Rick and Morty at the Hoyt Schermerhorn Subway stop by Kevin Nash, top.
William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, Moma, bottom
The teenager with ever changing hair and a banjo.
"PROTEST: Biden, End Vaccine Apartheid! Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, E 47th St, New York, NY 10017
Protest with us. Join us in anger as Biden prepares to address the U.N. General Assembly. Biden said the U.S. would be an arsenal of vaccines against COVID-19. Instead he's putting drug company greed ahead of saving lives around the world. We refuse to let President Biden continue to fuel the COVID vaccine apartheid with inaction. The unconscionable decision Biden makes every day to allow pharma monopolies to dictate the price and pace of COVID vaccination is perpetuating new infections, needless deaths of people in poor countries, and creating dangerous variants. While billions of people are yet to be vaccinated, Biden just announced everyone in the U.S. should get booster shots. We are uniting in anger outside the UN General Assembly while President Biden and the leaders of other wealthy nations are in New York. Join us and demand President Biden immediately expand COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing, break pharma monopolies, ensure sharing of production technologies, and end the false scarcity that perpetuates this pandemic. This is what will get the world vaccinated ASAP, keep people healthy, and stop new variants from emerging and spreading across the globe. We expect all protesters to wear masks, and masks will be available at the protest if you don't have your own. We highly encourage all protesters to be vaccinated. More info and sign-up page here: bit.ly/endvaxapartheid." 
While we were at the UN, Ken Schles was at
National Grid, acting up and snapping photos with the San Energy Crew. "Moments after London based @nationalgrid President and CEO spoke at a secret location for the opening ceremony of @unitednations Climate Week in NYC, we stormed their Brooklyn headquarters to expose their corporate greenwashing and to call them out as climate colonizers. Members of Frack Outta Bk and No North Brooklyn Pipeline rushed inside the lobby at 345 Jay St. and unfurled a banner reading “Brooklyn Will Not be Sacrificed for National Grid’s Profit” from the top of the lobby stairs, covering National Grid‘s logo and American flag, and began a speak out. Just when police thought that’s all there was, a drum line came marching in to join us. Even as the police force grew and were threatening immediate arrests to “protect the company”, we kept shouting out their hypocrisy, chanted and marched outside with a banner that read, “National Greed steals from BIPOC Communities for Poison Pipeline” because that’s what they’re doing here in Brooklyn.Don’t let their greenwashing fool you, National Grid is not concerned with environmental justice; they are concerned with making a profit, no matter how much it endangers low income and BIPOC communities of Brooklyn and increases climate chaos. Share the Live stream and spread the word @frackouttabk and Nonbkpipelinefor next steps #ClimateWeek #greenwashing
"Well, life is just one damned thing after another."
Virginia said chuckling with Mom and I, sitting on the porch outside in
Princeton, navigating the challenges of health and age and illness.
The only constant is change.
They say it all the time.
At Judson, the Land Acknowledgement said as much,
… remixing
words by Octavia E. Butler
“We
also commit to change. Everything you touch you change. Everything you change
changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change…. if we refuse to
change, we run the risk of being God-less. But if we commit to looking back at
where we’ve been, looking honestly at who we are, and looking forward to who we
can become, we might just touch God. …What does community look like in the face
of this truth? What does joy look like in the face of this truth? What does
utopia look like in the face of this truth? What does the future look like in
the face of this truth? We not only acknowledge the past, but we commit to
present action. Our futures await our willingness to change.”
It felt like that Saturday.
The elder teenager out in Los Angeles at Venice Beach, the high schooler
teaching themself Banjo.
The Philo Surfers were out catching waves at Beach 67.
Greg and I chatted all the way there, along our one-hour train ride from
Hoyt Street.
“It’s a struggle with the self, not just the waves,” I said to Greg as
we moved out into the water.
“We fight the voices in our heads saying we’re no good at this,
navigating waves and ourselves,” time and light and water and gravity and
motion, constant motion.
One wave after another, stepping up for a few more seconds in the white
water.
We fall, the water catches us, and make our way back out.
I stayed out for about an hour, chatted with a few others at the surf
party and made my way back.
Kevin Nash was busy painting Nina Simone at the Hoyt Subway stop.
“What’s that one?” I ask.
“That’s Rick and Morty,” I say.
I love it.
You’re the first one who has talked to me all day.
I love your work so much.
Love is in you. Pass it on.
I guess that’s the point… to see it in all our lives.
To be grateful for all of them.
We talked about that at book group, reading Rachel Cuck, wondering about
the human compulsion to chase oblivion, even if we lose ourselves doing so; still
we chase it.
And sometimes we find something in the water, the light reflecting, our
bodies in motion, on the trains in Mexico, in the early morning light in Adriatic,
running into a lake in the woods at midnight under a harvest moon, in a scene
in a Rachel
Cuck novel, recalling a universal moment, outside of time:
“And we flung off our clothes as fast as we could and ran shouting into
the water. I believe there are certain
moments in life that don’t obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and
this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeefers! We quickly grew quiet, after that initial
boisterousness, and swam silently through water that in the moonlight seemed as
thick and pale as milk and that left great smooth furrows behind us…. She swam
a little distance away from me and was floating and dipping her arms above and
below the surface so that the water ran down them like a molten light… ‘Its phosphorescence,’
I said, lifting my own arms and watching the strange light… She cried in
wonder, for she had never seen this before, and it struck me, … how the human
capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the
moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our
souls….” p. 169….
Riding over the Manhattan Bridge, the light moves over the water, the
Sane Energy Crew zapping National Grid as I move up to the UN, where the president
is arriving, police and activists everywhere, Back through the West Village, to
the Occupy show on 224 Waverly, old New York and new, past Doris’ old apartment down the street, where she recouped
after beating back Robert Moses, stars moving. We used
to help her with her tree. Flux ever transforms what was and is,
between then and now, emptiness and abundance ever moving between, “one damned thing after another."
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