The seed and the sword
“They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.” I spotted this powerful turn of phrase on a beautiful pin and immediately had to have it. I think it was in PDX airport. At the time, I remember reading that it had been used in relation to LGBTQ activism but didn’t know much about its origins or history. I keep the pin affixed to my work bag and think about it from time to time.
Someone I follow on Twitter recently did a light comedy riff on the verse. I was amuse-annoyed. In my response I recognized that apparently this has become something of a sacred phrase to me. As I traversed the replies, I learned that it had also been associated with the original formation of DACA. In the thread I found a satisfying article tracing its origins, posted by @black_masc. The original verse seems to be from Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos from a 1978 work in which he was allegedly lighting up detractors in the literary community. He was a real hater’s hater, as the article also details how he won and dramatically rejected the Greek Grand State Prize for Literature.
But back to the verse - hell of a potent way to reject oppression. It’s at the same time fiercely defiant and rooted in light rather than darkness, compassion rather than anger, and creative life force rather than destructive. It’s a keeper.
Giving swords to pigeons. I’ve mostly used Instagram’s pinning tool within a story to put a sparkle (or a Steve Urkel) atop a champagne glass, or drop some graffiti over top of a scene. Pinning is a feature that lets you not just put a sticker in to a video clip, but actually set it to track with (move in sync with) something inside the shot, similar to what used to be super expensive “rotoscoping” effects that only a professional feature film post-production suite could do, with much processing power. Now you can do it on a free app on a standard issue iPhone you bought five years ago. @nathanwpyle has a fantastic demo reel and tutorial here in this thread of some of the clever, simple things you can do with it, including tucking swords into the wing ends of pigeons.
It isn’t safe to go home because Mom will say some crazy shit to you. Fairly deep in this interview (all well worth reading) with the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, the being who does the music and end credits sci-fi stories for the podcast Reply-All, BMC sets up his great and bizarre remix of the Raffi classic “Down By The Bay” which you can listen to here. He says:
“Someone sent me some Raffi tapes and I was blown away by “Down By The Bay”. That song says it isn’t safe to go home because Mom will say some crazy shit to you, which is a weird message for a children’s song, but is actually how many adults I know feel about [going home for the holidays]. I crowd-sourced super-talented women on Twitter saying horrible, bigoted things and remixed Raffi, and hopefully now it’s a therapeutic little ditty you and the family can sing on the drive down to Christmas dinner or whatever.”
Bonus banana: Who knew it takes so long to make dirt, still.
Those are the bananas I have for you this week. Thank you. You can hit “reply” and send something and it will only go to me. Those are better than “likes” on the post because those all seem to be anonymous.
A brief harvester’s note: I noticed recently that much of what bananas are right now are deep links from inside my Twitter timeline. Sometimes they’re the main event, but often they’re secondary links someone shares as a response, that are remarkable in themselves and would otherwise be lost in the landfill. On the upside, that’s how I find a lot of great stuff - by deep reading. On the downside, it tethers me to spending a lot of time in Twitter. That in itself can be a hazard and a huge psychological drain on other things I care about. It’s a deeply ingrained habit, but I might like find a way to prune it back a bit so other things can flourish. For now, I’ll keep harvesting bananas there.