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Delaying Retirement via Procedural Shortcut: The Fragile Promises of China’s Lawmaking Reforms - Made in China Journal

2025-04-26T15:15:42.000Z

On 16 November 1957, China’s labour minister Ma Wenrui appeared before the country’s top legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), with proposed updates to China’s retirement scheme. Faced with a deluge of secondary-school graduates but insufficient job openings, the government hoped to make it easier for older workers to retire (Literature Research Office 2015: 527). The proposal would, in general, require men to retire at age 60, white-collar women at 55, and blue-collar women at 50 (State Council 1957). Women must retire earlier, officials contended, because they were ‘generally weaker’ than men (General Office et al. 1958: 9). As was typical of the time (Kan 2019: 53), the NPCSC endorsed the proposal ‘in principle’ the same day, while allowing the State Council to fine-tune the rules before finalising them (Xinhua 1957a). The State Council soon distributed the draft law to localities for consultation (Xinhua 1957b) and later reported that more than 3.1 million workers participated in discussions over the following month (Ma 1958). Some (unsuccessfully) questioned the disparate treatment of white-collar and blue-collar female workers, but there was otherwise no serious objection to the proposed changes, according to an official account (Ma 1958). The State Council (1958) formally promulgated the rules in February 1958.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), China’s nascent retirement system suffered a fatal blow (Xia 2019a). Ultra-radicals attacked the country’s earliest social insurance scheme for ‘breeding loafers’ (养懒汉) and ‘corrupting the working class’ (腐蚀工人阶级) (Yun 1999: 20). The movement soon paralysed the entire labour bureaucracy. By the end of the decade-long turmoil, more than 2 million eligible workers were waiting for the state to process their retirement applications (Xia 2019b). To clear the backlog and reinvigorate the workforce, the State Council came to the NPCSC with a new pair of retirement rules in May 1978—just weeks after the legislature had resumed regular meetings after the Cultural Revolution. Some of the 1958 rules no longer suited the circumstances and needed updates, the State Council said (Xinhua 1978). Among other changes, its proposal would reinstate separate retirement systems for ‘workers’ (工人) and ‘cadres’ (干部), which roughly corresponded to manual and nonmanual labourers under previous rules (Wu 2021; Kuei and Peng 2013: 30); create a special retirement status (with full salary) for veteran cadres; and otherwise treat ordinary cadres and workers equally, along with a general increase in their pension benefits (Feng 1986; Manion 1992). The State Council proposed no change, however, to the 1958 retirement ages. The NPCSC swiftly approved the rules ‘in principle’ after a two-day session (Xinhua 1978). The default retirement ages would remain in place, as it turned out, until almost half a century later.

Meanwhile, China experienced a sea change in demographics. Life expectancy has risen rapidly, from 48.8 years in 1958 to 72 by the turn of the century, and to 78 today (UN DESA 2024). Due to socioeconomic development and the One-Child Policy, fertility in China has declined in an equally swift fashion: it has dropped far below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman since the 1990s and is now among the lowest in the world (Cai 2013: 382–83; Cai and Cheng 2015: 46). Together, these two forces—rising longevity and declining fertility—have accelerated population ageing, which in turn has led to a shrinking workforce, mounting pressure on healthcare and social security systems, and widening welfare inequities among different social groups (Zhu and Walker 2021: 192–95; Mao et al. 2020: 284–85; see also SCIO 2021). The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences projected in 2019 that, if the trend continues, China’s main pension fund will run out of money by 2035 (Li 2019).

Delaying retirement, as the Chinese leadership was well aware, could mitigate those problems by replenishing the labour force and the pension fund (Feng et al. 2018: 31–34). The labour ministry studied such a move as early as 2005 (Bai 2012), before the Chinese Communist Party eventually added it to the official reform agenda in late 2013 (Central Committee 2013). Since then, the Party has repeatedly vowed to raise retirement ages, most recently at the Third Plenum of its Twentieth Central Committee in July 2024 (Central Committee 2015, 2020, 2024; Xi 2022). Yet, any retirement delay would have a direct, tangible impact on hundreds of millions of Chinese, who have, for more than a decade, consistently and overwhelmingly opposed the idea in successive polls conducted by various state media outlets (Han 2014: 129–30; Zhou 2016; The Economist 2021). At the top of their concerns were youth unemployment, age discrimination against older workers, and the loss of childcare provided by retired grandparents (The Economist 2021; Bao 2013). Because of the move’s unpopularity, no concrete plan to raise the retirement ages materialised—until last autumn.

On 10 September 2024, the NPCSC suddenly announced that it was considering legislation to raise retirement ages, without the usual prior indication that a bill was in the pipeline, much less drafted and ready for legislative deliberation. Three days later, it passed the ‘Decision on Gradually Raising the Statutory Retirement Ages’ (关于实施渐进式延迟法定退休年龄的决定) (NPCSC 2024, translated in Wei and Hu 2024), or the ‘Reform Plan’. The Reform Plan has three core provisions: first, it gradually raises the retirement age, over 15 years, to 63 for men, 58 for women in managerial or specialist positions (that is, redefined ‘cadres’; see Zhong 2024), and 55 for women in other roles (that is, redefined ‘workers’); second, it will gradually increase the minimum years of contribution required to receive post-retirement benefits from 15 to 20; and third, it allows for ‘flexible’ retirement, whereby eligible employees may retire up to three years earlier or later. The Reform Plan took effect on 1 January 2025.

Though the swift process was reminiscent of the way the NPCSC set and reaffirmed the original retirement ages decades earlier, the times are different. Much like China’s demographics, the NPCSC’s legislative procedure has undergone a profound transformation in the interim. As we will explain, the Chinese legislature has embraced, in rhetoric and in practice, procedural reforms that grant lawmakers more time to review and propose changes to legislative drafts, while considering the views of a broad range of stakeholders, including the public. Yet, that deliberative process was wholly absent from the momentous retirement reform, laying bare the fragility of the legislature’s promises.

‘Scientific, Democratic, and Law-Based Lawmaking’

In official discourse, China’s post–Cultural Revolution lawmaking reforms have been subsumed under the slogan of ‘scientific, democratic, and law-based lawmaking’ (科学立法、民主立法、依法立法). According to an authoritative commentary by legislative officials, this trifecta of principles entails both substantive and procedural commands (Shen and Xu 2019: 390). Legislation must address actual issues and ‘reasonably’ prescribe the rights and obligations of private and state entities; must ‘reflect the will of the people’; and must conform to higher-level norms in China’s legislative hierarchy (Shen and Xu 2019: 395–99). And such goals are achievable only with a process that, among others, promotes thorough and informed deliberations and incorporates public participation.

The NPCSC first moved to extend legislative deliberations. For about the first 30 years of its existence, the Chinese legislature passed all but a few bills after a quick single review, as the 1957 and 1978 retirement laws illustrate (Kan 2019: 53). It began to move away from this approach soon after legislative business resumed after the Cultural Revolution. To ‘prevent hasty deliberations and imprudent considerations from undermining the stability of the law’, legislative leaders decided in March 1983 to generally add an extra review to allot more time for discussing and improving draft laws (Council of Chairpersons 1983). This two-review process was then codified in 1987 in the NPCSC’s rules of procedure (Kan 2019: 54). To some lawmakers, this longer time frame nonetheless still felt ‘hasty’, as they worried that the quality of legislation would suffer from insufficient time to digest certain bills. With a third review down the line, they could instead use the second reading for ‘in-depth discussions over a draft law’s key issues, contentious points, and areas of disagreement’. The NPCSC leadership endorsed this proposal in April 1998, believing that more thorough deliberations would promote ‘the quality and efficiency of legislation’ (Li 1998: 177). The three-review rule was formally codified in the landmark Legislation Law (立法法) in 2000 and still applies today (with exceptions for uncontroversial, simple, or emergency bills).

The lengthier legislative process in turn created the space for public consultations, which over time have become another key feature of Chinese lawmaking. In January 1988, the NPCSC carried out the first public consultation on a draft law under the current (post-1982) constitutional order (Ai 2014). It published the draft in national newspapers and requested that citizens send in comments by mail. It was not until 2005 that public participation eventually shifted online and instantly reached new heights. The very first bill released on the legislature’s website, a draft Property Law (物权法), received 9,605 comments—almost three times the record of the comment-by-mail era (Ai 2014). Despite the technological upgrade, the NPCSC remained highly selective in its consultations, releasing only 13 drafts during the 20 years after the 1988 consultation. But legislative leaders soon instituted improvements. They first required in 2008 that the legislature generally solicit comment on the first draft of every bill, before extending that soft requirement to any additional non-final draft of a bill five years later (Ai 2014; Shen 2009: 1500). Almost 350 drafts have been released since 2008 as a result.

In the meantime, the Chinese legislature has implemented additional reforms to broaden informational input into legislative deliberations. They include involving academics and other experts at various stages of the legislative process—from formulating legislative agendas to revising draft laws, to assessing legislation’s feasibility, impact, and potential enforcement problems prior to enactment—and establishing ‘grassroots legislative outreach offices’ (基层立法联系点) to proactively solicit public input (Shen and Xu 2019: 407–10; Horsley 2010: 293–97; Chen 2023). And, as we have alluded to, the legislature has always allowed for expedited legislative review under specified circumstances and reserved the discretion to waive public consultation when necessary. But the default process—three reviews coupled with two rounds of public consultation—remains the standard (Wei and Hu 2023).

When the Party reiterated the goal of raising retirement ages at the 2024 Third Plenum—this time with apparent urgency—the NPCSC found itself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the reform is wide-ranging and deeply unpopular, as discussed earlier. It is also quite complex, which has led policy experts to propose a range of options based on different combinations of the relevant parameters (Feng et al. 2018). The case for following the standard process to evaluate these proposals and their implications could not have been stronger. On the other hand, doing so would have opened the floodgates to a deluge of comments. The public would have seized on an opportunity to air their views, as they did with comparable social legislation in the past; the labour contract legislation of 2007 and 2012, for example, together received almost 750,000 comments (Harper Ho and Huang 2014: 1009; Gallagher 2017: 68). So, too, would experts have eagerly offered their input. The sheer amount of information would inevitably have compelled the NPCSC to prolong the process by months, if not years, especially given the strong possibility that an overwhelming majority of public comments would have opposed the reform (Bai 2013). This prospect would have been politically untenable.

Faced with this dilemma, the NPCSC ultimately chose political expediency: it enacted the Reform Plan as a ‘quasi-statutory decision’ (QSD, 准法律决定; Wang 2011: 92), a category of legislation exempt from the procedural paradigm. Officially known as ‘decisions on legal issues’ (有关法律问题的决定), QSDs are not ‘statutes’ (法律) but nonetheless carry statutory force (Huang 2014: 14; see also Wei 2021). Because the NPCSC adheres to the unwritten principle that a statute should be comprehensive and infrequently amended, QSDs fill important gaps. Ordinarily, they are short instruments designed to address narrow issues, tackle urgent matters when a comprehensive statute cannot be drafted in time, or develop new legal schemes without formal statutory changes (Qin and Liu 2017: 213–14; Jin 2018: 154–55). For these reasons, since 1987, NPCSC rules have allowed it to adopt a QSD after a single review without public consultation, even as its legislative process has otherwise grown more sophisticated. Over the past two decades, the legislature has rarely taken a second look at a QSD, and, even when it did, it never solicited public comment.

The Reform Plan’s unusual features suggest the State Council may have deliberately exploited that abbreviated process. Like a typical QSD, it begins with a brief (five-article) main text, which announces the new retirement ages and lays down general principles for implementing the reform (NPCSC 2024: 720). Then, in a break with convention, the Reform Plan proceeds to a separately titled, visually distinct document: ‘Measures of the State Council on Gradually Raising the Statutory Retirement Ages’ (国务院关于渐进式延迟法定退休年龄的办法; our emphasis). Despite appearances to the contrary, officials emphasised that this lengthy document is an integral part of the Reform Plan (Constitution and Law Committee 2024). The Measures introduce the other two pillars of the reform (longer pension contribution periods and flexible retirement), address various subsidiary issues (such as the application of the reform to unemployed individuals), and include detailed charts that allow affected citizens to look up their new retirement ages and contribution periods (NPCSC 2024: 720–34). This level of detail brings the Reform Plan closer to a statute than an average reform-initiating QSD.

In addition, the State Council likely drafted the bill in a manner designed to restrict meaningful legislative review of the Measures. The Reform Plan’s main text states that the NPCSC ‘approved’ (批准) the Measures—indicating that lawmakers, at best, had less room than usual to propose changes to the embedded document and, at worst, had to vote on it as drafted (Wang 2012: 483). As evidence, the Reform Plan’s accompanying legislative report addresses only lawmaker comments on the short main text (Constitution and Law Committee 2024). While it is true that the State Council also drafted and submitted the 1957 and 1978 retirement laws—both under its name—for the NPCSC’s ‘approval’, the legal landscape of the time necessitated that process. Before 1982, the NPCSC’s legislative power was far more circumscribed than it is today, while the State Council had no authority at all to issue binding regulations. In response to the heightened legislative demand shortly after the PRC’s founding and the Cultural Revolution, the NPCSC resorted to legislating, in part, by approving documents that the State Council sought to issue (Chen 2016: 71; Luo 2019: 163). The 1982 Constitution subsequently expanded the legislative powers of both institutions and more clearly demarcated the boundaries of their authority. Reviving that archaic practice in 2024 was thus not only unnecessary but also legally dubious under today’s constitutional framework (Chen 2016: 70). Not to mention the resulting Reform Plan—an NPCSC enactment with a component bearing the State Council’s name—is an odd hybrid previously unknown to Chinese law.

That said, the State Council’s drafting choices could not—and indeed should not—have bound the NPCSC. The latter was free to rewrite the Reform Plan so that it contained a unified text. It also faced no legal obstacles to waiving the single-review exception and conducting further review, as it could with any QSD. There has long been scholarly argument that QSDs, like statutes, should comply with the Legislation Law; otherwise, this Law would become a ‘dead letter’ (形同虚设), as the legislature could simply circumvent its more stringent procedures by enacting important legislation as QSDs (Jiang 2012: 32; see also Jiang 2023: 105–6). This view finds additional support in the March 2023 amendments to the Legislation Law, which added a new article applying ‘the relevant provisions’ of the Law to QSDs. This new clause is admittedly cryptic. But there is early scholarly agreement (which we second) that it requires, at a minimum, that QSDs creating or modifying generally applicable legal schemes—such as the Reform Plan—follow the same procedures as statutes: three reviews with public consultations, unless a specified exception applies (Jiang 2024: 15–16; Tan 2024: 34). No such exception would have applied to the Reform Plan.

