Dear Reader,

Last Thursday, as sunset tailed into night, the kid and I sat on the couch by the window and looked out at a thin crescent moon, low in the sky. Just under it hung the planet Mercury. (I took out my phone to look this up.) We got out the binoculars and looked more closely. How nice it is when the world hits you over the head with its wonders.

We were all varying degrees of sick—head colds, nasty ones. That’s why there was no Lightplay last week. For five days, I just didn’t have any energy. And this here newsletter project requires at least one evening to grind it out.

I was sad to miss last week. I live in fear of falling out of the groove, and I worry about “dead air.” My desire right now is to have Lightplay be something you can count on finding in your inbox every week. But I just couldn’t get it done.

To the plus, I have energy aplenty this week, so I’ve written a main essay and a bunch of motes. It’s really a double issue. I hope you enjoy it, and thanks as always for reading.

– Jasper

Grocery shopping has different rhythms at different ages. These days, I beeline for the shopping cart corral and boost the three-year-old onto his “special” seat, which contains him and keeps his grabby hands mostly off the produce, the cookies, the egg cartons, the bar soap, and the checkout line lip balm. I take my usual path—dry goods, dairy, produce, bakery, checkout—because I have to be efficient, have to get home and cook dinner, get the kid into bed. For 35-year-old Jasper, the grocery store is just one more household chore.

The kid sometimes reminds me, though, of my own childhood experiences being pushed around in a shopping cart. For a young kid, the grocery store is a place of overwhelming visual density. He stares at the thousands of labels, the endless rows of chicken thighs, the pressing intensity of untold quantities and varieties of food. “What’s that?” he asks, again and again. Sometimes I have the wherewith to answer him. When I do, he often responds, “Why?” It’s fun, energy permitting, to follow him down into the half-formed foundations of his understanding of how our world works. The world is weird, if you just ask why. Why are grocery stores the way they are? Why?

It’s a good question, and between the ages of 16 and 30, I spent many, many hours wandering around grocery stores, exploring the answers.

Looking back, my walks in the grocery store were a big part of how I became the cook I am today. I would go to the Safeway in Fort Bragg and slowly walk the length of the ethnic food aisle, examining every brand of pickled jalapeño, every variety of Thai chili paste, the big bags of chicharrón, the glass noodles. Then I would turn the corner and go into the produce, looking at everything, picking up mangos, sniffing tamarind pods, palpating shiitakes. I drank it all in.

Later, I lived in Connecticut for a few years, during which time I became obsessed with a grocery store called Price Chopper. I loved its dozens of aisles, its endless quantities of puffy bread, and especially its name and silly logo.

When it was revealed that Price Chopper corporate had decided to rebrand the Middletown Price Chopper to Market 32, I knew it was time to go back to the West Coast.

Looking back, I suspect that much of my early wandering of the grocery store was inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”:

I was entranced by the idea that in an age like ours, you do better seeking transcendence in a supermarket than a church.

But what I actually found there was food. For me, if not for Ginsberg, a bag of masa harina was way more interesting than people-watching my fellow shoppers. Plus, you could actually buy it, bring it home, and try to cook it up. Such adventures were laying right there on the shelves, if any champion would be brave enough to take on the quest. Why not me?

Eventually I moved on from the ethnic aisle to actually seeking out ethnic grocery stores. I would go to them with lists of ingredients copied out from my Chinese and Indian and Persian and Mexican and Armenian cookbooks, then spend an hour or two slowly locating each ingredient, all the while exploring everything else in the store. A whole other education.

And of course there’s a whole world of farmer’s markets, farmstands, specialty grocers, and CSA boxes. Becoming a real gourmand is right there as an option, if you have the time and budget.

But I continue to find something atavistically appealing about the basic American supermarket. Maybe it’s just sentimentality. Or maybe there’s something there, some potential for discovery, that keeps drawing me back in.

In his 2007 cookbook [Mouth Wide Open], John Thorne writes about the wondrous things you can find on the clearance shelves:

This passage (which leads into a yummy-sounding stuffed zucchini recipe inspired by a gross can of stuffed zucchini) has stuck with me for years. It captures, in its way, the strange wonders and delicious discoveries that present themselves to those shoppers who lead not with a strict shopping list but with a sense of curiosity and play. At my best, that’s the kind of grocery shopper I strive to be.

I’ll always love the big, brightly-lit, regional supermarkets that taught me how to shop. My favorite these days is Stater Bros., a chain based out in the Inland Empire that has old-school narrow aisles and stocks just about everything, except for good cheese. Last fall we went out to the desert for a long weekend, and while everyone else went to a concert, the kid and I snuck off to Stater Bros. Boxed mac and cheese, broccoli, a dozen eggs, Tapatío, green onions, corn tortillas, La Morena brand pickled jalapeños—I found everything on my list.

