night Disco Died a few years ago on a couple of podcasts and realized that there was much more to the genre than all the shininess and all the dancing. Treating genre as a frivolous and hokey thing to indulge in at parties did not paint the full historical picture. The politics of people disliking disco in the States was a politics or racial animus, of a dislike of (implied) queerness, of the same old fear of the other that still drives under-appreciation of certain forms of music. How many artists on my dad’s mixtape were black? How much of their music had made its way under my skin before I had had the clarity to consider the implications of theirs? I revisited my own playlist and got stuck on Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. It’s a song I first heard as a lip-synch track on RuPaul’s Drag Race rather than in my dad’s car and it was performed by an openly queer artist who died of AIDS-related complications in the late 80s. This is the side of the disco story I did not quite get bobbing my head along to Daddy Cool, performed by four musicians from the Caribbean assembled by a controversial white producer, on the way to my grandma’s house.

I thought of Sylvester again on mine and my husbands’ first night back in New York, after we had spent a busy but ultimately pretty blissful week pretending life is normal in my apartment in Illinois. Naively, we had planned to divide our last spring break of graduate school between his research obligations in Connecticut and catching up with friends in the City. I had earmarked a MoMa exhibit for us to check out as a museum date and tried to scheme out a way to get some vegan donuts from a monthly pop-up. On social media, I put out a call for friends and acquaintances to reconnect with me and maybe offer advice on my job search. My husband fielded invitations for brunch, bar nights and poker. We talked about having people over for Italian cards, a bit of Croatia I had been trying to sneak into our shared social life. But then we decided not to get on one train and then another and so on until it became quite clear that it would be more than irresponsible to stick to any of those plans. The contents of our suitcases had already started to overtake the basement of my in-laws’ home anyway. The four of us in equal parts settled into a new shared routine, and braced ourselves for whatever further restrictions on it may still come.

Both of my husband’s parents are career medical professionals and my father-in-law still works in a hospital, in a department where all patients have trouble breathing. Words like ‘respiratory’ and ‘ventilator’ had been part of his vernacular years before this current crisis started and now, he found himself on its proverbial front line. That first night, while we were all still trying to feel out how much exactly we should panic, he outlined for us all the other health crises he had witnessed first-hand. We all remembered SARS and H1N1 (I was already living in the US at this point and was not sent home from boarding school), but he was the only one to have worked when HIV/AIDS was the big fear of the day. He lingered on that last one to underscore how little everyone, including those working in hospitals, really knew about that outbreak and how many times they inadvertently exposed themselves to danger. I realized that until now I had no framework for what that kind of danger of exposure may really feel like. On day five of all of us retreating from the world and more and more towards each other, while watching TV, we overheard my father-in-law take a midnight call from a coworker seeking advice about putting on safety gear before going into some room in their hospital.

***

Since I started writing this letter, I have been running every day and every day I have wondered whether that should be my last run for a while. I have traveled across state lines recently and now I share a home with someone that is very likely to have contact with the virus on the daily. Sure, I can keep distance from people when I run, but how many instances of accidentally breaking the six feet rule are needed before I put someone in danger? As I am likely to be a disease vector, even just one point of too close contact may be enough, and there is a really good case to be made about how I should know better. On day two of our stay in Brooklyn, a man on a bike briefly tried to race me and I am just petty enough to have considered whether I could outsprint him for even a few meters. It will take four more days before I start seeing the really serious, heavy-duty face masks covering men and women walking along my now standard four-mile-ish route. We all somehow have the impulse to be petty before feeling the need to keep extra safe.

As I run and listen to disco, I keep thinking about what we might remember after this is all over, and who. Whose stories will be forgotten or decontextualized? Whose suffering will not become part of legend surrounding whatever media and cultural staples we come to associate with this time? Movie theaters are closing, live tours have been cancelled, and releases of big franchise movies are being pushed back, but we will certainly all still manage to fall in line just enough to watch the same streaming service phenomenon or binge-listen the same song on TikTok or YouTube. At some point my husband joked that we will become masters of cooking noodles and bok choy because misinformed, prejudiced and panicked grocery store shoppers are clearing the shelves of everything other than products they associate with China. Should the era of social-distancing and self-isolation taste like Chinese food out of solidarity and support for all related business that have already lost money? How can we lay the groundwork to eventually tell the younger generations that we had been unprepared, that we didn’t really know how to protect ourselves in the early days, but at least we reached out to those most likely to be discriminated against in the face of crisis?

