this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

BARB MORRISON AND DAPHNE RUBIN-VEGA: BOTTOMING FOR GOD

Who: Barb Morrison, Daphne Rubin-Vega
What: Reading, conversation, and audience Q&A
Where: The Wild Project, 195 East Third St. between Aves. A & B
When: Thursday, July 11, $16, 7:00
Why: “the universe has a way of putting us in our place. a way of commanding what we pretend is destiny, what we like to call the journey and what we fool ourselves into believing is karma,” Barb Morrison writes at the beginning of her memoir, bottoming for god. “but the fact of the matter is we’ve already conspired with this entity, this force, this all knowing being, this GOD (or what EVER you wanna call it.) we already made a pact in the board room in between lives. we’ve already sat amongst our judges and jurors, our spirit guides, our guardian angels, our circle of souls and agreed to collaborate on whatever theater piece will take us to a higher consciousness. whatever decisions we THINK we’re making will move us up or down this mortal coil only because it was already agreed to. it was written before we zipped up these space suits. it was litigated at the table where our greatest enemies and best friends tried on costumes to see who will play which role this time around.”

My wife and I have known the Schenectady-born Morrison for many years, on a personal and professional level. A music producer, songwriter, film composer, football fan, multi-instrumentalist, former Gutterboy member, and mentor who has worked with Blondie, Rufus Wainwright, Franz Ferdinand, Asia Kate Dillon, Rachael Sage, Scissor Sisters, and many others, Morrison digs deep in the book, which is billed as “a story about gender euphoria, sobriety, old skool NYC, true love, past lives, and coming home,” in such chapters as “that fucking belt,” “fourteenth & third,” “the sound of a smile,” “shell shock,” and “hysterical and historical.”

Morrison’s summer book tour takes them July 11 to the Wild Project, where they will be joined by two-time Tony-nominated Panamanian American actress Daphne Rubin-Vega, who originated the roles of Mimi Marquez in Rent and Lucy in Jack Goes Boating and has appeared in such other shows as Anna in the Tropics, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Les Misérables as well as on such television series as Smash, Katy Keene, and Hazbin Hotel. The New Jersey–based Morrison will read excerpts from the book, then sit down for a conversation with Rubin-Vega, followed by an audience Q&A. Tickets are $16; signed books will be available for sale.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CHRONICLES OF A WANDERING SAINT

Argentine writer-director Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is a glowing debut

CHRONICLES OF A WANDERING SAINT (Tomás Gómez Bustillo, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 28
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.chroniclesofawanderingsaint.com

About thirty-five minutes into Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s gorgeous, elegiac debut feature, Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, a meditative dark comedy on love, faith, and the afterlife, a deeply sad tragedy occurs and the credits begin to roll. But just as the protagonist is reborn at that moment, so is the film itself.

In a small, religious Argentina town, Rita (Mónica Villa) spends much of her time at Saint Rita church, either praying with her three friends, Viviana (Noemí Ron), Beba (Silvia Porro), and Alicia (Ana Silvia Mackenzie), or cleaning, mopping the floors until they glisten. She and her husband, Norberto (Horacio Marassi), live a simple life; they have no children and don’t travel. While Norberto still has a lust for life, Rita looks tired. When Norberto suggests that they go back to the waterfalls they visited on their honeymoon forty years earlier, Rita doesn’t understand why.

“Well, the waterfalls are still the exact same,” she says. He responds, “But we’re not.”

Rummaging through the church basement, Rita comes upon an object she believes to be a statue of Saint Rita, missing for thirty years. Before even seeing it, Father Eduardo (Pablo Moseinco) declares it must be a miracle. However, when, after further research, Rita realizes it’s not Saint Rita, she and Norberto decide to fake it, proceeding with her claim nonetheless. It all goes well, until it doesn’t. But that’s only part of this tender and touching magical realism tale.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is built around the concept of a spiritual glow, as stated in Proverbs 13.9: “The light of the righteous shines brightly, but the lamp of the wicked is snuffed out.”

Early on, Rita is cleaning the floor of the church, and Beba tells her, “Quit mopping so much or those shiny floors will end up blinding us.” Several parishioners gather in the back and sing, “The light from your shining face will illuminate all the paths that lead to eternity.” And when people die, they eventually transform into a blinding white light; one person is actually reincarnated as a lightbulb. In one of the most surreal moments, Luchito (Iair Said), now a moth, can’t keep away from Quique (Mauricio Minetti), a bulb over a woman’s front door.

