Escape Velocity
Every time we sit down to watch a movie, whether it is joyful or terrifying, it seems to be about right now. (Thinking about movies when the pandemic is all you can really think about.)
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This letter contains spoilers for the films Shirkers and Burning and a few very mildly bad words.
ESCAPE VELOCITY*
Every time we sit down to watch a movie, whether it is joyful or terrifying, it seems to be about right now.
***
At this point in the pandemic, I am giving up on a lot of podcasts. Politics podcasts, economics podcasts and culture podcasts don’t seem to exist anymore. We mostly have coronavirus podcasts now. We have COVID-19 podcasts. We have “in this era of the pandemic” and “in this new normal” and “in this strange time” podcasts. I can’t really take it. At this point in the pandemic, I’m back to listening to shows reviewing TV series I’ll never watch and music I’ll never listen to. I’m back to listening to writers talk about writing and poets talk about poetry and sighing aspirationally. At this point in the pandemic I’m listening to commentary about the Michael Jordan documentary just because Space Jam was my favorite when I was a kid.
***
We watched Sandi Tan’s Shirkers on a mellow Friday night, after getting through the amorphous mass of “work for the day” and after everyone else in our household had gone to bed. I had heard about it on a podcast and mostly remembered the title – the string of hard r’s and k’s simultaneously reminds of me of my own language and makes my tongue stumble. This set the right tone. Watching Shirkers was sort of nostalgic and joyful, but in a distinctly prickly, textured way.
Shirkers is a documentary movie about a scripted movie also titled Shirkers. When she was 19, Sandi Tan and a few friends made Shirkers in Singapore together with her teacher and mentor Georges Cardona. Then Georges unexpectedly left the country and took all the footage with him. Both Shirkers and Georges were lost for nineteen years. In 2011, Tan learned he had passed away but the film, without the audio track, was preserved. The documentary fills in all the spaces it possibly can in the timeline of Tan’s engagement with Shirkers. Partly, it is about making your own art no matter what, and about being a creator stopped from owning their creation. Partly, it is about the underground punk and DIY scene in Singapore in the 90s and the thirst for weird movies in a somewhat restrictive society. Partly, it is about being 19 and obliviously working on your dreams with your friends. Partly, it is about a troubled man who seemed to be some sort of an emotional vampire praying on artists in particular. Partly, it must also be an excuse to show footage from Shirkers and publicly mourn its never becoming what it was meant to be.
Shirkers is pretty delightful to watch. The colors, the soundtrack and the undercurrent of softness in so many of the shots of the original and the documentary alike all build to an experience that goes by quickly and engrosses you almost instantly. It made me think of the animated film Paprika, but also something like the inverse of David Lynch, or maybe David Lynch if he was trying to convey a particularly pastel apocalypse. My husband and I kept asking each other whether we knew Singapore were so green. It made us want to go outside and read comic books while lying in the grass; something we’ve literally never actually done together.
Shirkers had been slated to be a phenomenon in Singapore at the time of its making, and film critics wrote about it as it was being filmed. It was considered to be way beyond its time. Since it was never finished and for so long considered lost, Tan was asked to write about it repeatedly. She could never go through with it because it was too emotionally taxing. The original Shirkers film would be a perfect Rosebud-ish metaphor for childhood creativity and naivete were pieces of it not embedded in the documentary. Here, Tan both looks for and finds Shirkers in its tangible, physical form, so it becomes something like a talisman or a totem. Its magical quality is that it has been reverberating through Tan’s life for decades. Having it in her possessions and processing it through making a film about those emotional aftershocks is part of her trying to reign-in its spiritual force.
In doing so, Tan allows it to reintegrate into her life. If Shirkers the movie presented an important point for her as a young artist, Shirkers the documentary not only immortalizes that part of her persona, but also added to her contemporaneous success. In 2018, the documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award. It holds a 100% approval on Rotten Tomatoes. Somewhat ironically, however, it has only been distributed by Netflix. How deeply lost in Netflix’s algorithm might it be for many of its users? Tan managed to resurrect Shirkers only for those already sort of looking for it. Maybe this too is a part of taming her story with Shirkers, maybe being lost in the endless scroll of animal abuse documentaries and reality dating shows about traditionally attractive people is how one lives up to wanting to make a cult-classic as a teenager nowadays.
