Weather Report

the lemons are blue when i arrive home

and so is everything else.

the neighbor demands i bring in her packages

and although she’s rude about it

i feel altruistic when i obey.

the rejections this year have been thoughtful

which my manager brags about.

i believe her that it matters.

the most prescient acting advice is

don’t want it too much

which feel misogynistic to me

but we’re all bored of that.

i’ve read 62 plays in the last quarter.

my favorite one is a farce in which

day never breaks again.

nightfruit in perpetuity.

i’d like to put it on but the company thinks

it’s too real.

diet pills and diet shots are scientifically good for you now and disordered eating is no longer a disease it is impressive.

which is fine, really.

i hate wind as weather but i love wind as a concept and an orchestral section.

there’s a movie about child soldiers in columbia and all i remember is the oboe sounding score that is actually the composer blowing into glass bottles.

her name sounds like mine.

my most talented friend

is super fucking mean

and my most successful friend

is super fucking judgey

my most beautiful friend

is super fucking scared

but the lemons are yellow this morning

and my dearest friend texts me about what she calls a capital C crash out and i tell her im proud of her and i wish we were elsewhere in time and space

laughing.

Mark grew up five minutes away from me

and when he tells our friends about the town

we have different stories.

He lived up that one street where the tax bracket changed.

Fences, white.

Grasses, green.

The way he talks about that Place

feels like watching jazz.

How a drummer swims their head through time.

Something different happens to him.

The one time i had a yard it was brown because water is expensive in this country

but my father loved me more than his

and both of our high school crushes are in jail now.

Nalini brought in a script she wrote about weeds

and it touched us all because it wasn’t about weeds

it was about love and noticing.

Does anyone see what you see?

I think of Watsonville road

and trying to produce theater in Los Angeles

and how the only frame that replays in my head from Sophie’s Choice

is them dying together

spooning.

The article went viral, which is to say that the SATC meme account I follow posted about it and led me to the piece. I love Chanté’s writing and the piece is concise and charming. It’s a fun take. She sprinkles in the lightest touches of political commentary and quotes women who agree with her premise:

Though she doesn’t dive into that, we all know what she means. There’s some thing going on where American Republicans are trying to raise the birth rate… Which is, from my perspective, less about concerns with American population statistics, and more about encouraging women to get out of the work force.

I also perceive, especially as I ascend into my thirties, absolute tons of my staunchly liberal friends having children on purpose and loving it. I think it’s a very strange tactic to make having a family and having a boyfriend partisan. A losing tactic. Which the democrats seem to obsessed with doing— finding more ways to lose.

What is glaringly obvious to me in the argument Chanté presents is that having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing, it’s expensive. She presents examples of two women who lose followers and see anti-boyfriend comments online when they hard-launch.

I’m not even going to touch the boastful comment because I don’t have time to talk about women making themselves feel small for having what they want. But Steph, reach out to me if you want a pep talk.

Rather than exploring the financial implications for these women, because lest we forget that followers are money for many people these days, the article concludes with two paragraphs about hetero-normativity and identity. Fine. Of course. But what about the money?

Women know the power of their appeal. They always do. I do. I am on a producing team. I work under a man who has a decade more experience and is incredibly good at his job. He is the most generous teacher and boss. I love him. We will often be in situations where we need to negotiate or get permission for things. Sometimes I will say to him “let me call him” and we both know what that means. Big blue eyes and a full teeth smile are tools to be used for capital gain.

I was recently on a guerilla shoot with a director and producer who have over twenty years of experience each. We needed a location we couldn’t pay for. They suggested many approaches and I said to them “Guys, let me just go ask him very nicely." It worked. The (male) owner of the location was charmed and charming and we got to shoot exactly what we wanted for zero dollars.

The slope is slippery. It’s logic that can justify the old “sleeping your way to the top” adage, but we do have a responsibility to call a spade a spade. If women are going to be economically punished (which they are) for being cute, we may as well use it to our advantage within reason.

There are doctors of feminism who are rolling in their grave. I don’t know anything about it at the academic and theoretical level. What I know is what I live. What I live is a power in my hands that I can either use for financial gain or ignore out of principle. I’ve been too broke for too long because of my principles. The power is already fading as the many smiles I have dolled out as currency crease my face. I will use it as long as I can.

I have a friend who started a job at a prestigious movie studio this year. She had recently been married and was warned through the grape vine to keep that to herself. A little birdie had told her that single women do better in the office. She abjectly refused, hoping that was an insane rumor and had no interest in lying about her marital status. She left the company after eight weeks.

Should that be the case? Of course not. Have pink pussy hats and not wearing a bra fixed the patriarchy? Of course not. How do we economically thrive in a world that values women of a certain age and look? I believe in fighting for what we deserve. For equality. For pay parity. But I don’t believe the way we get it is denying the appeal of women. When you’re a young attractive woman, having a boyfriend takes away you power. That sucks, but that’s true. The reason I haven’t hard launched a boyfriend on social media in many years is not because it’s embarrassing. It’s because its costly.

I do lots of jobs, but all of them are about network and attention. All of them. The audience I’m working with isn’t a 50/50 gender and sexuality split. It’s the film industry. There are more women than ever, but it’s far from even, and even less so when you are looking up the line to advance. The majority of power and money is in the hands of men. I want power and money. If presenting as single is going to help me advance for now, call me single.

I’m not embarrassed to have a boyfriend. I’m working here.

Below is an old poem from days of heartache [and the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to.]

I’ll put some food photography too because this is MySpace to do with what iPlease.

Dinners I had after we broke up

Coq au vin.

Spicy tuna rolls.

Eggplant with fried tofu.

Some sort of kale with another sort of salmon.

The dust of barbecue pistachios and one mealy pear.

Turkey slices that I rolled like cigars to dip in vegan pesto.

Yesterday’s lunch.

Tomorrow’s breakfast.

And nothing, many times.

Many times, I found myself having

Nothing without you.

Above: Tuscan Somewhere, Italy | Summer 2024

Above: Paris, France | Summer 2014

Above: LaSalle, France | Summer 2022

Above: Corte, Corsica | Summer 2014

Above: Skippino and Panino | Summer 2023

Above: Farmers Market in Paris | Summer 2023

Not really. But kind of. It’s called NEW FORMS and it is a community art event that features a gallery show of local artists and a performance by a local theatre company. A new form of entertainment.

The theatre company is one I started with my friends about a year ago [remember this post?] We all met in that acting class and wanted to put on full plays outside of the class structure, so we built BLUE PEN. [how great is that website? Shoutout Solomon, Hyewon, and Carth.]

For over a year we have been meeting once a week to read plays and scripts, direct each other, perform for each other, and build… something. We didn’t know if we’d ever be able to fulfill our dream of putting on actor-forward plays here in LA — it’s expensive, it’s hard to get people to commit, and somehow, in the city where everyone is a bored gorgeous actor, there is almost no theatre scene. But we started anyway.

Then an angel investor fell into our laps. I won’t get into that because it’s dumb luck and I want to respect their privacy. But Here We Are.

I was booked on a job in New York through June when I found the investor. I called the company and told them the news, offering myself as a remote producer and told them to decide what play to put up as our first step. Cut to a harrowing bout of strep throat and FOMO— I resigned from the job just in time for the first table read and got my ass back to the black box.

We are doing STUPID FUCKING BIRD by Aaron Posner. It is a modern adaptation of Chekhov’s masterpiece THE SEAGULL. This adaptation was written in 2012 but is prescient as ever, like all great works of art. The characters are doomed in hyper specific ways, fraught with crises about art, love, purpose, and the unknowable future of this crumbling world. It’s a comedy.

We founded our company with specific values— commitment, democracy, and excellence at the forefront. It’s hard to build something, but let me tell you, I am blown away by my peers. Their talent is boundless on and off the stage. I have been producing for a decade, but three of the company members and the director joined me as a producing committee to make this happen. One of our actors’ girlfriends designed the logo. Another actor in the company, who isn’t even in this play, has been at every furniture pick up and lent us his garage. He came up with one of the key interactive design elements of the show in a production meeting. We have an actress and producer who is on strict bedrest that has built our entire social media campaign with me and is running it herself. [thank god because I’d definitely collapse. she wrote a beautiful piece about her pregnancy I highly recommend.] Our fearless director falls asleep with his script open every night. I’ve never seen him more alive. To watch the values we brainstormed over a year ago in my living room come to life is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever been a part of.

We brought in the brilliant Ester Song Kim, co-director of Four Chairs, to production design the play. She has been the most patient and generous version of her already patient and generous self. I cannot overstate how lucky we are to have her on the team.

The lead character is a playwright named CON. He is obsessed with creating a NEW FORM of theater. We felt the piece itself was calling to be in a non-traditional space. One of our producers found MiViDa, a converted airplane hanger in Frogtown that is often rented for dance parties, but has hosted one play before. It felt exactly right.

