A Wide Range of Subjects

No. 1

Bird, a film by Andrea Arnold, 2024—where to begin, where to end? Only with amazement and admiration for a film starring a 12-year old black mixed-race girl living in a squat in industrial England with her daft heavily tattooed dad who rides one of those 2-wheeled scooters and is soon to be re-married, and her slightly older brother; co-starring a frog, an older white guy who she becomes friends with, the older guy who turns into a giant bird near the end of the film! The huge, seemingly endless cast features mostly birds, butterflies, horses, low-life teenagers, the ocean, the 12-year old girl’s battered iPhone she takes pictures on to document her predicament and text-messages her friends. The film captures an almost overwhelming flood of negative and positive life-forces, so improbable but so believable. The ‘narration’ of the film is the imagery—in which both the movement of the imagery and the words, spoken and unspoken, by the characters in the film, is ONE unified, compelling work that sometimes looks and feels like performance art, but isn’t, in which the characters are both followed and led into the violence of evil and beauty, hatred and love, human understanding and bewilderment. The unexpected happens in virtually every scene of the film, often banal, often surprising, then finds some sort of resolution.

No.2

A cliche can come to you unexpectedly with such great force that it shatters everything you’d never thought of before.

No. 3

Two books I’m reading—A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz and Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray.

No. 4

Dear European friend, thank you for writing your note, ‘These Words are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration’, with the attachment you’ve included from the New York Times. I see from the list in the Times that “hundred of words have been purged”, among the many words—activists, antiracist, Black, clean energy, climate crisis, DEI, equality, females, Native American, non-binary, pollution, pronouns, sex, social justice, underprivileged, women and under represented—on the list.

I don’t know what to think, my friend? Other than a list was compiled by the Trump Administration and then scrubbed by AI, an algorithm, and that the scrubbed words constitute a sort of sad ‘language’ that is a complete repudiation of what we once thought of and believed in as liberal humanism.

“A Wide Range of Subjects” (painting), 24” x24”, acrylic and paint stick, 2025. Photo by author.