The film is reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2010 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which is another fascinating integration of the human, animal, and spirit worlds. Bustillo maintains a similar slow pace but adds hilarious scenes beautifully photographed by Pablo Lozano, with spectacular production design by Doriane Desfaugeres, wonderful costumes by Margarita Franco, and a gentle, melancholic score by Felipe Delsart. The film is composed of still shots; the camera moves only once, zooming in on a piano, an instrument we later learn that Rita’s mother played.

When Norberto and Rita are in their kitchen talking about the waterfalls, they are both wearing yellow raincoats, the color echoed in the scrambled eggs and lemon wedge on their plates and the spray bottle on the table. Through the door is an old television set, furthering the idea that the couple, and the other parishioners, are living in an uncluttered, old-fashioned past despite Rita’s use of Facebook and a smartphone. Their old car has a cassette player; when she’s driving, Rita puts on a homemade mix tape that includes a dance-pop cover of Bryan Adams’s “Heaven.”

A shot of Rita sitting alone in a tiny bus shelter, looking downtrodden, surrounded by green grass and trees, a light pole rising behind her, is stunning; next to the shelter is a sign pointing out three nearby locations, but right then Rita has nowhere to go, unsure of which path to take. Not even the book she was reading about el Camino de Santiago, detailing the popular Christian pilgrimage itinerary, can help her now.

Villa (Wild Tales, The Holy Girl) is mesmerizing as Rita, a pious, devoted woman who wants to live up to her namesake. Her performance, especially her eyes, recalls Fellini wife and muse Giuletta Masina, who lit up such films as Nights of Cabiria and La Strada. Rita is not seeking much out of life, only a miracle. But as Norberto tells her, “If you want it to be a miracle, then it is.”

The multi-award-winning Chronicles of a Wandering Saint runs June 28 – July 11 at IFC Center; the LA-based Bustillo will be on hand for Q&As on Friday and Saturday at 7:05, joined by executive producer Samir Oliveros, producers Gewan Brown and Amanda Freedman, and moderators Taylor A. Purdee and Isabel Custodio.

Oh, one last note: Beware those unexpected sneezes. . . .

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

GLASS CLOUDS ENSEMBLE: LIKE THE FEATHER TIP OF A GIANT BIRD

Glass Clouds Ensemble rehearse for special site-specific performance at Earth Matter farm on Governors Island (photo courtesy Glass Clouds Ensemble)

Who: Glass Clouds Ensemble
What: Live performance and farm tour
Where: Urban Farm, Governors Island
When: Saturday, June 29, free with advance RSVP, 2:00
Why: On June 29 at 2:00, New York–based contemporary chamber music collective the Glass Clouds Ensemble will be on Governors Island performing “Like the Feather Tip of a Giant Bird,” a program featuring a piece inspired by Earth Matter NY’s Compost Learning Center and Soil State Farm, next to the Oval and Hammock Grove; the concert will be followed by a tour of the farm, which “seeks to reduce the organic waste misdirected into the garbage stream by encouraging neighbor participation and leadership in composting.” The trio, consisting of violinists Raina Arnett and Lauren Conroy and soprano Marisa Karchin, recently performed at Green-Wood Cemetery in Jody Oberfelder’s moving And Then, Now; the Governors Island program will include a new commission by guest composer Hannah Selin inspired by the farm as well as works by John Downland and Barbara Strozzi, Conroy, and Arnett, joined by special guest Alex Vourtsanis on theorbo.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FILM SCREENING & CONVERSATION WITH DIRECTOR: 76 DAYS

Two essential healthcare workers take a much-deserved brief break in a Wuhan hospital in 76 Days

76 DAYS (Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, and Anonymous, 2020)
China Institute in America
100 Washington St. (use 40 Rector St. entrance)
Wednesday, June 20, $12, 6:00
chinainstitute.org/events
www.76daysfilm.com

The prospect of sitting through a ninety-minute documentary about essential healthcare workers in four hospitals in Wuhan fighting in the early days of Covid-19, during the city’s seventy-six-day lockdown, might seem daunting. But what could have been a difficult, emotional, and political roller coaster about fear and anger, government lies and finger pointing turns out to be a deeply affecting film that celebrates our most basic hopes and humanity.

Chinese director Hao Wu was researching a film about pandemics when, in mid-February, he came upon footage being shot by a pair of reporters in Wuhan, Weixi Chen and a man who has decided to remain anonymous. They had been given full access to four hospitals, where they followed doctors, nurses, patients, and family members for several months. There are no talking heads, and no one speaks directly to the camera; instead, 76 Days offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective that manages to be as uplifting as it is frightening.