‘Breaching the Contract with an Entire Generation’

The public predictably reacted to the Reform Plan with ire, confusion, and anxiety. Yet, it is now only possible to glimpse that reaction through contemporaneous press coverage, as China’s censorship machine swiftly kicked into high gear after the document’s release. According to The Economist (2024), of the more than 5,200 replies to Xinhua’s Weibo post announcing the news, only about two dozen remained visible just four days later—‘none of them disapproving’. Most recorded comments expressed apprehension about the reform’s substantive impact on people’s livelihoods (The Economist 2024; Ng 2024; Woo and Qi 2024; Li 2024). Few directly attacked the lack of process, though that concern underlay posts worrying about a sudden further delay in retirement.

That sentiment more clearly drove netizens to widely circulate an 11-year-old front-page commentary from the China Youth Daily (中国青年报). That 2013 piece by Cao Lin, the outlet’s then chief commentator, responded to a social security official’s call to delay retirement—a few months before the Party would officially endorse the proposal. Among other criticisms, Cao rebuked the suggestion that the Chinese public should stomach a future delay in retirement simply because it is ‘a common international practice’. He argued that laws and policies, especially those that ‘concern significant public interests’, must provide the people with ‘stable expectations’. ‘The age of retirement and the timing of pension payments,’ he stressed, ‘are the State’s commitments to and agreements with the people—contracts that must not be breached lightly.’ He observed that retirement reforms in developed countries followed ‘due legal process, democratic channels, and consultation with the people’. If China were to dispense with the necessary processes, it would ‘breach the contract with an entire generation’ (与一代人的违约), Cao presciently warned. Eleven years later, reposts of his op-ed were quickly censored and the original disappeared from the newspaper’s online archives (Li 2024).

The Chinese state’s impulse to pass the Reform Plan hastily was understandable, as strong public opposition had forced it to repeatedly postpone the reform over the past decade (The Economist 2021). By pushing the whole package through the legislature on a highly expedited timeline, it could present the reform as a fait accompli, thereby rendering moot public calls for reconsideration and pre-empting attempts to bargain with the government over specifics. Yet, by settling for a quick fix for the looming crisis, the Chinese Government myopically sacrificed the greater benefits it could have gained by extending the legislative timetable—even by just a few months—to allow for further deliberation and consultation.

The NPCSC itself has recognised that ‘public participation can bolster the legality and fairness of legislative decision-making’ (Shen and Xu 2019: 397). As it elaborated in a 2019 volume touting its legislative accomplishments: ‘When the decision-making process is undemocratic and public participation insufficient, the enacted laws may present the will of only a minority, making them unjust; they may also lie dormant once enacted, failing to solve actual problems’ (Shen and Xu 2019: 397). Taking the time to publicly justify the Reform Plan and to credibly consult the public on such a complex and far-reaching matter—just as the State Council did in 1957—could have, in the best case envisioned by the NPCSC, fostered ‘a sense of identification’ (认同感) with the reform (Research Office 2019: 51–52) and ‘raise[d] the public’s willingness to abide by’ it (Shen and Xu 2019: 397). At a minimum, it could have ‘confer[red] procedural legitimacy on the NPCSC, the process, and the resulting legislation’ and ‘help[ed] lessen, if not prevent, opposition’ to the reform (Horsley 2020).

In comparison, the costs of cutting procedural corners here were immense. Not only did this move stand in tension with the NPCSC’s decades-long procedural reforms and cast doubt on China’s commitment to ‘scientific, democratic, and law-based lawmaking’, but it also needlessly damaged the legislature’s own credibility and legitimacy and sowed distrust in the legislative process. After all, the average Chinese citizen is unlikely to grasp the NPCSC’s procedural intricacies well enough to identify the Reform Plan as a QSD and to understand that it could be passed through an abridged process. And, given that officials had promised—time and time again (Bai 2012, 2015, 2016a; Bao 2013; SCIO 2021)—to consult the public on any retirement reform, citizens were especially justified in expecting such an opportunity in this case. In the end, taking the procedural shortcut did not—and could not—end the controversy over delaying retirement, despite the censors’ best efforts. It would only make the next unpopular but necessary reform in China that much harder to enact.

Featured image: Alxander Schimmeck (CC), Unsplash.

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The post Delaying Retirement via Procedural Shortcut: The Fragile Promises of China’s Lawmaking Reforms appeared first on Made in China Journal.

Post on Orion Magazine - Orion Magazine

2025-04-26T12:20:00.000Z

Rules for living with another family: respect each others’ privacy, keep the noise down, and, of course, use separate entrances. https://orionmagazine.org/article/bird-nests-blocked-our-doors-solution/

Through Surreal Paintings, Shyama Golden Reincarnates a Mythic Narrative - Colossal

2025-04-26T12:00:00.000Z

When Shyama Golden would find herself disappointed as a child, her parents would often respond with “too bad, so sad, maybe next birth.” Invoking reincarnation and the possibilities of an alternative life, this phrase continues to reinvent itself in Golden’s practice.

On view next month at PM/AM, Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth presents a collection of lush paintings filled with surreal details, earthly textures, and a recurring blue-faced character. As with earlier series, the artist invents a vast, magical narrative that flows through each of the works, this time as a four-act performance.

“Bevis Bawa Garden, 1936” (2025), oil on linen, 72 x 60 inches

The mythical storyline unfolds with a collection of diptychs comprised of a large-scale scene and a close-up companion offering another perspective. These pairings visualize a sort of alternative past for the artist as she explores the inexorable twining of personal agency and larger forces like fate and collective experiences that shape our identities.

In Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth, Golden opens with her blue-faced alter ego named Maya, a rendition of the Sri Lankan folklore tricksters known as yakkas. Dressed in a fur suit, the character lies in the roadway, her chest split open to reveal a bright red wound. A bag of oranges is littered nearby.

The counterpart to this titular work is a self-portrait of the artist barefoot, posed against the rocky roadside. She stands atop cracked pavement while oranges spill blood-red juice on the ground. Introspective yet invoking the universal, the pair grasps at the tension between unexpected violence and death, whether metaphoric or real, and the ability to find resilience in the face of adversity.

Golden’s series continues to unravel as a series of contrasts. She considers fame, erasure, and where freedom resides within the two, along with the notion of sole creative geniuses mistakenly thought to operate outside the whole. And in “Mexican Texas, 1862,” the artist tackles the porous, if not arbitrarily drawn, boundaries that tie us to states and nations and ultimately, change over time.

“Stories of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated” (2025), oil on linen, 72 x 36 inches

In addition to her oil paintings for this exhibition, Golden is collaborating on an animated video project with her husband, the director Paul Trillo, who will build an AI model trained exclusively on Golden’s paintings. Given the hesitation by many artists about the role of artificial intelligence and intellectual property, the pair is interested in confronting the issue from the perspective of influence and the myth of the lone genius. Golden writes:

Many artists who are canonized are actually working in a style that they didn’t invent but that was part of a movement arising out of their time and location. AI is deeply unsettling to artists in the West because we romanticise the artist as a singular figure, who is only influenced by one to three other clearly defined artists, giving them a lineage of artistic inheritance and perceived value.

Golden also ties this idea to “the clout needed to command a price for our work,” which she suggests is simply another narrative device in the act of self-mythologizing.

If you’re in London, Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth runs from May 23 to July 1. Find more from Golden on her website and Instagram.

“Mexican Texas, 1862” (2025), oil on linen, 72 x 60 inches

“A Myth of My Own Creation” (2025), oil on linen, 66 x 48 inches

“You Seeing What I’m Seeing” (2025), oil on linen, 48 x 48 inches

“The Sound of One Bird Colliding” (2025), oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Through Surreal Paintings, Shyama Golden Reincarnates a Mythic Narrative appeared first on Colossal.

Nobody Beats Kirby’s Dream Land at The Wiz - The New Leaf Journal

2025-04-25T22:41:37.000Z

On March 19, 2025, I read a report in Morning Brew that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had purchased another company called Wiz for a cool $32 billion. I did a double-take not because of the price or the note that “[t]his is Google’s largest acquisition yet–more than twice as much as its next-priciest purchase, Motorola…” Instead, I did a double take when I saw Wiz. I never heard of this Wiz. The only Wiz I am familiar with is the now-defunct electronic store (granted its spirt lives on in P.C. Richard & Son). The Wiz as in “Nobody Beats the Wiz.”

I am old enough to remember actual The Wiz locations, including one in downtown Brooklyn. While most of my video games back in the day came from Toys ‘R Us (also mostly defunct), some came from The Wiz.

I noted in an article on the video games that left the biggest impression on me that my first console was a Sega Genesis, which I received in 1994. Several months later in 1995, I received a Game Boy on a short trip to Texas. My first Game Boy game was Kirby’s Block Ball, a Breakout clone featuring Kirby. I apparently enjoyed that game well enough to want another Kirby game, not knowing anything about the mainline Kirby series which has featured in an article I wrote about video game aesthetics. Thus, my second Game Boy game, also received in 1995, was Kirby’s Dream Land. I distinctly remember getting Kirby’s Dreamland at The Wiz in downtown Brooklyn.

Unlike most of my old games, I still have my Kirby’s Dream Land cartridge and it still works. (I previously demonstrated that it is the genuine article.)

I received Kirby’s Dream Land 2, which I included in my big impression game article, not long after the original Kirby’s Dream Land.

I probably obtained Kirby’s Dreamland 2 at The Wiz, but I am not 100% confident about that in the same way I am about the original.

I know I got some other games from The Wiz. I want to say that Mario Golf for Game Boy Color was among them. But Kirby’s Dreamland with the gray-scale Kirby on the box is the one I remember distinctly.

Nobody Beats Kirby’s Dream Land at The Wiz (https://thenewleafjournal.com/nobody-beats-kirbys-dream-land-at-the-wiz/) by Nicholas A. Ferrell first appeared on The New Leaf Journal on April 25, 2025. Thank you for subscribing to our feed, the best way to follow The New Leaf Journal. Copyright 2025 The New Leaf Journal. All rights reserved.

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Post on Orion Magazine - Orion Magazine

2025-04-25T20:40:00.000Z

May 1, 2025 is the final day to apply to be a part of Orion’s in-person workshop at the Omega Institute this summer! Learn more (and apply!) right here. orionmagazine.org/omega/

A Bold Metaphysical Portal by Hilma’s Ghost Stretches 600 Feet Across Grand Central Station - Colossal

2025-04-25T19:01:00.000Z

A glass mosaic covering 600 square feet of the 2nd Street entrance to the 7 train in Grand Central Station greets commuters with a bold, cosmic map. The work of Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder, of the feminist collective Hilma’s Ghost, “Abstract Futures” is a vibrant, three-part portal to transformation.

Named after the visionary artist and mystic Hilma af Klint(1862–1944), the collective formed in 2020 and typically pairs innovative contemporary art practices with spirituality. Their tarot deck has amassed a cult following and shares a name with this new MTA Arts & Design-commissioned project (previously), the group’s first public artwork.

Abstract Futures opens with “The Fool,” a tarot card representing an embrace of new beginnings. Brilliant reds, pinks, and oranges nest together in entrancing, angular forms to invoke courageous, creative intuition at the start of a journey.

In the center is “The Wheel of Fortune,” which is intended to bring this passionate, if not naive, energy back to Earth. Here, grounding greens and browns form a cyclical pattern that reflects a natural rhythm. Concentric orbs and a string of ochre diamonds propel the viewer toward the future.

The last piece in the trio is also the largest, beginning with a celestial blue triangle met by an inverted plane in orange. This pairing draws on “The World,” creating a harmonious, unified relationship between the shadows and wisdom that exist within all of us.

Red, horizontal bars at the far right call on tarot’s suit of wands. Generally associated with fire and primal energy, this final segment symbolizes regeneration and the ability to begin again.

In a statement, the artists say they hope the work inspires a new way of looking at the city:

Abstract Futures is about the connection between people, spaces, and time, and intended to provide a powerful reflection of what New York represents to us all. The city is at once a sprawling metropolis with millions of people but also a dynamic network of interconnectivity. As we make our way through a single day in New York, we connect with so many people from so many walks of life. The density of the mural’s imagery, pattern, and color is a metaphor for the endless diversity of the city that is its heartbeat.

Miotto Mosaic Art Studios fabricated the work, and you can explore Hilma’s Ghost’s collaborative projects on its website. (via Hyperallergic)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Bold Metaphysical Portal by Hilma’s Ghost Stretches 600 Feet Across Grand Central Station appeared first on Colossal.

Mên-An-Tol - Cecily

2025-04-25T19:00:40.000Z

Caroline Williams | Dark Mountain | 25th April 2025 | U

Mên-an-Tol is a series of late Neolithic or early Bronze Age standing stones. It stands near the Madron to Morvah road in Cornwall and is regularly visited by walkers who also visit the abandoned tin mine nearby. The central stone has a large hole, perhaps manmade, perhaps not, which is big enough to crawl through. The poet D.M. Thomas referred to it as ‘the wind’s vagina’, but it is known locally as the ‘Crick Stone’. In Cornish Mên-an-Tol means ‘the stone of the hole’.

The site’s folklore declares that there is a piskie (fairy guardian) who will take care of curing you – if you do their bidding. This particular piskie’s bidding involves various instructions on how to pass through the central stone’s hole.

Children with rickets: nine times – naked
Young woman wanting a baby: one time – full moon – naked

What I’ve heard repeated the most is that passing through it three times, anticlockwise, with your back to the sun, will cure you of any ailment. Naked, of course.

The cows had left a large present for us when we arrived. A mound, freshly steaming, very close to the central stone. Even my dog refused to go through, and he eats sheep shit like it’s popcorn. I sat with the stones a while, wondering if this was a place I was willing to risk being caught by passers-by with my boobs out and possibly with a knee or elbow-full of cow shit.

That morning had turned sour. My partner and I were on a summer trip around Cornwall, seeking out sites associated with healing. We had attempted to drive to Holywell Cave, where St. Cuthbert’s remains were said to have touched the cave’s walls after they were transported south from Lindisfarne to escape the Vikings. Where the saint’s remains made contact, a freshwater spring had sprung. Since then, the sick and disabled were said to have crawled and hopped up the naturally formed steps to drink from the holy spring and ask to be healed. At Holywell Bay car park it was a one-in, one-out situation, with cars crammed full of beach umbrellas, dinghies, and sunburnt children. Cornwall, in August.

Halfway through our sweaty wait, I got a text from friends who, after several rounds of IVF, had finally had a baby girl. She was a bundle of sweetness. In her face, I could see the echoes of two people I loved a lot. I imagined the emotions all parents, particularly women, have been taught they will feel in this moment: life is complete, happiness starts now.

