change the pear vol. 26 4 Nov 2024

hello and welcome to november! i’m entering into my fourth month of living in australia (yikes). it doesn’t get any easier being further from friends and community back home, and i still don’t know what shape my life is taking here, but i’m taking it one day at a time. stay warm out there. i miss you.

on repeat

are you guys aware of just how many bangers were released in 2008 alone? i didn’t realise what a bumper year it was until i was suggesting songs for hana’s childhood pop playlist (cut off year: 2007), being met each time with no!! that’s too late, going to check and realising that yep, yet again it was from 2008.

• chasing pavements, adele

• single ladies, beyoncé

• viva la vida, coldplay

• low, flo rida

• hot n cold, katy perry

• so what, pink

• poker face, lady gaga

• american boy, estelle ft kanye west

we used to be a real country…

last seen

well, i finally did it. i finished the sopranos. a momentous occasion and one i’m glad to be able to write about here. i remember chronicling my thoughts on episode one when i started this newsletter and look at us now! who would have thought.

the sopranos is a tragedy, and once i accepted that, it became… not easier exactly but less painful to watch the final seasons, once all hope of anything good happening had been extinguished. there is no escape from the soprano family’s toxic maw and there never will be. everything is consumed and the bones are spat into the trash heap. there’s a reason the show steadfastly avoids telling us anything about the one soprano (barbara, tony and janice’s sister) that has managed to live apart from the world of her family, beyond very short cameos at moments of crisis. because this show is not about escape routes, it’s not about coming out the other side and living a redemptive and honest life—or at least, a different one. the focus is on those people whose hands are stained, the people who can’t help but enjoy their complicity, as carmela tells dr melfi.

i found christopher’s end so difficult for that reason. we’ve watched this boy become a man over six seasons, witnessed in minute detail his struggle with addiction, his efforts to stay clean, his relapses and his recommitments to being sober. when christopher’s addiction first prevents him from doing his job properly, tony asks uncle jun’s advice. it’s one of the most shocking moments of the entire show; uncle jun sits there and calmly tells tony that he should put christopher down as though he is a sick dog. seasons later, as we see christopher being all but forced into relapse by the cruelty of his fellow captains, as we see tony plug his nostrils to let him choke to death on his own blood, there is a sick inevitability to it. because christopher’s attempts to get sober are good and clean and true. nothing like that can survive in the soprano family, and so neither can he.

it’s not all doom and gloom, though—the sopranos is one of the few tv shows that has consistently continued to make me laugh out loud through the seasons, maybe because it’s not actively trying to pull off gags. it just sets up the characters and their foibles and eccentricities and blindspots and lets them loose on a situation. and whether it’s vito turning out to be a bottom, silvio having to take on the role of interim boss when tony is injured christopher wanting to make a movie, carmela and rosalie exploring paris or one of tony’s extended dream sequences—the results are absurd, inappropriate and very, very funny.

i managed to get through all six seasons of the show without encountering one single spoiler (shoutout to abeera who patiently rewatched seasons one through four with me and didn’t breathe a word about future episodes). i’m glad of it, because i think the thrill of the show lies in its unpredictability. we know how tragedies end. but we don’t necessarily know how we get there. i knew the show was going to come down heavy on the Tony-Soprano-Is-Irredeemable side, but i could never have predicted that final scene, the final shot. is tony dead? after i finished the show i spent days trawling through old reviews, blog posts, reddit threads to read about the finale. someone has written a painstaking play-by-play of every frame in the final scene to prove that tony is definitively, without a doubt, dead as dead can be. but i’m inclined to agree with emily st. james’ assessment:

From this point of view, it doesn’t even matter if Tony dies at the end of the series. He was given multiple opportunities to come alive and only half-heartedly grasped at a few of them. We know this man well enough now to know he will live the rest of his life—whether that’s 30 seconds or 30 years—in a state of spiritual decay as profound as the physical decay his uncle lives through… Tony, increasingly incapable of even these small moments of pleasure (though he takes a moment to look upon the trees before going to see Junior), is spiritually lost. He tried to find his way through the wilderness of his own psyche and soul, sometimes with the help of Melfi, and he ultimately failed. When he complains to A.J.’s psychiatrist about his mother in the episode, he’s back to square one. He got so lost in the maze he went right back to the beginning.

