Required Reading

‣ An independent, Michigan-based magazine by and for lesbians marks its 50th anniversary this year, and reporter Sydney Boles tells the story of its inception and evolution for Autostraddle:

To call the early years of Lesbian Connection a shoestring operation is an understatement. In their second issue in December of 1974, in an act of fairly radical financial transparency, LC published their very first budget for the upcoming year. Their total budget was $865.80, or about $5,251 today. They said that up to that point, they’d spent about $95 dollars, including $8.10 for a post office box rental, $12.00 for the printing of flyers, and, quaintly, $3 on miscellaneous office supplies.

They saved some money because volunteers brought reams of paper to donate to the cause. With no typewriter of their own, they snuck into various offices at night to type up what people had sent in.

A lesbian printer in Grand Rapids volunteered to print a few issues, and then the Iowa City Women’s Press printed it for some years. It was about eight or 10 hours each way, cardboard boxes full of magazines weighing down a Toyota station wagon that had been donated by two women from Detroit who called themselves the Red Dykes. They held collating parties; they stapled each magazine by hand.

‣ I have very little faith in Netflix's ability to do justice to August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, but the movie is drumming up interest in an artwork that inspired the original play. Gregory Wakeman writes in Smithsonian Magazine:

Wilson’s next Pulitzer-winning play drew on an unexpected source of inspiration: a 1983 print by American artist Romare Bearden. The artwork, called The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou), depicts a music teacher standing over her student in a Southern parlor. It was inspired, in turn, by French Modernist Henri Matisse, who in 1916 and 1917 created two paintings with similar titles. Throughout his career, Bearden mixed a variety of styles, including Cubism and Dada, while drawing on his own unique collage technique and his personal experiences as a Black man from the South. Bearden, who was born in North Carolina but grew up in New York and Pittsburgh after the Great Migration brought his family north, was also a songwriter and author.

The Piano Lesson didn’t mark the first time that Wilson was directly inspired by Bearden’s work. His 1984 play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was originally named Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, mirroring the title of a 1978 Bearden collage. Claude Purdy, the co-founder of St. Paul’s Penumbra Theater, where a number of Wilson’s plays premiered, introduced the playwright to Bearden’s work in the fall of 1977.

‣ Scholar and Deaf rights activist Sara Nović writes in the Baffler about the commodification of sign language, offering an important perspective on a new British program that may have detrimental effects on students:

So what is it about the Makaton programming that makes it so “unique?” The secret ingredient dates back to 1972, when Margaret Walker, the senior speech therapist at Botley’s Park Hospital in Surrey, introduced a selection of 145 British Sign Language words to deaf-disabled patients and staff to facilitate communication between the two groups. It was also an opportunity for Walker to collect data on language acquisition, and her study “revealed” that the deaf patients learned signed language easily and communicated effectively using the BSL vocabulary. No shit.

Here’s where it gets really wild: rather than teach the deaf-disabled patients more BSL, bring in deaf mentors who could provide robust language access, or share data about the potential value of visual language for intellectually disabled people with specialists in the field, Walker, along with two colleagues, Kathy Johnston and Tony Cornforth, expanded their BSL vocabulary list to about 350 signs. Then, using the first letters of their names—Ma, Ka, Ton—they trademarked it. The real innovation behind Makaton is the gall to trademark another community’s language. In Walker’s hearing hands, BSL suddenly became a commodity.

‣ Nearly two years into the Sudanese civil war and displacement of over 11 million people, Amnesty International found that the RSF paramilitary group gets many of its weapons from a French manufacturer via the UAE. Fatma Khaled reports for AP:

“Our research shows that weaponry designed and manufactured in France is in active use on the battlefield in Sudan,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

“The Galix System is being deployed by the RSF in this conflict, and any use in Darfur would be a clear breach of the U.N. arms embargo,” she said. “The French government must ensure that Lacroix Defense and KNDS France immediately stop the supply of this system to the UAE.”

In response to the Amnesty International report, Lacroix said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press that the company confirms it had supplied the Galix systems for the Emirati Armed Forces for the use of smoke-screening countermeasures.

‣ The military-industrial complex is also alive and well in the US, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement began mobilizing its surveillance network as soon as Trump won the presidential election. Caroline Haskins explains for Wired:

ICE’s recent notice asks interested companies to send specific details about how they would store location data and personal information, where their office locations would be, how they would staff agents, and what technology they have for remote surveillance, among other details. Currently, ICE uses a combination of ankle monitors and GPS-enabled smartwatches and smartphone apps to remotely monitor people. It also uses apps with facial recognition for “biometric” check-ins.

The notice says companies must have facilities with “suitably large intake rooms” for people being enrolled in ICE surveillance. They also must have the “ability to perform mass-scale intakes as required by unforeseeable events.”

‣ In a bit of satisfying news, the Onion has out-Onion-ed itself by purchasing Infowars at bankruptcy auction, reports Emma Roth for the Verge:

The Onion purchased Infowars’ assets with the support of the families in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, who sued Jones for spreading lies about the victims of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Jones was ordered to pay more than $1 billion in 2022 and filed for bankruptcy later that year. In September, a judge approved auctions to liquidate Jones’ assets, including Infowars.

‣ I highly recommend author Maya Schenwar's new essay in Truthout, a moving meditation on prison abolition, her sister's incarceration and overdose, and the imagination children wield as fuel for a better world:

The many tentacles of the punitive state — jail, prison, probation, family policing, coercive mandated drug “treatment” — had wrapped themselves around Keeley, and they were squeezing. Meanwhile, I was straining my imagination as hard as I could, trying, in my writing and editing and activism and direct support for Keeley, to dream beyond the walls that kept her from us.

But I often felt stuck, and at these times, baby K. — born during Keeley’s seventh incarceration, having heard her sing to them in utero through the phone — helped. She got a prison tattoo of their name on her forearm before they were even born. They repeated “Aunt Keeley” among their first words, adorning it with hopeful babbles.

In late 2019, when we found out Keeley was pregnant again, I told 18-month-old K., “You’re getting a cousin.” They responded dreamily, “A cousin, a giraffe?” and began to sing a long thread of nonsense syllables, punctuated by “Aunt Keeley” and “cousin” — a sunny melody, a ballad of their future together.

‣ Māori representatives in New Zealand's parliament disrupted a vote on a new bill that would potentially roll back Indigenous rights by ripping up the text and performing a haka. Simply iconic. Watch it here:

‣ I may be a dog person, but these bodega cat videos are a salve for the soul:

https://www.tiktok.com/@shopcatsshow/video/7436503640493411614

‣ Speaking of which:

https://www.tiktok.com/@la_paolaaa111/video/7436240599004499242

‣ Coming to a coffee shop near you in 100–200 years!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCHiNG-pSrF/

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

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