What stuck with me the most while watching Tan’s documentary, however, was the loss of some of the wildness, creativity and egotism of childhood that she viscerally experienced when her film and the man she creatively looked up to vanished. She is not always a sympathetic narrator. She made an internationally famous zine very young and she fell into making movies following the splash that Shirkers made while in production. She became a film critic right after college and met many of her idols through writing about their work then went to film school in New York and even published a fiction novel. When recounting her career, Tan makes it sound like she never really knew what she was doing, like she was falling upwards most of the time. It can be hard to empathize with someone like that. A few times in the documentary her past collaborators recall how intense she was on the set of Shirkers. In one scene, her best friend, cinematographer Iris Ng, exasperatedly calls her self-centered and an asshole. She shares that Tan was oblivious of all the hard logistical work behind the scenes of Shirkers. In a typical self-assured teenager move, she even cast herself as the main character. Georges is the villain for most of the film, but Tan is a close second more often than not. She doesn’t dispute her friends’ memories of her younger self. She acknowledges she thought she was hot shit. And she admits to being more scared, more flailing, less self-assured in the wake of losing Shirkers. She lost that blind faith in her ideas and talent. I completely believe her.
I remember being the kind of kid that thought she was the smartest, that she always deserved a seat at the adult’s table and a voice in any serious discussion, that she was going to be famous, maybe even be president, definitely be someone people look up to. I was ready to be everyone and do everything. I never made a movie over the course of one summer, but there was a time when I am sure I would have jumped right into that. Well into high school I drew incessantly and wrote short fiction. In middle school I went to something similar to journalism camp twice. No-one in my family really believed me when I said I’d do science for a living because I would not shut up about so many other seemingly more creative endeavors. But I did. My husband and I share something of a history of rational college choices – him only minoring in creative writing and me giving up on philosophy as a second major in favor of the more pragmatic math degree. Watching Tan and her friends recount their maddening and exhausting project, we admitted to each other a small pang of regret, a slight bit of nostalgia for a parallel universe where we did things slightly differently. Where we maybe did them with a bit more of that childish audacity and bravado.
Shirkers is full of women who are creators and artists. It adds to its vibrancy and texture that theirs are voices that are not always amplified. Maybe it’s already a tired trope to write about how often women are made to feel small, or like they have to make themselves small. It may be equally devastatingly normal to acknowledge that if being a successful creator requires panache and self-centeredness, then many women are not competing on an even playing field to begin with. We don’t go on to nurture our egos after we are told not to be snobby or bossy or shrill. I got into a Zoom argument with a friend recently about whether it is right to ask women to change what they look like to “navigate the realities of sexism” and consequently be successful. I surprised myself by being really hurt by this discussion. Staying at home and being a thumbnail of a face and that one yellow cardigan on a video call in recent months allowed me to forget how insecure trying to make rational, pragmatic, adult decisions about how I present myself had made me in the past. Tan and her friends were punks and they were weird. They’d go to school dressed as nurses just because they could. They watched movies no one else wanted to watch. When writing for a zine run by a man didn’t work out, they started their own. They didn’t shrink or try to navigate any sort of reality. Not until they lost Shirkers. Has Tan now reclaimed some of that young freedom and reckless carelessness? Watching her documentary underscored for me that though I have never really been an artist, I could certainly use some more of that as well.
What watching Shirkers made me realize is that it is such a privilege to have what Tan had before a man took her movie and sent her on a nineteen-plus-years stumble through an artists’ sort of grief. Just imagine being a self-centered brat with a dream and pulling it off with a little help from your friends. As Tan says: “There are moves. There are shakers. And there are shirkers.” There are so many things that are absolutely nonnegotiable right now. There are new norms that are keeping us alive and healthy. Shirking those would quite clearly be malicious and harmful. Yet, the physical confinement, the actual lack of space that will be our reality as long as we have to stay at home to stay safe, makes our old mental and social constraints seem so much harsher. From this viewpoint, nineteen-year-old Tan’s tagline rings as aspirational. These days, playing it safe means putting on a mask, wearing gloves, seeing friends only through screens, giving up on favorite restaurant meals. Being safe is a tangible action with prescribed steps. It is pragmatic in the true sense of the word, so different and so much less malleable than the safety and pragmatism we invoke when conforming to a norm we dislike or avoiding a project that may fail. With so many norms collapsing around us and so much fear confining us further and further, why should we in this moment chose to make our dreams even smaller? If we ever regain the kind of safety that actually feels safe again, maybe we all ought to do more choice shirking.