The investor and I discuss at length how to bring theater to a non-theater town. People in Los Angeles like to have a good time and they don’t like to be lectured. We hope that Angelino’s who think they don’t like theater come for the art gallery and let Blue Pen change their minds. Theater’s reputation has floated into the realm of the elite, but that’s not how it should be. In ancient Greece, attending the theater was considered a civic duty. It was a mass cultural experience, not a luxury. It can be chill and fun and profound and stimulating if done properly. That’s where New Forms comes in.

New Forms features the work of 5 local artists, of varied disciplines, who’s work will be showcased in the performance space like a gallery. After an hour, the gallery audience takes a seat to watch the show. The artists are all people I know and admire both personally and professionally. No dickwads was the curating mandate.

My favorite part about getting older is watching my friends reach new heights in their potential. I didn’t choose them just because they are my friends, I promise. These artists have fresh perspectives on the world and are expressing it through their mediums of choice. The website’s artist page will link you to more of their work.

For the first two weekends, I play a lovelorn, angsty, ukulele singer. To keep the form as new as ever — the actors rotate and there is a fresh batch of gallery artists for the second two weekends. I hope people come a second time with new friends. I will then play the supporting male part, a famous author who is dating Con’s mom and sweeps Con’s girlfriend Nina off her feet. Oops.

Gay Chekhov sounds overdue, right?

The actors are working for free and the tickets are sold at $45, which does not make our spending budget back even if we sell out, but we want to reach as many people as possible. We are trying something new. I’d like to think that people in Los Angeles are willing to try something new with us.

I’d love for you to come to the show, or support the event if you cannot. Every dollar made goes into the next show. We will sell merch at the event and anything we don’t sell I’ll put up on here for the Hand Fetish crowd to swoop. This is the first of many New Forms.

Read more

The prompt was to write a poem titled Fantasy. I titled it Honey Trap 2 : A Silence Impossible. His prompts are invitations, not rules. I could tell you why I called it that, but that would take out all of the fun.

Hand Fetish, the poetry and photography book, is done and has been done. For the last year I’ve been squeezing poems in there that really don’t belong. The fourth chapter of Hand Fetish is actually probably begging to be it’s own book.

This poem is of the voice of the second book [amazing to be plotting a second book when the first one isn’t released, but we are in the era of audacity] and yet it fits perfectly in the fifth chapter of Hand Fetish, called “David.” TBD what happens in every sense, so I’m just going to throw it to you here and now.

I made most of my inner circle read multiple drafts of this, I don’t usually do that, but I was haunted by getting it right. Thank you to those friends for their generosity and attention. I’ve had this idea for many many years and by the end I realized it doesn’t matter because it feels true and I like it and if I ever publish that second book, I can change it by then. It started out as a two stanza piece, evolved into one long block, and then found a semblance of structure.

Anyway. Enjoy an original fantasy:

Honey Trap 2 : A Silence Impossible

I have fantasies that he’s a secret agent

On a covert-something doing a somehow-mission in a somewhere-place.

It’s a lonely drunken dangerous job to which

Optimists are best suited.

They could tell from the smile on his Rec Cen badge that he’d find a way

To laugh and keep going–

He laughs and keeps going in this fantasy.

Optimists’ resilience is oft mistaken for naiveté, but

The cynics spread that rumor.

His favorite part of the job is the many sunrises

An amber-coated silver lining to the night shifts and long transit.

The hardest part for him is mastering the cyrillic alphabet.

The V’s look like B’s and the Z’s look like 3’s, but he finds the accent with ease—

He’s good with his tongue in this fantasy.

Ye as in yesterday, Yo as in yonder,

X looks like H as in Loch as in K as in maybe

He’s better suited to the romantic countries.

Tapas is his portioned preference, but his business on the Riviera is urgent

And he could always swallow the R.

He sleeps with women who have information he needs—

He needs in this fantasy.

He treats them nicely for all fourteen hours they share

Opens the door, eye contact, pays for the drink, loves her dress out loud

It is a using, but it is a pleasure for them both, even when he sneaks out

In a silence impossible.

A story for her grandchildren or even on her wedding day if she is drunk enough:

The man with eyes so green and curls around his ear—

His hair is still long in this fantasy.

MY GOD that freckle on that cheek she will say

As she wonders where he is now, right now,

In a rasp-ed whisper because her voice is gone from screaming

Buh Buh Buh Bennie and the Jets.

Or maybe she is French and it will be the Marseillaise that horses her down.

The summer nights are longer in Bordeaux so the sky is still cerulean when she

Leans on the table to lament what she could have had

And did in fact for one night before he left to save the world—

Because in this fantasy he does that and his funeral

Is something I plan and not something I remember.

Above: Phantom Orange Blanc Space from June 2023

I shot a text to 14 people yesterday as I streamed the inauguration during a snowstorm in New York City. I was alone in my circle it seemed, which still lingered in my mind most upon my 430am wake up this morning. I don’t have a particularly political inner circle of friends. I say this without a shred of judgement. Nobody has to do anything. My friends are incredibly values based, which is why I love them. Their values inform their politics. But to watch the inauguration? Especially this one? Not on the list.

I'm interested in politics. I considered pursuing that life for a long time, and still do on days where I’m particularly downtrodden about the industry I’ve chosen. I won’t do it for many reasons, but it’s not a far timeline jump to find Gubernatorial Aide Nika. That being said, I’m very resistant to write about them here. I’ve done it a handful of times [see: an unhinged Giorgia Meloni rant from my early days on Substack] but I am both shy about my level of knowledge and quick to slip into my philosophical academic safe space when I try. I’m not going to write about politics here for too long, but rather, people and hope.

I’ve been sick for 21 days. My body does this every winter, I don’t get sick all year and then I crash out hard in the November - January arc. I usually thug it out due to my charming cocktail of California hippie who doesn’t like to take too much medicine personality and workaholic persona that thrives in having a reason to stay inside with my reading and writing. I have a “job” right now… like… I have to be in an office from 9-7 every single fucking weekday. Imagine. I called out for two days, but when I woke up yesterday with new and worse symptoms, I finally threw in the towel and went to urgent care. The doctor scripted a catch-all antibiotic and charged me $270 (insert: American politik). I’m annoyed at myself for not getting them 10 days ago, but each path to healing is bespoke, ain’t it!

I walked home in the snow with my neon orange pill bottle and sat on the couch for the rest of the day. It was not quite 9am. The inauguration was on, which I both intended to watch and also hadn’t thought much about.

Trump lied, he invoked the God he doesn’t believe in, Melania dodged his kiss, nothing new. I was not surprised by the front line of tech CEOs, seated in front of the appointment cabinet members. I was not surprised that patron saint Bernie Sanders braced the back of his golden chair in a room full of blondes. I was not surprised by Trumps immediate executive order to pull out of the Paris climate accord. I was not surprised by anything.

Elon and the Nazi salute? I don’t know man… I’m a Jew, I talked to some Jews about it, he’s like… pretty openly autistic and a troll, I just don’t think that’s what he was doing. If he did, it was for the outrage. His agenda for a long time was making money in the tech world, he did that. His agenda as of late has been to become a viral political figure, he’s doing that. He’s good at it.

I’m concerned, but not surprised. What do we do about that? I’m not the source. I’m watching, I’m thinking, I’m writing, I’m talking— that’s all I know how to do. People like Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer have a lot to say about actionable items. I read and listen to them, I try. Again, this is without judgement, I understand why my friends didn’t watch. There is a resounding hopelessness. I’m not a naturally hopeless person. This system still pretends it is a democracy, we do have midterm elections in two years…

But sometimes the optimism and rest isn’t enough and you have to take some medicine.

I think it’s important to stay alarmed, which is why I’m writing today. I’m mad at myself for not being surprised, just as I’m mad at myself for not getting an antibiotic sooner. It is alarming that the ruling class of billionaires, whom have long had economic and political privileges in this country, are now unabashedly sitting next to the president’s son as daddy forgets to put his hand on the bible while taking the oath of office. It is alarming that our president pulled out of the most promising global climate initiative as my home city is still on fire and the city I’m currently in is facing an historic cold front.

He signed close to 100 executive orders yesterday. He pardoned more than 1500 of the January 6th rioters, including those who violently attacked the police— Police that he so ardently defends when the left is upset about police funding and brutality. Many of them are stunts, flexes, another act in the performance art. EO’s cannot create new laws or violate existing laws. They must derive authority from the constitution or statues. Courts will review, although the courts were stacked by him in his first term, and Congress can pass legislation to override an EO. That being said, many of them will be instantly influential. We, America, will be less great. Don’t get me started on his terrifying and blatantly racist immigration policies.