The film opens like a sci-fi thriller, as an unidentified group of people in head-to-toe protective gear that includes light-blue masks, long face shields, white Hazmat suits, and blue footies comforts a distraught colleague who is prevented from saying goodbye to her father, who has just died from the novel coronavirus. Near the end of the scene, one of her coworkers tries to calm her down, saying, “We don’t want to see you in distress or pain. What will we do if you fall sick? We all have to work in the afternoon.” Moments later, sick people are banging on a door of the hospital to be let in, like a crowd trying to escape a coming zombie apocalypse, while two workers decide who to admit first. Those exchanges set the stage for the rest of the film, in which doctors and nurses go about their business with a relatively relaxed demeanor, displaying endless empathy and compassion as they care for scared patients with uncertain futures.

Wu focuses on a few specific cases that serve to represent the crisis as a whole, following an elderly couple who both have the virus and are not permitted to see each other even though they are on the same floor, and a young couple who are forced to quarantine in their apartment after the woman gives birth to a baby girl, unable to see their newborn for two weeks. While the nurses fall in love with the infant, who must stay in an incubator and whom they name Little Penguin, the workers have their hands full with the old man, who constantly tries to leave the hospital and doesn’t seem capable of wearing his mask correctly, if at all.

Doctors and nurses in Wuhan care for Covid patients, displaying empathy and compassion during seventy-six-day lockdown

The genuine kindness and concern displayed by the hospital employees is, well, infectious. They are risking their lives at every moment; each encounter is fraught with the possibility that they could contract the virus even with all the PPE. It’s hard not to cringe when they feed the old man, wipe the face of the infant, or use a patient’s phone to call a relative with news, because the reality is that people die from this disease, and Wu is not afraid to show that. It’s a riveting film that immerses you in this global emergency that started right there, at that time; if this doesn’t make you wear a mask, wash your hands, observe social distance protocols, and avoid gathering with others indoors, I don’t know what will.

We also see the empty streets and highways of Wuhan, a city of eleven million people, deserted, with signs advising, “Staying home makes a happy family.” All the action is happening in the hospitals, where the doctors and nurses bond with themselves and the patients, decorate their white Hazmat suits with drawings and sayings (“Clay Pot Chicken: I miss you”), and caution everyone to “be extra vigilant.” The crisis may be over, but those are still words to live by. Winner of the Best Cinematography award at DOC NYC 2020 and nominated for a Best Documentary Gotham Award, 76 Days is screening June 20 at 6:00 at China Institute and will be followed by a Q&A with Wu and film scholar Karen Ma.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DRAMA DESK AWARDS 2024: CELEBRATING ARTISTIC ABUNDANCE

DRAMA DESK AWARDS
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
Monday, June 10, $105-$205, 6:15
nyuskirball.org
dramadeskaward.com

Balcony tickets are still available for the sixty-ninth annual Drama Desk Awards, honoring the best of theater June 10 at the Skirball Center. Founded in 1949, the Drama Desk (of which I am a voting member) does not differentiate between Broadway, off Broadway, and off off Broadway; all shows that meet the minimum requirements are eligible. Thus, splashy, celebrity-driven productions can find themselves nominated against experimental shows that took place in an East Village elevator or Chelsea loft. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of star power at the awards presentation.

Sutton Foster and Aaron Tveit will cohost the event; among the nominees this year are Jessica Lange for Mother Play, Patrick Page for All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, Rachel McAdams for Mary Jane, Leslie Odom Jr. for Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, Sarah Paulson for Appropriate, Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara for Days of Wine and Roses, Bebe Neuwirth for Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, Dorian Harewood for The Notebook, and Michael Stuhlbarg for Patriots. The Drama Desk also does not distinguish between male and female; the acting categories have ten nominees each, regardless of gender, with two winners. Thus, d’Arcy James is competing against his costar, O’Hara, for the same prize, although they both could take home the award.

Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara are both nominated for Days of Wine and Roses and will participate in the 2024 Drama Desk Awards (photo by Joan Marcus)

Among this year’s presenters are Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick, Montego Glover, Lena Hall, James Lapine, Debra Messing, Ruthie Ann Miles, Andrew Rannells, Brooke Shields, Seth Rudetsky, Shoshana Bean, Corbin Bleu, James Monroe Iglehart, and Steven Pasquale. O’Hara will perform a special tribute to William Wolf Award honoree André Bishop, Foster and Nikki M. James will both sing, and Nathan Lane will receive the Harold S. Prince Award for Lifetime Achievement. Others being honored are the How to Dance in Ohio Authentic Autistic Representation Team, lighting designer Isabella Byrd, and press agent Lady Irene Gandy.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LYNNE SACHS: FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

Lynne Sachs retrospective at DCTV features screenings, Q&As, and an interactive workshop (photo by Oscar Fernandez)

LYNNE SACHS: FROM THE OUTSIDE IN
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
June 7-11, $16-$20, series pass with monograph $80
212-966-4510
www.dctvny.org

Experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV in 1984; she and DCTV Firehouse Cinema are celebrating this fortieth anniversary with “Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In,” a five-day retrospective with seven programs comprising two dozen of her works, from 1983’s Ladies Wear to 2024’s Contractions and the world premiere of We Continue to Speak, from the three-minute The Small Ones (2007) and The Jitters (2024) to the eighty-three-minute Tip of My Tongue (2017). Sachs will be at every program, participating in Q&As and an interactive workshop; among her special guests are Tom Day, Sam Green, Tabitha Jackson, Naeem Mohaiemen, Lizzie Olesker, Accra Shepp, and her brother Ira Sachs.

“I walked into Downtown Community TV (DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film. I was twenty-two years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable,” Sachs said in a statement. “From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places, and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.”

The Memphis-born, Brooklyn-based auteur is an open book in her films, melding the personal and the political. In the grainy Ladies Wear, she photographs Ira on the New York City subway as he applies polish to his nails and sneakers. In 2013’s Your Day Is My Night, she documents a group of Chinese immigrants crammed into a closetlike apartment in Chinatown, where they ponder the differences between their lives in America and their native country and wonder if they made the right choice in coming here; there’s a fascinating kind of intervention when a young Puerto Rican woman moves in with them. In The Small Ones, Sachs shares the story of her Hungarian cousin Sandor Lenard, who during WWII in Italy was tasked with “washing, measuring, and cementing the bones of American dead.” His straightforward narration is accompanied by abstract images of war and slow-motion home movies of children at a birthday party. In 2021’s Maya at 24, Sachs depicts her daughter, Maya, at ages six, sixteen, and twenty-four.

Lynne Sachs takes a revealing look at her dad in Film About a Father Who

Sachs offers a unique perspective of 9/11 in Tornado (2002), her fingers ruffling through ripped paper that floated across to Brooklyn. In the seven-minute Swerve, artist and curator Emmy Catedral, blaqlatinx multidisciplinary artist ray ferreira, director and cinematographer Jeff Preiss, film curator and programmer Inney Prakash, and actor Juliana Sass recite excerpts from Pilipinx poet Paolo Javier’s O.B.B. in a Queens park; words occasionally appear on the screen, including “free emptiness,” “unknown thoroughfare,” and “hum your savage cabbage leaf.” Investigation of a Flame (2001) explores the true story of the Catonsville Nine through archival footage and new interviews, with one member decrying “the obscenity and the insanity” of the US government’s actions, “which are growing more and more obscene and insane.”

“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together,” DCTV Firehouse Cinema director of programming Dara Messinger said. “I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy — not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum.”

“I don’t believe that childhood is swathed in innocence,” Sachs writes in e•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), which contains footage from January 6 and Peter Brook’s 1963 Lord of the Flies. In The Jitters (2024), she cavorts with her partner, Mark Street, and three pet frogs and a cat. She takes a revealing look at the patriarch of her seemingly ever-expanding family in Film About a Father Who (2020). In And Then We Marched (2017), Sachs speaks with Sophie D., her seven-year-old neighbor, over archival footage of suffragists and shots of the 2017 Women’s March for equality.

Sachs shares her real to-do lists in A Year in Notes and Numbers (2017) while tracking her cholesterol, bone density, weight, glucose level, platelet count, and total protein. In Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018), she visits cutting-edge artists Carolee Schneemann in New Paltz, Barbara Hammer in New York City, and Gunvor Nelson in Sweden. In an essay Sachs wrote about the four-minute 1987 silent short Drawn and Quartered, depicting a naked man and woman divided into four frames, exploring the tacit nature of the human body, Sachs explained how she felt at the film’s San Francisco premiere: “Within those few painful minutes, the crowd went from absolute silence, to raucous laughter, and back to an exquisite quiet. I was shaking.” You can expect all that and more over these five days at DCTV; below is the full schedule.