***
At this point in the pandemic, I am learning that people I love are ill. None of them have the coronavirus, but they are certainly in danger. There’s lots of talk about biopsies, scans, bloodwork, going to the doctor in three week or in six weeks, getting an appointment as soon as possible. Ironically, pandemic-related measures have made it easier to get appointments with specialists you’d usually have to wait on for weeks. Ironically, pandemic-related anxieties have made it impossible to separate the fear of one disease from the fear of another. Being sick now has an extra-layer of being sick and at risk of the virus simultaneously. Being sick now means getting tested for the virus before any procedure, sitting in the waiting room socially isolated and covered up, waiting for results that will only address half of your fears. You need a piece of good news to be able to even fully access and engage your bad news. I don’t know how to fear for a loved one that is ill right now, and I don’t know how to brace myself for what they might have to go through. At this point in the pandemic, I’m not sure how to be sad or scared anymore.
***
In high school, I was big on Haruki Murakami. I was taken by the slow, melancholic atmosphere of his books. They knitted together lots of sad men, lots of worrisomely young women; lots of people getting pushed together by desolation and sorrow rather than some other social glue with more of a positive tinge. As a teenager, I unconsciously flattered my own glumness by reading about people that were broken in a seemingly elevated way. I was reminded of Murakami recently when a friend railed against literary fiction on a Zoom call (another yelled “He’s just a mood” from a different gallery view tile and they were right) and then again when we watched Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, a loose adaptation of a Murakami story.
It is reductive to describe Burning as a love triangle story, but much of its slow and relentless run is about patiently fleshing out each of the traingle’s corners. At one sharp point is Lee Jong-su, an aspiring novelist and a Faulkner fan. He’s dealing with the fall-out of his father’s anger issues (he is being sent to prison for assaulting a government official) and his mother’s abandonment (she briefly re-emerges, but only to ask for money). He works odd jobs, drives a clunky, dirty pick-up truck, and lives on a farm that seems to be either failing or has failed already. For most of the film, he doesn’t know what he should be writing about. We view the story through his eyes and it is the subject matter he settled on in the end. At times the camera literally shifts to where his gaze would land, staying there so long it becomes uncomfortable to be inside his head.
At another corner of the triangle is a rich man called Ben. Upon being introduced, he describes his job as too complicated to explain, but exciting enough that it makes him feel like he is just playing. It sounds like some bougie, entitled, dark money crap. He is well-groomed and trim. He only ever eats in empty restaurants and hard-to-find coffee shops that have the kind of sparse interior design that inevitably makes you think of Apple or some similar branded visual seared into our collective psyche through years of advertising. Everything about him is a signifier of wealth and class. He says he’s never cried in his life. He also says he burns greenhouses, commits arson once every two months because that is a “good pace” for him. Mimicking the impersonal, generic EDM music from a brief dance club scene, when he explains the appeal of this crime, he rhythmically taps his heart and says he needs it so he can feel the deep bass inside him. He needs the thrill of fire and destruction to feel more alive. From the moment he shows up on screen, it is clear that if he gets the girl, we are supposed to hate him.
At the third corner is the girl, Shin Hae-mi. She says she used to be ugly but got plastic surgery that made her prettier, but also barely recognizable to Jong-su. They used to be classmates and she used to live in the same rural are, then maxed out her credit cards seeking new life in the big city and purpose-seeking trips abroad. On one of these trips, she cries in the Kalahari Desert because a sunset makes her feel like not existing. Her upbeat energy drives the relationships with the two men, but she falls asleep on dates, during dinners, after a small taste of weed at Jong-su’s farm. Hae-mi seems lie often, putting lots of affect into grey-ish lies that award her attention. Burning takes a turn from tense to outright scary when she disappears and the triangle collapses into a line connecting two male bodies only. They shrink to singularly focused points and orbit each other briefly but find no real equilibrium. At the movie’s end, the tension between them has them spiral into each other and collide violently.
