July production diary: Live! From the rummage heap

This weird place I found

After a rough morning last week, I found myself wandering down Montreal's longest street, Gouin boulevard. It's a pretty boring walk – car-centric and residential – but taking aimless walks in not-especially-walkable places has been my main mental health strategy since I was like, fifteen.  Exploring these oversized, hostile environments makes me feel more human in contrast, and makes whatever signs of life I do find, even the odd weed or sparrow, feel especially vital.

The one thing Gouin has going for it is that it runs down Montreal's north shore, along a quiet little delta of the Ottawa river, and since tourists never bother venturing so far north, the parks are dead quiet every time I come around. Easy to forget yourself and observe undisturbed nature.

Well, I told myself it was undisturbed. A few minutes down a bike path, I hopped off the trail to check out a strip of beach that ran 15, 20 feet long at most. I admired the water for a few seconds, and then looked down and realized, "oh man, this isn't a beach". Its shore is composed almost entirely of construction scraps: broken bricks, rusty pipes, recycled concrete, plywood. It's not devoid of life, as you can see, there's a surprising diversity of plant species to be found, but all have to weave through a layer of refuse before announcing themselves.

It'd be a disservice to impose a simple metaphor onto the beach – it's easy to make it about hope growing in a dump – but I've been thinking about it a lot, because I'm trying to write about these places. For the past couple months, I've been meeting with a close friend to write a short film whose antagonist is basically "the suburbs". Their hostility to life, the way they seal their inhabitants in physically, philosophically, and economically. We're hoping to produce it with Nebula and show it at some festivals, but that's still a long way off, so I'll keep light on the details for now. Very excited though :)

The next video

I'm in the thick of production on my next video essay. It's a sweeping retrospective of 2010s pop feminism, a movement that was hugely formative to me as a young person. I'm referring to sites like BuzzFeed and Feministing, writers like Roxane Gay and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and video bloggers like Laci Green and Anita Sarkeesian: people who enabled a massive resurgence of feminism that, to a teenage Lily, made women's liberation, LGBTQ rights, and racial justice feel inevitable.

...As we've all learned by now, they weren't inevitable. Despite all its momentum, pop feminism failed to substantially change the social order, and petered out after being utterly overpowered by the reactionary backlash that was mounted in response (a backlash that arguably helped Trump win power in 2016).

Although several factors were outside our control, I want to believe none of this was inevitable. I want to understand what we could've done better – and, for that matter, what we did well, that we should consider reviving! This is a big one for me; I'm spending hours rummaging through the Wayback Machine, and reaching out to lots of web media workers to understand what it was like working behind the scenes. I'm aiming to have the video out the first week of September, but it'll depend when certain people are available for interviews!

A few things you should check out

• Writing: I'm currently obsessed with the webcomic What Happens Next by Max Graves. It's about a trans guy named Milo who, when he was 15, was implicated in the murder of his friend Haylie. It's about true crime culture, how punitive justice fails people, and, well, "what happens next" after a person commits such a terrible act. I read the whole thing in one sitting and haven't shut up about it since. I bet a lot of you will feel the same.
• Movie: Past Lives is a new romance movie about star-crossed lovers reconnecting after 20 years, when one is happily married. So gentle and beautiful, which makes it hurt even more. Catch it in theatres while you still can.
• Music: The latest Alvvays album, Blue Rev, is in my heavy rotation. It came out last fall, but it's the perfect summer album – fuzzy and emotive, just washes over you!