> the moon people when they did come
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: NEOWISE, Black voices in healthcare and classical music, sugartime.
Hello friend,
> Saw the NEOWISE comet with some high school friends while we did the social distance dance. It was lovely. I’m always so surprised and delighted to look into space.
> Listening to: “Joy,” the second installment of Black Voices in Healthcare from the podcast The Nocturnists.
> Talking with my boyfriend about the absence of Black and Latine musicians in classical music, thinking about this article, “Black Artists on How to Change Classical Music” (h/t Phoebe):
There needs to be community engagement, not community outreach. Outreach is something you do occasionally. But you’re always in the act of engaging; it’s a constant effort.
> Highly recommend Ruby Tandoh’s “The Primal Pleasure and Brutal History of Sugar” (h/t Calla), on how sugar represents sin, pleasure, temptation, innocence, on the way slavery’s history hides itself in sugar. Also about Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a 35-foot sphinx, a crouching Black woman made of sugar, in the former Domino Sugar Refinery.
> Watching: Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation, a travel food show about immigrant food in the U.S. It’s unapologetically political and I love it—the first episode features the sister sities of El Paso and Juárez on the border. Also watching a panel from the Museum of Food and Drink on the tokenization of AAPI voices in food media.
> Reading: Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing.
> From “Arrival Day” by Eve L. Ewing:
so they had no words for the moon people when they did come.
and the moon people could not be captured. camera lenses
looking on them turned to salt and cast white trails across the
eyelids of the looker. and the moon people were dressed in
every color. they wore saffron yellow and Kool cigarette green and
Georgia clay red and they wore violet, they wore violet. and they
were loud. as their hands worked, hammering the iron of the
jail cell doors into lovely wrought curls and bicycle chains,
smashing the fare boxes at the train stations into wind chimes
and bowing low to the passengers as they entered– some sashaying
through the turnstile, some dropping it low as they went underneath,
they sang. the moon people had been listening all this time and
they knew all about Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin and Mahalia
Jackson and Marvin Gaye and Missy Elliott, and they sang while
they smashed a bottle on the squad cars– a Hennessy bottle or
a Coke or a pressed kale juice, whatever was near enough to say ‘this
here is christened a new thing.’ and they drove them down my street
and your street and your street, the tires painted to look like vinyl 45s
and the children tied yarn and ribbons to the windshield wipers
and the moon people turned them on high so that as they drove, the colors
waved in the sunlight, which was now streaming so clearly
> Visual magic brought to you by Kara Walker.
Cheers,
Tiffany