I looked at the words of the text: ‘I didn’t know if I should share this with you because of your difficult fertility journey’. A sort of closing-in sensation began below my ears and quickly travelled along my jaw.

Three years earlier I was having lunch with my mum when I fell to the ground with the kind of out-of-the blue pain which can only take you to one place. I felt like I’d been shot, like something that wasn’t meant to give way had in fact, given way. I’d had bouts of pain in my pelvis before. A few times it had taken me to A&E but on arrival I’d always been well enough to nod along with the doctors. ‘Yes, I’ll talk to my GP if it comes up again.’

I’d leave with a few prods but never any investigations. The resounding message from the medics was: women sometimes have pain in their middle, at their core. Deal with it.

This time I was convulsing from the pain. I was put in a wheelchair on arrival. Appendicitis? Must be. While I swam in a sea of morphine and prepared to have my appendix removed, a final scan showed I had some extra body parts the A&E doctor hadn’t thought could cause the amount of pain I was in. Sacks, tubes, tentacles; a bobbing cretinous unruly mass hiding in the deep and something in it didn’t look right. This patient appears to have a problem in the other realm: take her to gynae!

It was during Covid so I sat alone in the small consulting room while the gynae doctor said a word out loud I’d never heard before: ‘endo-metri-osis’. The word was just sounds. ‘Stage IV. Deep infiltrating.’ I knew stage IV wasn’t good and deep infiltrating also sounded unpleasant. There was something about the way she asked me ‘where are you on your child-bearing journey?’ that initiated a thump of panic; the student doctor hovering at her shoulder looked down at the floor. She discussed surgery options for the coming weeks, but I just kept hearing ‘incurable’, ‘chronic’. As I stood up to go, I remember saying ‘this feels like the start of a difficult journey.’

I made my way out to the car park where, after 13 hours, my mum was still loyally sitting in the car. I put my head in her lap and cried in a way you perhaps only cry once or twice in your life. Through messy tears I kept repeating ‘it’s not cancer, at least it’s not cancer.’

I know now that endometriosis is a disease in which material similar to the material found in the womb starts to grow where it shouldn’t. This material bleeds each month along with your menstrual cycle but unlike the shedding of the material of your womb, it has nowhere to go. If left undetected it eventually sticks your insides together, bowels get attached to ovaries, and ovaries to diaphragms. Eventually this regular unwanted bleeding causes lesions that gnaw away at your organs; hence the ‘deep infiltrating’. It is believed to be one of the most painful diseases known to the medical community. Women who have endo and have given birth say that an endo flare is more painful than childbirth. It is illustrative of the gender health-gap, in which women’s issues are systemically underfunded and under-researched, that endometriosis, on average, takes over eight years to diagnose.

My endo had been undiagnosed for so long that it had begun to gnaw into my bowel, rupturing the bowel wall. It had caused my ovaries to swell, forming what are called ‘chocolate cysts’. It had taken over all parts of my middle, wherever it could find room, and stuck organs to places they shouldn’t be. MRIs in the weeks to come showed that it had even made its way to my diaphragm. It was literally taking over. It can’t be cured, only managed with hormone therapy. It can be cut out (excision surgery) but always with the possibility of it growing back.

In the ancient medical world, a ‘wandering womb’ was blamed as the cause of many ailments in women. It could even cause suffocation and death. How strange that they managed to name an ailment with surprising accuracy before science caught up. And in fact, endometriosis can develop in the chest, leading to shortness of breath, lung collapse, and, in severe cases like that of Kenyan endometriosis activist Jahmby Koikai, death. Endometrial tissue has even been found in the brain.

In the ancient medical world, a ‘wandering womb’ was blamed as the cause of many ailments in women

I often think of the multitude of women who were institutionalised and disregarded due to their wandering wombs. The ones sent to bed or sent away because of their swoons and funny turns. Menstruation and pregnancy were thought to make women the weaker sex, both physically and mentally. By the late 19th century, it was deemed scientifically proven that women’s biology made them less rational than men, unfit to participate in many areas of public life. Hysteria in fact derives from ‘hystera’, meaning womb. This linguistic association between women’s health and hysteria is still in use today in the term ‘hysterectomy’. Modern medicine has made diseases like PCOS and endometriosis undeniably real. They had to see it, to believe us.

My invisible pain was now acutely visible. On returning from the hospital, daily symptoms included acute pelvic and intestinal pain, a large distended belly, severe fatigue, rib pain and breathlessness.

Apologetic birth announcements had become a theme after my diagnosis. Calls from friends I hadn’t heard from in years, who in low, almost regretful tones, would tell me they were having a baby. Friends who were parents would stop conversations about their children, in case I was ‘being triggered’. All kind gestures of people trying to do the right thing, as the news of our fertility problems trickled through the social strata. But all this sensitivity had come to feel like a spotlight on our otherness. Do we get left out of your joy, as well as our own? Waiting in the line of cars to try and visit a holy cave, the shame spiral started to descend. Turn the car around. I don’t want to be in this queue. Get me out of here. Away from people. I want to be alone.

My partner is well versed in letting me sit with grief without trying to make it all better but by now this disease was weighing heavily on us. Since diagnosis we’d had three years of surgical interventions and various hormone treatments to try to preserve fertility and ease pain. Nothing had worked. During the darkest days of hitting our heads against multiple medical brick walls, I began to have a whimsical daydream: to make a series of journeys to ancient sites in Britain, where women, specifically, had come and asked piskies, fairies and even giants, the most risky and brave of questions: can you heal me?

It’s cloudy when we arrive at Mên-an-Tol and a cold wind has started up. So, you are meant to climb through the central rock naked three times going anticlockwise – your back against the sun. This was a relatively busy path and it was 11am. Note to self – if you want to do the naked thing maybe arrive closer to 5am. I am excited. Do I have an intention beyond ‘please don’t let me get caught in this field naked’? Not really. But I feel exhilarated. It is a thrill to actually do something. I have a map: a way of interacting with this place that has been followed, possibly for thousands of years, by thousands of people also wanting to be healed. It feels like they are cheering me on.

Afterwards I sit on a shit-free bit of grass (hard to find) and write down some notes reflecting on this place. My partner knows enough to leave me to it. The silence feels important. Very soon other people arrive. What a shock they would have had if they’d been here two minutes earlier. It makes me look at the stones differently. They know my secret.

As I offer to move out of the way for the family’s photos, they gesture for me not to move. I realise they don’t speak English. I don’t speak their language but I like the sound of it. It’s bouncy and friendly in their mouths – Swedish? I can’t help myself from saying ‘you’re meant to go through three times. Naked. With your back to the sun.’ I try to mime the meaning. Their nod says, we’ve no idea what you’re saying but thank you for communicating with us all the same. As the older lady in the family leans down to touch the central stone I read the back of her bright pink hoodie, ‘Don’t worry, beach happy’. The teenagers in the group point out the amount of cow shit everywhere and we are able to share the word ‘cow’ together, helped by smiling and making mooing sounds. As the family leave, the pink hooded lady rests her hand on one of the upright stones. The rest of the family walks on, but she lingers. She closes her eyes and whispers something – talking directly to the stones. As she leaves, she keeps looking back, as if waiting for a reply.

This is the first time on this trip that I feel like I’m doing what I set out to do. Being with a place. Tuning in to its invitation. Because what is a hole in a stone asking other than for us to go through it? A cave with steps wants us to walk up them and a spring asks us to drink. I think more about how each of these places is a way for the human body to have closeness to nature and how the invitations in these sites to come close are so clear. Their beckoning transcends language. From Neolithic humans to the Vikings, people could read them.

March 2024

The scratch started about an hour after waking. I know this pain now so I do the things I know to do.

At about 3pm I leave a voice note for my mum. I’m ok. But the pain is so bad I don’t think I can be alone. Just in case.

The animal in me worries.

That night I put a bag packed for the hospital beside the bed. It’s an odd thing to try to sleep with pain as your bed-fellow.

When sharing a bed with a pet or lover, an elbow or sharp paw isn’t comfortable but it’s safe and you can drift off in the solace of company. I’ve learnt to do the same with pain. I have a new companion tonight. They’re bony and scratchy and taking up too much room but I’m sure I can fall asleep alongside them. I try to feel affection for this uninvited entity. Come on in, I say. You’re welcome here. Yet to turn off the alarm bells that tell you this pain is dangerous is the work of a strong mind. This time I couldn’t do it.

About 3am I grab more of the hospital essentials: noise cancelling headphones, eye mask. In A&E there’s a woman screaming about demons. I say yes to morphine. It’s an eight hour wait. A man groans next to me. He’s been here for 12 hours.

Once admitted, my endo nurse comes into the ward and sings to me. She’s Romanian and this isn’t the first time I’ve been serenaded by her. This time it’s ‘No Woman No Cry’. They’ve forgotten me and my morphine has trailed off so I’m sobbing in the kind of mental health meltdown way that only strong drugs (or withdrawal from them) can induce. I’m not told that a scan isn’t happening today and so I wait confused as the sky outside my window starts to darken. I’ve never spent the night in a hospital before and I’m scared. There’s beeping and moaning; all night the slow steady retching of a heavily pregnant woman.

Once home the pain is daily now. A pulling ripping sensation. Intestinal cramping, burping until I’m sick. I go to the GP for a little help and we test again for cancer/ulcerative colitis/Crohn’s. I’m aware more and more that there is a disease in me. A constant burning. She wants to examine me again. I’m so used to taking my kit off for doctors that I’ve got my pants in my hand and I’m ready to go before she even pulls the curtain back.

When she presses on my stomach it’s so tender that tears come.

After this second pain event my partner and I sat down again with the endometriosis consultant. She was drawing things out on a piece of paper; a squiggly line that was my intestine and a dark circle where the endo had eaten away at it. I’d never seen my disease in picture form before. I know my consultant well now and looking at her scribbles I said, ‘I’m getting a sense of what you might have been like as a ten-year-old.’ We laughed. She took a breath and said, ‘look, the best way for you to really feel well is to have full excision surgery including a bowel resection and a full hysterectomy. That’s where we’ve seen the best results. Because you have two deep nodules on your bowel, it would have to be cut and then rejoined and if we feel it’s the right course of action we will put it in a stoma while your bowel heals.’

Wait, is she suggesting removing my womb entirely? And after all our efforts with surgical interventions and IVF, instead of a baby, our little bundle of joy could end up being a bag of poo?

There are over 200,000 people in the UK with a permanent or temporary stoma. Prominent figures such as artist Tracey Emin have opened up about the reality of it and there are amazing role models out there for living with them well. Most stoma wearers have cancer or significant enough bowel disease that without this medical intervention they would die. Stomas save precious irreplaceable lives every single day. With endometriosis part of its gift, and its complexity, is that the choice to have surgery is symptom driven and entirely up to you. Bowel endo is excruciatingly painful but it won’t kill you. Another consultant explained, ‘You’re ready to have surgery when you know that if you were to wake up with any number of complications you would still feel that the surgery was the only thing you could have done.’

The hospital organises for me to meet the stoma nurse team.

One of the warmest nurses I’ve ever met lifted my top and drew a large black spot to the right of my belly button with a permanent marker. It reminded me of the Black Spot in Treasure Island; the mark of betrayal for any pirate. Would I want it above my trouser line or below? The nurse said they draw the dot so that the surgeons know where to put it. She told me about shops that sell fancy underwear especially for stoma wearers and that often people give them funny names. One patient called his Boris Johnson, ‘because it’s full of shit’. I’d come alone to this appointment, not thinking it might be one where having support would be important. She got out a four-page pamphlet and showed me the first real life picture I’d ever seen of a stoma without the bag. I apologised as I felt teary suddenly. For some reason I’d always focused on the bag part, not the pink rubbery protrusion. I hadn’t realised it was literally your intestine coming out of your middle. Without the bag, it looked like a dog’s erection coming out of a stomach. As I instinctively held my middle, I thought about how ridiculous it was that so many people still think that endometriosis is just painful periods.

In the car park another patient saw me wiping away tears and asked: ‘Can I give you a hug?’ As I shifted my body weight to adjust to a stranger’s arms, she said ‘I promise you it gets easier’. That afternoon I delayed any surgery for a few months. The Black Spot kept appearing, unwanted, before my eyes.

A few weeks after the stoma conversation, we had our first chat with an adoption social worker. We were nervous divulging every aspect of our lives and particularly sharing the vulnerabilities around my health, but we were also excited. The lady on the phone suggested bringing my bowel and excision surgery forward. ‘A child experiences the illness of a parent as a loss and an adopted child will have already experienced a lot of loss in their life. Major surgery could be taken as a red flag in your application’. Trying to swallow the defensive streak around what I was feeling as an ableist sting, I let her words sink in. Illness as loss. Yes. I know that feeling. I had felt it in relation to my own life. The idea of my child feeling it too, because of me, was a hard pill to swallow. I felt both protective of my right to live with chronic illness and be a parent, but I could also see that trying to be as well as I could be would enable a child to feel safe and secure. So, the surgery had profound and possibly life-altering risks but not having it did too.

An unnatural paradox was beginning to form in my head: to have the best chance of becoming a mum, I needed to remove my womb.

As I shifted my body weight to adjust to a stranger’s arms, she said ‘I promise you it gets easier’

The day after visiting Mên-an-Tol we make a trip to the small village of Zennor, where D.H. Lawrence briefly lived. Walking towards the church there, St. Senara, I remember going to Bristol Cathedral during IVF the year before. Halfway through that process, in a hormonal fog, I had found myself heading to the cathedral. I lit a candle, knelt and prayed in my own misshapen agnostic millennial way. I then wandered around taking photos on my iPhone of all the baby Jesuses, on embroidered cushions and gilded statues – as if their digital capturing might conjure up some kind of magic. I mean, Mother Mary had a baby, and she didn’t even have to have sex. But it turns out iPhones aren’t magic. We only got one egg and it didn’t make it, which meant no backup. Excision surgery on my ovaries would be the end of our fertility journey.

In St. Senara’s Church I seek out the mermaid chair, a 15th century slab of ancient oak, whose arms depict a love story of the mermaid who lured Mathy Trewhella into the sea. An inversion of the little mermaid story, it was in fact the local man’s singing voice that first captured the mermaid’s heart. My heart was first captured by my partner’s voice too. He stood in front of a crowd at a storytelling gig in an old medieval tower in Hackney.

I remember him holding the room saying something about a tree and some treasure, but mainly I remember the sound of his voice. That was over ten years ago now, and I’ve often felt guilty that our love story led us into the choppy waters of endometriosis, with all its associated grief.