Outrage has become cheugy, I get that. I don’t care. I’d argue (and often do) that we lost the plot when George W. Bush was given the seat without winning the popular vote and nothing was changed in our electoral system. It’s as outrageous to me as our refusal to enact any legislation after the abhorrent amount of shootings in this country. It’s now happened twice in my lifetime.

The Democrat’s institution lost me (I still vote and vote blue, but I mean spiritually) when emails were leaked from the DNC chairs internally working against Bernie Sanders’ primary run. It’s a mess, the left, but it’s not the violent, hateful, demagogic oligarchy that the right is shamelessly parading itself to be. False equivocation grinds my god damned gears. Don’t do that. At least not to my face. It’s not the same.

I would love for the democrats to learn something from the right. I mean that. There is an artist I admire (I will be VERY vague here) who has been lauding Trump and Elon for the last year. I don’t believe the artist actually admires their policy— what i’d like to think the artist sees is effective messaging. That’s what us artists are actually trying to do I think. We have something to say and we cultivate a voice, a craft, a project, in order to say it. Elon and Trump have done that very well. Although, as alluded to above, he lost the popular vote the first time, he sure as hell didn’t this time.

A lot of my leftist community will say things about red voters to the like of “if they actually understood” and “they don’t know” and “the education…” No. Stop. Believe them. Believe that they know and that they are voting for this. Don’t give them the out of “not understanding.” It is elitist, patronizing, and far too generous.

It reminds me of the classic female trop of trying to fix a man. “If he really knew me and knew what he wanted…” No babe! He’s an asshole on purpose! That way of being allows him to get what he wants! I believe Trump will harm all Americans, a majority of which (lest we forget) are his voters. That non-committal dick wad guy who broke your heart will realize in 20 years that he could have had a lot of love if he just took anyone’s needs into consideration in addition to his own. I hope Trump voters come around to that, but I don’t care. I don’t care if the guy who treated me like shit eventually realizes he made a mistake. I’m not interested in revenge and get no satisfaction out of “being right.” It’s boring and useless if you’re not getting what you want. It’s not a way to live and it is certainly not a way to run a campaign. Democrats needs to come to the table with what they want, not with what they think will tap into the zeitgeist, the demographics, the voting public of North Carolina, the institution. I would love for us to run someone as boldly clownish on the left, Bernie was the tangible and effective example of this and we ate him alive from the inside because we were cowards.

We are in danger. The future of this country and the global economy is in danger. Keep reading, keep talking, keep voting, keep hoping. It isn’t cute or effective to write about it on your poetry / philosophy / photography newsletter, I KNOW, but I’ve given up on being cute and effective. It makes you sick.

I really do love it. I can’t help but call myself out on the obvious mirroring (dad taught me that) but reading every Carlo Rovelli book and many a Scientific American article has become a favorite hobby. I don’t pretend to understand it, I barely retain it, but there is a peace I find when I head for that section of a bookstore. I read fiction and poetry in boatloads, but nothing soothes me more than equations I know I’ll never really understand. I think there is a divinity to it that gives me great comfort as an anxious artistic spirit who never really had god in the house. My dad has and continues to throw Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle at me when I am anxious. It’s a stretch but a catch-all, something along the lines of “You can’t know the position and speed of a particle at the same time Nika, how can you be spiraling about knowing the entire outcome of every possible future!”

I found my way to Benajmin Labatut’s stunning book through an interview of Jesse Eisenberg talking about his new film A Real Pain. The Jewish neurotic (self-described, no shade) screenwriter and director made his beautiful new film about a trip with his quasi-estranged cousin to tour a concentration camp in Poland. There is a scene in a small cemetery where the tour group places pebbles on top of a headstone together. This is a Jewish tradition, that like many Jewish traditions, is interpreted in vastly different ways. Some suggest the soul swells within the grave and the stones keep the soul down in this world. Others think of it as garlic to a vampire— a rock keeps the demons away. One I love is simple— Stones last longer than flowers, your visit holds more permanence with a pebble rather than a lily.

Above: The only Jewish headstone I saw at Pere LaChaise. Not to say there aren’t more, but this was the one that found me on Jan 7 2025.

I found myself spouting anxiously as I walked through the Pere LaChaise cemetery with during my final hour in Paris yesterday. It was a classic manic monologue of mine that started with a suitcase and quickly found itself in love and loss and the dreaded chant “I hope it comes together some day.”

I haven’t been anxious in a long time. Part of that is a long job I’ve been on since September that will go for more months, a rare occurrence in the life of a freelance artist. Part of that is my recent injury— It’s hard to spiral down the “am I a megalomaniac delusional or is art the only noble pursuit” rabbit hole when you can’t walk and have to crawl to the toilet. I opened the book while in my four day paralysis, but only got through about 50 pages, because my capacity was limited in that state. When my familiar fluttering came back on the cobblestone steps of the cemetery, I realized that I had finally exited the weeks of physical pain and returned to my invented pain. It made me smile. And I knew I was going to finish the rest of the book on the plane.

“You look tired, Professor. You should take better care of yourself. Did you know the first symptom of a psychological disturbance is the inability to contend with the future? How hard it is to control our thoughts! You, for example— it is obvious you are possessed. That you are in thrall to your intellect as a degenerate is in thrall to a woman’s cunt. You are bewitched, Professor, you’ve been sucked inside your own head.”

Page 155— from the fictionalized breakthrough that lead to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

When We Cease to Understand The World (2021) is described as “a work of fiction based on real events.” Labatut takes us through the profound discoveries of a few select chemists, physicists, and mathematicians, and then paints a picture of their descent into madness. There is science and math in the book, but please don’t let that turn you off. I told a few friends as we wandered the streets of Paris, on one of my few able-bodied days, that it reminds me of stories you hear of artists. Van Gogh’s elusive ear, Sylvia Plath’s oven, Virginia and her walk to the river. This isn’t a book of suicide stories, but the poetry of Labatut’s writing and his cinematic passages of scientific breakthrough felt like nothing but biographies of artists reaching the edge.

It is no groundbreaking interpretation of mine to say that scientists are creative, but I feel this presentation gives these madmen the credit that they deserve in suggesting their brilliant minds relied just as much on imagination as it did mathematics. The stories, albeit fictionalized in the details, sound exactly like all of my artist friends when they recount how a great piece came to them.

“He found the draft of an equation similar to the one he had been looking for, but it bore no apparent relation to the pages that had come before. It was as if someone had entered his room while he slept and had left these calculations there, an unsolvable riddle, just to torture him. What had felt, the night before, like the most significant intellectual transport of his life now seemed little more than the frenzy of an amateur physicist, a sorry episode of megalomania.”

Page 129 — Schrödinger on the precipice of a quantum breakthrough to rival Heisenberg’s.

Above: Me telling Ester that my poem “La Memoire d’Argile” shared at the end of my Anger Essay couldn’t possibly have been authored by me.

Heisenberg had a fever and went on a foggy hike in Helgioland just before writing matrices that opened up access to the quantum world. Schrodinger went to the mountains and fell in unrequited love for his greatest advancements. Prince Louis-Victor duc de Broglie lost a lover and manically pursued their collection of art curation from the mentally insane just before he wrote his thesis about atoms being both wave and particle, a duality principle that catalyzed so much of Quantum Theory.

Schwarzschild was fighting in World War I as he descended into madness, and who can blame him? In the trenches, literally, he stumbled upon singularity through calculations from Einstein’s theories of relativity. His work gave way to the discovery and understanding of what we now know as black holes. Imagine… doing some math… and figuring out there are black holes. Of course you’d lose your mind. Toward the end of his calculations, his service, and his life, he feared that there was perhaps a singularity, a black hole density, to be found within human consciousness:

“If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will— millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space— unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was taking place in the Fatherland. Courant tried to appease him; he said that he saw no signs of the apocalypse Schwarzschild feared, and that surely there could be nothing worse than the war they were mired in. he reminded Schwarzschild that the human soul was a greater mystery than any mathematical enigma, and that it was unwise to project the findings of physics into such far-flung realms as psychology.”

Above: Page 56. I could write about 15,000 incoherent words on that quote alone, but I’m going to spare us all.

Ah yes, the great mystery of the human soul. I think we have so much in common, scientists and artists. Scientists happen to be concerned with things you can see, whereas artists are concerned with things you can feel. Other than that, the pursuit, and the madness, are one in the same. This book artistically crafts the unraveling of brilliant scientific minds just as they near an understanding of the world. For all of us trying, I think it’s comforting rather than fear-mongering.