Burning is rich with subtext and makes not-so-subtle allusions towards economic inequality and sexism. Early in the film, Jong-su describes Ben as a (Great) Gatsby. After Hae-mi disappears, seemingly perturbing no one other than the obsessively smitten Jong-su, a colleague of hers remarks that “there is no country for women”. Ben’s rich friends treat Hae-mi’s stories of trips to the desert as after-dinner amusement in a condescending way that rings true for anyone who’s ever been invited to a friend’s house just to realize that there are too many forks set on the dining room table and you have no idea how to chit-chat about anything that doesn’t seem painfully lowly. Casting Steven Yeun as Ben, a recognizable American star, only underscores the disparities his character and his behavior bring to the fore.
Burning is also long and drab. Whether it is showing South Korean agriculture workers and the border with North Korea or apartments and restaurants in Seoul, Burning keeps a palette of grays, tans and blues, only disrupted when a character wears a colorful sweater. Only Hae-mi really does so. The men in the film stick to browns, blacks and grays further emphasizing that she is the odd-one-out, a slightly tacky commodity. Her purple sweater coming off in a drug-induced dance halfway through the film signals that she is as much manic as she is pixie. We know, at this point, that something bad will likely happen to her, that that brightness will get muted. Color seems important in Burning and the warmth of the titular fire, once in a dream and once following the final, twisted crime, is the other notable break from otherwise darkly bland tones.
The story being set in South Korea complicates an American viewer’s experience: you wonder how much you may be missing, but the themes that resonate do so much more forcefully because they can now be dubbed universal. Beyond regional realities or politics, however, Burning is about obsessions and cravings. Regardless of whether they have everything or are hanging onto near-normalcy only by the skin of their teeth, all of Burning’s leads really want, or really need, something. First Hae-mi gets invested into roping Jong-su into her life after a very chance encounter at a market. Then Jong-su gets obsessed with Hae-mi, but she moves onto Ben. Ben admits to being obsessed with burning greenhouses, in his very regimented, very calm way. When Hae-mi disappears, Jong-su gets obsessed with Ben. He maps out all of the greenhouses in his neighborhood and checks them daily. He follows Ben in his impossible to hide white truck. He drops the pretense of doing many odd jobs to survive so that his one odd job can become trailing Ben. After two long hours of building tension, all these obsessions combine and the weight of them makes the characters’ relationships implode.
Ben’s greenhouses (the ones he says are so often forgotten and dirty, the ones he says Korean police couldn’t care less about) are women. He serially murders in pursuit of his deep bass, taking lives to feel alive. Jong-su’s obsession culminates when he murders Ben. While he is ready to forge a petition to plead with a judge for his father’s release from prison, he does not ever seem to consider reporting Ben to the police. His need for revenge is just a crystalized version of the disparity between them. It is one singular act of class warfare. Maybe it is not even about loving Hae-mi, but rather losing the contest to own her to someone who already owns so much more. Jong-su speaks little during the movie and now, at the very end, images continue to deliver punchlines instead: there’s blood and there’s fire. He strips his clothes that have been soaked in Ben’s blood and sets his body and car on fire. He is now just a naked body shaking with grief, with violence, with the full force of the unhealthy climax to his craving. He literally makes himself sick, vomits while cleaning up the murder. All the things people really, really want in Burning make them invisibly, deathly ill.