My partner has taught me that looking to fairytales and legends can sometimes help find a path through life’s harder parts and the mermaid of Zennor doesn’t have an unhappy ending. Some years after Mathy followed his love to the underwater realm, a local fisherman was out at sea and heard a voice from the water: ‘Tell your captain to haul up your anchor. It’s lodged against the door of my home on the seabed, and I can’t get to Mathy and the children.’ The village of Zennor was told the news and rejoiced. Somehow, under all that water, Mathy Trewhella had learned to breathe.

I sit on the mermaid chair and take a deep breath. I discovered Tonglen meditation in the darkest days of early pain flares and it was one of the only survival tools that really worked. You breathe in the hard stuff – the hard feeling – and you breathe out what you hope for instead. Then you do the same for all the other people that might be having this experience. And there will be many. So, I breathe in all the medical trauma of the last few years and breathe out something softer and kinder. And then I breathe in all the people out there who are childless not by choice; my endo sisters, their hot sticky pain, and breathe out the strength to keep open and loving in the face of illness and loss. And then I make a decision, not because the consultant or social worker told me to, but because healing is partly about believing that, above all else, you deserve to be well.

My excision surgery is set for early December. If the Black Spot becomes a reality, I will see it as our breathing apparatus.

Dark Mountain: Issue 27

Our spring 2025 issue is a hardback collection revolving around bodies, human and creaturely, plant and mineral, in an era of planetary breakdown.

Wild Animal Tales - Cecily

2025-04-25T19:00:40.000Z

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya | Paris Review | 24th April 2025 | U

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

For Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who spent much of her childhood in Stalin’s Soviet Union shuttling between orphanages, Young Pioneer camps, and tuberculosis sanatoria, storytelling began as a form of survival. “Every night before bed I’d tell the whole ward a scary story—the kind that makes people hold their breath,” she told me when I interviewed her for The Paris Review’s new Spring issue. Petrushevskaya, who was born in 1938 in Moscow, went on to become a prolific writer, a darling, she says, of the noosphere, a cloud that dictated stories to her “down to the final phrase.” Beginning with her collection Immortal Love, which came out in 1988 and immediately sold out its first run of thirty thousand copies, Petrushevskaya has published dozens of collections of prose, drama, and fairy tales. A mother of three and, subsequently, a grandmother, Petrushevskaya was also always making up stories for her children. From 1993 to 1994, she published a series called Wild Animal Tales in the daily magazine Stolitsa. They feature a cast of recurring characters, including Hussein the Sparrow, Lev Trotsky, Rachel the Amoeba, a.k.a. MuMu (who splits into Ra (Mu) and Chel (Mu)), Officer Lieutenant Volodya the Bear, Zhenya the Frog, Pipa the Foreign Frog, and many, many others. As usual, Petrushevskaya’s work resists easy categorization; while all these creatures are childlike and cute, the things they get up to are squarely adult. How much should a child know about the prevalence of infidelity among mosquitoes? How old should she be when she learns about cockroaches, bedbugs, and flies huffing inhalants? In any case, it is never too late to find out the truth about the creatures who live among us.

—Bela Shayevich

A Domestic Scene

When Stasik the Mosquito fell for Alla the Pig, she wouldn’t even look at him. She just lay there, totally nude on the beach, fanning herself with her ears—he was too scared to even try to fly up to her.

Stasik laughed bitterly at his bad luck and his weakness. Meanwhile Alla the Pig had just one thing to say to him: “I know your type!”

Stasik pleaded that he only ever had nectar, only his female relations drank blood, he never touched the stuff. Alla the Pig, whose physique was as vast as all our wide-open spaces, was having none of it. She refused to let Stasik land on her, not for just one little second. She had this terrifying habit of making her whole body quiver that caused the hovering Stasik to fall straight out of the air as though he’d been struck, but never struck dead, which was exactly what had him so hooked—he kept on falling and falling, but he could never hit bottom.

Finally Stasik’s wife, Tomka, showed up to collect him; enough was enough. She tried to show Alla who was boss, which instantly landed her on the receiving end of an ear thwack. With the infinite patience of so many husbands before him, Stasik dragged Tomka off the battlefield, and on his way out, in passing, he finally managed to make a brief landing, brushing Alla’s incredible body with just the tips of his toes and immediately shooting back up like he’d been stung.

It turned out that Alla’s nudity had only been an illusion and that, in reality, she was covered from head to toe in a coarse stubble. Clutching his slender Tomka, the myopic Stasik took his wife home for the thousandth time, convinced for the thousandth time that there was no place like home!

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

Grandpa Eddie

The story of Edward the Leopard was a delicate, even ticklish, matter. Edward had once lived a life of leisure, racing through fields (at 160 kmh), savoring coffee and pastries, and nobody knew of his secret passion—aristocrats can be so secretive.

In the fields, Edward the Leopard had gotten a reputation among the mice for a game that he played with them using just one of his paws: tossing them up, catching them, and so on and so forth, all with only one paw.

It’s not that anything bad came of it for the mice. Edward took strict hygienic precautions, even washing his paw beforehand, but nevertheless, those mollusks from Greenpeace got word of his proclivities via a telephonogram from some mice, the parents of a certain Sophie, who’d gone to Edward’s for a quick tumble and never came home.

The mollusks sprang into action, swimming around with their banners, shooting their flares, and Edward couldn’t make heads or tails of the situation. It turned out that Sophie the Mouse, having gotten herself into Edward’s house, had chewed a hole in his dresser, hidden in one of his socks, and made a nest in which she gave birth to a litter—apparently her time had come.

The leopard was forced to adopt fifteen mice, including Sophie’s parents and grandparents going back three generations—and who could tell them apart?

However, Edward categorically refused to marry, insisting that neither the children nor the grandparents were his brethren. He even demanded blood tests (a fool’s errand), grumbling about genera, species, classes, and families, and in the end he got his way. Mstislav the Bedbug took everyone’s blood, although in the process he got so drunk on it that he answered “yes” to all subsequent questions, including those regarding the age and sex of the leopard.

The attorney Alla the Pig demanded Edward’s extradition and negotiated for alimony.

But Sophie’s kids grew up very quickly, they all intermarried, and the question of alimony became moot because the subsequent generations of mice continued living with Grandpa Eddie. Even now, whenever the mice go to the movies, they always make him babysit their kids, all of whom he scrupulously tosses up in the air with his one freshly washed paw.

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

On the Road

Mstislav the Bedbug and Maxim the Cockroach were on the train and decided to ward off the boredom of travel with a can of pesticide. But how were they going to split it?

Mstislav the Bedbug insisted it had to be divvied up by the millimeter. He proposed opening the can using a diamond—he had inherited it from his father, who had been executed.

Maxim the Cockroach thought it unwise to try cutting into the can itself, but how else were they to proceed?

Just then Domna Ivanovna the Fly took a seat in their compartment, but although she too was a lover of pesticide, she couldn’t remember how one was supposed to partake.

They decided to toss the can out the window, then disembark at the nearest station and see what shook out. But then the fly flew out the window with the can, which was just like her, and so by the time Maxim hitched a ride in a Mercedes that happened to be going that way, Domna Ivanovna had already stripped down to her underwear and was crawling around on all fours, her fifth and sixth legs having given out, but what can you say—a party’s a party!

As for Mstislav the Bedbug, he got so impatient that he jumped out of the Mercedes before the end of the line and walked behind it the whole way, slowly imbibing the fumes.

By the time he found the party, having huffed more fumes with each step he took, Maxim the Cockroach was dead to the world, leaning against the dented can with his whiskers curled into tight spirals.

Some random village folk had joined in too and were passed out next to Maxim. And Lenka the Ant, who’d happened to be wandering by with his flock of lice, as well as the soldier beetle Andreyich, lay there entwined with his wife, Verka.

The party had been a solid success, only now Maxim had nobody to talk to about his murdered family members, and so he began to sing “The Bed Was Made,” with lyrics by Yevtushenko.

Pedicure

One day Nikolavna the Caterpillar decided to change her gender and so she went to the hospital.

They bandaged her up and discharged him as Kuzma the Butterfly. The butterfly managed to fly out the door, but day after day he kept having to feel at his mustache, which kept growing fuller, wistfully reminiscing, as he circled the air, about his past on the ground.

He was now forced to travel ceaselessly, dragging his luggage behind him; airports, passports, suitcases, a razor, a pipe, long johns, six slippers, and always the greasepaint: everything always had to be handsome now!

Kuzma started to get some attention, for example from that sparrow Hussein, who offered him passionate fraternal friendship.

But something was off. Hussein was a bit too ardent for his new friend, and the shy Kuzma stopped even coming to the phone when it rang. Really, despite the mustache and the pants, Kuzma still called himself Nikolavna and, in moments of loneliness, gave himself pedicures.

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

A Doorm

Edward the Leopard’s mother Galya couldn’t get ahold of her son. She decided to go to the post office (traveling 170 kmh) and send him a letter containing the essential points:

(1) hello (2) how are you, you are impossible to get ahold of (3) what do you mean “fine” (4) this is not news to your mother (5) it is high time you came up with something new to say (6) you’re always busy (7) so that’s why ) and where (9) don’t go running around there, the fields are dangerous (10) yes, for you (11) if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: you’re a klutz (12) but have you heard, I read in the paper that Hussein the Sparrow practically got his whole tail ripped out in the fields (13) fine, not his tail (14) then what (15) you never tell me anything (16) quit trying to hide things from your mother, I always find out (17) Edward, I can’t hear you, call me right back (18) hello (19) everyone laughs at me because I’m always the last to know (20) I’m a laughingstock (21) the article was confusing (22) so what happened then with Hussein the Sparrow, I can’t get over it (23) imagine yourself in his mother’s shoes (24) yes, I care about it as a mother and as a wild animal (25) how come (26) what’s wrong with me knowing (27) I swear I won’t tell anyone (28) what do you have against Caleria the Cuckoo (29) she is the only one who ever visits me (30) nobody needs me, an old (and here, the ink runs on the word “hag” ) (31) hag and (ink running on “nothing but”) (32) an old hag, I can hardly get around anymore, I go 100 kmh, tops (33) we can all tell where this is headed (34) the fact that you care more about Hussein than your own mother (35) and since when are you friends with that sparrow (36) Eddie, you’re nothing but a doorm (ink running on “at”). (37) and here comes Hussein, he will tell me himself (38) gotta run, bye! (39) Call me! (40) Hussein! Looking good! (not you, goodbye)—YOUR MOTHER.

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

The End of the Party

Domna Ivanovna the Fly got a craving for something sweet and started bugging Leyla the Bee, who was on her way to the garden with six empty buckets.

But Leyla didn’t want to have Domna Ivanovna over and wouldn’t agree to visit her in the trash heap either.

“Big deal!” Domna Ivanovna said and flew off into the house, where they were making jam.

But they were ready for her in there and even began trying to swat her with a wet towel.

This warm welcome made Domna Ivanova lose her bearings: she dropped into an open jam jar (three liters) and started sinking right to the bottom.

The jar was taken straight out to Domna Ivanovna’s homeland, where the fly was buried with great decorum, under all three liters of jam.

Huge numbers of Domna Ivanovna’s children gathered and the wake started, but after a while Domna Ivanovna climbed out of the jam and yelled up at Leyla, who happened to be flying by with her buckets all full, “Come on over! My treat!”

Leyla the Bee simply shrugged and replied that she didn’t need any of their slop.

However, just three minutes later Leyla was back with her buckets empty and the entire adult population of her hive with their own empty buckets in tow.

Over the protests of Domna Ivanovna and her many thousands of children, the bees worked, enraptured, until the very end of the workday.

“And where is the justice in that?” Domna Ivanovna asked Theophan the Worm, who had crawled up for some fresh air at sunset. “I invited everyone over, even those morons of labor the bees, then Alla the Pig showed up uninvited, broke down our fence, and ate everything. I barely made it out alive.”

“That’s how it always is at the end of the party,” posited Theophan the Worm.

The Careerist

Mstislav the Bedbug got a job as a lab assistant, but while he was still in training they wouldn’t let him do blood tests, focusing on other kinds of exams.

He dreamed of a promotion, imagining the moment he would work with a syringe, meanwhile confined to dripping the fluid with which he’d been entrusted, into thin sheets of glass.

The job wasn’t hard, but Mstislav had no opportunities for displaying his talents. At night he got depressed imagining the next day and all the smells that came with it.

“I want to take professional development classes,” he kept on repeating.

But there were still those who envied him: It was easy work, appetizing, you got clean green scrubs, and were up to your ears in the precious material, surrounded by smells. “You are nothing but a careerist, Msislav,” Domna Ivanovna the fly would say.

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

The Part

Klava the Roach decided she wanted to be in a movie so she called up her acquaintance Adrian the Mollusk.

It was as simple as that—Adrian asked her to be in a horror film, The Industrial Manufacture of Sprats in Tomato Sauce.

It was a background part, but they filmed on location by the Baltic Sea, and all of Klava’s friends saw her in the movie afterward. In one shot she lay (playing the role of a headless sprat) in a tin can, and the can began to slip, gained momentum, and suddenly there was an explosion—everything went flying into the air, with blood everywhere!

Klava laughed and laughed at her friends’ reaction: “It was only tomato sauce!”

Nina’s Defense

Hussein the Sparrow got very interested in Nina the Moth and started waiting for her after work, watching her from the bushes with his eyes aglow.

Nina lived modestly. She had no appetite for these kinds of twists of fate, especially considering Hussein’s reputation (first it was Domna Ivanovna the Fly, then Tomka the Mosquito, and then that awkward affair with Kuzma the Butterfly).

But there was something attractive about Hussein the Sparrow. He had nice eyes for one thing, and strong wings he would stretch forth from the bushes, and then there were his powerful, muscular, masculine legs.

To make a long story short, things started going the way they always do, until Tolik the Goat intervened.

He ate the whole bush that Hussein always hid in. (The goat had always had a hankering for that bush, but the Greenpeace mollusks had gotten in the way.)

So when everyone started whispering about Hussein the Sparrow (identifying features: mustache, yellow glasses), Tolik began devouring the bush with everyone’s approval and even caught one of Hussein’s claws in his mouth, mistaking it for a twig, which made Hussein drop his suitcase, which fell and broke open, revealing his suspenders, his address book, some hardboiled ant’s eggs, and other masculine sundries. For example a bag of dried horse dung.

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich.

Bela Shayevich is a writer, a translator, and an artist. Her most recent translation is Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia. Read her interview with Ludmilla Petrushevskaya here.

Eulogy To The Obits - Cecily

2025-04-25T19:00:40.000Z

Xander Balwit | Asimov Press | 21st April 2025 | U

With a litany of gene therapies and longevity medicine staving off biological death, those paid to write about it must reimagine their craft.

