> 196: Remember this
Here’s some art, ideas, and internet for you:
I wrote about the brilliant and irreplaceable Allison Rockey, our best friend, who died last month at the age of 43.
You may have heard me say before that America may be bad, but New York City is good. And you know what? We’d be even more good if we had a mayor who was not terrible. If you live in New York, please help! If you aren’t registered for the Democratic primary, do so by this Saturday. Then don’t rank Cuomo or Eric Adams. Tell a friend or neighbor to do the same. Truly, we deserve this one nice thing.
Further evidence for the above maxim: Chess: The Musical revival coming to Broadway this fall!!!!!!
A corollary to “America may be bad, but New York City is good”: Everything may be bad, but science is good.
How to protest safely. Also, if you take any advice for the coming months and years, let it be this.
360-degree panorama from inside a dishwasher.
“Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director—without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job. That is what actors do: I’m going on Broadway, I’m playing a villain for six months. I got to live in that. I’m playing the slave, I’m playing the fisherman, I’m playing the nurse, I’m the murderer—you have to get in there. You have to live lives through other people. I think that the simple act of that transformation and that process automatically gives you what I would describe as a more generous and progressive point of view. It just has to.” Tony “Andor” “Michael Clayton” “The Cutting Edge” Gilroy patiently explaining to Ross “The Worst” Douthat why art is so often—Douthat’s words—“left wing.”
“The importance of authenticity in friendships was illustrated for me recently at a party to kick off a literary festival. While holding a drink in one hand and a paper plate with hummus and pieces of pitta bread in the other, my friend Erin asked if I could hold her plate so she could dip the pitta bread in it. Is it weird that this request made me feel seen and understood in a beautiful and moving way? I knew that others at the party might perceive me as Curtis the writer, but Erin and I were close enough that she knew that at certain moments—in fact, at more moments than not in this life—my highest purpose was to be a hummus plate holder.”
“I've been feeling a particular kind of grief for a prior version of me who still believed if I was hard-working, creative, and resourceful, I would find a way to be financially successful and “stable” in the traditional sense, doing the thing I love. I thought I could still outrun it. But I am starting to accept that maybe I can’t, and that maybe a different source of security has to emerge in its place.”
Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day's colors in the day's shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this—"Black Cherries," W.S. Merwin
Laura
> If you were forwarded this email and want to subscribe yourself, sign up here. <