A SPELL FOR JULY
Epigraphs for a spell
muttering, puttering, lettering
A lè ní kó pẹ, kó yá; a lè ní kó yá, kó pẹ
—— a yorùbá proverb
... Poor, unreliable things that will never make up for those that are disappearing--- and the energy that goes along with them. It's subtle but it seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out. If it goes on like this and we can't compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it's completely hollowed out, we'll all disappear without a trace. Don't you ever feel that way?
—— The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else. Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So, there was one.
—— Sing to it by Amy Hempel
And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquition on the colors of the day, a soporific daydream, or bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.
—— June Jordan
BAD HAIKU
a haiku for each day spent in july's orbit
Indifferent to my intentions, time has passed. Our limited energy has been put to other uses outside the blog. We thought by now we would have completed some of the fibre projects we started a while back but they will be written alongside August's spell.
What happened in June has escaped with the heat of summer, all that is left are the sounds we lived those days with in form of a playlist. (June's playlist is at the end of this spell.) There was something we were consistent with in July. As a way to get back (was there ever a time when we wrote poetry daily? now that we think on it?) on the slow horse of writing poetry everyday, we decided to write an Haiku everyday in July. The Haiku is a form we have no prior experience with nor expectations about so we figure this is the perfect form to be bad at.
We are bad at writing and finishing poems because we feel the pressure to overly edit or perfect every sentence till we lose interest in what we want to say. To break out of this perfectionist hold, we chose an impressionistic form that wouldn't trigger the impulse to overly edit or revise. All it required from us was 5-15 mins each day where we wrote three lines about the most vivid shards of the day. Quite a lot of them is about the heat...
07.01
criss cross on a date
a pen scrawls on time's visage
life lived in square grids
07.02
a motocycle
shaves a strip of road
into a mohawk
far beyond conquest
there exists a land of sound
where hair spills unspoiled
07.03
intoxicating
nights you want to freeze in time
end much too quietly
07.04
koan of the morn
never face the bright lit phone
instead face the dawn
a call in exile
cannot bring good news of home
nowhere left but ruins
07.05
when the farce flares fly
giddy war shippers forget
the rent too damn high
07.06
on restless legs, lies
kick pebbles of doubt inside
the most guileless mind
07.07
words in frozen ink
stir up a whirlwind of real
grief in friendly mouths
07.08
a lit match will singe
old roots and branches of rot
for green shoots to live
07.09
high crests and low troughs
no template can chart its flow
learning comes in waves
07.10
darkness vibratin'
reaching low down ocean floors
release the divine
07.11
a river of white thread
carries the prayers of ice
through the hands of wives
07.12
sun hiding in clouds
the undead melt into dance
as the drums bend time
07.13
an overcast day
not much to do but nap
fever head feeds boredom
tendons sparkle pain
your furry face kneads my palms
with you, stillness comes
07.14
"I envy your heart"
said a scarecrow to blue bird
"find your song, stick crow"
07.15
a squirrell darts by
metal, glass, wood adn wing sing"
heatwave drops tired flies"
moving trees bend and blur
thoughts like fishes swim across
to scoop or let drift?
07.16
floating 'tween love notes
a voice that stings and beckons
leaves wonder renewed
07.17
rookie wraithe idols
in rhinestones and miniskirts
bring Hallyu to boil
07.18
bright orang sofa
a markdown form rich hill folks
not made for bad backs
07.19
childhoods dug with hoe
hunger ruled by crop cycles
all dust roads lead out
metropole of lights
an urban trap; lies in wait
how far will we run?
07.20
a midnight like dawn
from eyes to stars, myths travel
floles of clouds drift west
07.21
windows shut; blinds drawn
yowls, growls, testy snipes come with
summer's white hot breath
in cups, ice jostle
to cool overheating tongues
foreheads sheen with sweat
07.22
purple lace flutters
swelling with the tides of wind
inside cursors blink
07.23
molecules humming
a shrill shrike shades the air red
migraine sonata
07.24
gang signs or slogans
screen symbols spit sarcasm
while the frame freezes
07.25
an odd thing, indeed
to come to face with fossils
once a beating heart
07.26
when deboning fish
run a chopstick along the fin
let your worries fall
07.27
The hull of a whale
transmits a scream from the deep
singing it's last fall
07.28
greenhouses burning
fading light; schrodinger's cat
phone rings, nothing speaks
07.29
The story you want
does not wish to be written
write the one that comes
07.30
Have you heard the news
a hormone is on the loose
Quick!—— we must find it.
07.31
The ink in my hands
shadows dancing in the flames
a story summoned
CYBERSPACE CRUISIN'
space adventures during the great web implosion
Unsung heroes of illustration and animation with Pete Beard
We are endlessly in awe of illustrators and animators. Free from the conventions of classical representations, they bring line, color, sound, form and movement in harmonious sequence with strokes of their pens and stylus. It is such a painstaking artform that thrills and instills such sense of wonder in us, we go in search of them whenever energy permits. Pete Beard's YouTube account, The unsung heroes of illustration has some of the most beautifully rendered illustrations alongside a detailed dive into the lives of the remarkable artists whose work have shaped visual culture as we know it.
