Today I’m going to put some time into thinking about how I can best coordinate locally with some women who are working together to pool resources and ideas so we can oppose Trump in the most effective, concrete ways. We’ll be meeting up after Thanksgiving but I’ve set aside time today to organize some of my thoughts.
The effort is in keeping with a concept the wonderful Carrie Frye, a dear friend and my writing partner, shared on Facebook last weekend:
Sewing Circles Against Totalitarianism (SCAT) is an idea that’s meant to help us band together, support, and encourage each other in the hard work ahead. Here’s what it is: You get together with a group of people who live by you and form a “sewing circle”:
“The term sewing circle usually refers to a group of people, usually women, who meet regularly for the purpose of sewing, often for charitable causes while chatting gossip and politics.” (Wikipedia.)
SCAT Sewing Circles meet once a month. Each Sewing Circle will decide for itself but you can of course make this meeting a true stitch & bitch. (If that sounds like a nightmare, then don’t.) We organize now and locally, because we are stronger in person and together, and because the kind of help that’s needed will vary community by community.
Within a SCAT sewing circle:
• Members encourage each other to commit our time and energy to the organizations already doing good work in our community and country, as well as to engage more actively with our local and state government to build a more progressive, inclusive platform. *You* choose what particular issue, cause, or nonprofit group’s work matters most to you; your Sewing Circle is there for support, accountability, brainstorming, and networking to help you stay the course over time.
• We work together to identify where additional immediate help is needed among our neighbors (groceries, escorts, Plan B donations, legal resources, calling local representatives, etc.) and to coordinate action.
We do this with humor and good faith. We do this believing in connection. We do this in resistance to any “new normal.” And we do this in the belief that small stitches can add up in time to something bigger.
On a strategic level, I think it’s important to start now getting local organized social networks like this in place. More than this, just on a human level, I realized last week that I felt better—and strengthened—when I was talking to the other puffy-eyed, sleepless-looking, vibrating-with-foreboding women that I was running into. One woman said to me, “I can’t breathe.” It was the second time we’d ever spoken to each other. I keep thinking of Masha Gessen’s essay “Autocracy: Rules For Survival” and its line, “This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It’s no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.” One nice thing about having a sewing circle is that, at least one night a month, you’re guaranteed of not being the only hysterical person in the room.
When she and I spoke about all this on the phone early last week, we agreed it’s important to have local contacts in place now partly in case we all end up having to take our strategic planning – and even other communications – offline. At no point did either of us accuse the other of being hysterical, which I guess is one reason we’re such good friends.
(Unlike my mother and her mother and her father, I can’t sew worth a damn, so I will not be doing any actual sewing.)
Sewing class image is from Wikimedia Commons by way of Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the UK.
Check out Maud’s Tumblr for other daily actions to take to oppose Trump. Grateful right now, more than ever, for connection, friendship, and ideas on how to pull together on the internet and locally.
Source:
maudnewton
A hilarious newsletter from one of my oldest and dearest, @tinglealley
The captions to the above photos, and others, are awesome. Also linked in the newsletter is an article for The Awl that Carrie wrote (with submissions from me and our friend Allyson) in celebration of Nick’s 50th birthday in 2012 (D2 tweeted and FB’d it. We were giddy for weeks!). You can link to it here as well.
The caracal’s moustache, eyebrows and ear-tips are a giveaway even from birth…
…and it looks like the ears grow before the legs…
…which soon follow…
If Elves had cats, they’d look like caracals.
I’m sorry to interrupt but that comparison picture of the caracal and lynx is clearly a wedding photo and I’d like to take a moment to wish the joyous couple every happiness.
I started a tinyletter! It’s about the Kardashians (and murder, and women, and invisible laws and shadow trials). I’ve so enjoyed the tinyletters I subscribe to. Here’s a little list:
Black Cardigan by Carrie Frye: light and clever, earnest and broad. For people who like Harriet the Spy, Hilary Mantel, and occasionally discovering an archaic word.
when I sing along with you by Zan Romanoff: the complications of accomplishment, the many weirdnesses of publishing, and One Directionitis. @zanopticon has not one but TWO books coming out, this feels like riding shotgun next to her on the way there.
Like This by Meaghan O’Connell: Love her in NY Mag, love her here.
Reading the Tarot by Jessa Crispin: “Day Five. Tower again. Fuck off, I think. One time I pulled Temperance 10 days in a
row. I was in Budapest and then en route to Timisoara. Things were not
going well.“
Coffee & TV by Ruth Curry: if you want to cry about someone else being moved to tears by Orphan Black
Intermittent Theories by Lucy Morris: Lucy Morris can just write the shit out of a newsletter. “This is perhaps why things I wrote when I was 22 do not particularly
embarrass me, as I understand they are supposed to; I fault myself for
many things but never my attempts at understanding something in the
center of it all, and in the face of that endeavor, it has always been
difficult for me to care about the fine-tuning of structure or the
making of sentences.“
mmmm, vol 1. by cassiem: She moved to DC, what now?
