Time was once described by Arthur Eddington as an “arrow” flying from past to present: morning to night, young to old, less to more. Eddington’s metaphor suggests that time is a movement forwards and things subject to it undergo a sort of temporal transmutation. This is second nature to us: we not only think of time “passing”, we also think of things-in-time as “becoming”.
In 2023, when the leaves started to turn gold in New York City, I noticed a pair of Chinese grandmothers walking with bamboo baskets, gathering wild plants from the sidewalks during my regular morning stroll in Sunset Park. “What are you collecting?” I asked out of curiosity.
The dial-up modem’s screech pierced through our Doha home as I waited impatiently to sign into MSN Messenger. It was 2005, and I was deliberating over my MSN status—an inside joke, a cryptic song lyric, or just my mood, perfectly punctuated with emoticons?
At the end of the earth, I find {} is a triptych poem—a letter and reflection on my family, ancestral home, grandparents, and the ways to visualize silence. The poem is a piece that discusses my tenuous relationship with my extended family back in China, the inability to communicate in another language, my failure with language, my queerness and Chinese culture, and the fundamental truth that my family will never accept my queerness.
i inflect you ransoms:
a lung in tupperware
body composing
sweat puddle aubade
The imminent destruction brought about by the climate catastrophe has brought something of an epistemological void along with it. The axioms that have taken us to this point are clearly flawed and unreliable…seeing as they have taken us to this point. Our intuitive reaction to the problem is to solve it – but our systems of knowledge are entrenched in the very practices and beliefs that are culpable.
Far from being the exception, borrowing, transforming and adapting prior work is the norm in modern music, and has always been a key part of the human creative process. For millennia, songs (much like stories and poems) were processes rather than products — they were handed down from generation to generation, and passed around from village to village, with melodies and verses added, removed, swapped, and otherwise modified from performance to performance.
Filmmaker and real-time artist Kevin Peter He explores metaphors of grotesque yet beautiful transformation in a new visual translation of experimental cellist MIZU’s single “prphtbrd”, from her sophomore album Forest Scenes.