When I posted about watching Burning on Instagram, a friend messaged me to say they loved the movie because it was “so twisted”. I probably wrote back to say I loved it too but felt guilty about liking something so dark and violent right now. People in the US are still dying in large numbers, and it is still underprivileged and marginalized communities that are hit by the virus the most. There is no metaphorical class-warfare here because the working class is too busy working in now deadly conditions. Or maybe class-warfare has become a covert killing of those we have deemed “essential” or even “heroes”, but who in reality cannot refuse that label and survive at the same time. A few days ago, a friend told me about the situation in the Midwest, not that far away from where my apartment is costing me money just to stay dusty and empty, and all the outbreaks they could recount were in meat-packing plants. How visceral is that – those handling murdered flesh, flesh many consume to keep themselves alive, being at most risk to their own bodies? Others’ consumptions and cravings nudge them towards danger every day, as does the obsession with wealth that is keeping the plants open. I am rethinking whether anyone has the right to crave anything right now. Isn’t every craving for something fresher, wider, more elegant and posh, now potentially deadly? Maybe that has always been the case and we just lacked awareness. If satisfying wants, especially the ones that feel like an impulse, ever becomes widely accessible again, maybe we ought to carry over some of the painful awareness and care we attach to all our actions now.
***
At this point in the pandemic, I want things I never consciously wanted before. Not just trips to the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney, or vegan pop-ups upstairs from Mr. Kiwi or Saturday morning rocket yoga at my home studio followed by a trip to the farmer’s market back in Illinois. I want a beer-and-a-shot special at a dive bar even though I’ve been mildly scared of serious drinking my whole adult life. I want to board a plane at LaGuardia and get the tofu and veggies and white rice at the Manchu Wok when I land at Chicago’s O’Hare though this meal is absolutely terrible, and I dislike the former airport so much. I want to go into my office and stare at the pile of papers that never leaves my desk and my one dead plant though I have dreaded cleaning out that whole space at the end of every single past semester. I want to look at the pile of dirty laundry in my hallway, think to myself “I can’t live like this anymore” and continue to live exactly like that. At this point in the pandemic, we are doing laundry so often.
* In kinematics, escape velocity is a minimum velocity some small body, such as a satellite, needs to achieve to escape the gravitational pull of some larger body, such as a planet. When the smaller object reaches escape velocity, its kinetic energy and gravitational energy become equal. In other words, it has enough kinetic energy to balance out or “break free” from the pull of gravity that is keeping it stuck in the big body’s orbit. Mathematically, the small object transitions from a closed orbit to and asymptotic one, but really it is just free to fly away.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING: Being production manager for a play based on Dante’s Inferno and quantum mechanics a few years ago was one of the more unusual projects I was involved in while I was in graduate school. It was very much a masterclass in being efficient and flexible, and also taught me a few things about science communication and truly creative outreach practices. I recently wrote about this experience, and its lessons, for the Lifeology blog here.
LEARNING: This past week marked the end of the semester at my university and my research work suddenly picked up some new steam lately, so since my last letter I have been pretty busy. (You may have noticed a gap in the schedule of this newsletter, and I am a bit unhappy about that.) Overhearing many Zoom calls every week and seeing me at my computer at all times seems to be equal parts mystifying and entertaining to my in-laws, but for me personally it is just a reminder of the “new normal” being similar to the old, slightly frenzied normal in more ways than some of us are acknowledging.
I have been spending a lot of time emailing back-and-forth with various collaborators, often multiple times a day, in an attempt to put finishing touches on two research projects. Both are far along enough that paper manuscripts have been written and these correspondences seem to be as much about writing and as they are about its content. I have been proof-reading while running code and double-checking minus signs in pen-and-paper calculations while trying to come up with the most precise way to describe calculational techniques in a limited number of words. I guess this goes to show, yet again, that being an academic scientist requires all of the parts of your brain to be engaged at all times, even during a global pandemic. Reading emails dense with equations and Mathematica plots late at night is not exactly my favorite, but it also shows that some of the relentless energy behind academic research has found a way to creep into the circumstances we have now been sharing for two months. In some way, it is encouraging to know that researchers are still eager and able to pursue their work. A friend defended their degree through a video conference a few days ago, and I couldn’t have been happier for them and more amazed by their work. As their faculty committee was extending congratulations, I was really grateful for the adaptation and the technology.
