6: tausif noor, banana ketchup, how the buddha got his face, tariq ali on who let the dogs out

This week feels like Arthur Russell’s World of Echo—all spare, strange, sueded optimism. I’ve returned to it at many different points in my life, and like the best works in any genre it mutates with every listen. Despite so many years thinking about cultural production that, like food or wine, has terroir, is so precisely fixed and specific to a time and place, I realise I would much rather be able to write like that one day.

Rainy weather makes me want to clean or perhaps it’s a delayed spring feeling. A controlled burn-and-purge, like the pollen fluff above. Yesterday, the deep windowsills that I imagined would become cosy reading seats when I first moved in but instead house my collection of balefully wilting plant sons. Tomorrow, the open shelves that pass for kitchen storage, and one day maybe all the clothes I never wear. I’ve embraced caftans, which no longer feel strange in this geography, and am finding new sartorial inspiration in Wishbone, which apparently aired on a Saudi channel when I was a kid but I only encountered it this week. I think I’m going to start trying to learn German again.

spiky boi

France mandates masks to control the coronavirus. Burqas remain banned. Why it’s so hard to read a book right now, explained by a neuroscientist. How coronavirus—a ‘rich man’s disease’—infected the poor. Yoga alone, together. The disappointing truth about antibody testing. Impact of Covid-19 on Hijras, a third gender community in India. Working with airline caterers, this startup nonprofit has delivered over a million meals. The Great Antarctic Escape. Three migrant workers recount riding their bicycles hundreds of kilometres to return home. I tried hypnosis to deal with my pandemic anxiety, and got something much weirder. Staying at home.

glouglou and snackchat

An adopted obsession with soondubu jigae. Heaven was a place in Harlem. First course. The queer appetites of Ismail Merchant. Vittles 6.8—Ramadan. She invented banana ketchup and saved thousands of lives. Why have we never heard of her? The assholes of the sea. Eating in Xi’an. How cooking websites are failing people with disabilities. Feast your eyes on delectable clay replicas of Asian-American foods. Food & race sensitivity resources. Trove of recipes dating back to the Inquisition reveals family’s secret Jewish roots. My mango is better than yours. Japan’s father of cooking manga. The Burrata Brothers. In Poland, VR is teaching people how to bake bread. MFK FIsher’s How to cook a wolf is essential reading right now. I want crab. Pure Maryland crab. The Nazi origins of your favourite natural wine. Inside Masa’s $800 sushi takeout box.

language

Sugar on the gash. 愛してる (Aishiteru): How to Say “I Love You” When the Language Doesn’t Exist. DId the language you speak evolve because of the heat? Lâche-pas les langues de la Louisiane. There’s a distinctly Philadelphia accent in ASL. How to translate a concept like ‘social distancing’ in other languages. Why did I teach my son to speak Russian? With drawl. What Hindi keeps hidden. Teaching them to speak: on Juan Pablo Bonet and the history of oralism. The case against italicising ‘foreign’ words. The beautiful language. Everybody in Almost Every Language Says “Huh”? HUH?! The search for new words to make us care about the climate crisis. Bankspeak. Speaking in tongues. Why I write in English.

☞\( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞ yeehaw

Mommy queerest. The women who speak for the gods. Zoom, Xoom, Zum: why does every startup sound fast now? The unashamed empathy of literature’s original Horse Girl. 19th century female husbands. Sewer cleaners wanted in Pakistan: only Christians need apply. The teetotaling couple who filled their home with novelty whiskey containers. How the Buddha got his face. Tariq Ali discussing “Who let the dogs out.” Making my moan. The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when 6 boys were shipwrecked on a remote island for 15 months. Was a ‘90s Scorpions song the work of the CIA? This podcast is on it.

this week

Art lovers movie club: Ivens Machado (11/5-19/5) Art history from home: me, myself, and I (12/5). Kitchen broadcast: C.Spencer Yeh & James Allister Sprang (12/5, 14/5) Philbert Aimé Mbabazi Sharangabo’s Keza Lyn (13/5-19/5). Stanya Kahn in conversation (13/5) Data Feminism (13/5) One day on earth (16/5) Embodied emotional resilience (18/5) Home Cooking calendar. BORDERS.

