I know time unspirals and re-spirals according to experience. I know this. But I cannot really explain how nearly a month has gone by without my sending out this newsletter. Not that I haven’t been writing.
Wrote an extremely long essay last week about silence, my relationship to being called a self-hating Jew, which a couple people spat at me via social media a few weeks back, and being raised with anti-Zionist philosophies but actually deepening this understanding in a different and more profound way years later.
Looking back at what I wrote it is of course valid to express, but frankly, who cares about my own experience when the end game of the destruction and annexation (I use that word pointedly) of Gaza is happening right now.
I will not compare, not hold up one grief against another to justify the destruction of people anywhere in the world. I didn’t do this after September 11 and I won’t do it now and hope to never do that. And as many people have said better than I, the flattening of ethnicities to nation-states or political intents is unfair, unjust, and wrong. I mean this about a Jewish person in Brooklyn or Berlin or Wichita and about a Palestinian person in Gaza, the London, or Des Moines.
Yesterday I was looking back at my 2012 film The Perlin Papers, begun as a series of shorts during Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld’s long-schemed destruction and attempted annexation of Iraq and Afghanistan. That film is a collection of documents from the Perlin Papers archive, which is a huge room filled with hundreds of thousands of declassified papers related to the case, trial, execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 and the subsequent two decades of domestic espionage on United States’ citizens thereafter.
Papers, typed, mimeographed, hand-delivered down hallways. As efficiently deadly yet modest-seeming now compared to the tsunami of destruction wrought in this country and around the world at present. Some of the issues of silencing, splitting off of people from one another, suspicion and wondering are still relevant. Some things have changed.
I have been following with great appreciation and my usual support-from-afar the actions of Jewish Voice for Peace, whose takeovers of Grand Central Station, Penn Station in Philadelphia and yesterday’s Statue of Liberty occupation have been signficant, loud, and I hope tide- or at least tide-pool changing. Same with the marches on November 4. November 9 there is a call for a walkout.
Yesterday I was grateful to have another good conversation with Emma (age 12) about the decades of repression of the Palestinian people and its relationship to things that happened to Jews over the course of history and the difference between Jews and the state of Israel. It led us to talking about a lot of other things and I was really glad she was discussing it with her friends and in the socialist Jewish sunday school program she is part of this year (as was Oliver, now age 16). This also represents a change.
***
The exchange student from Israel who is taking one of my courses was back in class this week. He had traveled to Israel two days before the Hamas attacks, meaning to to go to his sister’s wedding. Right at the start of the semester he had let me know he’d have to be away those exact weeks and was eager to make sure he could make up the work. I hadn’t expected he would come back.
He arrived to class early on Thursday, dark circles under his eyes, twitchy and all springs everywhere. I asked how his family was. He said everyone is fine and all very depressed. He then wanted to talk only about 16mm film, the piece he filmed, when it would come back from the lab, and finishing up the semester. His leg bounced incessantly throughout our four-hour class.
I have not heard from the Palestinian people I know in different places around the world, not since we last communicated in mid-October.
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Yesterday afternoon Oliver texted me that there were people shooting at each other right outside his school. He texted several times that he was inside and safe. Like in the past, about thirty minutes later, I received a placid-sounding group email from the head of school assuring us that school security teams were in place and that there was counseling available and that the NYPD was blocking off the subways next to the school.
Oli said he heard a couple shots and then a whole bunch of pigeons flew up past his math class window. He texted it was scary but I am safe. The 7th and 8th graders were outside school coming back from a field trip at the time.
This is at least the fifth time something like this has happened since Oliver was in grade school. Emma’s school day encounters similar things too but she doesn’t text me at the time, she tells me after. Both children have required lockdown and active shooter drill practice multiple times a year, like our old tornado drills or the previous generation’s useless rehearsals for a nuclear blast.
What I mean is that I cannot fathom that people don’t see the connection between the violence of the founding of the United States, its current and continuous policies and priorities of weapons and prisons over healthcare and food security, and the shots fired in yesterday Brooklyn, Kansas, Texas, or in countries around the world. But you know this already. Nations founded on exclusion and violence and oppression only build and transmit those principles, no matter the flowery or fire-fuelled language of “freedom and justice.”
It’s been interesting to see our German-Jewish kids negotiate their way in this time and I have to say they are doing it a lot better than any gerrymandered-into-office elected official (except a few whom I admire deeply).
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Here is an excerpt of what I wrote last Sunday and while I am compelled by the subject matter I find myself interested in the change in tone between last week’s writing and today’s:
In Oslo l went with some friends and their families to the rally to end the war in (and on) Gaza. To be present with others in a show of solidarity for an end to the occupation, a demand for the human rights of people being killed. And in memory of those killed, the people in the kibbutzim and the millions of people being bombed right now. Somehow I don’t think most people want to be killing each other and the flattening and consolidating of ethnicities and peoples into one or another category makes no sense at all. Fear propels but does not solve.
