Dear Reader —

This is the third time I’ve written this introduction. The first time was a few weeks back. I spent my only free afternoon in a long time hunched over my notebook in a busy cafe, trying to get it down on paper. The second time was earlier this week. I sat cross-legged on my couch, laptop perched on lap. Again I spent hours trying to say just what I wanted to say. Each attempt took thousands of words. Neither was enough.

What I have been trying to say in these essays is: it is awful what those with power are doing to those without power—in my city, in my country, and in my world today. End the genocide in Palestine! Abolish ICE! Impeach the Supreme Court! Decarbonize now!

What I have also been trying to say is: it is so hard to write in these days. My soul feels tired. I know and agree we must bear witness and face evil squarely. At the same time: how?

Sometimes failure is itself a data point. I interpret my inability to sustain my enthusiasm for either of those pieces of writing to mean that I need a different approach. I mean, come on: if I, the author, can’t bring myself to enjoy finishing a somber piece of political polemic, how can I possibly expect a reader to enjoy reading it?

So here I am, on the far side of failure. I’m still writing, still trying to write my way through it. I’ve got my laptop open here on the kitchen table. Beyond it I can see the living room, where the kid is sitting in a sunbeam, playing with his magnetiles. “Look, Dad, I’m paving the road!” he says. In her hiding place under the couch, the cat gazes out on the tableau. She adjusts herself, tucks her paws under her chest. “I see the garland,” says the kid, pointing up at the Halloween decoration he and his mom made this morning out of orange and black construction paper. It hangs cheerily off a bookcase.

I think the thing I can do with this space—this five-year-old newsletter, Lightplay—is keep sharing the things that make me feel alive, make me feel like I’m growing and evolving and playing and discovering. I don’t need to write exhaustive political screeds. I’m not even sure that those, coming from me, to this audience, would help anything. But writing about joy and art and food in a time like 2025 can be a political act, too. I believe each of us can, in the way we move through the world, be a zone of living, wild culture. An island of life.

Which as it happens is what I think I’ll write about here in this newsletter today: wild fermentation, as practice and metaphor. You see, I’m becoming a fermenter again.

– Jasper

An Archipelago of Life-Promoting Culture

A month ago, I made an impulse purchase of five heads of green cabbage. I saw the cabbages, and I realized that if I bought them I would be forcing myself to overcome or ignore my feelings of busy-ness and do a little fermentation project.

The cabbages spent a few days sitting as a centerpiece on my kitchen table. Then (as predicted) I started to feel sad for them, wilting in an August heatwave. I took down my much-loved copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz and reacquainted myself with his carefree recipe for saurkraut. Soon I was shredding the cabbages with a knife, tossing them with kosher salt, and packing my crock. All told, it took about forty minutes. Then I started waiting.

Wild Fermentation, the book, has this refreshing combination of you’ve-got-this encouragement and wide-ranging curiosity. Katz thinks that not only can you make your own saurkraut, you also don’t need to stress about it. It’s gonna be okay. When he’s discussing how mold might grow on your kraut he says,

This reassuring voice helps. Fermentation is, indeed, often nonlinear and a bit confusing.

For this batch of kraut, I was concerned it might go off due to the heat wave that was choking most of the continent. A day or two after I packed it, the crock began bubbling, which made me feel more confident that it would work out. Over breakfast each morning we would wait to hear the loud glug of the airlock on the crock.

But then after a few days it stopped burping, and when I opened the lid I was overwhelmed by a powerful, somewhat gross smell. I read and re-read the recipe, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Eventually I decided that the smell that was grossing me out had to just be an especially rank cabbage smell. It would probably turn out fine.

As I waited for the sauerkraut to resolve into something I would actually want to eat, I did what I always do when this cookbook is on the table: I flipped around, reading random recipes and dreaming of making them. Katz is equally rah-rah-you’ve-got-this about making your own Red Miso, your own T’ej (Ethiopian-style Honey Wine), your own Gv-No-He-Nv (Cherokee Sour Corn Drink), and your own Chicha (Andean Chewed-Corn Beer). And why not explore these other fermentation traditions?

Ever since I first encountered this book in 2013, I have been struck by what an inspiringly political project this book is. First published in 2003, it is mostly comprised of its 119 recipes, but within and around them you get the larger story Katz’s life and journey into studying fermentation traditions from around the globe. He is open about being HIV-positive, and he speaks often about the community in which he lives.