Nb these are based on what comes my way—please do send me your events!

quarantine culture diary: tausif noor

monday

I wake up a little later than I’m supposed to and scroll through my work email; thankfully, my boss canceled our 11AM meeting. For the past two months, I have been living with my boyfriend and friends at their house near Chinatown in Philadelphia and working remotely for a cultural organization, eking out the last few weeks of an underpaid fellowship position that I am incredibly lucky to still have, given the circumstances. Theoretically, I am supposed to start graduate school in California this fall, but all is uncertain with coronavirus. I try to take advantage of the time I have still in proximity to the ones I love. These days, all that means is sticking to a daily routine: Putting away dishes, making coffee, putting something ambient on Spotify for the house. From bed, I look out to the view I’ve grown accustomed to: a red brick church with a green roof, framed by trees. Very little happens today, a reluctant start to another week.

tuesday

Writers like to read about other writers’ routines in the hopes that they’ll find something they can graft onto their practices between cycles of procrastination, I think, which is why Susan Sontag’s diary is popular inspiration porn. I try to work on an essay that I should have written earlier this month by reading every dull thing I can adjacent to the topic and drafting two pages that I ultimately whittle down to two paragraphs. I give up and order veal saltimbocca and watch Nathan for You with my friends.

wednesday

I have my weekly Zoom calls with my colleagues. We update each other on celebrity baby news (Chloe Sevigny!), our reading groups, and the state of our gardens—my boyfriend recently planted nasturtiums, green beans, and sunflowers. I receive the Prada suit I ordered from The Real Real in the mail. I try it on and look like a poor man’s David Byrne. I make an elaborate and delicious beef stew. For my film club I watch Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), an oblique biopic of the titular novelist, actor, filmmaker, and fascist sympathizer with a somehow disappointing Philip Glass soundtrack. But it’s a stunning collage, flashing between intricate stage sets depicting scenes from Mishima’s novels and the final moments before he offed himself after a failed coup of the Japanese state in 1970. In its famous concluding scene, he gives a speech to onlookers from a roof, expounding on the divide between words and action. I wonder if things would have been different if he had a microphone.

thursday

Guilty because I haven’t gone back to the essay, guiltier still because I am not maximizing my time reading all the things I said I would. I vow to finish Middlemarch in spite of my failed attempt at an online reading group (my fault). I have a virtual appointment with a dermatologist on an app that sounds fake. I respond to an editor’s questions on a piece I filed and eat leftover stew, trying to identify a scientific reason for why it tastes better the next day (the results of this research are inconclusive). I half-listen to a lecture where two curators talk about an artist whose work I love and wonder if I will have a “career” someday. On YouTube, we watch James Charles’s reality show, Instant Influencer, which is chaotic and unbelievable.

friday

For the past week or so, my boyfriend and I have had varying schedules, wherein he stays awake through dawn and we intersect in the hours between approximately 3PM until I fall asleep around midnight. To help him wake up I play YouTube videos of various animal noises. We watch Hot Rod (2007), I get extremely stoned, and we put on more Instant Influencer. Goose, my boyfriend’s pet snake, moves from his moss cave to his tree cave.

saturday

I make blueberry pancakes from scratch and eat them with my friend. My mother gets her flowers early and we talk on the phone; she is still hoping that I’ll be able to visit New York sometime in the next month, which seems unlikely but perhaps not impossible. I make fried rice with leftovers and we put on the original Grey Gardens (1975) in the background. My boyfriend cuts my hair, and it turns out really great, actually. Later, restless and irritated for no reason, I decide to be profligate and order pizza, spiked lemonade, beer, a blender, ice cream and we watch Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996). I keep drinking these disgustingly sweet spiked seltzers and I’m drunker than I have been in a long time. I fall asleep around 3AM within the first thirty minutes of Annhiliation (2018).

sunday

I wake up just as my boyfriend is going to bed at 8:30AM. He’s already taken a walk to the rail park and watered the garden. I eat leftover cold pizza and watch Claire’s Knee (1970) in the living room. Rohmer is perfect for quarantine because his films are so languid—serene character studies of aging men battling moral quandaries (whether or not to have sex with teenagers). The French love making vice glamorous! I FaceTime with my parents briefly and then just dawdle the rest of the day. I haven’t been able to read anything in a sustained way for so long. I walk to CVS and then when I get there, I remember that the pharmacy closes early on Sundays. I buy assorted knickknacks and then go for a long walk and listen to Animal Collective. I talk to my friends about Secrets and Lies, text my other friends about grad school, and make my boyfriend read my pointless writing before falling asleep. I vow to write tomorrow, another week to try and force myself to make sense.

featured creature: dead leaf butterfly

Instead of gas station coffee discourse—no wonder people think art criticism is out of touch, elitist, irrelevant—I’m devoting my thoughts this week to this beautiful butterfly.

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niͥghͪᴛⷮliͥfeͤ is brought to you by rahel aima / @cnqmdi