Greetings from the Overwhelm
A random collection of things I've read, watched, or thought about since last we spoke
Hi there.
It has been a LONG time since I’ve seen you. I hope you are well.
The last time I posted something here was the end of February and boy howdy have I been busy doing anything else but writing.
We had family staying with us from mid-March to Mid-April during which time we went to Disneyland and Universal Studios and a bunch of other tourist-y things, then hosted two 30-person seders in our backyard on the first and second nights of Passover. I went to see Dead & Co. at The Sphere (thank you, Peter!). We all got sick with Influenza B. It’s all a blur, honestly,
And now the Notes app on my phone is filled with one-line ideas and observations that I intend to turn into essays. Same with my Reminders app and my pen-and-paper journal. So many essays to write, so little time.
So, in lieu of one well-considered essay, here is an assortment of the things I’ve been reading, watching and thinking about recently. I reserve the right to go back and write actual essays about any or all of these!
COMMUNITY, CULTURE AND PLACE
I’ve been working my way through a copy of The Routledge Handbook of Urban Cultural Planning that a colleague loaned to me because it is crazy expensive. I started with the chapter on Cultural Asset Mapping and have been dipping in and out of different chapters depending on my mood and curiosity at the moment.
The Global Cultural Districts Network is convening in Los Angeles this week and if I had been invited I would love to have given a talk about the “Dramaturgy of Place”. How do we deploy more complex story mechanisms to tell a multi-vocal, community-centering narrative of place (not “Hero’s Journey”, TV writer story mechanics)? And how do we look at those mechanisms alongside Cultural Asset Mapping and Cultural Districts as dramaturgical tools for storytelling? Also, decentralization, distributed networks, etc. etc.
Also thinking about how individual identity and community identity are formed in physical space vs. digital space? What are the differences and what are the implications? We’ve seen it play out and evolve a lot over the past 20 years. What have we learned? What can we change?
I posted a short essay over on LinkedIn, sharing some thoughts about making community-centered creative places online that reflect and engage the physical, place-based communities they are meant to serve. Connecting the dots from Culturebot to Cultural Treasures of South LA. Here’s the short version of a deck I made in 2014 (one of many!):
I’ve also been reading Democracy as Creative Practice, a collection of essays offering “arts-based solutions to the threats to democracies around the world, practices that can foster more just and equitable societies.” It is an inspiring collection of essays about great projects and big ideas.
Once again I’m kind of dipping in and out, starting with the chapters by folks I know and then following my curiosity at the moment. I was really struck by Andrea Assaf’s musings on decentralization. Reading this book - and encountering so much creative and imaginative power aggregated in one place - is astounding. I was left wondering how do we gather and aggregate all of this collective power in the physical world? I guess that is what Movement Building is all about.
Looking at the front of the book I noticed that the editors’ bios included short essays about their positionality. This particular implementation feels a little clunky to me but I think it is important to acknowledge the social context of an editor or writer. I’d love to see this in the NYT.
Back in 2017 I wrote an essay called “A Choreography of Ideas” about writing cultural criticism in the digital age, on the Internet, in a space where authorial position and context is inherently unstable. I wrote:
To begin, situate yourself in time, space and cultural context, reveal yourself — if elliptically — to the reader. This is important. If they don’t know the storyteller they won’t care about the story. If they can’t trust you, they can’t trust what you say. Reveal your bias, articulate your position mapped across multiple axes. Be friendly.
I then proceeded to do just that - situate myself for the reader - before getting into the heart of the essay. This is central to the framework of “critical horizontalism” that we put forth on Culturebot back in 2012.
Following my curiosity about community storytelling that bridges digital space and physical space, I attended a webinar called “Hyperlocal Heroes: Building Community Knowledge in the Digital Age” - very interesting discussion about hyperlocal journalism.
This work clearly aligns with community based cultural asset mapping and community engaged art practices. Bringing art and journalism together seems like a natural fit. How do we do it?! (As you might imagine, I have some thoughts on this.)
(See also this interview with Heather Chaplin, Founding Director of the Journalism + Design Lab at the New School, about informal news networks!)