Although I’ve sat around many an aperitivo and argued that artists do not have to be insane or terrible in order to produce great works, I do think there is great discovery and creativity found at the edge of madness. Call it neuroses, anxiety, mania, call it a concerning disposition! Facing lunacy and still maintaining my manners is kind of my singular pursuit. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In my own bout of madness, I’ve gone from North Carolina to Oaxaca to San Francisco to Paris to New York in the last 24 days. I had a stomach virus, two fractured back bones, wrote three poems, two essay, and was up after 5 hours of sleep to write this one before heading to a 12 hour work day. Los Angeles is on fire and I’m texting people where my lockbox is if they need a bed. New York winds are banging on my window, warning my California spirit to mentally prepare for my commute. My friends in Paris are texting me poetic goodbyes and my immigration lawyer hasn’t heard back from me in 8 weeks. My phone is buzzing with news alerts of natural and political disaster and my thriftbooks cart has 7 copies of this book that I’m sending to friends in different cities. I have ceased to understand this world. I’m fairly certain that we will never will, but I laud and love all of us who are trying.

What else can we do? Perhaps just put a stone on the grave, to keep away the demons, to de-swell the lost soul, to remind us all that we were once here.

“You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.”

Above: Nikos Kazantzakis in one of my favorite books ever, Zorba the Greek.

Usually when I “throw out my back” its 2-3 bad days and then a fuzzy memory. It’s now been 11 days where I cannot sit in a chair. I also got sick yesterday, and coughing while having a gruesome back injury is a special kind of hell.

In the moments where I can think straight, I’ve tried to jot down some notes about the experience so that I could turn it into an essay. The way I bundled up my giant trench coat to sit on while trying to be in a chair for a coffee meeting. The drugs I had to take on my flight and the flashing images from a Uruguayan film that haunted me during that high. My posture as I walked through the streets of Paris, leaning forward, hands behind my back, like the many elderly folk I’ve photographed before.

Above: Paris, November 2021

The notes have come to… Nothing. I don’t know how to write about this episode in a contained enough way. I don’t know how to do it without talking about some emotional pain going on that I abjectly refuse to write about. I don’t know how to do it without complaining and then feeling guilty considering the vast amounts of pain in the world. I just can’t figure it out.

That being said, shall we dance?

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I find a lot of the girl boss conversations about it to be rather annoying. I think because I have been angry my entire life. My dad laughs and smiles as he tells the story of me emerging from the C-Section as “the incredible hulk baby.” Full head of jet black hair, in a fit of absolute rage. My birth announcement literally says on the card “Arrived Kicking and Screaming.” Look.

I have a little sister, who for a long time was capital S Small. I was always above average in size, so the two and half years I have on her in age felt like four in our size difference. Due to this, physical fighting was absolutely off the table, and my dad was sharp enough to throw me into sports so I had a place to bump around. My first year playing soccer (age 8, aka “late”) a fellow parent called me “The Linebacker.” Every single right-foot cleat that I owned was lain to rest because of an inevitable slit on the toe from an inordinate amount of slide tackles. Water polo ended up being even better for me because it’s quite hard to break a girls collar bone in the pool. Don’t worry, I’m going to make a movie about it.

I’ve generally been very lucky with men and lucky with my rage. I mostly put it on the field or on the page. (ew i’m so sorry to rhyme)

I dated a guy who called his ex “crazy” which is apparently instagrams favorite diagnostic test for a red flag. Maybe she was crazy. Women can be crazy. Totally. But, maybe she was… mad. I don’t have time or the interest to break down the entire history of misogyny, but I blocked a number for the first time recently and found myself realizing I would be tossed into the “crazy girl” pile.

Do it. I’m Wild. Uninhibited. Self-Assured. Angry. I’m that way on purpose.

Photo by in the 10eme.

I’m also a perpetually smiling optimist. The two are non-exclusive, and I often muse that my optimism fuels my rage. Not because I’m proven naive and made a fool, but because I see injustice and wrongdoing that I don’t believe has to be there and, instead of feeling defeated or cynical, it makes me mad.

Nowadays I describe my anger as systemic. Until I was about 17, my anger was… all the anger. Taken out on the field/page as previously noted, but taken out on myself most of all. Age has helped with that.

When I started studying philosophy in college, it felt like the first correct dosage of a prescription against the wrath. I don’t know if it was a simple ascension into adulthood, or the obvious work of philosophy to be big picture thinking with a clear understanding of both your argument and the argument from the other side. Probably both, maybe neither. I know that it helped and continues to help. I’ve been lucky that alcohol and drugs don’t call to me as rage balms. Writing helps. Friends help. Photography helps. Engaging debate about anything with someone I respect. Nothing soothes me more than dropping into a book, other than a near-impossible work out.

This is my favorite book on female rage. I give it as a gift to a select few women, usually those who’s rage I can’t see at first. When it catches the sunlight and shimmers for a fleeting moment, I send them this book.

Julia in Tuscany. Slicing with precision.

I wrote a poem about anger once, it’s actually from another book: I must exact myself.

It is a poetry dialectic between myself and where we began with a random word from a random book. She wrote a poem that included that word, and I chose a word from her resulting poem and wrote my own. This went on in the Fall of 2022 for 53 days. It is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. We might publish it.

For now, please find a poem of mine from I must exact myself, which had to include the word “delicate”:

the french word for memory,

like the french word for clay,

is feminine.

she is raw,

she is delicate

she lets you form her,

until she is set on fire.

nothing holds its shape so well

as a woman who has been burned.

(((((:

There are logistical obstacles, naturally. There are hypothetical career obstacles that my anxious mind reads as fact, and my confident mind reads as child’s play. There are political motivators, let alone the artistic and lifestyle ones. There are pro lists and con lists and opinions and advice and lawyers and dreams and nightmares. Rather than letting myself [continue to] soak in the whirlpool of that jacuzzi, I’ve tried recently to see the forest through the trees— it led me to consider the umbrella of commitment issues.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my life romantically. I’ve almost never dealt with a lover who has commitment issues, but have of course been along side friends who try to navigate that ever common ailment to a connection. I also have a lot of friends who admit their own commitment issues, a fruitful insight that has given me empathy and understanding, and has led me to reflect on my own.

Let’s call Paris a lover. Let’s say this lover and I have been entangled for quite some time now. She is exciting, independent, beautiful. My god is she beautiful. She inspires me to be better, she has amazing family and friends that have welcomed me with open arms. We have a great thing going. I’ve learned how to communicate with her and she is consistently herself.

Paris, being herself, outside of Rock Bottles in the 18eme | Portra 400, July 2024

There are things, like with any lover, that will require adaptation and compromise on my part… but there are things to figure out in any relationship. To deny true romance is irresponsible, isn’t it? At what point to do you commit to a good thing? Is it that I think there is something better out there for me?

If we stretch the puddy of this metaphor, Los Angeles is the long term relationship that I keep trying to save, even though I’ve fallen in love elsewhere. I have a loyalty to my dreams that Los Angeles promised me when we started dating. It’s hard to leave any long term relationship. It’s hard to accept that this relationship may not bear the fruit that I believed it could.

Los Angeles bearing no fruit in Los Feliz | December 2019

I have many brilliant friends who have lots of insight on the subject— but my dearest Kevin shot me straight recently. “Nika — you want to make European films. You’re running a race on the wrong track, and the incredibly fickle finish line isn’t even where you want to end up.”

I’m under no illusion that the French film industry is going to welcome me with open arms. But, I do not want to make the movies that the American market is financing. I do want to make the movies that the European market is financing. To date someone who tells you from the beginning that they don’t want the same things long term… that’s where the math is undeniable.

A serious hesitation in leaving my long term relationship, despite the chemistry I have with Paris, is that networking is a real currency in the film industry. When I’m anxious, I see the move as throwing away ten years and starting again from zero. When I’m less anxious, I know that isn’t entirely true, but it is a relevant consideration.

Then we get to gambling.

I’ve been working on an essay for three months about gambling. I may still post it, but it has felt insurmountable because it is hard to keep it focused. The subject matter surrounds the concept of gambling and I try to dial it in to having a career in the arts, all while speaking about my almost clinical aversion to actual gambling. I try to reconcile my phobia of gambling with the notion that my entire life path has been and is a gamble in and of itself. I don’t have an answer, hence it living safely in my drafts.

To tie this in to commitment issues — if I could casually move to France and change my mind, a la being in a non-monogamous relationship, I would have done that years ago. In a way, I have— spending months at a time there, building a community, directing multiple films and commercials in Europe, and lord knows that suits me. But eventually, it’s a shit or get off the pot situation. Is that a gamble or is it faith?

Don’t answer that, I’m not looking for advice.

Lovers bombing down the hill with abandon | Kodak 200 Gold, July 2024

At some point… when you have a friend who is afraid of commitment, it becomes frustrating. Just DO IT and if you don’t like it, leave! Relationships and cities have that in common— they are places you can come to, find out if you can give each other what you need, and then leave if you find you are ultimately incompatible. The beautiful thing about being alive in this day and age is how free we are. Nothing is permanent, so what is there to be afraid of?

Above: Photo by - a main editor of The Requisitions and head of the publishing imprint “Kingdom Anywhere” with Samuel.