With death all but obsolete, Jamie’s life felt moot and emaciated. The Obituary Desk at The Times, where he worked, had turned into a ghost town he presided over with the bearing of a man who had given everything up for the bitter disappointment of a mine devoid of mineral riches. He would go on long walks around the deserted halls, choosing a different desk each day from which to work on whatever writing projects he could find. It was a shame, for death was what he liked writing about most.

Lives had been easier to frame when they’d been time-bound. A man at 60 is hardly the same man at 153, let alone 154, with how quickly things were changing. Happily, at least for Jamie, there were still the unfortunate saps who gave up the ghost to sheer accident or, lacking technological enthusiasm or a spirit of curiosity, elected to bow out early — or had never opted in to begin with.

Deaths were rare enough that when one was announced, those still employed in the Obits clamored, begged, and connived their way into a piece of the action. But after an ugly incident involving a bribe, a bottle of cognac, and the burning of an office chair, the holdouts had taken to drawing straws.

As luck would have it, Jamie drew the next reported incident. He didn’t know when exactly it would take place because chance, rather than age, had come to herald death’s arrival. No longer could one preempt those venerated elders whose lives had been haunted by finitude as now they sustained themselves through a regimen of drugs, diets, and therapies: products of the decades and countless billions poured into longevity medicine.

The call came a little after noon, just after Jamie had returned from the short walk down to his favorite cafe for his third cup of coffee that morning. The cafe line crept along at a glacial pace because their barista was one of the older task models — attractive, but inordinately slow — steaming milk with the rigidity of someone who detests babies but has found themselves holding a squalling one. There was an awkwardness about her that Jamie liked, a charm in the mechanical smile and uncanny valley of her handwriting on the cup he now tossed aside as he made his way out of the building to the scene.

Hurrying across the park, he could see the uprooted tree lying horizontally across the path before he saw the police tape. It had been a windy few days, and the weather-weakened roots had not been up to the task. Even with the body removed, the site was surrounded by onlookers, keen to see the aftermath of the lethal accident. A police officer stood consoling a blubbering woman, who described a powerful snap, a shriek, and a boot sailing into the freshly manured lawn. The boot still hung from her hand.

The manner of death had always been popular with Obit readers, who craved details, reveling in the drama of sheer randomness — the rotten branch, the freak lightning storm, the accidental tumble out a window. They now had the means to live hundreds of lives, but the unpredictability of their environments still posed a threat. And as safe as cities had come to be, any nature not battened down, any architectural feature not secured, still presented inhabitants with the only opportunity to join their ancestors the old way.

So while Jamie noted the details of the park — the marigolds in bloom and the predominance of Goldendoodles — he also wrote how the mangled body was extricated with only one shoe, hardly recognizable save for its lace.

Back in the office, Jamie began digging up all he could find on the dead woman. The shoelace belonged to Elena Kramer, whose public record placed her at somewhere between 84 and 168 depending on which program she had been operating on at the time of the accident. She had grown up in Jersey and was the oldest of her family to opt in, so that by the time she did so, she was already physiologically elderly. Perhaps this had contributed to her fatally slow egress from underneath the tree. While Jamie learned she had been a high-school music teacher before opting in, he could not find much in her profile to suggest a deep love of music. Instead, it seemed that she had spent her time ice skating. The terabytes he combed through showed years of exuberant gliding across wintered-over ponds and glacial streams until she could land moves befitting a 20th-century Olympian. Videos of Elena danced across his headset like beads of rain.

Jamie hadn’t realized how long he had been lost in the visualizations until his colleague Nils, a thickly accented Swede with an unruly mop of mouse-brown hair, knocked on his door.

“Dinner?” Nils asked.

It was customary that when one of the group received a call, they would celebrate the following Friday over oysters and ales down at Sydney’s. They liked Sydney’s because it was quiet. Even though most of their cohort had opted in, Jamie included, they felt a kind of sentimentality for those people and places that felt untouched by such choices. There were no screens at Sydney’s, only finger-softened menus, a rococo bar groaning under its fleur-de-lys, and a grandfather clock in the foyer, stuck forever at 7:13.

Jamie, suddenly aware of his hunger, stood up from his desk and stretched.

“Dinner,” he concurred.

“Have you put any words down today?” asked Nils, as they descended the wide stairway to the lobby.

“Just an opening line: ‘Elena Kramer, an ice-skater who once glided across piano keys with similar grace, died on Oct. 17th, 2076, when a tree brought her to her final rest in St. Catherine’s Park.’”

“To the point. Was she skilled?”

“Impressively human,” Jamie replied.

Jamie had seen better skating, of course, for everything in the sim was done at a superlative level. But it was rare to find such a human touch — little imperfections, such as turning the beginnings of a fall into a shotgun spin, were details that sims still fumbled or omitted. These signatures of a previous, unaugmented life were generally only achieved by those who had opted in late.

The October air smelled like wet newspaper and baking bread, and the cold scraped the men’s faces as they walked. Sydney’s was down a narrow street, where the colors of various neon signs clashed over the rain-slicked sidewalks. Sometimes Sydney’s daughter worked as a server, but she wasn’t there today. That suited Jamie just fine. Her glassy dark eyes and pouting mouth unnerved him and made him feel awkward. By all rights, he should be able to relate to her just fine. He had opted in, after all, and was able to access any and all manner of social decorum instantaneously. But the sim still struggled when dealing with some of the unaugmented — those with enigmatic expressions, the very old, and those with darker skin.

Jamie had another theory, too — that the sim was thrown off by looks of sheer contempt; perhaps the faces on which it was trained had been too adoring, too expectant, and too willing to be understood by the technology capturing their biometrics. Some of the training subjects may have been nervous of course, but none that truly loathed the program would have elected to help enable it. The sim lacked some crucial data underscored in Sydney’s daughter’s flashing eyes and disapproving smirk.

“Will it be the usual for you boys, then?” asked Sydney, advancing on the table smelling of fish and cigar smoke. “Or,” he asked, “are you too full from imagining the thought of dry-aged branzino and oysters? Maybe you already drank up in your head.”

Sydney, the proprietor and head chef, had not opted in and was aging about as well as a formerly heavy smoker and robust eater could. His brassiness and occasional outright hostility towards those who had chosen otherwise kept many prospective patrons at bay. He also knew perfectly well it didn’t work like that; they had to take in calories just as he did.

“The usual’s fine, Sydney,” they chorused.

Jamie felt the juice from the lemon he had been squeezing sting a cut he didn’t know he had as he listened to Nils and Amir gripe about the Obits. Amir, a few glasses of brandy in, was deep into his usual spiel.

“I’ve half a mind to kill ‘em myself. ‘Cept I know they’re likely decent folks, just like us in this room. Only you walk past ‘em, and they look right through you. ‘Course, we do it to them, too, when we’re running our programs. Only it’s so damn unsociable, really. I’ve half a mind to grab the nodes right from their heads. Maybe chuck ‘em into the harbor. Or better yet — chuck them and their nodes into the damn harbor. That way we might actually have something to write. Well, that doesn’t even matter, really, cause I’ll be quitting soon. Too much damn sentimentality in this job. And we’re running out of octogenarians and the accident-prone, anyway. Soon there won’t be people to be sentimental about.”

Jamie, Nils, and Harry moved their faces sympathetically, but they all knew it would be good if Amir quit. He was right. Obits had become unbearably slow. Jobs in and around the sim were inevitable. Why avoid them? And why focus on the very fact they had all shaken off with the arrival of the program? Jamie had been scared of death his whole life, and now he was obsessed with it — like a hypochondriac intent on watching his own surgery.

Nils, who had been fiddling with something on his watch, raised his head and slammed down his fist. The force sent the oyster shells rattling.

“Maybe we should be convincing people to opt-out,” he said.

The other men also shared this thought. But it somehow seemed a worse possibility than nudging the few remaining holdouts into the path of an oncoming train. Who would want to relinquish infinity? But they all knew that some people certainly did: people for whom any career in the world, any language, any woman, could not slake their boredom or frustration; those who felt like cheats or defectors; those who suspected their decision to opt-in had been an affront to God. Indeed, skeptics offered a long list of reasons. Reasons the men at the table had all written about before.

The answer didn’t come from them, however, but from Sydney. The barkeep had been listening from a high-backed chair at the counter, where he was busy peeling garlic, but now he materialized before them, dishrag over his shoulder.

“Good idea,” he boomed. “Too much fantasy is a drug. And a society on drugs is no society at all — only a simulacrum. Living one life slowly is good. You absorb it that way. Why anybody would want more is beyond me. Most people can’t even understand the life they’ve got. You get folks to opt out, I’d give 'em free drinks and hang a picture of you over my bar.”

As Sydney made his way back toward the kitchen, Jamie glanced at the spot he’d indicated. His eyes came to rest on the clock and, for the first time, he found himself wondering what had happened at 7:13 the day it stopped.

The building where Jamie lived ballooned into the skyline, unapologetically obstructing a large electrified billboard for various luxury baths. These baths hardly needed advertising. Almost everyone Jamie knew had a membership to such “safe zones,” where they could swaddle themselves from any unpredictability left in the outside world. There, in an atmosphere resembling a sanatorium crossed with an incubator, those who opted in could select from a carefully curated list of spa treatments, gene therapies, and other routine physical maintenance. The bath experience was so nice, in fact, that some people ran them in their sims even while there in a kind of infinite regress.

Jamie preferred the humbler comfort of his own apartment building.

Constructed in 2054, it had been a senior living facility boasting both high-quality care and kosher meals. Well past its glory days, its original residents had either died or opted in, leaving for the comforts of the more modern constructions uptown. Their rooms had been replaced by boutiques, kino machines, produce stalls, and cafes run by an unlikely slice of society — those who had never opted in and the working rich — as well as an assortment of robotic models, both general and task-specific.

Only two rooms were still occupied: Jamie’s and another belonging to Ms. Fitz.

Jamie had moved in because he’d been attracted to the building’s eccentricity, the reasonable rent, and the proximity to a few remaining centenarians whose passing might mean work (they had). Ms. Fitz, by contrast, had inherited the place from her mother. Now, in the very room where she had passed, Ms. Fitz kept a menagerie of canaries and a blind cat named Mavis. It had taken Jamie a while to figure out that Ms. Fitz had opted in because, outside her apartment, she never wore the nodes, headsets, or other devices favored by those in the sim. When he finally asked her, she let out a musical laugh and said, “When I am out, I like to occupy the world, such as it is.”

Though their rooms were on different floors, they made a point of seeing each other regularly. They caught up over coffee, as, having lived in Ankara for decades with her first husband, Ms. Fitz brewed it in the traditional Turkish style and served it in dented brass cups that Jamie loved. He would drink down to the grinds while listening to her tell stories about the physical places she had traveled. And while Jamie was skeptical that they could be all that different, Ms. Fitz was adamant.

“I have been back to Ankara in the sim, and it looks exactly as I remember,” she said. “The Mahaleb cherry trees outside my old house, the cracking paint on my neighbor’s shed … But it does not smell the same. They haven’t captured the quality of the air. Nor the right feeling of the sun on the skin. It’s close. But somehow, Turkey itself is lost.”

“What do you think the sim is good for then, if not modeling worlds?” Jamie asked.

“But it is skilled at modeling worlds,” Ms. Fitz replied. “Only, endogenous ones. We get to know ourselves better. We can iterate faster and introspect more deeply, and there’s far less to miss. It’s as if we can experiment with being multiple people.”

Jamie mulled this over as he rolled his coffee grounds around the bottom of his cup, where they formed a little crater. He wondered if he ever experimented with being multiple people. Perhaps the best example of this was the day he opted in. He remembered the first couple weeks of headaches as his brain assimilated to its quicker processing speed. He remembered the gluttony of those hours (days?) spent on the couch sampling different personalities and simulating far-flung cities.

He could never get used to the queasiness, though, that came with ceaseless exploration, preferring one identity at a time. However, even so, one often blended into the next, as when his interest in steel-frame construction vaulted him into civil engineering. Jamie didn’t remember these as fully distinct eras, but he did recall a palpable sense of evolution.

As Jamie drifted off that night, he wondered about the death of those transitional selves, left behind as one moved from the world as it was to the world in the sim, or between programs, fields of study, partners, cities, and interests. These, it dawned on him, were no less significant than the passage between biological life and death.

Pulled by the idea, Jamie tottered from his bed, shadow flickering across the fins of his radiator as he made his way over to his desk. When he booted up his computer, his unfinished Obit for Elena Kramer illuminated his face.

“Elena Kramer, an ice-skater who once glided across piano keys with similar grace, died on Oct. 17th, 2076, when a falling tree brought her to her final rest in St. Catherine’s Park.”

Jamie frowned. “Her final rest.” That much was true. But she had had others. He knew she spent her early life instructing high schoolers on how to hold a bow, printing sheet music in moldering teacher’s lounges by day, and listening to symphonies in the inky black of her large bed by night. Then she had opted in — a death! And traded music for the ice — another death!

Indeed, the more he examined her life the more deaths he found.

By the time Jamie heard the mourning dove outside his window skittering across the metal gutter, the triviality of Elena’s biological death had become clear. The obituaries Jamie wrote could do nothing to influence or affirm their subjects, but they might if only he wrote them earlier.

The transitional deaths were the meaningful ones.

The Obituaries Desks at The Times had turned into a boom town. From Jamie’s office, he could hear the constant clacking of keys and shuffling of shoes as reporters traipsed in and out. The rapidity with which people changed in the sim meant constant work, yet — this bothered no one. The ceremony of marking the transitions between selves was electrifying. And where Jamie and his colleagues used to have to seek out tragedy, self-reported triumph now sought them — A doctor wanting an obituary on his transition into marine ecology. A former postal worker wanted notice for having turned physicist. A newlywed couple sought an obituary for their former single-selves. Jamie himself kept a running obituary of his own open on his desktop. And while he did not add to it as quickly as others, he ended each eulogy with an ellipsis — three small dots that signaled that so long as he lived, more deaths would follow …

Listen to a behind-the-scenes interview with the author on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Xander Balwit is editor-in-chief of Asimov Press.

Cite: Balwit, X. “Eulogy to the Obits.” Asimov Press. DOI: 10.62211/28he-94ty

Artwork by Martine Balcaen at sure.ai.

The Timeless Allure Of Tintin's Aesthetics - Cecily

2025-04-25T19:00:40.000Z

Ryan M. Allen | College Towns | 6th January 2025 | U

The Adventures of Tintin officially entered the public domain in 2025. We now all own the alluring aesthetics of this timeless classic.

