When I was half as high as the door between the kitchen and the garage, I caught a fever for the world between the real and the imaginary. Each side of the threshold was familiar: On one side, in the kitchen, everything was clean and tidy, matching and spotless, useful and practical. ’Twas the pride of an A+ homemaker. On the other side was the garage, poorly lit from one small eastern-facing window, everything shadow and suspect, grime and dirt, mysterious and unknown. I hovered on the threshold, comforted by the orderly precision of my mother’s kitchen but attracted to the objects in the garage that could be whatever I told them to be. The woodpile, the deep freeze, the
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I. Grief knocks the pinecones from my limbs. I can’t pick them up, which makes me wonder if grief is really to blame, or did I deliberately let them loose to lose you, to claim good riddance and then bemoan: I can’t pick them up. More than four seasons pass. I was always a late bloomer. Yet, here they all are again. Fifteen, sixteen, so many months to remind me of you. I twist like a child in elementary school, attempting to whittle my waist. “Helicopters!” shouts the long ago gym teacher. My swaying does not dislodge you. It takes grief, sweeping through like a storm, to knock the pinecones from my limbs. II. I leapt. I left. And you
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Sometime one summer when I was almost or maybe ten, I found a bird under one of the lilacs behind the house. I watched it gasp a few last breaths and knew it would die. I kept watching. My little brother swooped in, hollering, and scooped the bird into the bowl of his hands. It’s what I had wanted to do but wouldn’t allow myself. My brother and I examined the bird, from the flutter of the smallest feathers around its neck, soft as love, to its round eye, hardening like spilled ink. I stared into it, and the eye seemed to expand. I observed the point of its beak and was tempted to see if it might pierce my
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In 2014, I tried my hand at audio journalism, editing several pieces on music and new media. Highlights included one-on-one interviews with impresarios, composers, and music directors: — A profile with Chris Rountree, artistic director of wildUp — Behind the scenes at REDCAT, including a post-performance interview with David Rosenboom — Looking back on Invisible Cities with Yuval Sharon, artistic director of The Industry — Contemplating astronomy, data visualization, and music composition at Pasadena’s AxS Festival These pieces reflect my passion for investigating the praxes of media arts on the West Coast.