On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

Lan, through her stories, was also traveling in a spiral. As I listened, there would be moments when the story would change — not much, just a minuscule detail, the time of day, the color of someone's shirt, two air raids instead of three, an AK-47 instead of a 9mm, the daughter laughing, not crying. Shifts in the narrative would occur — the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. "Make me young again," Lan said.

Ocean Vuong

To a Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

Linda Pastan

Live Update

They held views on the matter,
one way or the other,
of our awful American problem.
They watched the last even unfold and thought:
More laws. More guns. Less violence. Less coverage.
This, no, that, no, this,
with more or less certainty or stridency.
"This is the last straw." "How can we be this way?"
"It is our culture." "Our right."
"Isn't this the price of freedom?" "Isn't this abusrd,
grotesque?"
They are dead now.
They and their various views on the matter,
swallowed up suddenly by darkness,
their loved ones maddened with grief,
breaking things they've bought, pulling at their hair,
all that undeliverable protest at the void.
I think of others, alive today, soon to die,
(who knows when or whom, maybe you, or me,
or the him or her who's more to you than you)
who with more or less certainty hold views too
that will vanish into the dark with them
tomorow, the week to come, by this time next year.

Teju Cole

Sweet Song

What am I to do
Someone here is really unhappy
Put myself on the line
It seems I never got through to you
So I wean myself off slowly

I'm a darkened soul
My street's all pop music and gold
Our lives are on TV
You switch off and try to sleep
People get so lonely

I believe, I believe, I believe
Everything's out to sea
I believe, I believe, I believe
I believe that is the way it should be
I hope you feel the same

Everyone is dying
Stop crying now here comes the sun
I didn't mean to hurt you
It takes time to see what you have done
So I wean myself off slowly

I believe, I believe, I believe
Love is the only one
I deceive, I deceive, I deceive
I deceive 'cause I'm not that strong
Hope you feel the same

And now it seems that we're falling apart
But I hope I see the good in you come back again
I just believed in you

Blur

Me and My Shadow (MXMS)

The dark.

It’s a place some acknowledge from a distance, cowering in fear. To others, it’s hollow void is a welcomed solace; a destination of comfort and safety. For Ariel and Jeremy, otherwise known as “Me and My Shadow”(or MXMS for short), it’s their un-written reality. The two met by chance in a studio in the San Fernando Valley in late 2013; Ariel having just arrived in Los Angeles from New York City. What was to be a short writing session instantly blossomed into something poingent and deeply moving as their personal stories meshed into song over the coming weeks and months. The pair moved through the discovery that expelling love, death, pain, and fear into art brought instant relief not only to their personal lives; but became readily relatable to others navigating the broken state of our world and its current affairs.

Offering hope through honesty showered from broken beats, dark pianos, angry synthesizers, and Ariel’s unparalleled hypnotic voice, MXMS carves yet another name on the genre tree…funeral pop. With a gamut of releases and their first feature cinema score slated deep into 2017, MXMS challenges our darkness to come to light through sound and visual stimuli in the same blunt and dramatic fashion that the duo’s influencers Massive Attack, Tricky and others began during the renaissance of technological music.

“MXMS’s music frequently swells from lush yet painfully intimate lows to rousing and inspirational cinematic highs, demanding to be mined for a transformative film montage. The duo relishes straddling the fine line between light and dark–as well as navigating, and often deliberately disrupting, the fault line between their fierce desires to both shun industry norms, and to share their music with the world.”

-Kurt McVey for Interview Magazine

"Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been."

David Bowie