This is the nicest description of the Black Cardigan newsletter! Also: the other newsletters mentioned here are all wonderful and worth subscribing too.
Source:
catherine-nicholas
Peace for the World. 30 years ago a bunch of us teens skipped school and spent the day hanging out at Houdini Plaza in Appleton, WI. This newspaper article and flyer are some more of the goodies I unearthed recently in the adjunct vinyl vault. ‘86 was the height of the Reagan and Cold War era and we were all generally freaked out at the prospect of nuclear war (this was just three years after the airing of The Day After which scared the shit out of just about everyone).
The main instigator of the nuclear protest/peace rally was local very cool girl Carrie Russell, who was inspired by BYO Records, which had recently sponsored a nationwide protest against war. Throughout the day we hung out, wrote anti-war messages on the pavement in chalk, planted white flowers and generally freaked out the downtown Appleton adults. I went with my good friend Carrie (not Russell, a different Carrie, but just as very cool) who made t-shirts for us. Faded completely now, on the back she wrote part of the lyrics from John Lennon’s “Imagine.” That last picture above is me in May ‘86 wearing the peace shirt, which I still have.
Two local punk bands performed: Mission of Mercy from Green Bay and Bad Culture from Neenah (though the newspaper article misnamed them “Bed Culture” - ha!). Old man Clifford Johnson had this to say about the band, “Maybe the music tells a story. I don’t know. I can’t understand it.” Now get off my damn lawn.
We were so gloriously naïve, passionate and sincere. The fear in the world unfortunately hasn’t gotten better in 30 years, quite the opposite, but hopefully there are people who will continue to show up, speak out and try to foster change.
Duran Duran “Girls on Film 1979 Demo” 1979/2016. Four song EP on clear vinyl. Pre-Simon LeBon and Andy Taylor: Andy Wickett on vocals and John Taylor on guitar rather than bass (also still going by Nigel), Roger on drums and Nick on keyboards of course.
Side A leads off with “See Me Repeat Me” which would later be rewritten, turning into “Rio” - you can hear this especially in the musical transition between verse and chorus. On the second track, “Reincarnation,” Wickett sounds a lot like his replacement, Simon, and Nick’s keyboards are delightfully low-tech.
Side B’s “Girls on Film” is a rough version of the well-known single and it’s weird to not hear Simon’s voice. The lyrics are quite different (and the harmonica disconcerting) but the hook, rhythm and bass are wonderfully familiar. “Working the Steel” leans heavily toward arty experimentation, a lot of dissonance and howling. John Taylor describes this era of Duran as “the Sex Pistols meet Chic.”
You can listen to “Girls on Film” and “Working the Steel” here.
Depeche Mode “Black Celebration” released on this date 30 years ago, March 17th, 1986. I’ve been waiting anxiously for this one - Black Celebration was such a big deal for me the spring of ‘86 and I’m pretty sure I bought this within weeks of its release. Such a gloriously dark album: “Fly on the Windscreen - Final” is perfection in its death-march pace, rolling romantically in pain with the lyrics “Death is everywhere, there are flies on the windscreen for a start, reminding us we could be torn apart tonight…Come here, kiss me. Now.” The urgent fear of violence and domination in “A Question of Time” kinda scared the crap out of me when I was 15. “Stripped” is one of the best and rawest love songs I’ve ever heard (“Let me see you stripped down to the bone, Let me hear you speaking just for me, Let me hear you crying just for me). “Here is the House” makes me think of a couple of places we’d hang out at during the course of ‘86, places “where it all happens, under this roof” for real. My teenage indignation was riled by “New Dress,” a politically charged track criticizing the cult of celebrity over real world problems, the trend that has obviously worsened in 30 years, and its lyrics still ring incredibly true today:
You can’t change the world But you can change the facts When you change the facts You change points of view When you change points of view
You may change a vote And when you change a vote You may change the world
My friend Carrie and I saw Depeche Mode while they were on tour for Black Celebration on June 22nd of ‘86 outside of Chicago at the Poplar Creek Music Theater. My dad and grandpa drove us there from Wisconsin in my grandpa’s motorhome and they hung out in the parking lot while Carrie and I went to the show (Book of Love opened). We bought a concert program (are those still a thing?) and both DM and Book of Love t-shirts, my Depeche Mode t-shirt taken by some boy or other later that summer, which I’m still kinda pissed about. But I wore The Book of Love shirt until it disintegrated.
Oh this was such a fun show! My first concert. (Sarah’s dad and grandpa played cards, if I remember right, while we were in the show.)Source:
vinylfromthevault