On the animation front, we stumbled on this stunning short film, dreaming of a whale, written, animated and soundtrack by an immensely talented new animator who recently graduated from Kyoto Seika University, Shuzuku. While inside the rabbit hole for the film, we found out one of the voice actors for the film, is the creator of the wonderful world of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!
a video from Pete Beard's YouTube account on the illustrations and graphic art of Shigeru Hatsuyama
An indie film titled "dreaming of a whale" uploaded by the animator Shuzuku
At home with Barbose
Life has been full lately — full of small things, good things, hard things, stitching things, thinking things. I think that’s partly why I haven’t written. I’ve been living the days before I could find the words for them.
Spells ago, we shared a WordPress blog, Another Spectrum, we had found in space and we we visit often. Turns out that Barry's sister also writes a blog and honestly, we may be more obsessed with her blog than his. The lines above are from this blog post: Too Busy too blog (But not to Busy to Live) and these lines are the truest words I have found for these long moments when the lines have not appeared but life is being lived intensely. We enjoy the creative reflections that arrive to her from her faith, craft, memories, life and family.
M:USICAL DREAMS
fantasies of a music nerd
Abbey Lincoln x Nidia Gongora
if the film, Sinners is good for anything, it is to serve to remind us that if a number of us desired, we could burn the thin membrane that sits between this world and the cosmic realm of the ancestors, with little more than the fire of our voices and the pulsating rhythm of our bodies. It is to remind us that music when done right serves to connect us to something greater than ourselves. The shamans who sing these portal open are not difficult to find. They are everywhere, lurking inside the woman wearing the fascinators in church, that homeless buskers playing to live by the subway, that child working a rhythm out of metal cans. You can find them anywhere if you know how to listen. They are not hidden in some place hard to reach, they arrive to you— unbidden, on a boring afternoon like this. You put on your earphones because you wish to be transported out of the heat. You see an album you have side-stepped for others many times before. The mood was never right, the feeling never perfect. Another time is now the universe says so you press play. The first song that plays sends you flat on your face in reverence — in gratitude. Abbey Lincoln has gone to the land of the ancestors but her voice rings through souls long after her exit. There is a disc jockey out there blessed with the gift of sonic dialogue who can create something magical with the performances she left behind and the healing music of Nidia Gόngora.
official music video for Nidia Gongora's en los manglares. in the video, Nidia is sitting in front an altar singing directly into the camera.
YouTube playlist for Abbey Lincoln's wholly earth. In the album cover, Abbey stands in a mud colored grey room, looking at the floor with her gaze on the floor.
Stimela x Dennis Mpale
Not sure where we were when the first stirrings of Zwakala came through. (prolly floating in the marsh-space of not quite past and not quite future). But by the time the drums, strings and Ray Phiri's voice comes in? We were firmly in the present for the nine minutes of the song. After that, nothing else mattered beyond listening to everything Stimela ever recorded. This led us to this world music compilation album called African Jazzscapes on one of our aimless walks. That experience, listening and wheeling down the neighborhood was magical and cannot be recreated. It lead me to the ecstatic and virtuosic music of the Trumpeter, Dennis Mpale. Nothing but the Jam is a track that would inspired any burnt-out boom-bap producer. Mpale's sense of naming for his albums are so funny and real.
The official music video for Stimela's hit song Stimela
an album cover of Dennis Mpale's Nothing but the Jam
FULL-MOON MEDIA
dir. by Philippa Lowthorpe —— funny, sad and intimate in a offbeat, deeply moving ways. developed an hyperfixation with goshawks that lasted a whole week.
dir. by Nicholas Ma —— it's every nerd's right of passage to have their heart broken by the teacher they admire. Failed mentorship aside, Callie's family is hanging by a thread.
3.
dir. by Lucy Kerr —— a portrait of a family whose sense of danger and community has been dulled into a ennui. everyone in the family is numb by the meaningless repetition of their lives, their affluence has them senseless with boredom.
4.
dir. by Genki Kiwamura —— feels like a wandering meditation of resposibility, the one required to live an upright life. appaz, it was adapted from a game?