At the same time, exchanges that would have usually been handled in-person now look like long email threads of often ambiguous tone. Consequently, they seem to carry more emotional weight. I’ve been mildly energized by some (quasiperiodicity is still really cool) and mildly terrified by others (typing something dumb in front of faculty eyeballs is still mortifying). The anxiety I am learning to recognize in myself when I keep refreshing my inbox on my phone while I’m cooking or watching TV is a new flavor of an older worry, and I guess one I will have to continue to navigate in the coming weeks. And of course, every finished project only ever brings up dozens of new questions and ideas so summer research will for sure be a whole other adventure.
LISTENING: Lulu Miller talking about resilience on Call Your Girlfriend, Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris talking about how community translates into virtual spaces and whether all of us effectively starring in our own reality shows every time we try to connect with a loved one is doing something to how we frame and value authenticity on Still Processing, Ocean Voung on how the immigrant experience resides in bodies and words on On Being. The last episode of Supercontext in which hosts look back on the show and assess it in such an honest way that my heart was simultaneously warmed and broken. (My podcast diet tends to be pretty dense, but I will feel the absence of this show very sharply.)
The retirement of Supercontext reminded me of some of the show’s episodes that tackled bands considered to be classic or iconic in some way. I put on Mission of Burma’s Signals, Calls and Marches quite a few times and let Television’s Marquee Moon play as background to a whole bunch of my work as well. Both are really solid albums and feel appropriately soundtrack-y whenever the mild un-reality of this current time floods me. I have also been listening to Tool’s Undertow on my nightly runs. The record that was covered on the show was actually the more famous Lateralus, but I burned myself out on re-listening and re-listening to that one in college. Undertow also has just a bit more edge to it which makes it conducive to moving. About half of the songs on this record have lyrics that I struggle with now that I am older and a little more sensitive to the world around me than when I first heard it ten years ago, and as much as I enjoy this music I wish that it did not have that baggage. If I ever gather up the energy to engage with Tool’s latest record, I hope I’ll find that they became a bit more careful as well.
WATCHING: Episodes of Letterkenny are just short enough to make the show binge-able and though we did not fully employ that mode of TV consumption, we did finish it very fast and probably at a faster pace than is optimal. What I mean to say is that watching more than a few episodes back-to-back makes it pretty obvious when the show gets repetitive or decides to actually not care that much about plot or character development it may have previously set up. I was pretty taken with Letterkenny’s first two seasons because the humor was so odd and delivery so sharp and fast, but about halfway through the show’s run it became obvious that a lot of it follows a few pre-set formulas. And really, how often can a person laugh at ten-minutes of celebrity name punning? And once the humor lost its charm, I started to pay more attention to what the show has to say about women and LGBTQ+ folks which, unfortunately, did not help its case. A few episodes try to address political and “PC culture” issues head on, but I’ve found them mostly insufficient, sometimes being too didactic, sometimes leaning into a weird both-side-ism, sometimes just really not being funny and, a few times late in the run of the show, plainly offensive (I’m thinking of some comments about mental health during Crack an Ag segments). Maybe this is just what happens to any slightly kooky show once it gets noticed and becomes a phenomenon, but it was still disappointing.
We picked up Succession as our nightly TV show after completing Letterkenny and I have been surprised by how much I’m enjoying it. When Succession first made a splash a year or two ago, I did not want to watch it because a glossy-and-gross HBO production about the troubles of rich people just sounded like a painful investment of my time. The show is exactly about that and pretty much every character is both an unreal caricature and believable enough to be very unlikable. Down to their names, Kendall, Conner, Siobhan and Roman are the kind of people you’d like to think don’t actually exist, but they absolutely definitely do. And, in Succession, they are all scheming and plotting against each other. Succession is fast and zingy, funny but not in an actually laughing kind of way, and the zoom-y and slightly shaky camera makes it occasionally seem like the older, secret, evil sibling to The Office. I should be mad about late capitalism here, but I’m having fun watching this show instead.