The Adventures of Tintin was a Belgian comic by the artist Hergé that ran from 1929 until 1976. As the first publication, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, is now over 95 years old, the character has entered the public domain in the US as of Jan. 1, 2025.

For those unfamiliar, Tintin is a journalist who travels the world solving various mysteries and cases. He’s joined by a cast of eccentric characters to help him along the way, like Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Thomson and Thompson, and of course his little dog Snowy.

Given this auspicious addition to our collective ownership, I wanted to celebrate Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin as a valuable cultural heritage that remains an enduring timeless classic. The comic’s aesthetics, themes, and global reach make it alluring to readers young and old today.

Timeless Aesthetics of Hergé Urbanism

Tintin is timeless. I use timeless here not as a feeling of modernism. Nope, it feels very of a different time and place. Instead, timelessness in the case of Hergé means the beauty and allure of his aesthetics remains unanchored to the era.

The panels and pages within Tintin are filled with an ephemeral old world that doesn’t really exist anymore (if it ever did). Hergé creates a sense of scaled urbanism as well as the naturalistic world in fantastical yet real places.

The color palettes and details give it a mood and atmosphere that has universal appeal. Dark-drawn outlines allow the colors to pop off the page, called “European ‘ligne claire’ style,” according to cartoonist Barry Deutsch.

These stills are from comic panels, but they are also works of art with aesthetics immediately recognizable. They give a range of emotions: a new adventure begins in the bustle of a big city, the immensity of a mountain range, the calmness of home.

From Tintin in America.

From The Blue Lotus.

From Tintin in Tibet.

Tintin longingly gazing at the skyline of New York City offers a familiar whimsy. The sense of adventure in the Shanghai presented in The Blue Lotus is the same one we may feel simply wandering around a new city, especially in a foreign country. Even the natural settings in Hergé’s work offer recognizable immensity and awe.

There are countless other emotive experiences emanating from the pages of Tintin that relate to our humanistic instincts for beauty and appeal. It’s through this aesthetic that PaulSkallas aka LindyMan proclaimed, “Tintin is basically the only lindy comic you'll find.”

Inspiring Travel and Learning

As a kid, Tintin’s own globe-trotting adventures helped to plant the seed into me to see the world. The world seemed bigger in the age of Tintin. There was no internet (obviously) and travel was mostly done on large passenger ships. There is a romanticism still emitting from the mystery of the era.

Just look at some of the exotic locales in the titles of the series. Yes, ‘New York’ was probably still exotic for little Belgium children in the 1930s. The city still is for some people!

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
Tintin in the Congo
Tintin in America
Cigars of the Pharaoh
Land of Black Gold
The Red Sea Sharks
Tintin in Tibet
Tintin in Tibet
Tintin and the Picaros

Overall, Tintin’s adventures span the globe. In a lot of ways, it might be the first depiction that some children see of these locales. True, there are instances that may grate the modern sensibilities—these are still part of the learning process. Even Hergé himself grew in his depictions and understanding of the various peoples and cultures he was sketching.

My favorite in the series, The Blue Lotus, was inspired by a young Chinese student who was studying art in Brussels in the 1930s. Chang Chong-chen and Hergé became close friends, giving the Tintin comics a more sympathetic insight into Chinese life and the reality on the ground in Shanghai during this tumultuous period.

Teaching History Through Tintin

The works are stylized versions of a jam-packed era in the 20th century, building intrigue to a geography, a people, and history. Tintin is a keyhole to explore and study more. That can mean actually going to these places for visits, or just learning more about them from textbooks.

Educators have also been using Tintin to teach history. Given the imagery and allure, the panels and material capture student attention when competition for that attention is at an all-time high. Despite being almost a century old, the kids still know Tintin, empathizing with the story themes and artwork.

Nathan Goldwag, who writes on history at Goldwag’s Journal on Civilization, published an intriguing essay exploring the theory on how Tintin helped prevent World War II from happening in the Hergé universe. You’ll have to read the full essay to find the answer.

While my old history professor John Delury used to tell me, “Historians don’t do conjecture,” knowing the detailed intricacies of history is a must when considering alt-history. Goldwag’s essay walks through the real historical incidents, comparing them to what happens in the fictionalized world of Tintin.

In fact, Tintin himself stumbles upon a thinly-fictionalized version of the Mukden Incident false flag attack on the South Manchuria Railway. But that’s where things get interesting.

In our timeline, the Imperial Japanese Kwantung Army invaded and occupied Manchuria in 1931, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo. A League of Nations investigation, known as the Lytton Report, condemned the invasion, leading to the Japanese withdrawal from the League.

This is a fun way to learn about aspects of history. Attaching the comic with history lessons makes it more memorable for learners, especially topics as packed as the world was from the 1920s to 1960s when much of the Tintin series was published.

A Kid’s TV Show That Holds Up

Have you ever gone back to a TV show or movie you liked as a kid and realized it was terrible? This is not the case with The Adventures of Tintin. The TV show was released in 1992 and can now be found on Amazon Prime. The open credits still get me amped for a globe-trotting adventure.

The themes in the series remind me more of Indiana Jones than other comparable cartoons of the era. That makes sense as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were inspired by pulp comics of the same era. The comparison between the two adventurers is even poked fun at on the r/Tintin subreddit.

I remember watching the show as a kid thinking it was unlike anything else I had been watching. While each episode is a brisk 21 minutes or less, the plots do not just conclude with each one. The arcs of Tintin’s adventures span across multiple episodes, more akin to modern serialized TV that was popularized in its Golden Era with Sopranos and The Wire.

The Adventures of Tintin, in that case, was ahead of its time in terms of TV generally, but also because it was targeted at kids. It did not dumb down the content for 8-year-olds. We were watching Tintin look for opium or uncovering international conspiracies in the 1990s just like comic readers in the 1940s.

Modern Meme-ability

Tintin has survived across generations. It likely was first geared at the Silent Gen or Greatest Gen during its early run, then later to Boomers during its core years, Gen X and Millennials with the cartoon, and now to Gen Z with the movie. New generations of fans are continually discovering the old works.

The character and series still get posted quite a bit on social media. Impressive for a 90-year-old piece of media. In one case, I see the following gag posted almost every week. It perfectly captures the mood that some incident-packed weeks have that seems all too common these days.

People love posting this on particularly crazy weeks.

However, the panel is real, but the texts are not. In the original, Tin Tin meets Captain Haddock for the first time in The Crab with the Golden Claws, accusing him of opium smuggling. According to the Know Your Meme, the replaced text is a gag from the TV show 30 Rock.

The relatable meme is not the only thing that goes viral from Tin Tin. The artwork and offshoot inspirations, too, constantly capture new audiences simply through their aesthetics and mood.

Vintage.stuff posted this scene in September and got over a million views. The atmosphere of the fall season can perfectly be felt in this walkable European neighborhood. Tin Tin is putting on his jacket, the leaves are browning and falling to the ground, the air tinged orange, I can almost smell autumn in this drawing.

Work via Vintage.stuff.

Honorable and Horrific Homage to Hergé

Real artists making original homages to Hergé have kept the character alive. I can appreciate people being inspired to create their own pictorials that capture the same sense of wonderment as the original Tintin. After all, the cartoon I love is technically a new adaptation, too.

Still inspiring real artwork today, via MostlyPrint in Brussels.

I can even admit I enjoyed the CGI Tintin film that was released in 2011 (even if I think the traditional cartoon aesthetics are superior to computer-generated versions). The Spielberg film at least managed to keep the general spirit and sense of adventure expected from the classic.

While I am excited that we all suddenly own Tintin together, I do understand that the work can now be misused and abused. Artists in Europe have already been fighting to protect the copyright of Tintin to keep the artwork away from large language models (LLMs) training various AI algorithms. With the character entering the domain in the US, it is now open season on Tintin.

Tech companies like Microsoft and OpenAI have no doubt used the work by Hergé to train their AI content generation machines and tools. AI art sites are already promoting Tintin-style work and Google Images is awash with the same kind of AI imitations.

From Google Image.

Tintin will live on. The inspiration fuels real human artists across the world to continue imagining and building on the legacy of Hergé. The flip side is that Tintin will also survive through supercharged copying of AI slop. This puts even more impetus to cherish and value the original works that we now all collectively own.

I asked X to make a Cybertruck ad in the form of Tintin. Sorry.

Tales Of The Yucca Man - Cecily

2025-04-25T19:00:40.000Z

Ken Layne | Longreads | 25th April 2018 | U

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Ken Layne | Desert Oracle | Winter 2015 | 11 minutes (2,903 words)

The story you’ll hear most often goes like this: There’s a young Marine on guard duty in some far-off corner of the massive Twentynine Palms desert training base. He hears an awful sound in the dark, something like a growl. Then, the breathing, coming from one side of his lonesome little guard booth and now from the other.

It’s circling him.

He steps out into the dark, his sidearm drawn. There it stands, eight feet tall, an unbearable stench from its hairy body, the eyes glowing like red coals.

Sometimes, the Marine is knocked unconscious by the beast and found hours later by the next shift. One version occurs at the old rifle range, where the watchman — also armed with a rifle — wakes from the assault to find his weapon bent in half.

Since the 1970s, when the Mojave Desert base expanded from its World War II encampment, there have been regular reports of new recruits terrorized by both the Yucca Man and pranks inspired by the tales. But most sightings of the spectral creature come from campers and hikers at Joshua Tree National Park. Tents have been opened in the night by stinking monstrosities, and there is an occasional large footprint or blurry photograph submitted as evidence. A snapshot from the Hidden Valley campground has made the rounds for a decade now: The figure bounding over the boulders looks much like the iconic Bigfoot from the Patterson–Gimlin film of 1967.

A photograph of the alleged Yucca Man from the 1990s.

Since the 1960s, when tales of Yucca Man and his desert cohorts were commonly reported by Southern California newspapers and television stations, amateur “cryptozoologists” and Bigfoot researchers have analyzed the blurry pictures and measured the prints in the sand, all in the effort to document a flesh-and-blood creature they believe exists alongside everyday mammals such as bears, coyotes, and humans.

But the Natives who lived in California long before European colonization considered these creatures to be supernatural entities, with names that often translated to “hairy devils.” They took care to avoid the gloomy spots where the devils were often seen.

The Tongva People living around the Santa Ana River called the devils’ hideout east of the river’s source in the San Bernardino Mountains the Camp of the Takwis, pronounced the same as the Tahquitz known to the Cahuilla of Agua Caliente. According to John Reed Swanton’s The Indian Tribes of North America, “Takwis” also survives as a site name at the head of the Santa Margarita River, at Temecula Creek. Throughout Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, you’ll see it spelled Tahquitz — the angry specter’s unhappy home in the region is the cursed Tahquitz Canyon.

Sometimes the Takwis or Tahquitz played a role in creation stories, as in Cahuilla culture. Other times the creature was an omen, or simply something weird in the wilderness that should be avoided. To the Cahuilla, the Tahquitz could be the “original shaman” and a murderous monstrosity that collected victims from Tahquitz Rock (or Lily Rock). “Tahquitz has also been said to manifest as a large green fireball moving through the night sky,” the website Weird California reports.

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That coastal and desert Indians should know the same creature is not in itself cause for skepticism: Under various names and dressed in myriad traditions, Yucca Man has been reported in the wilder parts of Southern California as long as people have lived here.

In Fontana, that hard and wind-blown Inland Empire town, there was a famed racetrack north of Foothill Boulevard called Mickey Thompson’s Fontana Dragway. From 1955 to the dragway’s closure in 1972 following a gruesome series of fatal crashes, spectators repeatedly saw something they called the ‘Speedway Monster.’ Assumed to be a “wild man” resident of the foothills of the nearby San Bernardino Mountains, it had the habit of crossing the rural land at the dragway’s edge, during car races that produced horrific noise.

In the new suburbs of Antelope Valley, encounters with the Mojave Sasquatch reached epidemic levels from the late 1960s through late 1970s, as new housing developments in Lancaster and Palmdale pushed into the wild desert and secret technology was tested at Edwards Air Force Base and Lockheed’s notorious Skunk Works facility.

The Antelope Valley Daily Ledger-Gazette described the common features of the eyewitness reports in a staff report from June 1973 beneath the headline “Bigfoot Surfaces Again In Palmdale, Nine-Mile Canyon.”

According to reporter Chuck Wheeler, “the creature likes to run around houses and leaving footprints. That is its MO in the East Lancaster area where footprints were found around several houses recently. One woman reported that the creature ran around her house and scratched at the door. A small boy sent to tell his father supper was ready was found hours later crying near the corral. When asked what happened to him, he answered that a big, furry man would not let him pass.”

Southern California encounters were common enough in the 1970s to keep multiple Bigfoot-investigation groups busy taking reports. In March of 1973, a babysitter and three Marines — separately, we presume — reported seeing the sasquatch in Lancaster. Nerves were frayed to the point that two separate vigilante groups searching for the monster nearly killed each other two months later, according to the files of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization:

In May 1973, a search party in Lancaster attempting to follow up on several ‘Big Foot’ reports was forced to take cover when another party on the same sort of search panicked and started shooting when they thought they were being approached by a large creature. Fortunately, no one was injured.

In recent years, the hair-covered red-eyed “Sierra Highway Devil” has been repeatedly spotted by terrified drivers on Highway 14 near the junction with Pearblossom Highway, always at night, always running along or across the road.

The strangest tales come from Edwards AFB itself. The desert base adjoins the massive Rogers Dry Lake, with its miles of smooth desert runways, and is famed for its “Right Stuff” test pilots and landings of NASA’s space shuttles. There is significant subterranean infrastructure at Edwards AFB, with the personnel and technology required to keep secret aircraft a secret. Security cameras were always pointed at sensitive areas. According to persistent stories from Edwards, those cameras repeatedly captured images of desert sasquatch moving through the tunnels by night. Entire families of the hairy monsters apparently traveled the base’s buildings and corridors, appearing and disappearing at will, and to the bewilderment of base police sent chasing after the phantasms.

With the report of Edwards Bobbie Ann Slate, that tireless Bigfoot researcher, collected this report from the base policeman, who was patrolling the old “sled track” section of the base where the notorious Thelemite wizard and Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder Jack Parsons tried out his rockets, and where Nazi V-2s had once been tested on a specially built railroad:

Heading back to the main base, I noticed maybe 200-300 yards to my left, these large blue eyes. I do a lot of night hunting and it was strange — they were larger than anything I’d ever seen before. The [blue eyes] had to be about four inches apart and seven feet off the ground. I stopped the truck and sat there watching them. It was too dark to see any body shape to the thing. The blue glows proceeded toward my truck at a right angle for about 100 yards and then stopped.