Unless a radical turn for the better occurs, I will probably stop running. As I am writing this, the mayor of New York City and the state’s governor are fighting over issuing the order to shelter-in-place. A friend from Illinois has been texting for a few days about not being able to find toilet paper in any of the stores, locally or online. My brother is in Germany for work and encountering a closing of borders painfully diametrical to the openness of Europe that allowed him to be there in the first place. This closing is, sadly, probably more than necessary. On Monday I will start teaching through Zoom and I will absolutely not be walking in a graduation ceremony to celebrate having defended my PhD a few weeks ago. It would be a lie to say that I am not worried and anxious and scared. I’m scared for me and for my family and so many of my friends in big cities or on college campuses. The physical distances between us that I have become so used to ignoring over the years now seem ominous. The emotional strain on all of us, the hints of which I can already see emerge between the lines of text messages and emoji-laden Instagram replies, seem like the thing that will definitely get us even if we manage to ward off the coughs and the fevers. At the same time, I don’t want to forget how privileged me and my loved ones are, from the fact that I got lucky enough to be with my husband right now, to the purely basic survival factors such as being in a house with a well-stocked pantry and a strong Internet connection. I can send my mom that video of penguins waddling through Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium and I can laugh with my husband when he says they must be freaked out by the sight of all these fish they’ve never seen before. That connection and that laughter is a privilege. And it is a reminder that I still have some power.

The truth is that many of us have some power over what our new normal will become in the near future. The situation is rapidly changing in terms of public health and economy which opens a whole new space for a changing or re-establishing social norms. We all get some small vote in how that will go. We get to choose to stay home even if the disease probably wouldn’t hurt us all that much because we want to protect others. We get to choose to call friends, check-in on neighbors, bring groceries to someone who lives down the street, or send a book to someone’s kid currently out of school. We get to choose to support artists, service workers, content producers and many others whose livelihood is endangered by social distancing, who are in the unenviable position of having to ‘take one for the team’ while the rest of us keep warm on the bench. And we most definitely get to choose how we talk about the situation, what sort of a narrative we preserve through our writing, talking and photo-sharing, who we center and who we protect in our framing of the crisis. Eventually this will be over, and a new anxiety will become front and center, but the story we tell each other, and ourselves, about what today was like will stick with us and inform how we attempt to weather future storms.

I imagine that in a few years, on some sunny-but-not-too-warm Sunday I will linger in front of the door of my home, scroll through my phone looking for a song that may fuel another steady five mile run (always on my Sunday schedule) and come across something that reminds of me 2020 and days spent near-isolated with my family in Brooklyn. And the part that I really want to imagine is that what I will primary be reminded of is respect and kindness.

Best (and please stay home and wash your hands),

Karmela

P. S. This is the playlist:

That first song is an abomination my dad would have never included, but I heard about it on Slate’s Hit Parade (it’s a pretty wild backstory) and could not get it out of my head afterwards.

* An electric current is just a bunch of electrons moving together, and electric conductivity is a measure of how easy or difficult that motion is within a certain material. In a material with low conductivity, electrons face many obstacles as they try to move, and they lose motional energy through collisions with particles that are not letting them pass further. Such resistance leads to a dissipation of a lot of power, often in the form of heat. In materials with high conductivity the appropriate analogy is one of water rushing through an empty pipe; nothing stops the electron movement and formation of a strong electric current that can only be stop by applying strong electric fields or potentials.

ABOUT ME LATELY

LEARNING: A lot has happened since my last letter, including the fact that I finished writing my doctoral dissertation and successfully defended my PhD. I practiced for my defense talk incessantly and was rather relieved when it went fairly well, from being able to answer all of my committee’s questions to getting some chuckles for the few jokes I bashfully planned for. It was surreal to have various friends and professors shake my hand and call me “doctor”, and I am still getting used to it. I am still working on quite a bit of physics, trying to tie up three publications and making myself available to younger members of my research group while my advisor is away on sabbatical. After my defense, my day-to-day obligations seemingly didn’t change at all and I was thinking about how to move-on from that status quo. I have pretty spectacularly failed to acquire a postdoctoral position for the next year so instead of any grand academic celebration, in the days following my defense I have also been rethinking my career trajectory and my future pretty extensively. The pandemic certainly changed a lot of the moving-on calculus, logistically because my teaching assignment is now quite different than a few weeks ago, but also emotionally as planning for the future seems so silly in the face of so much global uncertainty. The processing of my permanent residentship (and my husband and I have been braving mountains and mountains of paperwork on that front for months) has also been delayed by the current crisis, somewhat complicating my immigration status and adding more anxiety to my trying to imagine anything like “real life” after graduate school. At this point most learning on my plate seems to be of the squishy, fuzzy kind that surrounds bravery, hopefulness and mental health, regardless of how many interesting conversations about Majorana modes in superconducting devices I have with groupmates and other colleagues. Of course, there are also cover letter writing skills and CV tailoring skills and an awful lot I probably don’t know about teaching virtually, but what I’ll mostly probably need to learn now is just how to keep my mind open and light in the face of so much that is just unknowable at the moment.