Lynne Sachs’s poetic short Swerve moves to the rhythm of Queens

Friday, June 7, 7:00
Performing the Real, followed by a Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker, moderated by Sam Green and with special guest poet Paolo Javier: Fossil (1986), The Washing Society (codirected with Lizzie Olesker, 2018), Swerve (2022)

Saturday, June 8, noon
Frames and Stanzas: An Artist Talk and Workshop, including A Biography of Lilith (1997), Starfish Aorta Colossus (2015), and Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home (2020)

Saturday, June 8, 4:00
It’s a Hell of a Place, followed by a Q&A with Lynne Sachs, moderated by Margaret Rhee: Ladies Wear (1983), Tornado (2002), and Your Day Is My Night (2013)

Saturday, June 8, 7:00
Fightless, followed by a Q&A with Lynne Sachs, moderated by Naeem Mohaiemen: The Small Ones (2007), The Task of the Translator (2010), e•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), and Investigation of a Flame (2001)

Lynne Sachs hosts an unusual fiftieth birthday party in Tip of My Tongue

Sunday, June 9, 2:00
Bodies and Bonds, followed by a Q&A with Lynne Sachs, moderated by Dara Messinger: Drawn and Quartered (1987), The House of Science (1991), And Then We Marched (2017), A Year in Notes and Numbers (2017), Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018), Maya at 24 (2021), Contractions (2024), and We Continue to Speak (2024)

Monday, June 10, 7:00
Tip of My Tongue (2017) + A Month of Single Frames (2019), followed by a Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Accra Shepp, moderated by Tabitha Jackson

Tuesday, June 11, 7:00
Film About a Father Who (2020) + The Jitters (2024), followed by a Q&A with Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs, and Dana Sachs

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER: ATTRITION

A bison skeleton lurks in City Hall Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

ATTRITION
City Hall Park
Broadway, Park Row, and Chambers St.
June 5 – November 17, free
www.publicartfund.org
online slideshow

We all know about alligators in the New York City sewer system, as honored by Alexander Klingspor’s NYC Legend sculpture on Union Square Park’s Triangle Plaza.

But Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Attrition, a site-specific Public Art Fund project at the south end entrance to City Hall Park, is not only more real but arrives with an important message.

“I live because my ancestors survived a war of attrition carried out by extractive colonizers in order to subjugate tribal nations of the Great Plains for American progress,” Luger, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and is currently based in New Mexico, explains in his artist statement. “By the year 1895, across North America, bison herds had been systematically eradicated from numbers in the tens of millions to a mere 1500 — this was genocide. The public artwork Attrition is an effort to transform industrial processes and materials into a symbol of these buried histories reemerging in the twenty-first century.”

The ten-foot-long bison skeleton, made of steel with an ash black patina, peers out of a bed of wild grass that covers the park’s large historical medallion, which contains this 1855 quote from civil engineer and Confederate army officer Henry Brevard Davidson: “It must not be forgotten that the park is still the refuge of the people, the cradle of liberty.”

The mandible is hidden under the grass, but you can get an up-close view of the cranium, scapula, ribs, thoracic vertebrae, and horns. Just as if it were a living bison, gnats hover around it amid the sounds of chirping birds. The skeleton is covered with circular engraved star-shaped symbols that reference the interconnectedness of land, life, and the cosmos as well as the devastation wrought by human intervention in natural ecosystems.

In a statement, Luger, who descends from buffalo people and is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold from the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota cultures, talks about how men would build pyramids of bison skulls in the 1800s.

“These were testaments to settler force and monuments of conquest. They communicated a warning to Native Americans, asserting a haunting commitment to our destruction — and yet, we have survived,” he says. “My ongoing exploration of bison aims to bring awareness to the importance of their impact as an apex species in the environment. Over the course of my life, I’ve developed a personal relationship with this animal — one that is on the verge of survivor’s guilt — because I know their eradication was put in place to create dominance in the Central Plains. We’ve oversimplified our kinship with nature, and you can’t have a whole, complete relationship without complexity.”

Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Attrition will be celebrated with a special program on June 4 at 6:00 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

On June 4 at 6:00, there will be a public celebration, with remarks from the artist and American Indian Community House executive director Patricia Tarrant, along with readings as part of a brief program; the work officially opens on Wednesday, World Environment Day. On the horizon is a Bison Bead Making Workshop in City Hall Park and the Museum of Arts and Design in August and a Public Art Fund Talk with Luger at the Cooper Union in October.

In addition, Luger is represented in the Whitney Biennial with Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (a Lakota phrase that translates as “the fat-taker’s world is upside down”) from the ongoing series “Future Ancestral Technologies.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]