5.
dir. by Stanley Kubrick —— That white men are only concerned about their appraisal from other white men is not news but I suppose it might have been then.The haunting is not inside the hotel, it is within.
dir. by Arturo and Roy Ambriz —— so giddy with the first independent animation marketing, they lost sight of plot and coherence. For a musical, the music didn't have any business being as one-note as it was.
dir. by Jiří Barta —— watched after Frankelda as palette cleanser. The rape scene was uncalled for but the stop motion and choreography sequence was very artistic.
dir. by Kelly Reichardt —— I suppose one way or another, America will getcha at the end even if you are a white man who tends to fail up.
dir. by Zach Cregger —— an bricolage of hap-hazard references and symbols. barely a story and very conter-insurgent.
trans. by Asa Yoneda —— more underwhelming and less resonant for us than dead-end memories but props to Yoshimoto and Yoneda for writing sensationalized topics like age -gap romance and brother-sister romance with her characteristic sensitive flair.
dir. by Questlove —— visions of grandeur eventually come home to roost. but whatever shall with do with hagiography? If enough time passes, all becomes forgiven. It seems we are in the age of biopics.
dir. by Shuchi Talati —— ever since we watched Kani Kusruti in all we imagine as light, i will watch anything she is on. Thought this was a lesbian film set in a boarding school but it ended up being a story about a daughter-mother relationship within an patriachal culture that demands sensual repression.
dir. by Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu —— when did people start flipping the bird as an insult? we wanted to like this film but there was sthg deep unsatisfactory about it. like the director and screenwriter couldn't quite decide the tone, stakes and show for it. Perhaps the mistake was telling the story from the head matron's perspective. also, did we really need the white lesbian?
dir. by Park Chan-Wook —— Yeom Hye-ran! the thespian that you are!! claps This film had no business being as funny as it did. A true theatre of comedy and tragedy. Well-done Park Chan-Wook. There is a one-take sequence in the film that is simply unforgettable.
trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones —— Utterly masterful! Tokarczuk and Lloyd-Jones are truly first rate writers. I usually don't care too much for thrillers but that minor detraction did nothing to diminish my enjoyment.
dir. by Boots Riley —— When all the trippy, psychedelic funfare fizzles and the shock of the shock value wears off, Boots Riley's latest message is pretty simple: if you feel sad, lonely & alienated, the antidote is friendship and struggle. I can't fault that kind of message. Lakeith was putting his sad eyes to maximum use here.
written & dir. by Aleshea Harris —— what does it mean to hold your children close to your breast as you burn Ooooof, this was damn good film. a burning film that had a lot to say about rage, sisterhood, beauty, abuse and many urgent things and said it in an unflinching, poetic and funny way.
written & dir. by The Wachowskis —— Wanted to watch Blade but ended up watching Matrix 1 & 2 because we couldn't find a good copy of blade. If the original Matrix is concerned with choice, the Matrix reloaded is concerned with whether purpose exists. It is a pity it throws the concept of the one into question in the first part only to never do anything subversive with it. Lewks for dayssss tho!
dir. by Josh Thomas —— offbeat, sad and funny. everyone is so lost in the swamp of their selves, needs and loneliness so no one is actually listening to what anyone else is saying. There is something pitiful about how whiteness decieves its so called previleged beneficiaries into surrendering all their agency until they feel as if their life is not theirs, everything is happening to them. The learned helplessness, the desperation to be liked and the tragi-comedy of it all.
in orbit,
eégúnjϙbί
a glossary for spells
a guide for reading
🛸cyberspace cruisin'🛸
part of the heady pleasure of falling in love with something is sharing it with people. we want our love for blogs to bleed into these sprawling missives we send out monthly so this little corner will be where we share blogs we stumbled on that had us visiting almost daily throughout the month. these are mini-universes onto themselves and we hope that they morph into portals for to other people to slide down one lazy afternoon. sometimes, it is a small inflect to remember the ephemeral lives of these blogs.
💡did you know💡
is intended and used as a kind of section break in these monthly missives to introduce new information we stumbled into each month that we previously did not know. When we were a child, we remember loving these random unexpected bits of information that would come into our known orbital world about things we did not know, previously took for granted and/or simply never had the time to pursue with attention. that feeling of wonder-awe at all the things we did not know and the unknowable non-limits of the world that sizzled in those moments would continue to lure us past our teenage years when even admitting you did not know something was seen as the most uncool thing.
🌘full-moon media🌒
like the moon, each new spell is uploaded approximately 30 days from the last one, some months take longer. this is the pace that feels most compatible for our energy levels. included in this section are the different cinematic, written or animated media that we either started, continued or completed during our orbit. these aren't really recommendations or reviews or anything of the sort. at most they are two liner notes of hypertexts we are currently orbiting at any given month. Shiny bits of visual flotsam breadcrumbing for our attention.
🎐musical dreams🎐
is this musical nerd's version of sailing a wish lantern. the ships sailed are magical collaborations we wish to happen in our lifetime. these are musical bells we can hear, imagine striking a sonic chord with each other. it is an avid wish that we write into paper boats and sail into the sonic void. we hope that these artists, or sonic alchemists, find each other, record and or re-interpret moar and moar beautiful music that they will then share with the rest of the world. some of these wishes have already happened.
