2: saudi apocalypse, prohibition cheesefoods, troll dolls, lou cornum

Week five of quarantine and it’s all beginning to feel a little bit like this crocodile, holding a watermelon so carefully as it cruises by. I’ve been having little panic attacks when I hear sirens going by and watching the Netflix adaptation of another childhood favourite, Anne of Green Gables and dreaming vivid dreams. Last night, it was that I was at a research university-bunker in the Saudi desert (we went to Dammam beach clubs to party) during some kind of weather-triggered zombie apocalypse. I had gone to buy decorative glass vials, the kind with glitter suspended in liquid, with 𝓰𝓸𝓸𝓭 𝓽𝓲𝓶𝓮 printed on the front for my partner, who was operating some kind of illicit restaurant over WhatsApp. My Uber—the cockroaches of this particular dystopia—driver turned out to be someone I went to high school with in Dubai who became a professional golfer. I wondered what they were doing there.

Coronavirus car aside (my people seem very enamoured with the form), the rest of these stunning images come from Iran’s Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz, which local women have converted into a mask making workshop; more can be seen here.

spiky boi

Wearing a mask can’t protect us from our history. Social distancing is bringing drive-in theatres back to life. The all-female Afghan robotics team who made a cheap ventilator out of Toyota parts. Corona ya corona: Arabic pop music takes on Covid-19, with a side of racism. Real estate for the apocalypse: my journey inside a survival bunker. What Jewish medical ethics can teach us about triaging and coronavirus. I am not at all relaxed by Animal Crossing. Medical colonialism in Africa is not new. When ‘fake news’ was used to target ‘Hindus’ for spreading diseases. Warehouse workers are forcing Amazon to take social distancing seriously The history of loneliness. Ärvo Part.

drinking & snackchat

When the government banned PBR, Pabst made cheese instead. Nobody likes me (worms as comfort food). Pasta shapes for your emotional state. Coronavirus has us doing chain letters for recipes like it’s the damn ‘90s. Italy’s great garlic divide. The secret ingredient in Kellogg’s Corn Flakes us Seventh Day Adventism. A revolutionary vegetable. Marijuana edibles and pounds (and pounds) of pasta: Jia Tolentino on writing and cooking. Inside the story of how H-E-B planned for the pandemic.

eggs

Orthodox Easter and Palestine’s “Saturday of fire.” The Chinese city famous for eggs with two yolks The lost Victorian art of egg collecting. A surprisingly simple explanation for the shape of bird eggs. “I look at ingredients lined up in the fridge like a crocodile surveying her eggs.” The criminalisation of the American midwife. “I know Easter,” my father said. “Easter is when Jesus goes upstate.” ‘Cloud eggs’ are actually centuries old. Scientists are tracking the ancient luxury market for carved ostrich eggs. Please enjoy this thread of some of my favourite eggs.

☞\( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞ yeehaw

The colourful history of the troll doll. Inside the strip clubs of Instagram. Forgotten American Depression-era post office murals. In Marshall Islands, radiation threatens tradition of handing down stories by song. How the ghosts of the past can threaten the future. Critic Hua Hsu is an enthusiast of the margin. The rise and fall of Dalit journalism in India. When can we really rest? The Craigslist of guns. Interview with Teju Cole. How Kinfolk defined the millennial aesthetic… and unravelled behind the scenes

quarantine culture diaries: lou cornum

moving day

We start the day clearing the cupboards and kitchen shelves of odds and ends left at the bottoms of bags and plastic containers. We are leaving my house today, where four others live right now, for M’s apartment which her sole roommate has left. What a gift, an empty apartment. Getting there will be a series of groans, though it’s less than two miles away. 

In the back of the fridge there is a bit of blended clementine left from the midnight breakfast cake M made last week. I put it in the pre-mixed buckwheat pancake mix, not bad at all. For lunch, the last pack of ramen and then sitting at a desk for nearly three hours speaking with a few people about Covid-19 in Indian country and all the shady moves the United States is getting into abroad. I hadn’t heard until this afternoon that Trump was repositioning Naval destroyers to the Caribbean, supposedly to stem narcotics trade but really as part of general domestic disorientation with intent to spur regime change in Venezuela. Our convo gets turned into this Red Nation “power hour” podcast that I haven’t listened to because I am mortified of my voice and am also sure I said everything wrong. 

Then we get ready to go and schlep everything to M’s place. It takes all evening. Packing, M writing “salmon” on her hand, walking twenty minutes to my friend’s place to get their car, talking in the stairwell at a distance with our masks on but unable to resist petting their chihuahua, driving back to my place, loading up the car, grabbing the salmon from the freezer, driving to Maysam’s place, unloading everything quickly, driving back to my friend’s, disinfecting everything we touched in and on the car, giving back the keys, talking, dog-petting, ordering from one of those vegan pan-Asian restaurants on the way back to M’s, running into that friend’s partner along the way, talking at a distance with our masks on, for some reason not petting a stranger’s corgi who comes by really wanting to be pet, cleaning every surface we’ll touch that night in the apartment, eating, crashing. 

Before bed, I catch the last hour of my friend Sophie’s radio show “Walkin’ Blues” for WTJU, the University of Virginia’s community radio station. She’s playing all country blues and ends with an amazing yodel number “Pig Meat Mama” by Mae Glover from circa the late 20’s, early 30’s. 

day one

M makes a mushroom omelet with lots of herbs, Jacques Pepin style. I make potatoes cubed and fried in oil with turmeric, salt, and pepper. 

The deep clean continues. I head down to the basement to do laundry first with a bandana, and then when changing the clothes to the dryer, a pair of tights wrapped and tied back around my head. “Nobody can tell,” M says. Waiting for the elevator back up, I hear on the I Heart Radio station that plays down here that the fine for non-compliance with social distancing in NYC can now be as high as $1,000. This murderous state.