Samuel is a master of multiple mediums, and holds one of his two Masters Degrees in Holocaust studies. The first day I met him, it was just over a year after I finished a huge research project that evolved into writing a Pilot for an original mini-series set in a concentration camp. About 3 minutes into our first exchange we found ourselves leaning closer over a trusted table at Au Chat Noir to check if we heard each other right... In fact we do share a huge creative pull to tell stories from this harrowing time and place. In fact our addiction to philosophy and storytelling did lead us both into Nazi-infested worlds, where the exploration of ethics, responsibility, and resistance is endless. In fact he was working on this novel that very day.

I ought to speak for myself, but I think many readers assume an author is always a part of the story. Auto-fiction is a rapidly growing subset of independent cinema, almost to the point of no return. The virus-like fascination with celebrity culture is spreading beyond just movie stars, with executives asking me point blank in pitch meetings how much of the character’s trauma in my scripts are my own, and there is a lingering tension that if I do not answer in the affirmative that I am not the person to tell the story. I have some inherent resistance to this, perhaps more accurately labeled as pride. I am a writer. I am an actor. Fiction is the game we play. What does it matter how much of me is in there? Do you think I can only tell my own stories?

Samuel may not have this issue of pride that I have, he is a better man than me in many ways, but presupposing he has confronted this thought before, he seems to have doubled down with an interesting take. He has placed a modern day version of hisself throughout the book. The concept of historical fiction is one I had just danced with in my pilot, but Samuel created a historical metafiction.

The Requisitions weaves between three points of view in early 1940s Poland, with a fourth character being the author himself in the 2020s. It has poetic license and a fictional filter, but the starkness of the fourth POV is a surprising structural element. It reminds me of the NYT game “Connections” where sometimes three of the tiles are so clearly fitting and the fourth is where the game begins.

It reads to me as a charming bet against the “author always writes hisself” at the very least least but, upon deeper reflection, I find it to be a vulnerable act of humility and a bold claim of responsibility to get ahead of anyone asking why this young non-jewish man of the 2020s ought to enter the canon of Holocaust fiction.

The answer to that is within every page of the modern chapter and reflected in the intimate and accurate representation of the historical bulk of the book. We also are gifted an author who answers directly for himself about what the fuck he is doing here. Fear not, Samuel doesn’t linger in the modern chapters on that explanation. I imagine if he had, it would read defensive. Instead, he takes the reader through a narrative of his own as his mother enters a new phase of her late years in life and they both have to reconcile with memory, mortality, and meaning.

These themes of course haunt all three of the war-torn protagonists in their varied and horrifying fates in and around Łódź, Poland. Viktor Bauman is a professor with two Jewish grandmothers that he did not know, condemned to the target class on two accounts; Intellectual and capital J-Jew. Elsa Dietrich is an Aryan beauty who is forced into a relationship with one Nazi and a Secretary job for another. Carl Becker is the SS officer who has claimed Elsa for himself, but spends much of his time yearning for her whilst on duty. The three characters have vastly different places in the hierarchy of the collapsing city, but none are painless, and none are expected.

I will admit, I was concerned before reading that Samuel’s intricate academic knowledge of the Holocaust would constrain his narrative freedom. I have certainly stood in my own way with a “good student” commitment to facts, logic, and history. Not to say that a moment of the book felt outside of those elements, but only to compliment his brazen willingness to enter the emotional and sensory experience of all three of these characters. In doing so, he demands an intense consideration from the readers about what may seem as obvious ethical choices. Does a small act of resistance absolve an SS employee? What about a big one? How do we feel about the young, drugged up farmers who were drafted to the German front line? How about the Jews running the Ghetto’s, serving down Nazi orders? Thought experiment after thought experiment is posed in each scene, challenging the audience to reflect on questions they thought they knew the answers to.

“But what remains of ‘The Professor’ on this day of days? Was it not an illusion all along? Viktor glares at his reflection. What was he trying to prove all those years? What use is philosophy in the face of death squads?”

The Requisitions, page 29

Now, why do I call this my favorite movie of the year? The prose finds an incredibly difficult balance of political quandaries and historical devotion through a character-first emotional story. The writing engages all of the senses, down to a continuous quasi-surreal stomach ache that I won’t spoil, but will tell you I felt inside my modern American guts. You can smell this book from a mile away, there are select suspense scenes that would fill a movie-salle with palpable tension, and when I tell you I could feel the light change as the book went on… I’m going to request that you believe me and give Samuel the credit. We also have a reverence for music and other literature in here, which often books will stray away from doing unless it is a major plot point. You can hear what they hear from start to finish. These people are in an incredibly specific world and time, and like any good film, the details paint the picture so that you know exactly where and when that is.

There is a strategy in film production to adapt “bad books,” because you save yourself from disappointing a fan base who is attached to the vision in their heads. Because authors are often focused on the word and character and leave out the production design and lighting unless they can spin it into a pointed poetic turn of phrase. Because movie executives are afraid.

I hate this strategy, but I understand it, especially as a lover of literature. Some things are meant to be books and not go off the page. Samuel defies this with his masterful work. I both have watched it by reading, and hope to watch it one day in the cinema so that I can read it again. If I were tasked to adapt it, all I would have to do would be follow his directions.

You can read about the writing process HERE, before or after you read the novel. I imagine it will inspire you through his endurance and trust that he had something to say and had to say it.

You can purchase the book here, I would love to hear what you think.

Last year I began working with my writing and directing manager Matt Rosen who I don’t have time to describe to you, and who would be impossible to capture in 2 dimensions. I committed to him after many meetings, a brutal but mental-health-motivated decision to stop auditioning and only act in the theater or films made by my friends, and a long conversation on Zoom with him the week before he was getting married. There is an undeniable comfort that washes over me when I meet someone who is as neurotic, obsessive, direct, passionate, and Jewish as me. It’s rare and important. But what convinced me to work with Matt was how earnest he is. [And the smile that crept upon his face when I answered his “who do you want to be” question with Alice Rohrwacher.]

I know it’s a cheap trick to drop a Webster definition, but let’s enter a semantic and tender dance for a moment:

earnest [adj.]

“characterized by or proceeding from an intense and serious state of mind”

“serious and zealous in intention, purpose, or effort:”

“showing depth and sincerity of feeling:”

For the last few years I’ve been describing myself as “a serious person.” It is partly an act of self-soothing to justify the insane path I have chosen, partly an attempt to fight against the hollow context that “multi-hyphenate” has taken on in the zeitgeist, and although I was there first, it has become an ode to Succession.

I think American Jewish culture has an astonishing grip on being serious without being self-serious. This is important. I see the irony in me writing a self-published reader-supported newsletter with my art and philosophical musings. It is pretty fuckin self-serious, but let me promise you that nobody laughs at me more than me.

There is profound humor, humility, and empathy within the American Jewish community, but none of this counteracts the serious. I wonder if it is cultural, a coping mechanism, or a survival tactic? We have to take things seriously, most of all our pursuits, because historically they have been dismissed and undervalued. I am not sure though. Maybe I’m projecting my personality flaws onto the entire tribe— I have also mastered the Jewish skill of feeling guilty about anything and everything.

Matt is hilarious, passionate, and the definition of earnest to me. He writes a holiday letter every year, and I have been lucky to receive it twice now. It is gushing with his serious intention, purpose, effort, depth, and sincerity of feeling. These are the people that inspire me in life, and an Earnest Woman is all I hope to be.

I cannot possibly write an essay about being earnest without mentioning my brother, my best, my Alessandro Marino. Our friendship began nearly seven years ago at an awkward dinner for 12 to which only 4 people showed up. He didn’t know what “arugula” was and my semester of Italian language was able to translate the ingredients of the antipasti for him. This man has changed my life and my personality for the better more than any single person [perhaps besides my father.] He made a short film a few years ago that is incredibly earnest, and now uses that instagram page to share poetry. I offer it to you here for a dose of the wonderful. He lifted me out of a victorian era depression this autumn with his passionate and serious studies in mindfulness. We shared books, poems, hikes, and many many many jokes at each others expense. He directed a new short film in May that I was lucky enough to be a part of and edit. I could not be more proud to know and love this earnest man.

2023 was colored by shades of international travel, filmmaking, film watching, and so much laughter. I produced the most complicated short film of my career in three countries with yet another beloved earnest cinephile, Becca Holstein. She is an essay of her own and has unlocked an emotionality in me that I believed would always be private. To say I’m grateful would be an understatement, to say my life is forever changed by her would be just the beginning.

Two earnest Paris dwellers, that you will be familiar with if you are an avid Hand Fetish reader, are the unrivaled and ever expanding and . I got to travel with them, sing with them, read with them, eat with them, and laugh with them many times this year. Samuel published his second novel with great attention, care, effort, and aplomb. Augusta took photographs that museum-goers would be lucky to see, nearly daily. She shares them with the world because sometimes life is that fortunate. They have guided and inspired me since the fateful November day two years ago when I met them.