How have I never seen these amber snails with Green-banded Broodsacs in their eyes before?

Bryan Pfeiffer wrote about them, and that’s his video I clipped, but I found out about them through an interview with Pfeiffer on the lovely podcast Rumble Strip: Episode #309 - Zombie Snails. I love Pfeiffer’s conversation with host Erica Heilman. In particular, I love the contrast between the guest, a wonder-filled biologist, and the deadpan humor of the host.

“And [birds] pluck the pulsing blue broodsac out of the snail’s eye socket,” says Pfeiffer.

“Oh,” says Heilman, “So now it’s even Oedipal.”

My favorite Minneapolitan, M Allen, finally wrote about the occupation, in a piece titled “conceal and carry” about “the weight of a gun in my hand.” The writing is quotable and sharp:

There’s a weariness in this writing, together with a sense of resolve. M Allen writes that “The people who are dusty and bedraggled with this integrity, whose eyes are shiny with it, whose voices are hoarse, they are like beacons.”

The essay is ultimately about transformation—but not into an ice-cold shooter, rather into someone who knows that they will do what needs to be done to protect those they love. “It can’t only be me,” they write, “we looked around and saw fortitude in each other, saw strength and it awakened such a hunger to be alive, to be more than labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. To become beacons ourselves.”

Labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. What a damning survey of what our society gives us. I’m hungry to be more than that, too.

M Allen’s writing glows with the intensity and purpose of months on the ground, resisting violent fascism—not an experience one would ever ask for, but clearly an intense and meaningful and even transformative experience nonetheless.

(This piece made me think about an argument I had with a loved one after my note on “diversity of tactics”. He encouraged me to change tack and instead call out and shun any violent acts by folks I otherwise agree with. He said I should not just practice nonviolence as a tactic but actively be “anti-violence.” I see where this view is coming from and can even admire it, but by my lights, moral absolutism is no fit for our time of ascendant fascism. Just as there’s a paradox of tolerance, I see a paradox of nonviolence. If your opponent can and does murder protesters and observers in broad daylight, with impunity, it’s clear that the space for nonviolent resistance is being constrained. I’m not saying give up on nonviolence as a tactic—not at all!—but I am saying I can understand why M Allen and their friends are learning to use guns. Pacifism as a virtue above all others is a dead end.)

In case you aren’t paying attention to the ongoing and increasingly dystopian war against trans people, as of today—and with basically zero notice—all trans people in Kansas have had their driver’s licenses canceled. Per Erin Reed’s reporting, they’re being told to go to the state DMV and get new licenses showing their sex assigned at birth. This might sound like nothing more than a bureaucratic hassle, but it’s way more than that. It can lead straight to incarceration in a different-sex prison, and all the perils that entails:

My dad has introduced a new wrinkle in my recipe for toasted oats: he toasts them in a wide cast iron skillet. I’ve tried it, and there’s something to it. I think the broader surface area means the oats toast faster and more evenly. Thought you should know.

What is it that makes certain symbols and stories rise to the heights of ubiquity? And what is it that makes certain people adopt them as personal totems, or even, sometimes, as load-bearing parts of their personalities?

This Disney-era Star Wars odd couple—Mando and The Child—has certainly entered the canon. And I get it. The Child is cute! Heck, even my kid has a The Child plushie!

But doesn’t the pairing also have a weird, police state energy? The mask-always-on mercenary and the foundling. Dream-archetypes of violence and innocence, each needing the other to survive a cruel world. (And I know, I know, The Child ends up having superpowers.)

My point is: Raising Arizona it’s not. And it’s a bit intense to cover your car in it.

The ongoing destruction of the Washington Post is such a sick sign of the times. I canceled my subscription last March, and since then Jeff Bezos and his flunkies have only grown bolder in their gutting of the paper. I appreciated former Executive Editor Martin Baron’s statement after the complete destruction of the sports and books sections. He knows whereof he speaks when he writes:

(Found via Ruth Marcus’s excellent New Yorker piece, “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post”)

As I was introducing my photographs in the last Lightplay, I started thinking about the politics of abstract photography and the ways that the desert, in its bareness, can lend itself to seeming empty, untouched, unperturbed. Wrong ideas, all!

This reminded me of Richard Misrach’s incredible photographic work in the Nevada desert.

As the Whitney Museum’s accompanying text explains,

I love how these photographs tangle up aesthetics and beauty and politics, rightly making a big powerful ball of them. And how wild it must have felt for Misrach, tipped off by locals, to find the pit where the army was dumping radiation poisoned farm animals—and to find in these carcasses the makings of such a powerful piece of art.

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?