THE OLYMPICS
Speaking of telling more nuanced, complex and multi-vocal stories of place - how does Los Angeles tell its story to the world? Who decides what story we’ll tell and who will be listening?
Alissa Walker wrote a great essay over at Torched LA about “What If The World Doesn’t Come” unpacking the impact of the current administration’s xenophobic rhetoric, unwelcoming attitude and undemocratic “policing” tactics are discouraging tourists from coming to the United States at all, even for world sporting events.
In September 2024 the Washington Post published an op-ed titled, “Paris overturned the Olympics’ Nazi traditions. L.A. 2028 can follow its example” which now seems quaint and quixotic. More on point is an article in The Nation by Jules Boykoff and Dave Zirin, published in December 2024, in the wake of the election, about “Stopping Trump From Using the LA Olympics to Burnish His Strongman Image”.
Boykoff and Zirn just published a related follow-up, “With ICE Out of Control, How Can the US Cohost the 2026 World Cup?”
This is important stuff and should be discussed in public.
DOUBLE DOWN ON BOLD IMAGINATION
I read, with some measure of relief, Aaron Regunberg and David Sirota’s takedown of the “Abundance” discourse currently being peddled by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s to promote their book titled Abundance. (The article is in Rolling Stone and is paywalled but somehow I managed to read it by cutting and pasting the URL into a new browser)
I have not read the book, so grain of salt, etc. But it feels as if, for at least a few news cycles, this abundance idea has permeated the discourse and the more often I hear about it, the more it feels that the Oligarchs of the Ideas Economy are trying a little too hard to “make fetch happen”.
It is endlessly frustrating when “Thought Leaders” glom onto whatever the next Grand Unifying Idea is, coalesce around a narrative and do a hard sell. It is especially frustrating that people with big platforms consistently narrow the scope of the public imagination rather than expanding it. Going back to public narratives, dramaturgy and story mechanisms - there are structural reasons for this confinement of narrative; and there are political reasons why people in power want to aggregate momentum around a specific idea or agenda. But this is still profoundly “top-down” and now, after several years of really immersing myself in community-based work, I can say without qualification that this approach is misguided. We need more voices, not fewer, and the people with power and platforms need to actually listen to people, not tell them what to think.
There is no shortage of big, bold, ambitious ideas out there offering a vision for the society so many of want to see - a society that centers care, that rewards collaboration and cooperation over competition, universal health care (not health insurance), universal basic income, free college, affordable child care, early childhood education, healthy food, clean air, preserve natural resources, strengthen our communities, cut the defense budget, tax the rich, get money out of politics, rein in corporations, build social capital, restore decency and public trust, etc. etc. etc. There is enough, if we choose it. But talking about “abundance” is not going to get us there. An “abundance mindset” is not going to get us there.
“The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.”
(William Gibson, though attribution is disputed).
The folks that control “The discourse”, such as it is, keep neutering the bold imaginings and dreams of the Caring, Conscious Majority. Rhetorical spaces of possibility that foster collective imagination keep getting deflated, narrowed and overwhelmed by well-intentioned pundits with big platforms. And the real-life spaces where people gather to foster community and practice becoming a public, where we can have an embodied experience of e pluribus unum, are suffering disinvestment and are under attack.
Martin Luther King, Jr. did not scale back his vision to what he might accomplish. He didn’t get lost in the technocratic weeds. He wasn’t constrained by the tyranny of the possible. He inspired a nation to reach for the seemingly impossible.
If the chattering classes are going to do the work of the Autocrats and Authoritarians by shutting down and constricting the boundaries of what it is possible to imagine, then we, the people, the artists and dreamers, need to reclaim those spaces, grow them, expand them, carrying with us and planting the seeds of Imaginative Revolution wherever we go. Be the transformation you want to see, Be the World you want to live in. Double Down on Bold Imagination.
LOVE, ART AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Speaking of which, in a more sedate approach to a similar idea, I’ve been watching this lecture by the philosopher Alva Noe about “Love and Consciousness” which is great. I love Alva Noe’s thinking and have been inspired by his writing since we first connected around his book Strange Tools. I had the chance to talk to him in 2015 and am always eager to hear what he’s thinking about. I always feel that my consciousness and heart are more expanded after an encounter with Professor Noe.