LISTENING: I’m not a very sophisticated or informed hip-hop consumer but in the past month I’ve been a little obsessed with GREY area by the English rapper Little Simz. This record cycles to genres pretty seamlessly, Simz’s delivery is fast, punchy and otherwise impeccable, and her tone switches between angry and nostalgic in a way that feels more than familiar. Venom and Therapy in particular got stuck in my head though 101 FM also feels like a pretty pure expression of a certain bittersweet mood. In the more familiar musical territory, I’ve been really into Toxic Holocaust and their really good brand of something in between thrash, death and speed metal on Chemistry of Consciousness. And, to round off my fairly incoherent music consumption as of late, I’ve been pretty blown away by the Tuareg musician Mdou Moctar and his incredible electric guitar playing.

On the podcast front I gave in and binged Atlanta Monster. I was something like pleasantly surprised by its approach to the rather grim true crime story the show centers on as it is more complex and uncertain than it could have been, and less sensationalizing than I feared it might be. The way the show ends, however, confused me in terms of both political signaling of any sort and storytelling structure. I have also been pretty invested in Radiolab’s The Other Latif which is really stunning while also being devastating. As many of their listeners, I am used to Radiolab churning out great reporting and packaging it well, but this story still surprised me. It manages to make space for the reporter to be a full-fledged person beyond his reporting while maintaining enough objectivity to highlight a much bigger issue with real political implications. At only six episodes so far, it’s a worthwhile listen for sure. I liked Reply All’s recent episode about taking the search for that one song that’s always in your head but seemingly nowhere else to an absolute extreme as well. It reminded me of some of the early episodes of the show; the signature warmth and joy of those early days is all over it. Finally, Supercontext now covered both a Rush album and a Tool album so if you were ever a pretentious teenager that skewed towards anything under the alternative music umbrella, you basically have to give these a listen.

WATCHING: As always when I am with my husband, my TV and movie watching went through something of a renaissance lately. We caught up on a few shows and delved into a pretty random assortment of movies, a trend that I believe will continue as long as we are forced to spend lots of our evenings inside the house and the only New York City bar and theater available is the one of our own making.

We were both unimpressed with the second season of Altered Carbon on Netflix. It felt even more lazy in terms of exploring all sorts of interesting aspects of re-sleeving across gender, race and class than the first run of the show while also being unnecessarily packed with action sequences. It was a watching experience that left me feeling like there must have been a really interesting story in there, but it just got buried in so many effects, so many characters and so much stilted dialogue that I quickly lost patience for looking for it. I was slightly more on-board with the third season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (another Netflix production) which did tone down some of its more artificial, in-your-face, wokeness that bothered me so much in season two in favor of actually letting characters have both some depth and moral and ethical opinions of their own. A lot about this season was still cringe-worthy but I was not left angry about it when the final credits hit, and some moments of drama and emotional tension actually did resonate with me this time around. Out of pure love of schemes and heists we also sunk some time into HBO’s McMillions, a story about a gigantic defrauding of a McDonald’s promotional game in the 90s, which is darkly entertaining and not much else. There is no big punchline here, just a story with a big wow factor and HBO’s crisp and compelling production. It has the appeal that any whodunnit does which does not actually make it all that good. Finally, we have been watching FX’s Devs on Hulu. As much as I appreciate the experience of waiting for a new episode to drop every week instead of just inhaling it all in one sitting, only four episodes in I am already feeling a loss of momentum. Part of it is certainly my bias against any fiction that hinges on loose babble about interpretations of quantum mechanics (an actual plot point in episode four) but a big part of it also seems to come down to how far Alex Garland’s impressive and eerie visuals can carry a story that is revealing itself to not be as rich and textured as the show’s aesthetics.

On the movie front I was sort of underwhelmed by Three Identical Strangers and sort of irritated by The Laundromat. The first tried too hard to make the viewer outraged and the latter sort of tried the same thing while also being just a tad bit condescending and more than a little gimmicky. On a whim, we re-watched Dirty Harry on our last night in Illinois and having not seen it since I was a kid catching glimpses on late night Croatian TV I was pretty struck by how much it is about Clint Eastwood quipping and showing off rather than the plot which is really fairly thin and driven by a heavily caricatured villain. This is not a good movie, but we agreed that it is quite clear how it could have become iconic. Feeling noir-ish we spent another evening watching Kubrick’s The Killing which was both more fun and less heavy than I expected and gave us way too much material for banter. Finally, as we both seem to feel that we should at least try and spend our social-distancing time dipping into older and more distinguished movies (please recommend some?), we watched the 1969 Best Picture Academy Award winner Midnight Cowboy. This is probably the best film we have watched since we saw Uncut Gems in the theater a few months ago, and though I felt a sense of dread for the future of its two protagonists throughout, when the tragic ending did hit, it was surprisingly wholesome and almost calming. In general, the aesthetics of this movie are impeccable, the scenes of New York painfully on-point, and the whole thing feels like such a poignant testament to a very particular point in time regardless of how timeless its two hustling-and-conning protagonists probably are. It’s a movie that would probably be significantly more gritty and gross if made in 2020 and though it is the only X-rated film to ever win Best Picture, it is fairly tame and at times almost tender (a few pretty bad instances of homophobia excluded) in comparison to so many highly acclaimed movies we consume today. I really enjoyed watching it. And I’m going to need all of Jon Voight’s shirts.