As an overpowering stench filled the desert air, Sgt. House saw the huge blue eyes again, now just 50 yards away. “The movement of the eyes was extremely fast. Another thing that bothered me was that they didn’t bob up and down. It was like two lights on a wire moving from one point to another.” A radio call gave him a good reason to drive away fast.

Because of the ribbing he suffered after filing a report, others in the squadron refrained from making formal statements about their encounters.

But the encounters didn’t end. Not until 2009 would Edwards Air Force Base officially acknowledge the many incidents with “Blue Eyes” and other strange phenomena.

According to a 2009 article in the base newsletter, Inside Edwards, the entity known as “Blue Eyes” was much discussed at a reunion of the 6510th Air Police Squadron officers who worked on base between 1973 and 1979, known as the 6510th Desert Rats.

“Attendees traded memories of their bizarre experiences on patrol such as seeing ‘Blue Eyes,’ the local version of a Yeti near South Base or ‘Marvin of the Mojave,’ a ghost who could be heard but not seen and left size-10 sneaker imprints in the sand,” Lisa Camplin of the 95th Security Forces Squadron wrote in the official Edwards newsletter.

The now-retired Edwards guards also recalled “observing unexplainable objects in the skies [and] seeing disappearing tail lights on the dry lake beds.”

The Desert Rats’ motto, shared with the Air Force Test Center for which it served, was Ad Inexplorata, or, “Toward the Unknown.”

As with the padres’ old stories of “hairy monsters” living at a camp of devils along the Santa Ana and Santa Margarita rivers, written accounts of monsters in the Antelope Valley date back to the Spanish colonial era. Horace Bell, famed for his role in the frontier vigilante group called the Los Angeles Rangers, later wrote two influential history books about life in mid-19th century California. One of those, On the Old West Coast: Being Further Reminiscences of a Ranger, tells of a shadowy winged beast at Elizabeth Lake, that deep-water hole where the Sierra Pelona Mountains meet Antelope Valley. The “sag pond” was created by the San Andreas Fault, and successive generations have branded this generally welcome geographic feature—ample fresh water in the desert!—as a cursed place. Supposedly given its old Spanish name by no less a figure than Junípero Serra himself, the Laguna del Diablo held an awful creature, a beast that would fly in shadow form over the rancho from the 1830s—when early California legislator Pedro Carrillo (grandfather of actor Leo Carrillo) abandoned the place following a mysterious fire and general bad feelings.

The winged wraith flew over the hacienda of Don Chico Vasquez, a man unimpressed by the folklore surrounding the lake. It was his foremen who alerted the Don to the beast thrashing in the mud on the cursed lake’s shore. He saw it, too, but the creature vanished — whether into the lake or into the sky or into thin air, they never knew. Cattle and horses began disappearing shortly thereafter, with the eventual discovery of several carcasses leading to the belief that the devil in the lake had grown hungry for meat. As with the “hairy monsters,” the winged lake beast also assaulted the rancho with its vile stench.

Don Chico Vasquez had enough, selling cheap to Miguel Leonis, the “Big Basque” known as the “King of Calabasas.” Leonis not only proposed to capture the lake monster that had bedeviled his Indian, Spanish and American predecessors, but he also planned to make money on the deal. The Big Basque contracted with the Sells Brothers Circus, which operated across the country from its base in Columbus, Ohio, from 1862 to 1895. According to On the Old West Coast, Leonis’ contract with the Sells Brothers would have made him significantly richer, had the flying lake beast been captured:

That if the python is such as the party of the first part describes it to be, and if the party of the first part succeeds in taking it alive, then the party of the second part agrees to pay the party of the first part the sum of $20,000.

Instead, the winged snake flew east after being shot by the Big Basque’s hunting party. According to legend, this was the same “dragon” killed outside Tombstone, Arizona, in 1890. But evidence of the monstrosity’s corpse has proved elusive, and Elizabeth Lake remains “haunted” to this day.

While Yucca Man and its cohorts are often described as huge, hair-covered humanoids, there are nearly as many reports of shadow beasts lacking any real definition beyond their brilliant glowing eyes — often red, sometimes blue as in the Edwards AFB reports. Such brazenly paranormal entities have much in common with England’s “Owlman” and West Virginia’s “Mothman” — or the Mojave Desert’s own “Cement Monster.”

Anyone who has taken the scenic drive on Highway 18 from the West Mojave up to Big Bear Lake has driven past the huge concrete mine eating into the mountainside and national forest. Now owned by the Mitsubishi Cement Corporation and surrounded by security fencing, there was a time when many of the mine’s graded roads could be easily accessed from the two-lane highway.

In March 1988, two U.S. Marines returning from a day of snow skiing at Big Bear encountered the red-eyed shadow giant and pursued it into the strip mine. The former Marine, Ken Fox, sent his report of the incident to sasquatch researcher Douglas E. Trapp in Texas.

“From the left side of the road something very large seemed to stand up on two legs and run across the road,” Fox wrote. “The bottom half looked human, covered with hair. The top half wasn’t very visible, but appeared monsterish, scary in other words. The headlights only got the bottom half, and the damn thing ran out about 150 feet in front of us. It made it across the road in three strides. I distinctively remember seeing the arms pumping back and forth just like any of us would do if sprinting across the road in front of a car. It appeared to be 8 feet tall.”

What was it? Ken Fox’s buddy recognized it immediately: “It’s the Cement Monster! After him!” They briefly pursued, but having no luck continued back to base at Twentynine Palms. If the cement mine is still haunted by this monster, it is considerably more difficult for people to access the cuts in the mountainside today.

This transition zone between the transverse mountain ranges and the High Desert is rich with reports of similar monsters, from the beast seen as recently as 2012 at Devil’s Punchbowl to the sasquatch stalking hikers at Big Rock Canyon.

Yucca Man, too, is connected to these immense mountains via the Little San Bernardino range that runs from Joshua Tree National Park westward into the proposed Sand-To-Snow National Monument up to San Gorgonio and Barton Flats —generations of summer-camp kids have suffered sleepless nights as a diabolic forest monster lurked just beyond the cabins.

The harsh, hot badlands that comprise much of Anza-Borrego State Park are home to many strange and terrible stories of the creature that has been called “The Missing Link” and the “Borrego Sandman.” The Sandman has been seen by 20th-century gold hunters and rockhounds and is most often described as being an enormous primate with whitish fur and glowing red eyes.

The Missing Link sasquatch of Deadman’s Hole is reportedly a mass murderer.

Once the Gold Rush reached Southern California’s mountains and deserts in the later 1800s, prospectors and bandits quickly made the area home. Discoveries of gold at Julian and in the desert to the east brought many hopeful miners to the scorching San Diego County desert, and many stagecoaches loaded with suspicious characters. One of them, Peg Leg Smith, claimed to find and then lose a “mine” near the Salton Sea where gold nuggets could be picked up off the ground. And a couple of characters from Julian, Edward Dean and Charles Cox, claimed to have shot a sasquatch dead. An 1878 article in the San Diego Daily Transcript reported that the men had found and then killed the monster at Deadman’s Hole, northeast of Warner Ranch. Delivery of the mysterious creature’s corpse was promised, but it never appeared in San Diego. More than a century later, a Daily Transcript reporter named Herbert Lockwood went digging for the old story and found it appeared in an 1878 issue dated April 1.

It was March 1876 when a more credible report appeared in the San Diego Union. A man named Turner Helm claimed he saw a “missing link” near Warner’s Ranch (four miles south of present-day Warner Springs). Described as a bear-like giant with a human face, the report generated great interest because of the many unsolved murders at Deadman’s Hole, then a water stop on the Butterfield stage line.

The bodies had been piling up at the stagecoach stop’s waterhole for two decades, with the victims including a French-Basque shepherd, several dubious individuals on the run from the law or creditors, and a wealthy San Franciscan named William Blair.

Many of the victims were found with bruised and broken necks, their money or gold untouched. The last unsolved murder at the waterhole dates to 1922, when again a strangled victim was found there, 64 years after the first recorded murders at the hole.

Deadman’s Hole — “Deadman Hole” on modern maps — is located in a grove of live oaks about 15 yards east of California State Highway 79, an 8-mile drive up from today’s Warner Springs, just southeast of the place called Takwi at the headwaters of the Santa Margarita River.

The visitor to the Deadman’s Hole of today should look for the small, plainly lettered sign that reads “U.S. Navy Remote Training Area,” at an unmarked crossroads just before Sunshine Summit. As at Edwards and Twentynine Palms, here the Marines train side-by-side with the elusive sasquatch of Southern California’s wild lands.

* * *

This article first appeared in the fourth issue of Desert Oracle, the quarterly print magazine edited and designed by Ken Layne out of Joshua Tree, California.

Jinying Li, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai - International Journal of Communication

2025-04-25T17:46:57.000Z

Unwind with the Ancient Japanese Art of Kumiko, a Wood Joinery Technique - Colossal

2025-04-25T17:22:38.000Z

If you’re familiar with the Japanese art of wood joinery, you’ll likely find kumiko equally intriguing. The traditional craft emerged in the Asuka era between about 600 and 700 C.E. and similarly eschews nails in favor of perfectly cut pieces that notch into place. Intricate fields of florals and geometric shapes emerge, creating a decorative panel that typically covers windows or divides a room.

A video from The Process, a YouTube channel exploring various manufacturing sectors and hand-crafted techniques, visits the workshop of Kinoshita Mokuge. Viewers are welcomed into the meticulous, labor-intensive process of producing elaborate, interlocked motifs. Japanese Arts also offered a glimpse into this art form a few years back during an equally calming visit to Kurozu Tetsuo’s studio.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Unwind with the Ancient Japanese Art of Kumiko, a Wood Joinery Technique appeared first on Colossal.

The Indigenous Artists Prioritizing Community Over Virality—and Achieving Both - How Music Charts

2025-04-25T16:39:03.000Z

In the streaming era, music discovery happens at a breakneck speed. Spotify alone adds 100k new tracks each day. Yet, the songs that endure beyond editorial playlists often follow a slower arc, carrying with them memories of specific places and a loyal following.
Many Indigenous artists are embracing this long-game approach. They prioritize community over virality—and often achieve both.
Colorado-raised rapper and activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Québec-born violinist and composer Geneviève Gros-Louis, and Diné producer Cecil Tso of hip-hop collective Fang Over Fist are building careers centered on thoughtful, place-rooted engagement that rewards authenticity over churn.
Music rooted in place and purpose
Xiuhtezcatl, a climate organizer with Nahua roots, first broke through the noise via a simple video clip of his aunt braiding his hair while he sang in English, Spanish, and his Indigenous language of Nahuatl. That raw intimacy drove 100k streams of his music video for the single, “Careful,” in its first month.
“It reminded me to stay grounded,” he says. “All of a sudden all these people from Latin America and from the diaspora living in the United States were like, ‘Wait, I see myself in this.”
Xiuhtezcatl says his followers’ response was heightened by the fact that most ESL speakers in the U.S.—himself included—miss out on formal education in their mother tongue. “The conflict and the emotion in that clip—I haven’t been able to replicate it since,” he said.
The hip hop artist spent much of 2024 collaborating with Indigenous musicians in Ecuador and Peru, gaining new inspiration in the Quechuan territory of Sarayaku near Ecuador’s Bobonaza River. There, he teamed up with Quechua pop singer Renata Flores, whose viral rendition of Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” sung in her Indigenous language has reached over 2.2 million YouTube views in the past nine years.
In March 2025, Flores and Xiuhtezcatl released “SÍGUEME,” a trilingual track in Spanish, Nahuatl and Quechua that celebrates the shared experiences of Latin American and diasporic communities. Since its release, the song has boosted Xiuhtezcatl’s monthly listeners to over 50k.

The video opens in Quechua against a backdrop of the Andes. Xiuhtezcatl said he learned parts of Flores’ language and attempted to flow between dialects the way water flows through life on earth.

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A post shared by Xiuhtezcatl Tonatiuh (@xiuhtezcatl)

Xiuhtezcatl leans on author Adrienne Maree Brown and her guiding principle of prioritizing critical connections over critical mass for both his musical marketing and activism. Simply put, he is less interested in flashpoint fame than in creating something long-lasting.
He also points to artists like Tyler, the Creator as examples of artists who built a profound connection with their audience long before they were embraced by the mainstream.
“They were written off time and time again,” Xiuhtezcatl said. “It’s not appealing, it’s not marketable, it’s not all these different things. However, they hit these turning points where they became accessible to the masses, and it’s because of the depth of the connection with their core audience that that mattered. That’s what builds something real,” he said. “That’s longevity.”
That connection between survival and creativity is especially important for Indigenous artists. “A lot of Indigenous communities have survived because of oral storytelling,” he said. “Our oral histories are what has kept our cultures intact.”
Now 25, Xiuhtezcatl still sees a long road ahead, and he hopes to blaze a trail for others along the way. “I feel like I have so much to share and to leave behind… for other young artists who are aspiring to do this stuff,” he said.
He recently opened for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their Fighting Oligarchy tour, where he performed for an audience of 35,000. “To feel that energy and that level of connection with such a large audience was very astounding,” he said. Since the event, his Instagram followers have soared by over 30k, making it his most dominant channel across all platforms.

In that way, Xiuhtezcatl sees himself as a bridge. “I am a microcosm of the communities that I come from,” he said.
He sees a shift happening among Indigenous youth who are carving out space in mainstream music without letting go of who they are. “We’re not just these pieces of history we’re so often framed as,” he said. “We are part of contemporary culture. We are part of the future.”
Ancestral sounds in modern scores
For Geneviève Gros-Louis, a Wendat violinist and composer based in Los Angeles, longevity means honoring lineage and shaping how Indigenous stories are heard onscreen.
In recent years, she has scored more than 40 episodes for National Geographic, including "First Alaskans" and "Life Below Zero," both now streaming on Disney Plus. The network has submitted her work for Primetime Emmy consideration.
Even with this growing recognition, Gros-Louis stays grounded in her community and creates compositions with a historian’s ear. Her latest score for "Courage," a short film about Lumbee hoop dancer and Cirque du Soleil performer Eric Hernandez, includes a vocal performance from Hernandez’s uncle.
"The scene shows Eric embracing his culture," Gros-Louis said. “He’s doing this beautiful slow-motion movement with the hoops, and then his uncle’s voice comes in through the music. It’s meant to feel like his ancestors are with him—and it literally is his ancestor in the track. To have his actual uncle’s voice in that moment, his literal family, adds something lasting. I know 99% of people will not realize this connection, but it gives it a spirit and an energy that brings it to life.”
Gros-Louis brings to her work a degree in violin performance and a decade of orchestral experience. Still, she adds personal touches that would not be possible without her deep community ties. When producers of "First Alaskans" needed a specific drum sound tied to an Alaskan tribe, she sourced a custom recording directly from a friend working in an independent studio. That personal connection made all the difference.
When it comes to marketing, Gros-Louis says she doesn’t care much about follower counts: “I don’t have a huge following. I have, I don’t know, 9,000 something [on Instagram],” she said. “But it’s the quality over quantity.”
That quality has mattered. One of her most recent collaborations was with Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas, who is of Shoshone and Hopi descent. “All of those random connections are a result of the Indigenous telephone network,” she said. “Seriously.”
She says Instagram, not TikTok, is where those connections happen. She has more than double the followers on TikTok—over 23k—but said the platform doesn’t foster the same kind of creative dialogue. “It does not pass the vibe check,” she said. “The kind of interactions I’m having on Instagram are really deep and insightful. Artistic collaborations. Real connections.”
"That’s how Nat Geo found me," she added.