I saw films that blew me to bits and one that even got me practicing piano again. Talk about earnest; American Symphony is the film to watch —

The year was painful beyond a shadow of a doubt. War looms large, and although I don’t write about it publicly, those who know me know I read and speak about it every day in thorough, open, tender, fearful, empathetic, passionate conversation.

Antonyms of earnest are listed as:

apathetic

cold

dispassionate

indifferent

insincere

unenthusiastic

Right.

It seems obvious in that context the disavow these traits, but let’s give them some respect. There is a self-protection to be found in a lack of earnestness. Especially in Hollywood. The town does not love you. The industry does not love you. It is not a meritocracy and it certainly won’t green light your film based on how earnest you are. In fact, there are many that have taken on the fruitful strategy of “writing for the market” and “writing what will sell.” That works. They are right. I know they are right. I don’t have the ability to do it, but if I did I probably would. [*More on that sentiment soon*]

And let’s also call out the other obvious marker— it’s not cool to be earnest, at least in the short term. I was bullied [overstatement, but heavily-teased sounds too sexual] for reading from a young age, for liking both jazz music and fantasy football, for writing about poetry and crying when I beg people to let me read them a passage, for doing the things that I like to do with a zealous commitment. That’s par for the course.

The short term reaction to earnest acts is often a scoff or an eye roll. Even the people that love you. My theater director berated me for writing another script with Italian language, telling me it is a performative relationship I have to European culture. I had one of the most profound drug trips of my life this year within which one of my best friends in the world came down to earth to put his hands on my shoulders and say “You don’t have to try so hard.” I said “If I could stop being this way, I promise you I would.” And I meant that. I don’t know how.

Don’t worry, they both love me, but this is to say; The earnest path is off putting to many and you are just going to have to take that on the chin. If it is really the earnest path, which takes time to find, you won’t have a choice anyway.

I do believe being earnest is cool in the long term, but cool is not the objective. It’s a losing battle to pursue cool as I presume we can all agree on. My darling homecoming queen of a sister absolutely RAILED against me when I started studying philosophy and singing publicly at university. “Oh you think you’re so artsy now?” was the first of many casual burns she branded as I ascended into my adult self. She has changed her tone over time, and this past weekend she said her friends responded to a photo of us online saying “your sister is so cool, she’s like actually artsy, not like XXXXX.” Although I don’t encourage gossip, and in fact have an anaphylactic reaction to it [an essay to come], we had a great conversation on the other side of that DM about sincerity and authenticity. It did of course result in a masochistic and melodramatic monologue from me along the lines of: “It’s not better to be this way. It’s torture, but I’m damned for life and don’t have time to engage with peoples opinion on it because I’m trying to survive the sentence.”

Some earnest photography to break up this Rambling Man:

Above: 35mm Puglia, Italy | August 2023. The ever earnest Dawn and her lemons ❤️

One of my most beloved friends who happens to be one of the most talented filmmakers I have ever known is Anthony Lucido. He recently came to visit and we spoke for 10 hours uninterrupted. This is not an exaggeration. We spoke about everything you read here today, and made each other laugh with the bleak but honest shared sentiment: “I wish I didn’t care, I wish I didn’t want, I wish I didn’t think, it would be far less painful.” We decided that is genetically unavailable to the two of us, but also far less joyous. I drew an abstract and shaky visual metaphor of a 3-D graph where despair and joy are two ends of the same line revolving around the axis of time. The higher up your line reaches for joy, the further down it must root in its capacity for despair. Yikes. It implies that they are not opposites we bounce between, they are tied together. We mused that there may be an alternative to despair in clarity.

I have great clarity about how I like to move through the world and interact with people. I will send snail mail to a person I met once. I will offer, without resentment or expectation, to do favors for friends that give me nothing, and mean it. I have great clarity about what I love. I can rage against the film-industrial complex until both you and I are blue in the face, but it is a reaching for clarity rather than an act of convincing us to leave. Revolution happens from the inside.

I’m not in the habit of reflecting on victories [see self-protection above^.] It’s perhaps again the endless Jewish pursuit of perfection that we know is unattainable, or maybe it is the athlete never satisfied with the last win when another match is on the horizon. I think this attempt at a year-end write up would be remiss without at least one— so I would like to give an ode to Matt once more. He got Polo on the Blacklist.

I wrote the first draft of the script in 2015. Eight years of support and encouragement from countless friends, table reads, rewrites, and ample delusion, got us here. I can say with great confidence that, if nothing else, the film will be earnest. It is a sports movie about recovery and community. Every team I was on, every bone broken, every ice pack on every knee, left me with an understanding of the importance of community. Everything else is just a game.

I’d like to make this movie for the ruthless and angry girls out there who need to hear that. I certainly was one, and I think it would have helped.

I re-read a book this year on writing that I implore every creative to take a look at. I in fact shipped it to four people and texted three others who I believed it would speak to as directly as the whisper of a best friend who can read your face without a word, knowing exactly what you need in the moment. I’ll leave you with a few excerpts from that woman, much wiser than I:

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

“There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness, a sign that god is implicit in all of creation. Or maybe you are not predisposed to see the world sacramentally, to see everything as an outward and visible sign of inward, invisible grace. This does not mean that you are worthless Phlistine scum. Anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain of the natural world, of the human mind and heart, and can try to capture just that— the details, the nuance, what is.”

---

“Sometimes people turn out to be not all that funny or articulate, but they can still be great friends or narrators if they possess a certain clarity of vision— especially if they have survived or are in the process of surviving a great deal. This is inherently interesting material, since this is the task before all of us.

---

“Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then un-hypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly. There will be many mistakes, many things to take out and others that need to be added. You just aren’t always going to make the right decision […] Some of us tend to think that we we do and say and decide and write are cosmically important things. But they’re not. If you don’t know which way to go, keep it simple. Then, if you’ve worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.”

I have a habit to find an artist I love and then go through their whole repertoire. My favorite of her books are “The Lost Daughter” and a collection called “Frantumaglia" — an untranslatable dialect word that is related to shards, shredded, jumble of fragments. The book, fittingly titled, is a compilation of letters, speeches, and interviews. It gives insight into the author’s process and emotional response to the reception of her works.

I don’t have my copies of her works with me here in Paris, or else I would post this entire piece as a jumble of fragments from the underlined passages and my margin bound footnotes. I will pull some Frantumaglia and My Brilliant Friend from the holy internet as I take you to Naples with me.

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Yesterday was his birthday.

A woman whom I can’t call a friend, because she is so much more than that, sent me flowers in his favorite color. They arrived two days early, but it happened to be the day I finished writing the screenplay, and felt like the perfect delivery error. Then, on the phone with her yesterday, the delivery man called again. They sent the bouquet again. An exact copy, with the exact same card. “Happy Orange Day.” Spooky would be the right word if I wasn’t so used to his presence.

Here’s a poem:

Delivery Error

A ghost sent me flowers.

It was his birthday, but ghosts are cheeky like that.

The ultimate attention seekers.

He picked orange as his symbol 

So that citrus and basketballs remind me to remember.

Sunsets blind me while I drive,

Tempt me to swerve into a median and come join him,

But ghosts are attentive in return.

Earthly friends have bills to pay.

Meetings to attend and supervisors to please.

They get distracted by music and musings,

Personal projects pounding pestering,

They justify forgetfulness with short texts as penance:

Let’s grab a coffee! 

We should hang out!

How are you! how are you! how are you! How--

Ghosts never demand small talk.

They send you flowers and break your heart and make you care about garish colors

And never leave you.

And never leave you.

Happy Orange Day.

I balanced a busy suburban childhood with as many activities as possible, because my parents both worked and they needed somewhere to put me. It ranged from piano, to jazz singing lessons, club soccer, swim team, and tutoring middle schoolers. All of these got me high, but nothing hits like the theater. I acted in a play for the first time when I was seven years old. I was the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. It wasn’t the last time I was in that show, but it was my first drug like experience.

Above: Noah Silver outside of Two Roads Theater - December 2022 | Ilford 400

I was involved in a theater program in college for a year before becoming a philosophy major, and that was more like heroin than a psychedelic. I’ll blame it on the deadly cocktail of being that age, the Santa Barbara binge drinking, and the pressure of the institution. But despite the darkness, I found something new in acting there thanks to the incredibly talented students in my program and a few professors who rocked me to my core. I graduated and wanted to find a way to make a life as an actor, but did not want to move to New York. That’s a subject for another essay, but I just don’t dig that place. In Los Angeles, acting means film and television.

There is an unsustainable supply of actors who want to act in this town and an ever smaller number of opportunities for them to do so. A parasitic economic complex emerged as a capitalistic response, realizing itself in the form of acting classes. When actors meet each other in Los Angeles, within the first five minutes they ask where you go to class. There is a cult-like following to some teachers, and the all too brutal exploration seen on shows like Barry is more realistic than parody. I blew it off as a ponzi scheme, but the truth was, I was 19 and dead broke with a philosophy degree and no contacts. I couldn’t afford acting class, and wouldn’t know where to go to find the good drugs anyway.