READING: I read the first two volumes of Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s Gideon Falls (a friend brought me volume one while I was in hospital in December - thanks!) and was completely stunned by the art and the layouts. Unlike some other horror comics, it was also genuinely creepy and scary at times. I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on more of the series, especially since volume two did an additionally good job of making me care for the story in addition to being wowed by the art. I also finished Pleasure Activism and have mixed feelings about its very mixed offering of academic essays, re-printed blog posts, poetry, personal essays and some fairly concrete how-to’s. It is overall a worthwhile read, but probably the most so if one skips around and picks and chooses rather than reading it linearly or treating it as a coherent volume. A lyrical essay about squirting or an imagined interview with sex toys is certainly a very different reading experience than a checklist for practicing enthusiastic consent or an academic discussion of Audre Lorde’s take on the erotic. As readers we likely benefit to being exposed to both and I am glad that this book is out there, but also recognize that not everything is for everyone. I would for sure endorse adrienne maree brown’s assertion that all we do should be motivated by a deep sense of an embodied, enthusiastic ‘yes’ (especially in political and movement spaces. However, I would not recommend this book to anyone seeking a very rigorous, rigid or dry discussion of sex, pleasure and the politics that surround them in the present era – brown is purposely looking to do something quite different with her collection despite a fair number of academics having their fingers in it. Finally, I have been reading poems collected in Halal If You Hear Me and though I know next to nothing about being a young Muslim poet (often female or queer or both in this book) I’ve found it quite resonant and emotionally powerful quite often. I read more poetry than ever last year and I’m still really enjoying that newfound habit.

EATING: In the last seven days I have cooked an awful lot because I am dually motivated by being anxious and being with family, and family that is always hungry and always supported by a very full pantry at that. I made pita bread, I made banana bread, I made homemade vegan pho with all the accoutrements, I made at least one stir fry and a whole vegan feast for St. Patrick’s Day. I wrote down exactly zero of these recipes and have largely been letting my intuition guide me rather than trying to check of any steps. I’m still reading a lot of recipes and glimpsing the sort of general formulae at their core has been helpful. For instance, the colcannon that was part of that Irish-ish operation was loosely based on this The Spruce Eats write-up (with almond milk instead of soy, onions and scallions instead of leeks, and a lot more spices than suggested), and this post from the First Mess inspired me to finally use up all the mushy bananas in the house (I used all-purpose flour instead of spelt, coconut sugar for part of maple syrup and mixed in shredded coconut instead of nuts).  I also want to recommend this fairly simple bundt cake from the Full Helping blog which really delivers on the chocolate front and was very well received at my practice defense talk. If you don’t have access to good vegan yogurt (the kind that is mostly coconuts or cashews and probiotics and isn’t very gelatinous i.e. has a very small amount of ingredients and no added sugars or flavorings ), you can use full-fat coconut milk from a can mixed with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar or lemon juice and allowed to curdle for a few minutes before being added to the batter. Finally, a few weeks back, I turned this Lukas Volger sandwich recipe into an oatmeal bowl, and this may have been one of my favorite savory breakfasts yet. Especially if you are stuck cooking with pantry ingredients only in your home, I would very enthusiastically encourage any savory uses of peanut butter and other nut and seed butters.

Since the coronavirus crisis hit, I have been joking that vegan home-cooks are uniquely fit for staying strong in the kitchen as we are already used to cooking with dried beans, frozen vegetables and ingredients like tofu that will not fly off the grocery shelves as fast as animal proteins might. However, I do recognize that not being able to frequent restaurants or facing half-empty grocery stores is a much more dire issue for folks that have families, whose employment is currently in peril or for whom cooking at home is an accessibility or a health issue, and I do not want to make light of that in any way. Back in January I posted a whole lot of vegan tips and recipes across my social media feeds and many of those are fairly pantry-friendly while also not requiring any intense level of culinary skill (after all I am in no way trained as a cook myself). All of them can be found in this document which I am now re-sharing on the off-chance that you might find it helpful. And if you ever find yourself staring at a can of beans or a box of pasta in utter despair over what to eat, please feel free to reach out and bounce some ideas off of me – talking about food and cooking is one of the things I am bound to keep enjoying regardless of how this situation develops.