that’s tragedy baby! there is something so rotten at tony’s core that, in every way, is reified by the life he was born into: the violence, the whoring, the gambling, the uncontrollable rage. and it spreads and spreads until there is nothing redeemable to be found. but in the end—what’s the point of it all? tony visits uncle jun, now in a state psychiatric ward, and tries to remind him of the good old days. you and my dad used to run all of north jersey, he tells junior. and junior doesn’t even register it. the whole thing is utterly futile. even the argument that tony is doing it for his children falls flat. they’re complicit, carmela reminds us, and they always have been.

god, what a show. there’s so much more i could say. i want to go back and rewatch my favourite episodes—paulie and christopher in the woods, carmela and tony’s divorce argument, AJ becoming a nihilist—and honestly, maybe even rewatch the whole damn thing because i think it’s a show that would really reward that. but i think i might give myself a little break first. next up: the wire.

currently watching

on dual recommendation from matthew and eddie, hana and i have been watching jet lag: the series, specifically the tag eur it seasons. jet lag: the series is a webseries hosted by three nerds (sam, ben and adam) who play games across the globe, and i am obsessed with them. they begin tag eur it in a small town in france, notable for being the midpoint of three end locations: jersey, borkum and zermatt. they have three days to make it to their end location, but have to earn “coins” by doing absurd challenges in order to travel on any form of transportation that isn’t walking or running. when one person is the runner, they have a 45 minute headstart to get away from the two that are chasing them. the chasers have a live tracker on the runner, so they know where they are and have to then catch up to the runner to tag them. which is a lot easier said than done, thanks to the irregularity of european trains and the difficulty of predicting each other’s moves. sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it very, very wrong. ben is a he/him lesbian who approaches the challenge mostly on vibes and a positive attitude, adam takes it incredibly seriously, to the point that he is in active distress most of the time (and the more distressed he gets the more his voice cracks), sam has a plan for everything and is aware of even the most obscure train stations that someone might go to. the way they try and outsmart and double-bluff each other leads to some ridiculous manoeuvres. it’s truly incredible stuff.

reading

recently, i finished the tainted cup by robert bennett jackson, a fantasy murder mystery set in the empire of khanum. the action takes place in the outer rim of the empire, right by the eastern seas, where massive walls have been constructed to keep out the leviathans—titanic beings that attempt to breach the walls every wet season and rampage through the empire’s lands. many of the subjects of the empire modify themselves using grafts or other concoctions, enhancing them physically or aesthetically. our narrator, dinios kol, has been modified to become an engraver, meaning he remembers everything he sees and hears, but there are darker and stranger modifications too. and the source of many of these alterations? organic matter found in the bodies of the leviathans. creepy! nasty! in the outer rim, contagion abounds. and contagion is what is suspected when a military officer is found dead, killed by the sprouting of a patch of trees erupting from his chest. an investigator called ana dolabra and her stolid assistant, dinios, are called on to solve the crime. ana swears a bit too much for my liking—i’m not prudish about language but it did feel a bit grating to read through speech littered with fucks on every page. but she is a detective in the true holmesian tradition: reclusive, unwilling to modify herself for anyone, curious, deductive and experimental. she eats raw meat and wears a blindfold to avoid overstimulating the senses. in her wake trails dinios, acting as ana’s eyes and ears at crime scenes. it’s a lot of fun, the worldbuilding was well-thought out and executed, and it’s even gay! what’s not to love.

free palestine

The Pitfalls of Liberalism, Kwame Ture

Is it not violent for a child to go to bed hungry in the richest country in the world? I think that is violent. But that type of violence is so institutionalized that it becomes a part of our way of life. Not only do we accept poverty, we even find it normal. And that again is because the oppressor makes his violence a part of the functioning society. But the violence of the oppressed becomes disruptive. It is disruptive to the ruling circles of a given society. And because it is disruptive it is therefore very easy to recognize, and therefore it becomes the target of all those who in fact do not want to change the society. What we want to do for our people, the oppressed, is to begin to legitimatize violence in their minds. So that for us violence against the oppressor will be expedient. This is very important, because we have all been brainwashed into accepting questions of moral judgment when violence is used against the oppressor.