This alone—this shameless, matter-of-fact claiming of his own queerness and outside-the-mainstream lifestyle—is a powerful political statement. But at the back of the book, right after the recipes for vinegars, there’s a final, thirteenth chapter, titled “Cultural Reincarnation: Fermentation in the Cycles of Life, Soil Fertility, and Social Change.” And it’s here that the book becomes a bit cosmic. Katz meditates on decay and death, the pleasures of watching compost “gradually melt back into the all-oneness of the Earth,” and the violence of “chemical mono-crop agriculture.”

The chapter is worth reading in full. It’s rather moving, in fact. But the jewel, the pièce de résistance, is the penultimate paragraph of the whole book. It comes after a description of two fires—a wildfire and a housefire—that had recently affected friends of Katz.

There’s something here for us in 2025.

For me, it made me think of all the communities of people who have tried not just to push society towards more justice and joy, but who have in fact tried to embody that justice and joy in their very way of being. I think of Black utopian projects like Alice Turiyasangitananda Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram in Malibu, Promise Land in Tennessee, and the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit (Lisa recently finished The Black Utopians, and I can’t wait to read it myself). I think of Rojava in Kurdistan. I think of the occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes. I think of the communes and community centers and monasteries founded by back-to-the-landers all across northern California. At their best, what are these communities but an archipelago of alternate futures? Little islands of justice and joy. Places where a better future is not only imagined—it’s lived.

I include my little three-person household in this archipelago. Small islands are fun, too!

This archipelago idea feels so much better, so much more intuitively fruitful in this life, than waiting for some big, nationwide or globe-spanning utopia. Total revolution, the fire of Katz’s metaphor, has such a bad track record. The 1917 Revolution in Russia led, rather quickly, to Stalin and the Holodomor and the Great Purge and everything else. Mao’s revolution led to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and, eventually, the current regime in Beijing. Give me the path of fermentation any day.

The question I’m left with is, how do we nurture and maintain these small, generative communities? If we’re trying to build our families and communities into bubbling crocks of transformative change, how do we do it? And how do we bring them to more people, and slowly transform society into something more succulent and probiotic?

As I thought these thoughts, the sauerkraut in my big ceramic crock gradually developed to a delicious, sour, briney, crunchy state. I decanted it into wide-mouth pint jars. Gave one away to a friend who came over for dinner. Gave another to the downstairs neighbors. And kept some to serve with Enfrijoladas Pintos on a hot Los Angeles evening.

Some hopeful policing news out of Baltimore. The city has seen multiple years in a row of stacking 20+% declines in homicides and non-fatal shootings.

In today's political environment, these approaches are frequently derided as “woke” and “naive.” But the dramatic decline in violent crime in Baltimore over the last few years suggests that there is a better word to describe its holistic strategy: effective.

Our country’s typical approach to policing, on the other hand, reminds me of the saying, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

I enjoyed this podcast interview with a booster for “Dark Retreats”—therapeutic visits to spaces that have been specially prepared or identified for their profound lightlessness. Who can say why in this day and age I found it so soothing to listen to a long, gentle discussion of this practice.

A local establishment—a nudie bar that was actually just a brothel—recently closed. The out-of-business sign is pleasingly to-the-point.

I appreciated this plea for folks to return to making our own websites. It’s not only a good argument, it’s packed with cool technical information about neocities. If I wasn’t wed to Wordpress/Siteground for most of my projects, I would absolutely use the 11ty/Github/Neocities workflow described here.

I’ve recommended Benn Jordan’s videos before. “Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras” might be his best yet. Highly entertaining, highly informative, relevant to our moment, and containing what might be the best explanation I’ve yet seen of how surveillance and data mining work.

Do you enjoy the occasional pithy, spear-sharp rant? You might like “I Am an AI Hater.” I found this part brutally to-the-point:

One of my favorite numbers. (Seen earlier today in Van Nuys.)

This is a few months old now, because I haven’t put out a Lightplay in a bit, but my partner Lisa wrote about her “Top Picks at the David Lynch Auction” for Alta Journal, and it’s a banger.

They ended up selling for $1,625.

Why not just go out into your town or city and look upon the facades as softly as you might gaze upon the face of an old friend?

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to your buddy who likes stuff like this?