3/19/2022 #56

Here & Now (mom), Petrov again, Art, Timothy Snyder, Hayao Miyazaki, Barry Webb, John Akomfrah, Arvo Pärt, Rain.

Mar 20, 2022

HERE AND NOW

I’ve been thinking a lot about “emptiness,” “space,” and “boredom.” This is perhaps natural, since I’m no longer posting art and photos on Instagram; I’m still busy, but I feel like I have more time/space to think and breathe between freelance gigs.

I’ve already inherited a busy lifestyle impulse from my mother, who, like me, was involved in organizations, social groups. My mother was also a hard worker, as well as a talented seamstress. While living in the Philippines, she owned her own beauty salon, and had dreams of an easier life in the post-WWII U.S. But once here, she could only find drudge work: shirt factory seamstress, cannery worker, laundry worker for a hospital; a job she stayed with until retirement, mainly for the benefits and to be with the friends she made there.

Mom (Trinidad G. Vengua), the fashion plate, wearing a dress I suspect she sewed herself (1930s).

While American life offers many of us a measure of freedom in voicing opinions and identities, (although it seems a constant struggle to retain that freedom), the economic security this country has offered to immigrants and refugees often seems to have been just media propaganda for the working classes.

Echoing my mother’s experience, I know that social connecting, in-person as well as online, among minority groups (and especially for Filipinos), is not just about making friends, keeping in touch with family, and reinforcing identity: it’s about survival. In the U.S. this somehow becomes about productivity and promotion.

Well, sometimes I want nothing more than “nothingness” and non-improvement. Robert Reese (a teacher at the Monterey Zen Center) on “The Virtue of Nothing.”

NIKITA PETROV

In the 2/26 issue (#53) of EO, I linked to a video on Psychopolitica. “My Country Started a War” (with transcript) was a discussion between Nikita Petrov and John Horgan, about the dismay that Petrov, as a Russian citizen, was feeling about the attack on Ukraine. The conversation felt off-the-cuff; Petrov was clearly still working through his responses to the war (the video is now labled “private”).

A few days later, news media were reporting that Putin was cracking down on the media and dissidents; I decided to remove the link as a protective measure for Petrov. He was silent for several weeks. Then, yesterday he posted a new issue—from Armenia. He and his girlfriend, Karina had decided it was time to leave Russia; they took their dog with them. He describes their struggle to leave the country in “Nightmare Journal: From the First Days of the War.”

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