I started working more jobs than I can count, often some variation on the word “assistant,” and was just barely able to pay rent in a shared studio apartment along the questionable edges of Koreatown. I finally got my head above water financially and through a thoughtful referral, signed up for a class with a teacher who cared about theater and didn’t care about auditions. In fact, we were not allowed to speak to her about our careers. We were to prepare our scenes and any questions with her were limited to craft. I shot that pure commitment and intellectual rigidity right up my veins. One session, Marjorie Ballentine came as the second teacher to join, and the drug thankfully shifted from opiate to psychedelic.

Above: Marjorie Ballentine at the cast party - December 2022 | Ilford 400

She trained under Stella Adler, who I like to call the Godfather of modern acting. Marjorie is now carrying the torch and training actors to do the damn thing. The first time I worked with her, I was playing Agnes of God. A naive 19 year old nun. I don’t find it natural to play someone innocent. I lived a lot of life at a young age, not to mention the flaming jew of it all. By the second time we brought the scene to stage, we found something. It’s a moment I’ll never forget, acting in that scene, with the teachers yelling out directions to me as it went on, and I broke into a full panic, in character. I accessed a new level of acting to me that I never thought I’d be able to reach. I then performed in a Female Playwright festival in Hollywood, starring in a one act about post-partum depression. It was an original modern script that was surreal and bizzare, and one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. It was directed by a young woman who was about to graduate from UCLA. I was the oldest member of the one act at 25 years old. On stage under glowing blacklights with dancers surrounding me as my character experienced a nightmare, my fingers tingled in the same way they did as Agnes of God. I knew in that moment we were tripping on the good stuff.

Above: Nalini Sharma and Marjorie Ballentine on stage at Two Roads Theater - December 2022 | Ilford 400

Marjorie opened up her own studio, and after some time focused on films, I auditioned to join her master class. To say I was intimidated and felt like an imposter would be putting it lightly. The class is full of actors who work on TV, who are overflowing with talent, and happen to be extremely good looking, because we are in Los Angeles after all. I was terrible in my first few sessions. Really, just… I think something worse to do than bad acting is mediocre acting. I knew my lines and knew the answers to all the questions, and it was fine, but there was so much missing. It was like eating three squares of mushroom chocolate and still feeling sober. Frustrating, confusing, and tinged with an edge of guilt.

Marjorie decided to start a company, B Home, and invite some of us to perform as B Home Players in a showcase this past weekend. Because god is a slutty bitch with a wicked sense of humor, I had been preparing a scene with a partner for over a month, and Marjorie decided to put us onto another play 2 weeks out. He had already prepared that piece in class with someone else, and I had to catch up from nill. I didn’t expect to be invited to perform at all, so I was in no place to push back. Plus, I’m a competitive athlete by nature, so I held my breath and dove in.

Above: Jonathan King and Noah Silver before the first show - December 2022 | Ilford 400

We had two tech days and our 16 person company, with our beloved director, stayed until three in the morning to refine our work and choreograph collective set changes between each scene. There were many cooks in that kitchen, but it was worth every oil burn on our aching wrists. We all sat in folding chairs under a pop up tent as the December mist dampened our costumes. We did crossword puzzles and kicked around a soccer ball. We pressed our ears on the edge of the stage door to listen as our brothers and sisters gave themselves to the audience. We did what we had to do, but more than performing well, we built a community.

Above: Nick Samson signing a card for Marjorie - December 2022 | Ilford 400

When I do good work, whether it be writing, acting, or even being able to comfort a friend, it doesn’t feel like I am responsible for it. I don’t know how to explain it other than it feels like it is coming from elsewhere and I am a conduit for whatever is needed. I think that is what appeals to people that pursue the theater. It’s a tender task of helping these characters feel their feelings out loud. It’s an opportunity to give the audience an emotional experience along side the characters. The actors aren’t the point. The story is. The actors do the work to give that to you.

In a speech before the Saturday night show, she said to the audience “I believe actors need to work. They need to be seen. And I wanted to provide a platform for that.” So why isn’t Los Angeles a theater town? Open your mouth, swallow the pill, and take a look for yourself. You might see something different. More shows to come from the B Home Theater Company soon.

I live in a special part of the chaos chart where I read anywhere between 4 and 18 books at a time. It’s probably a good barometer for my mental state, the more books that I chip away at ten pages at a time, the more splintered my interior life is. But who knows [and who cares.]

I read this book for the first time so long ago that I barely remember it at all. I have read a lot of Jewish WW2 literature in my life, being one of those Jewish people who is enamored with said recent history. I wrote a mini series [on spec] during covid which required extensive [self-imposed] research, and I read over 20 books on a specific concentration camp. Most of these books were written by women.

(When I say most of these books I mean all of them, but I’m too lazy to go check the box to confidently say “all of them.” And when I say box, please picture an antique box for carrying overpriced wine that I stole while working an assistant job, perched on a near empty shelf in one of the too many closets in my apartment. It is now full of [mostly] books written by women describing their lived [or researched] unimaginable horrors.)

This mini-series I imagine will be the project of my life. I am an incredibly scrappy and compromising filmmaker [see: quantity over quality] who loves to take notes and direction [see: actor by training] but this series requires an unflinching commitment to itself. I will not make it only in English. I will not over sentimentalize. I will not add in a love story. I will not cater to watchability. I will explore something new in the Holocaust cinematic cannon. The series will be brazen and surreal and horrifying and funny. People dreamed and laughed and made friends in those camps. Because they had to. I don’t know why I decided to write it that way.

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I bought the French translation for an astonishingly talented young artist who worked at a vintage store and came up to me to wish me a happy new year. [L’Shanah Tovah sweet Liza.]

 Above: Liza on Portra 400 35mm at Francis LaButte, Paris, France - September 2022

I bought it in New York for a 60 year old Chinese Destiny reader who invited me to a table with his wife where he gave me a rare tea tasting as we read each other our poetry. I read him a poem I wrote inspired by the first line of this book [I’ll share it in the next Hand Fetish Book Tease soon.]

Above: Ken Lo on Fujifilm Instax Square at Chrysanthemum Tea Shop Brooklyn, NY - October 2022

This August I walked up to a wine bar in Ortigia, Sicily, but there were no tables left. I was traveling alone, seeking just one chair to sit and read in [I was reading Autobiography of Red, another color for another essay.] I asked a man if I could join him, he was alone and deep within a book himself [He was reading A Little Life, in Dutch.] After an hour in our silent outdoor library, he broke it to ask me what I was doing there. I told him reading. He meant Sicily. We spoke for three hours. He had gotten out of a ten year relationship just a few days before and was drenched in a state of what I will oversimplify and call blue. I could not buy him Bluets in that region, but we spoke about the text, and he texted to tell me he had purchased it a few days later.

Above: Fabrice on Portra 400 35mm at Chambre Noir Paris, France - October 2022

*This is not the man from Sicily. That day my camera was waterlogged. Please enjoy some other hands and some other wine as a consolation.*

Last month, I was early to a pitch meeting with a producer in Ménilmontant. I popped into a bookstore, with the intention of picking up a copy of Bluets as a birthday gift for a new friend who wears Lemon earrings and hugs strangers with all her warmth and might.

 Above: Dawn on Portra 400 35mm in Montmartre, Paris, France - October 2022

After the business pitch was out of the way, the night evolved into hours of wine, other friends joining us, and long discussions of our overlapping political and artistic passions. It was clear that the Bluets burning in my bag was in fact for him. [The birthday girl instead received On Freedom, which was the more appropriate Maggie Song for her after all. “On Freedom” is a contemporary analysis of the historical and philosophical way freedom interacts and intersects within four songs of life. I am working on a piece about that and another excellent book I read last year, “The Right to Sex,” but I have more work to do before I share that one.]

Maggie Nelson’s work spans from poetry to auto-fiction to the aforementioned academic style of writing. Maggie is punk rock. She is angry and sexual and balances introspection with aggression. Her life is colored. From 2003-2006, while writing this book, that color was blue. Perhaps it was long before. Perhaps it still is. Perhaps it’s all an act of performance art and she doesn’t love blue at all.

Above: ”Les Bluets” (1973) by Joan Mitchell - the painting, the namesake

How do I describe what Bluets is about when people ask? Usually it’s something along the lines of “just read it.” For the sake of doing the damn writing I came here to do, I’ll try to be more generous in my answer now. It is a dream journal. It is a guide book. It is an anxious introspection. It is a philosophical text on desire and pain. It is a historical collage of blue, pasting together scientific facts, citations by artists, references to other works, and multiple personal anecdotes to underscore her cyan musings with just enough plot to justify her existential reflections and azure analysis of being. 