The gathering was peaceful, parents with babies, speeches, flags, songs. I was glad to be present and also really not comprehending why standing together in a group made any difference at all. But I tried to return my mind to the recent screening I did in a different class in a different school where I teach. That day I showed Marlon Riggs’ 1989 video Tongues Untied.
My Manhattan classroom was filled with young people watching this powerful film for the very first time. Even though I have seen it many many times, I found myself responding differently to sections of the video I had once thought were too long. These were scenes where people (who had been portrayed earlier in the film in a variety of interview, poetic, and performative settings) are marching together in a parade. They are holding flags and a large banner about Black Gay Alliances, smiling, hugging, shouting back at hecklers, and cheering for each other. Being together and out in the world. Despite everything, connection sustains.
At the protest in Oslo people all around me sang in Norwegian but I recognized the tune of “Last Night I had the Strangest Dream.” I sang along in English and mumbled the words I didn’t know, like I do with everything, song or not.
I don’t know what community is for me exactly, it is different from this, dispersed, still a little bit surreptitious, but it’s there.
***
I was in Norway for a conference about artistic research. I had a presentation to do. I showed a couple of excerpts from the films I am making. I worked a lot on editing excerpts together. And while I had recorded a voiceover and considered room tone and music and effects for these videos, in the end I chose to show them silent. I started my talk by asking people to imagine they were lifting up into the skies and that sounds from far below were fading away. Silence. And I think the audience was grateful. I needed this silence.
The last image I showed in the presentation was different. Here’s a little bit about that in an effort to bring some small joys into a bleak time:
I had been very afraid to open the boxes that went to the stratosphere on the balloon. I don’t remember if I even wrote about it but probably did. In September I had the opportunity to attach two of my own nonscientific “experiments” to a stratospheric balloon. I went to Kiruna, Sweden, to the Esrange Space Center, for a week, to film young scientists preparing their proper scientific experiments for the launch. And I made my own, surreptitious, launch with the help of a very kind aerospace engineer at the Swedish Space Agency, Armelle Frenea-Schmidt.
I had named the boxes Lumière and Méliès, after the pioneers of early cinema. Melies was a closed box (because he had been a magician before making films, so that seemed clever and fitting) and Lumière box was the long exposure pinhole camera that I had been making tests with over the summer.
So in the very early hours of a dark snowy September morning, I peeled off the piece of tape closing the Lumière pinhole from the light. Then I handed over the boxes to Armelle who handed them to Håkan who taped them to the long ropes that connect the balloon to the scientific experiment boxes.
The whole thing launched at about 6am, took a couple hours to rise up to 27 kilometers above the earth, floated for a few hours, and popped and parachuted down into a swampy bit of forest across the border in Finland. Then the whole thing was picked up via helicopter and brought back to the space station, where several hours later Armelle came and handed my my tiny boxes. Despite my sleepless exhilaration, I remembered, thankfully, to re-cover the pinhole lens with tape.
Needless to say, with all that movement and over 12 hours of being open to light, I did not expect anything to be on the piece of photo paper sitting patiently inside that little box with a tiny hole in it. It was more a conceptual exercise, I said to myself, my hidden hope masked with a false artworld steeliness. Whatever happens, it’s fine. I can work with whatever.
With this kind of pinhole photography you don’t develop the latent image in chemicals in a darkroom. Instead, you take the paper negative out of the box quickly, in dim light, and place it face down on a scanner. You scan it once, maybe twice. Each time you scan it, the light from the scanner exposes the paper more, so the image starts to fade and the paper starts to grow dark. Very poetic.
I was too nervous to open the box right away so I waited a week. Then I opened the box in dim light right next to the scanner. Reader, I almost shouted with joy, in fact I think I did when I opened that little box and saw what was on the paper.
I scanned it quickly, then again, and then a couple more times for good measure. By then the image was already disappearing. I didn’t want it to vanish, so I put it back in the black bag and then into the box and taped the hell out of the box and now it is in a drawer at home.
This is what the paper saw through the tiniest pinhole of light, as it rose, floated, and came down from the stratosphere on one snowy day in September in the stratosphere above the Arctic Circle. I’ll write more about indifference and magic and science and speculation in another post. In the meantime, maybe there is a little bit of hope in the fact that images appear, that you are still reading this, and that a somehow dispersed community exists. And this shared reading might be one way to hold onto that.
Thanks for reading.
News about BUNKER: my film is now streaming on Mubi and Metrograph, in addition to Amazon and Projectr, so you have more new and exciting ways to see my feature doc if you haven’t already. Thanks for your support.