I’m not sure how we managed to avoid socially distanced movie nights for the past two months but the technology and the people finally got to us and we ended up recently watching two very different movies with friends. I watched Okja with my husband and his friends in the most distracted kind of way. I had just finished my run and workout and was tending to a pot of vegan bean and cauliflower chili when they started the movie. I was unimpressed enough by it to not want to tune into it more intensely once we finished eating. Part of this reaction is certainly that I am bothered by the notion of watching a movie about animals being killed for food with a group of people who eat killed animals as food regularly. I remember when Okja was first released and many viewers temporarily became vegan just to then quickly revert back to consuming animals. My personal bias is against garnering sympathy for the animal lovers’ cause through this sort of theatrics. However, even just as a piece of filmmaking Okja feels a bit under-baked, and a little too much like a children’s story with too much star power. If I wanted to watch Tilda Swinton be ridiculous in a Bong Joon-ho movie, I’d still pick Snowpiercer every time.
The other film we watched with friends, but only thanks to some mildly convoluted technology, was the multimedia documentary film Zero Impunity, streaming through the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film. This is a heavy film that mixes animation, in-person recordings and shots of talking heads projected on buildings in public spaces as they are delivering their expertise and commentary, all in the service of giving a pretty devastating overview of how sexual violence is used as a tool in armed conflicts around the world. Zero Impunity addresses the Syrian conflict, the war in Ukraine, mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay detention camp and the Abu Ghraib prison and misconduct by UN peacekeepers on missions in Africa. Many of the interview subjects in Zero Impunity are animated which lends them anonymity in a very creative way but does not dull their stories. Their stories, presented in succession to highlight the universality of the issue and its true nature as a feature of war rather than something incidental, hit hard. It feels inappropriate to comment on the film’s form much exactly because it is addressing such a terrible issue, but it is done well and would be an interesting format, mixing not just live-action and animated filmmaking but also some aspects of activism and performance, in any event. I would recommend watching Zero Impunity if you can get a hold of it but brace yourself for outrage and sadness.
Finally, we watched the Beastie Boys Story. Though it is advertised as a documentary, this film is really a recording of a sort of story-telling event Beastie Boys band members Mike D and Ad Rock conduct in front of a live audience. It shows both how much they must have practiced it, and how they still have some spontaneous spirit to share with their fans. At times they are a bit self-congratulatory, but they do also acknowledge their past mistakes and own up to them without many excuses. In a way the format of the show speaks to a big part of what their evolution and experiences as artists involved in their earlier days: trying to take charge of their myth and building it as they see fit instead of letting someone else malign or canonize them. They are compelling speakers, even when they mess up. Their story, though its structuring and delivery do decline a touch as the first hour goes by, is pretty wild in a very can-you-imagine-the-world-used-to-be-like-that way. And the grief the remaining Beasties show for the third member of the band, MCA, is touching and genuine. If the Beastie Boys are myth-building with this film, more precisely they are constructing an altar to the friend and collaborator they lost too soon. Even when that is done ham-fistedly it is still relatable. Needless to say, after we watched this film, I ran some really fast miles to the beat of Sabotage.
READING: I continue to be terrible about reading anything other than physics papers and either newsletters of poetry that lands in my inbox and cannot really be avoided. Accordingly, this section is, this time, just a small shout-out to these two letters by Sasha Frere-Jones, this poem by Paisley Rekdal, this one by Dante Distefano, this one by Ryan Eckes and this one by Dorianne Laux.
EATING: If I was slightly tired of cooking earlier in the pandemic, I’ve definitely overcome that tiredness and sprung back into over-production recently.
I made a red lentil, sweet potato and peanut stew then kept eating with spinach and pita bread as lunch for days, a blood orange and tofu salad so large it had to be served on a sheet-pan, at least one peanut butter and greens breakfast sandwich (they are genius!), some everything-from-scratch individual pizzas with this really easy but really flavorful overnight pizza dough and my husband’s homemade tomato sauce, a big Cinco de Mayo meal that included air fried beer battered tofu tacos (inspired by this recipe though I halved the amount of flour in the batter but doubled the amount of spices) and a billion toppings, two wonderfully pillow-y focaccia breads based on the same method as the pizza dough, a batch of German-style pretzels, this black pepper stir fry with broccoli and roasted eggplant in place of bok-choy (I tossed my tofu in a mixture of cornstarch and the recommended amounts of salt and pepper then baked it without oil at 400F for 20 minutes, flipping halfway through and made a double amount of sauce) and something along the lines of this vegan carbonara-adjacent pasta dish with gray squash and navy beans instead of mushrooms. These were all very successful and I’m glad I let myself try some new recipes.