THE MIRROR WORLD
The other day I read a thought-provoking article about how “A New Generation of Birth Control Skeptics Leans Right”. I didn’t expect to read it, but I got hooked.
What fascinates me is that there is a very real and non-partisan issue here: doctors don’t take women’s concerns seriously, are condescending, and just generally dismissive. And so women look for other resources that are more welcoming and less judge-y. I’m not an expert at all but I imagine this was part of the impetus behind Our Bodies, Ourselves back in the day!
So, conservative Catholics and Back-to-the-Land organic hippie types take different paths to “natural birth control” but arrive at the same place. And somehow the Democratic Establishment is perceived by some as the force propping up a medical establishment that is indifferent to women’s health concerns. And now these folks are coalescing around the whole RFK Jr./MAHA scene.
This is not a new topic, even though New York Magazine just published an article (that I didn’t read because it is paywalled) about “How New Age Women Turned Right”. Kathleen Belew wrote a great essay in the Atlantic in 2022 about “The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline” (also now paywalled, unfortunately).
I started to try and unpack this drift, or mashup, or repositioning of issues, positions and people from the Left to the Right in my 2023 essay “Talkin’ Crunchy Granola Far-Right Lefty Blues” and I also tried to unpack it a few months later in this essay about Marianne Williamson. I continue to be alternately fascinated - and horrified - by the way the world gets weirder and weirder.
For instance, how do you wrap your head around a government filled with Nazis that also purports to be “combatting anti-semitism” - which of course we know it isn’t? The constant work of parsing the truth from the rhetoric - decoding the discourse - these days is EXHAUSTING. (I wrote about Christian Nationalism in an essay “When Christians Attack” but have yet to unpack the dynamic of antisemites combatting antisemitism! Maybe in the weeks ahead.)
GRIEF
I listened to Marc Maron interview Bridget Everett on his WTF Podcast and was just delighted and moved.
I don’t actually know Bridget Everett from the downtown NYC scene, but I know a lot of her collaborators, and I know Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen who co-created the brilliant Somebody Somewhere with her for HBO.
I don’t know Marc Maron either but I feel as if I know Marc Maron from the mid-90s downtown NYC alt-comedy scene, so it was a treat to listen to these two in conversation. Many parts of this thoughtful, intimate and wide-ranging conversation resonated with me - about artistic practice, performing, vulnerability, creativity, turning personal struggles into art for other people’s amusement. Then they kind of segued into this deep dive into grief that really hit home.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the presence of grief in my life these days and the way that Marc and Bridget talked about it, and their experiences of grief, of living with grief, affirmed mine.
I guess I had grief on my mind, though not front and center, until I realized that I was listening to their conversation on Thursday May 15 which happened to be 17 Iyar on the Hebrew Calendar, which is my mother’s yahrzeit - the anniversary of her death. It was such a complicated relationship, I’m still in dialogue with her, trying to get to know her, trying to keep our relationship alive even as she’s moved on to another space.
I also felt a little grief as they talked about Bridget’s path as an artist and the NYC scene because I still miss it very much and I miss working with artists. My life these days has so much joy and awesomeness but there is this persistent gaping hole of sadness that I’m not doing this thing that I love so much.
Apparently Maron and Everett overlapped a little bit in NYC but never crossed paths between 1997-2001 and I really wanted to chime in and talk about the downtown scene at that time, the venues, the intersections, and the venues/scenes that could have intersected but didn’t. That’s part of the magic of NYC - the way all the creative micro-communities and scenes overlap or don’t, and what can be made to happen with a little bit of strategic cross-pollination. (I think we did that back in the day with the WYSIWYG Talent Show at PS122).
HAPPY THINGS
On an entirely different note, we had a super fun Mothers Day! A great reminder that one of the best ways to keep your sanity and stay centered as we navigate the turmoil and chaos of the current moment is to invest in relationships and community, spending quality time in-person with friends and family (or family of choice, whatever your family looks like) and also picking up the phone and calling people. Connect! Connect! Connect!
Thank you for reading and spending some time with me. Hopefully it won’t be so long before the next time! Be well and take care out there.
