Happy new year! I hope you’re all feeling good after some time off. I also hope you’ll agree that we need way more time off. How different is your brain after a week of no work? What if we had another week? (What is this, Europe?) Back in the land of reality, I have missed you, and because time is continuous and 2021 is not the clean break we all pretended it would be, I’d like to start the year the way we ended the last one: with a massive playlist. My buddy Kev Nemelka just released the latest RN, an annual zine full of the most impactful tunes of the year, as selected by his network of friends and collaborators (heads up: you may see a familiar face in there). This year is the Protest Issue, and you’ll find a number of organizers in there, alongside many, many tunes that have become the soundtrack to efforts for social change.
Kev, an artist-curator-art-director and organizer in Utah, is also one of the OG Lorem readers and now a long-time penpal of mine. When I get slices of news from him, there’s always an envelope being pushed: he’s producing a video for Caroline Polachek or applying to join his local Public Safety Board to help monitor the police. Kev is a real one, and I’d love for you to get to know him and his crew a bit through the zine. You can download it *and* find the playlist here, and I hope both will energize you— if not for whatever your job is, then for another year of the work that needs to be done.
One effort we’re not embarking on this year, evidently, is Dry January. One might hope for that to reflect having better things to do than “self-improvement.” (Remember when we tried that in March and all we got was bread?) But let’s not overestimate ourselves. The real reason there’s no Dry January is that there was no place to overdo it in December. Surprise! No overindulgence = no atonement. Wonder where else we could apply that principle in our lives.*
*Related: over the break I read The Overstory, and if you haven’t, boy, do you have a treat ahead. It won the 2019 Fiction Pulitzer and all anyone can tell you is, “it’s about trees.” I’ll tell you that it’s really about people and consumption, and the ways our lives intersect with other beings. Tracing the paths of characters’ lives via their interactions with trees, it leaves you with bountiful knowledge about forests and a really spot-on perspective of where humans fall in the order of living things. Read it so soon.
You know who is righting past wrongs is Bon Appétit, after hiring Dawn Davis as new Editor-In-Chief. Instead of nursing December hangovers, as may have been the routine in years past, a group of BA staff is now taking a red-penned slog* through the magazine’s recipe archives, amending all the white-supremacist rhetoric by recipe authors who, ahem, didn’t know better. The penance team is scanning recipes for cultural attribution (turmeric chickpea stew does not from the ether arise) and striking ingredient descriptors like “surprising,” weird,” and “exotic.” We appreciate said team for their efforts, and also for opening a window to a world that accepts that vintage ain’t necessarily cute.
*What a luxury to solve your problems with a pen**
**Pens don’t solve all your problems
Speaking of people who historically get it wrong, it seems that Pantone, for the first time ever, has done good with the 2021 color of the year. Recalling recent selections of green (climate crisis!), a dual blue-and-pink (gender is over JK HAHHAHAA), and for-Chrissake-purple, the (two) new colors are— drumroll— grey and yellow. Sorry, make that “Ultimate Grey” and “Illuminating,”
otherwise interpreted as MASSIVE MORAL GREY AREA (plus, I’d say, racial reckoning), and a light cast on the darkness. Somehow colors actually do capture this year’s themes of moral conflict and illumination in a way that irony can’t defeat. Well done, Pantone, but don’t expect us to buy your merch.