Below, I am sharing the only one from this list that I truly improvised – the big salad I made because a neighbor gave us a huge bag of blood oranges and we had to find a way to turn them into dinner. I’ve included many thoughts on substitutions and modifications in my write-up, including not having blood oranges since I think citrus fruits in salads are generally underrated.
This recipe can also be found in my Eat More Plants document which collects many of the tips and guidelines for vegan cooking I’ve developed for my own reference over the years and a lot of infinitely modifiable recipes I’ve consistently relied on.
This salad will comfortably serve 3-4 people as a full meal.
For the salad you will need:
1.5 cup baby potatoes
1 cup green beans, trimmed
1-2 heads red romaine (or some other lettuce or baby spinach)
3-4 carrots, peeled and shaved (or chopped into matchsticks)
2 blood oranges, peeled and cut into rounds
1. Take the tofu out of the package and warp in a kitchen towel or paper towels. Put a cutting board or a plate on top of it then put something heavy, like a cast iron pot, on top of that. Let the tofu press for 30ish minutes, until the towels are soaked, and water visibly seeps out of the tofu. (You may be able to skip this step if using super firm, especially if it comes in shrink wrap.)
2. Cut the tofu into bite-sized cubes. Mix the rest of the tofu ingredients in a bowl, this is your marinade. Combine the tofu and the marinade, make sure all tofu pieces are submerged (you can use a Ziplock bag) then refrigerate for as long as you can, at least 30 mins. Preheat the oven to 400F
4. Bring a big pot of salted water to a boil, toss in the potatoes and the green beans and let cook no more than 4 minutes. Green beans should stay slightly crunchy and bright. Drain and set the beans aside.
5. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, toss the baby potatoes with some olive oil and plenty of salt and arrange on the sheet. On the rest of the sheet arrange the tofu so that the pieces have half an inch or so off space between them. Bake for 10 minutes then shake the potatoes and flip all the tofu pieces. Bake for 10-12 more minutes or until the potatoes start to look wrinkled and the tofu slightly crispy and deeply brown. Finish off under the broiler for 2-3 minutes. Some potatoes should brown a bit as well.
6. Cut the green beans in half and chop the lettuce into strips.
7. In a blender or a food processor combine all the dressing ingredients and blend until smooth
8. On a large platter mix the green beans, carrots and lettuce. Evenly distribute the warm tofu and potatoes over top then garnish with blood orange rounds. Dress as much as you like.
Substitutions and variations: Use a Cara Cara orange or a red grapefruit in place of blood oranges or use a lemon orange lime for the dressing and leave out the orange rounds from the salad. Instead of lettuce or baby spinach use kale massaged with lemon juice until soft or very finely sliced red cabbage. Instead of baby potatoes use any other potato cut into bite size pieces. Instead of potatoes use a sweet potato or a butternut or acorn or kabocha squash cut into bit-sized cubes and skip the boiling part. Instead of potatoes use cauliflower separated into small florets and skip the boiling part. Instead of green beans use sugar snap peas and slice them instead of boiling (or omit the green beans or use canned or frozen). Leave out the carrots if you don’t have any. Use pine nuts, almonds or sunflower seeds in the dressing instead of cashews just make sure they are raw and unsalted. If you don’t have any nuts or seeds handy just make the dressing with an extra tablespoon of oil.
To make this oil free, omit the oil when roasting the potatoes, and in the dressing, use double the amount of cashews with no oil (add a bit of water if this makes the dressing too thick). To make this gluten free use tamari instead of soy sauce. To make this soy free skip the tofu all together and add some chickpeas (1-2 cups), roast them with your potatoes or pan-fry then if you want.
Add chopped up avocado or a handful of some toasted nuts (cashews or almonds or walnuts) over the top. Fresh scallions or mint or basil chopped finely and scattered over the top would probably be great as well.