Cuomo is a ghoul. 

april 7th

I know the date because WKCR tells me it is Billie Holiday’s birthday. It’s a pre-recorded broadcast and they say she would be 103. This year she is 105. I remember I have been keeping April 7th in mind because it’s also my friend Charlie’s birthday. 

I read an article about Spain instituting UBI. I end up, by association maybe, trying to make a tortilla, Spanish tapas version, but end up with an egg frittata-like thing. A revision of my “egg pizza” (the crust is egg) idea which was met with swift skepticism in bed that morning.

Tea in the afternoon with another cake. Strange to experience this as luxury even if it’s basicness. M has this tin of rose lapsang souchong—I add thyme on the advice of a very generic guy in line with us at the health food store weeks ago now who told us thyme is good for respiratory health. 

When I start to journal, it makes me work more on drafts and projects I’ve abandoned prior until then I slowly abandon the journal. 

M makes the most delicious mushroom risotto (or farrotto I suppose, sorry). My housemate who has been working at a grocery store but also pondering different kinds of grocery delivery models that would be less shitty for her fellow workers has tried out ordering Baldour’s to our house, then using the driveway to prepare for distro. We ordered a box of shitakes together before I left my place and they are beautiful. I love the rubbery feel of their pads under my thumb as I run them under the faucet stream to clean the flecks of dirt. 

Before bed, we watch the second episode the new season of Westworld. I’m somehow still incredulous when this show goes more ridiculous. It’s embarrassingly shallow how the show keeps Maeve loop-locked within these fasc fantasies—all different flavors of warworld—while Dolores masterminds and self-actualizes. I think I fall asleep during this episode, like last time.  

day three here

Two spoonfuls of peanut butter and cups of coffee for both our breakfast today. We’re running low on fresh food and heading to the store for more. Masks on. Gloves too. We’re going to a fruit and vegetable market on Flatbush which feels less cramped than the big grocery also nearby. 

The blooms outside!

At 12:21 I am so hungry I can’t decide what to eat even though/because we suddenly have all this food. Decide on shakshuka. Hearty. I start chopping.

My brother who is navigating pandemic life after recently leaving “treatment” says he might call me soon and I’m a little apprehensive. Throw myself into the shakshuka and my now standard turmeric fried potatoes so I can tell him without lying that I’m busy for a while and can’t talk right now. Guilt and helplessness are hard to shake these days. He texts me and says it’s okay, he’s busy getting ready and I don’t know if the path he mentions is for today or beyond.  

This is the day I finish reading C.L.R. James’ A History of Pan-African Revolt. I’ve been at it for more than a week though it’s just over a hundred pages long. I savor the last pages on Julius Nyerere’s theory and plan for African socialism, especially the passages on revolutionary education even as I recall from Robin D.G. Kelley’s introduction to this edition that the Tanganyika African National Union was severely criticized by Tanzania’s leftists and radical intellectuals. I note to also read Class Struggles in Tanzania by Issa Shivji to learn more about this. 

Salmon marinated in soy sauce, rice vinegar, minced ginger, sesame oil, over coconut rice for dinner. I make it before and during a virtual screening of this short doc Invasion about the operations of Coastal GasLink to build a fracked gas pipeline through unceded Wet’su’we’ten territory in British Columbia. The Indigenous Kinship Collective is doing live updates and discussion after the screenings every Wednesday.

days fourish to fivish in the apartment i’m calling home for now

In the morning I make bran muffins with the kind-of-off blueberries from the market. The use of coconut oil instead of butter was a big mistake. I’ve started the collection of Bolaño stories, Last Evenings on Earth, originally Llamadas Telefonicas. As always with Bolaño, it makes me resentful of the lives of teenage boys, and wishing I was a poet. 

For an in-between second meal before a planning meeting, I scoop out some coconut rice and heat up milk with cinnamon, clove, ginger and agave syrup to pour over. M remembers the raisins and put them in hers. It’s way better that way. 

This might be the day we listened to The Weekend’s new album and danced around the table before making lunch. Sin city’s cold and lonely.

It’s almost certain this isn’t the day we made mushroom tacos but I’ll write about them here because I want to make sure they get mention. Three main components. The mushrooms cooked in cumin, salt, pepper, chipotle powder on a skillet. Sliced onions and red pepper blistered and stir fried. Minced onion mixed with jalapeno, cilantro, and lime. In this order placed on old cheap tortillas from those thick industrial cut wheels of corn tortillas. More lime. Sadly, no salsa. Just cholula. But still damn good. That friend Charlie whose birthday it was once said I was one of those food sexual people. I feel that way today.

Somedays though all I have for lunch really is handfuls of peanuts and another muffin. For some reason M only has a muffin tin that is for twenty-four mini muffins. The ones I made then are like those muffin bites boxes from soccer practice….but bran. 

In the evening to wind down into a sort of hum instead of the agitation of the day, I start my translation of Poetique de la Relation. This how I’m going to try to actually re-read it. I keep a glossary of all the words I need to learn again. There are many. 

...

[I stopped keeping tracks of things. M made a clementine cake again so I guess we’ve completed another cycle.]

featured creature: gigantic siphonophore

Last week, footage emerged of a beautiful, eerie gigantic siphonophore, some several feel long, hunting in a slow spiral pattern. I’m probably misunderstanding, but it’s some kind jelly made up of a million clones? (Which just reminds me of this Unicorns song). This is a great thread on its significance, with some incredible closeups.

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🅽🅸🅶🅷🆃🅻🅸🅵🅴 is brought to you by rahel aima / @cnqmdi