Actually, that last part is not right. She isn’t justifying her musings with plot. Her relationship to blue, and her historical and artistic reflection upon it, is a method of processing her pain. Yeah. Color therapy. 

Maggie is processing two personal events: A romantic heartbreak, and a dear friend’s permanent physical turmoil after a near-fatal accident. She interacts with these two pains with the help of blue.

She carefully organized her questions about existence, anecdotes from her past, and reflections of joy/misery/womanhood, as a numbered list. And so to us it has been bestowed. She invented something entirely new. Entirely blue.

Number one begins by setting the tone: unique and unapologetic, shamelessly upright within the abstract thesis:

1. “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak as though it were a confession; Suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke.”

She ignores any notion that this book shouldn’t be a book with the ever tactile feminine strategy of presenting her idea as an option, an offering, a gentle whisper. She sets the scene cinematically, giving the speaking character [it is Maggie, but is it?] an anxious and humble action— A docile beginning to ease you into what she knows will be a turbulent, angry, raucous, gushing sea of blue blood. 

She quickly touches extreme sensations of overwhelming joy and unquenchable longing. Or rather, blue touches it, and she feels it in her each time blue arrives.

8. Do not however make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. […] I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you. 

Her voice presents within the first pages as unforgiving and direct. She has no time to ease you in to the abstract universe within which this book unflinchingly exists. She has no shame in its abstraction. She has no interest in seducing you with delicacy, although the way she began tricked you into thinking so. She has no fear in contradicting herself. She has questions rather than answers, for answers are not the point.

36. Goethe describes blue as a lively color, but one devoid of gladness. “It may be said to disturb rather to enliven.” Is to be in love with blue then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

She gives the reader knowledge, imagery, and that delicious thing truthful art does where you see your personal confusion and pain, that feels entirely singular, reflected right at you.  

81. What I know: When I met you, a blue rush began. What I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

In addition to charming, universal, heart wrenching reflections like 36 and 81, she explores the natural insecurity of the writer writing about something they love:

183. Goethe also worries over the destructive effects of writing. In particular, he worries over how to keep the essential quality [of the thing] still living before us, and not to kill it with the word.” I must admit, I no longer worry much about such things. For better or worse, I do not think writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is. “What does your poetry do? I guess it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language.” (John Ashberry.)

What she gets at here is something I feel particularly close to. Is it a crude act to write about something you love? Does it suck the juice out of a supple fruit to put it to word, to image, to audience? Is it a bastardization of Bluets’ value to tinker around on my keyboard and hit send to subscribers and screenshot it for my instagram? Maggie answers with something aligned with my unabashedly absurdist instincts— No. It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t do much at all. Write what you want. Rinse it in blue. Your significance is moot, so just move forward telling the truth. Nobody cares.

But, Maggie and I both talk ourselves out of that perspective quite quickly:

193. I will admit however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve[…]

196. I suppose I am avoiding writing down too many specific memories of you for similar reasons[…] Sei Shonagon felt similarly “Whatever people may think of my book…I still regret that it ever came to light.” 

I didn’t make films about anything that really happened to me until this year [see: Four Chairs] because I did have an undercurrent of that Goethe paranoia— that to make films about some real incidents in my life would be using it in a nasty, shallow, exploitative way.

I’ve decided it will never be clear to me if I believe that making art, creating stories, or even writing pieces like this is a good thing or a bad thing. It’s arguably both and arguably neither. I’m passionately agnostic on the matter. I will continue, either way. 

I even face this [pointless?] philosophical dilemma taking photographs and sharing them online. If one remains present and attentive, taking photos and sharing them is an act of connection with their community that isn’t there with them. It is expression. It is celebration. It is joy. But is it performative? Is it indulgent? Is it vapid? Perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t find the alternative to be inherently more valuable. Maybe it’s “cooler.” But you can’t chase cool. Or, I can’t. In such seasickness, it is upon us to simply tell the truth and offer ourselves some grace. 

Speaking of seasickness and grace, one last excerpt for you, because it just moves me to my darn core every single time:

199. “For to wish to forget how much you loved someone — and then, to actually forget — can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).”

[The poem “Mal de Mer” Hand Fetish Book Tease #1 smells of #199 in Bluets]

My note to Liza on the cover page included something along the lines of “here is our new testament.” I am known to be dramatic, particularly in the form of zealous joy and unfiltered appreciation of things, but for me, Bluets is biblical.

Why am I passing it around like an overeager missionary? Do I really think it will affect everyone? Do I simply want the people I love to touch what has touched me? I’m not sure I need to know. I don’t remember how Bluets came to me. I don’t remember ever not having it. I’m not sure what it would be like to look at blue without Maggie in my head. I’m not sure I ever did.

Above: Portra 400 35mm Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy - August 2022

I discussed this notion at length with a friend, with our core beliefs aligning (fascism is bad) but we reacted differently to Clinton’s comment. I will let him speak for himself, but I completely disagree that it is a step forward. In fact, I believe to call it a step forward is a step backward. Meloni’s gender identity means nothing to me. Stay with me for a second, I smell the privilege steaming off of that aggressive 28 year old pie. 

My privilege of being born a cis-white woman in the 90s in America means that I can drive, I can vote, I can open a bank account, I can live with vast amounts of freedom and agency as a woman. My life has always included women in politics, my media is full of power suits and possibilities. While recognizing how misogynistic our government and our populace is, let alone the world at large, I have great confidence in women’s ability to be heads of state, and always have. Can we give some credit to girls and women to believe in their power? We have to consider the time we are living in, and the time we are living in includes astonishing women with ample voices, power, and historical impact. I don’t need a Mussolini with mascara to make me believe I can achieve my full potential. 

That evening I also dined with a mixed woman who, like me, was born in the 90s and grew up in the California Bay Area. At first, she had the same reaction as I did to Clinton’s comment, but then spoke about the impact she felt seeing Kamala Harris elected to the Vice Presidency. She does not align with Kamala’s politics, and has concern about her history as the San Francisco DA, but the symbol of having a woman who looks like her ascend to national power was nevertheless impactful. It is not the same of course, as although I'd love Kamala to shuffle about 450 miles to the left, she is not making comments like the Meloni banger “Mussolini was a good politician, in that everything he did.”

I am a woman of Jewish descent and I myself am in doubt that a Jewish person will be elected to the presidency in America in my life time, because of the rampant anti-semitism in America [see: America's last president defending violent Nazis in the streets as "very fine people."] I would be personally moved to be represented by a head of state with my background, but if a Jewish person, a Jewish woman, shared politics with Giorgia Meloni? That would not represent me. That would not advance my beliefs and my agenda, despite our shared lineage. I would never vote for a Jewish woman with extreme right wing politics just because they are Jewish or a woman.

That being said, of course it is significant to see women in power. It is significant to be represented. Although Meloni will be the first female head of state in Italy, a country that has a long way to go internally with their perspective on women, we are in an epoch of female power. She is not the only woman in the world for Italian girls to look at for empowerment. Her policies are racist and favor the elite class, they are not focused on women's rights, nor human rights. [see: Intent to establish a Mediterranean naval blockade to keep out "smugglers and slave drivers"]

Is it a step forward that Marjorie Taylor Greene is in the United States congress? Does it empower young American girls to hear Lauren Bobart spew her propaganda? A right wing leader is not a step forward, even if they are a woman.  

To say that the female identity of leaders like Greene, Bobart, and Meloni is more significant than their politics in fact rings of anti-feminist verbiage. To pose their gender identity as more important than their political perspective is diminishing the impact of their voices. Clinton’s comment is about identity, representation, and sociology, and she ignores the political circumstance. "I don't know much about her..." Yeah? Give her a google Hil, let's chat in 5. When we talk about steps forward in feminism, policy must be more significant than imagery. To value imagery and representation over the political policy of a head of state is demeaning to the feminist cause.  I believe young Italian girls do, and will continue to, feel empowered in this modern era if they are represented by leaders who are fighting for their rights, regardless of said leaders gender identity. 

Above: Portra 400 35mm Livorno, Italy - August 2022

This week also included the brutal murder of 22 year old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini for “unsuitable attire,” and this summer showed a cataclysmic loss for women’s rights in the United States with the Supreme Courts decision against Roe. Despite these few examples of the massive amounts of daily violence against women, my confidence and trust remain steadfast in women’s ability to believe in themselves and step in to their full power. 

Extreme right politics that have dominated in my country arguably since 2000. Extreme right politics that have killed millions of people, that continue to strip away voting rights and women’s rights to their bodies, and that protect corporations and guns and the wealthy class over citizens. Right wing politics fight against the cause. An extreme right wing head of state is a step backward, regardless of their gender. I do not accept Meloni’s victory as a step forward for feminism. It is a step forward for extreme right politics.