What the liberal really wants is to bring about change which will not in any way endanger his position. The liberal says, “It is a fact that you are poor, and it is a fact that some people are rich; but we can make you rich without affecting those people who are rich.” I do not know how poor people are going to get economic security without affecting the rich in a given country, unless one is going to exploit other peoples. I think that if we followed the logic of the liberal to its conclusion we would find that all we can get from it is that in order for a society to become equitable we must begin to exploit other peoples.

One Year by the Palestinian Youth Movement

In this sense, we owe much of the development of the movement to October 7; so too, the fledgling Western left. It would be easy to become complacent or disillusioned by what has followed, but we have obligations to the martyrs, to the prisoners, and to all who fight to end this. Here, hundreds of thousands have been mobilized, joined new organizations, confronted the campus and the state. They have Gaza to thank for this, but it is not enough. Israel is the model for a global future, of fully-realized 21st century fascist nations. Its blueprint is in reinforcing duality with the American security state: the same technologies, strategies, and rationalizations will be brought to bear on coming waves of climate refugees and the lumpenproletariat who will strain the edges of the prison or ghetto. The consolidation of the means of mass death production in the hands of the ruling class and their media accomplices is a convalescent prologue to the coming decades of catastrophe.

This is a normalcy that should not be normal, and each of our martyrs fought to end it.

‘A time of painful birth and major transformation’

My message to the international community is that one of the motivations behind the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was the international community’s failure to prevent the occupation from liquidating the Palestinian cause. Our position has been validated because the international community has watched our extermination for a year and has done nothing practical or effective to prevent it. After a year of genocide, we still see Netanyahu speaking at the UN. Therefore, we say that your silence on Netanyahu will create others like him among you, and when that happens the suffering will reach everyone. There is still time for you to take humane and ethical positions that are in your interest as much as they are in ours.

To the free people supporting the liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian people are watching your actions, and we see that you pose a real threat to the occupation. Continue your struggle, continue exposing the occupation, highlighting its crimes, and putting pressure on it and its supporters. Make them outcasts wherever they go, and sever the ties between your governments and the Israeli government. Ensure that your activism becomes more effective because the children of Palestine need your action.

Message, received by Momtaza Mehri

I won’t be the first or last to note this, but one characteristic defining this era of political defeat is how feebly solidarity is imagined. The identity documents of countless volunteers tell another story. Sift through the archive of the Palestinian struggle and you will find them. Japanese, French, Norwegians. Bangladeshis, Sudanese. Fighters from all over the world, who made their way to Palestine, to a besieged Beirut, and defended the inhabitants of refugee camps. People don’t brave perilous routes for hundreds of miles or risk their lives for a goal as ambiguous and vacuous as ‘uplifting’ the voices of the oppressed. They do so because they recognise, as Ghassan Kanafani wrote, that striking one arm of imperialism anywhere is a blow to its collective body.

miscellaneous

hana bringing me letters from friends at home. walking through the botanical garden in the saturday sun. spotting water dragons. our new plant babies. finding glazed terracotta pots on sale. red braised chicken. sunday market trips with hana. fresh blood oranges. lemon gum essential oil. sitting on the patio with a $3 beer in the afternoon sun. hana’s joy at finding cebu mango in the asian grocery store. my new lilac uniqlo t-shirt. introducing hana to sophie and family. hana giving morgan a makeover and holding neenaw the chicken. new ducklings everywhere! japchae. fresh snapper from the fishmonger. cooking chicken adobo for sarah. amy and weggs baking us banana bread. marble sculpture of a frog. crushing a v5 on the kilterboard. blasting shine by take that in the car. when will you wear wigs. the bottlebrush in our garden beginning to bloom.

take care out there. see you soon.