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A post shared by Geneviève Gros-Louis Salamone (@theonewomansymphony)

Music as community—not content
And Tso, a Diné rapper and producer based in the Southwest, crafts full-length albums alongside independent collaborators that explore themes of identity, place, and connection to his Navajo heritage.
For Tso, crafting an album is about emotional coherence. He shapes songs by the quality of emotions they evoke. “If it makes me feel something, I keep it,” he said. “If not, I scrap it. It’s that simple.”
Tso is a member of Fang Over Fist, a self-managed collective that functions as a label, production house and booking team. Based primarily in Arizona, the group includes collaborators across Utah and New Mexico, and maintains close ties to independent music circles such as Connecticut-based Fake Four Inc., which released "Finding Our Balance," Tso’s most personal album to date. Although the record was released under his name, he describes it as a collaborative project.

“I still had a team,” he said. “I wouldn’t do this by myself.”
Tso’s recording process is built on intuition. He plays instruments by ear—acoustic and electric guitar, bass, synthesizers—and builds songs one feeling at a time. “It’s not necessarily the composition itself,” he said. “It’s a feeling I follow until something clicks.”
While many artists track streams or social shares, Tso uses a combination of Bandcamp downloads, word of mouth and physical sales to drive engagement. “Spotify is easy to share, but Bandcamp is where the people who really care about music go,” he said. The group has sold CDs and cassettes at shows and hopes to put out vinyls in the future. “That’s how we fund what we do,” he said.

Finding Our Balance by Tsoh Tso

When “Finding Our Balance” dropped, Tso opted out of playlist submissions, PR campaigns and paid promotion. He says he wanted to see what would happen if the music traveled through relationships alone.
“I didn’t want it to be content,” he said. “I just wanted it to be an album. And I wanted people who listened to be real, with a genuine interest.”
The response has been slow and steady. Without a marketing budget, Tso says the album found listeners in Europe and earned a radio interview through Phoenix NPR-affiliate station KJZZ. The Navajo Times has also featured Tso in recent coverage.
Tso is now focused on building from that foundation. "I’m figuring out what comes next,” he said.
What the metrics don’t tell you
All three artists rely on the belief that numbers matter, but not at the expense of the connection their music fosters. In a moment when attention is a commodity, they are betting on the underlying but ineffable quality of “heart.” It may be impossible to quantify—but it’s indeed responsible for pulling focus.
Xiuhtezcatl, who says he leans heavily on Instagram’s broadcast channel feature to make himself available to listeners, enjoys analyzing the strategy behind successful drops. “I love the metrics of it,” he said. “I really enjoy deeply studying other artists, their rollouts, the way that they translate the attention of their audience into listeners, into fans, into ticket purchasers,” he said. But even with all that research, he doesn’t believe there’s a formula for what makes music truly resonate. “You can’t synthesize that [quality] in a lab,” he said. “You can’t generate it in a writing camp.”
His forthcoming album “Tōnatiuh,” coming in June, is named for the Nahuatl word for “sun.” Most of the visuals were filmed in southern Mexico City, where his family has ancestral roots.
Gros-Louis, too, has a new project on the horizon: “Wendat Indie,” a debut solo album slated for release in June. Supported by a grant from her community, the album reimagines traditional Wendat social songs that have been historically performed for friends and guests. The project features orchestral instrumentation with vintage wax cylinder recordings from more than a century ago, along with vocals from singers who incorporate the Wendat language.
“They’re very beautiful, uplifting pieces of music,” said Gros-Louis. “It's all about preserving the culture and keeping it alive for the next seven generations.” The album will be available to stream and download on the Huron-Wendat Nation’s website.
Like all musicians, each of these Indigenous artists have learned to navigate the industry on their own terms. So far, they’re betting on depth over virality and—perhaps most importantly—on the idea that the most lasting music bears witness to its listeners.

Pastor Of The Planet - NOEMA

2025-04-25T16:08:31.000Z

A light has gone out in our troubled world.
Pope Francis’ humility, compassion and message of universal human dignity stood in contrast to the political tide of arrogance, jingoistic nativism and intolerance sweeping the globe. At a time of ingathering national passions, this pastor of the planet insisted on including the cosmos in the polity.

As a spiritual guide, the Argentine pope’s love of all humanity was unbounded, emphatically reaching beyond the comfortable mainstream to the most marginalized in society, especially to migrants from what he called the “peripheries,” seeking to escape their suffering for a better life in the north.
Earthly borders did not divide his global flock, all of whom are God’s children. The mission of a faith that embraces every soul equally is aptly portrayed as you walk into the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. On the left side of the entryway is a large mosaic map without any border between the United States and Mexico.
In all this Pope Francis was the incarnate conscience of humanity, constantly reminding us, as he wrote in his autobiography, “Hope,” that we could not be fully human unless we empathized and cared for others unlike and less fortunate than us.
What he was not was a policymaker who had to consider the complexities of governing jurisdictions constituted through a social contract of citizens with historically cultivated identities and a sense of belonging, all bounded by borders.
When it comes to what makes us human, the great pluralist philosopher Isaiah Berlin had another idea. “Just as people need to eat and drink, to have security and freedom of movement, so too they need to belong to a group,” he told me in an interview once. “Deprived of this, they feel cut off, lonely, diminished, unhappy … to be human means to be able to feel at home somewhere, with your own kind.”
The reconciliation of these two definitions of what it means to be human can only take place where the moral ballast provided by Pope Francis meets the real-life cultural and fiscal constraints of societies.
While the mean-spirited demonization of immigrants one associates with the MAGA constituency has no place in our moral universe, we should be careful not to blithely ascribe racist or xenophobic motives to a defense of belonging.
On the other side, open hearts cannot naively translate into open borders. Avoiding the backlash that invites nativism entails aligning the humanitarian impulse with the political, economic and cultural realities of host countries.
Even in a mostly sanctuary state like California, the conflicts of interest over the costs of undocumented immigration are coming to a head.
As a gaping budget deficit looms, the state is spending more on medical care extended to all undocumented adults — $8.5 billion — than on the entire California State University system with 23 campuses and 450,000 students, for which $5.4 billion is allocated from the state general fund.
CSU is the main transmission belt of upward mobility in California, the top in the nation for lifting a mostly Latino population — the children of immigrants — from poverty into the middle class. It is also the state’s social infrastructure for the future: Its students come from the local communities where the campuses are located and go back there as nurses, teachers, law enforcement officers, environmental engineers and small business entrepreneurs.
The state cannot afford both gigantic expenditures. Something must give. This conundrum for the most progressive state in the U.S. underscores the limits and constraints on political jurisdictions when facing the scale of migrant flows in the world today. A similar set of issues beset Europe as well, from the Italian heel to the shores of Scandinavia.
The passing of Pope Francis does not diminish the power of the gospel he lived. But the light he emanated must be mediated by practical politics to be effective. Bad faith results from good intentions if the capacity to fulfill moral claims is lacking.

The post Pastor Of The Planet appeared first on NOEMA.

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-04-25T15:55:01.000Z

"I spent the better part of two days and nights listening to students answer questions at the Foy desk, where phones have been ringing since 1953, when James E. Foy, Auburn’s then dean of students, opened the line as a resource for students and then as a service to the public." —Emily McCrary for Oxford American
https://oxfordamerican.org/oa-now/the-alabama-landline-that-keeps-ringing
#Library #ReferenceDesk #Information #Education #Analog

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-04-25T15:37:14.000Z

Our Top 5:
- Conspiracy or coincidence?
- A warning from the water
- Rot as resistance
- Equine dynamics
- A short history of creativity
https://longreads.com/2025/04/25/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-560/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
#Longreads #Reading #Storytelling #Essay #Reporting #Journalism #Nonfiction

Post on Orion Magazine - Orion Magazine

2025-04-25T15:20:00.000Z
Sabrina Imbler sings. On the evolution of our own voices, from Orion's Spring 2025 issue. https://orionmagazine.org/article/key-changes/

Behind the Scenes - The Verge - Features

2025-04-25T14:00:48.000Z

On the first day of filming, a small crew set up in my parents’ house in Long Beach, California. We were shooting a short documentary about my parents’ experiences as Vietnam War refugees who were used as background extras in Apocalypse Now nearly 50 years ago. Though my parents played a variety of characters — translators, Viet Cong, drivers, POWs — they had no face time and no speaking parts. Director Francis Ford Coppola sought to authenticate his film by hiring Vietnamese extras. My parents were cast as background characters in a story they lived. We hoped the documentary would shift perspective, foregrounding their stories instead.

In the kitchen, I interviewed my mother. We’d always had an easy relationship. Though we had to schedule around her daily work, this part felt straightforward. It felt like every other conversation I’d ever had with my mother.

I was nervous about my father’s participation, though. While he was also open about his life, our relationship was strained. I was his adult daughter, a writer born in the US and accustomed to speaking my mind; he was a patriarch who grew enraged when I voiced opinions that didn’t match his. Our relationship was still recovering after my father said he’d disown me for a third time. Now, we said little to one another beyond hello and goodbye. My father agreed to the interview, but I wasn’t sure what would happen.

I’d primed him about what to expect, but when he returned home from work and saw the lighting and camera setup, he exclaimed in Vietnamese, “What is all this? I have nothing to say. My life isn’t important.”

From what we knew, no video-documented first-person accounts by extras from the set of Apocalypse Now existed. We were trying to include stories of Vietnamese people who were set on the margins by this film. My father’s story was important. But how would I be able to explain this to him?

I looked nervously at the crew. I had scheduled a week for production. I’d received grant funding, flown the director and cinematographer out from New York, budgeted for food, and figured out housing. We’d already shot in Vietnam and the Philippines two months before. If my father wasn’t going to participate, how would we make our film?

My mom walked in from the kitchen and intervened: “It’s for a school project! Just go along with it.”

Inside, I chuckled. It wasn’t for a school project. I hadn’t been in school for years. But this was my mom’s way of making this project comprehensible to him.

My father nodded, still scowling, and shuffled into the bedroom to change out of his work clothes. When he emerged and spotted the crew, his demeanor changed. He might be fine challenging his family behind closed doors, but he didn’t want to appear difficult in front of others. He smiled, introducing himself, shaking hands, playing the warm host.

The sound recordist affixed mics to my parents’ shirts. My parents sat down on the living room couch. We turned on the television and played a scene from Apocalypse Now. Their narration was, at times, sad, but also funny, punctuated with laughter as they spoke about a time nearly five decades prior. I relished in my parents’ communal storytelling, the way they completed each other’s sentences. It felt like our dinner table conversation.

On the television screen, we saw two Vietnamese women shooting machine guns into the air.

Pointing at the screen, my father said, “At that time, your mother wore clothes like a…”

“…Viet Cong,” replied my mother, laughing.

My father chimed in, “She was holding an AK-47, shooting up at US helicopters!”

My mother nodded. “I was so scared. I stuffed cotton into both of my ears.”
“You know, in Vietnam, poems rhyme.”
I wrote insistently about my family because the world outside of my home — the school, library, television, radio, movie theater — lacked their voices. This erasure felt painful, and I sought to make the world outside of my home my home, too. This became a focus of my art. Yet I rarely felt comfortable sharing my work with my family, especially my parents. I wrote in English; they spoke Vietnamese. And anyway, I wasn’t sure that they fully understood what I was doing as a poet, children’s book author, and now, filmmaker.

My parents vaguely understood that I was a writer. When I told my mother that I was getting an MFA in poetry, she didn’t quite understand what I was doing until I explained that the degree would allow me to teach at the university level. When my first essay was published in an issue of Poets & Writers, I showed my father a print copy of the magazine, and he declared, “Wow, that woman is so old!” The cover featured Joan Didion. When a few of my poems were translated from English into Vietnamese and published in one of the main newspapers in Vietnam, my cousin forwarded a link to my father. His only comment to me was, “You know, in Vietnam, poems rhyme.”

When my private writing and artmaking began to become public, I was faced with the question of bringing my ambitions into my family’s life. What seemed naturally like a process of self-definition, of carving out a space where my family was no longer being erased from the external world, was also freighted with questions about power, duty, and responsibility. Was I writing about my parents out of love, or was I extracting their stories from them to make a career in art?

Once, after I’d written about my father’s explosive anger, he told me that I had a poetic way of exaggerating the truth. “You haven’t experienced war first-hand,” he told me. “Do you know what an explosion can do?”

I didn’t. But I did know how it felt to be my father’s daughter, and I knew what it felt like to experience the war secondhand, through his stories and through him. I knew what it was like to be silenced. And I didn’t want to choose silence.

My father told me once, “You’re my daughter. Your job is to look down and say yes.” When I told him I couldn’t fulfill that role, he said, “From here on out, you’re not my daughter.” He didn’t show up for Thanksgiving that year.

Being disowned by my father was excruciating. I cried for years and felt at a loss for what to do or how to be in a world where my father, the subject of so much of my writing, wouldn’t speak to me.

For my project, I also faced a dilemma: I no longer had access to one of my main interview subjects. I’d devised this art project as a way of understanding myself and my family. Suddenly, I didn’t know how to be around him. During those years, I faced the question of what it meant to write my father’s story without him in my life.

So I wrote poems in a speculative mode, wondering, Who are we to one another when we are no longer in each other’s lives? I wrote poems in his voice, trying to understand him as a fully dimensional person. These poems would become an important braid in my collection Becoming Ghost.

Bomb that tree line back about a hundred yards. Give me room to breathe.
a golden shovel
Daughter, I think you embellish what you don’t know. A bomb
is nothing like a slammed door. That
is just your poetic imagination. Have you seen a tree
disappear into flames? That’s what a bomb can do. I taught you, line
by line, my own poetry. It was a song back
when I went hungry. Your grandmother died when I was about
to turn ten. I became an orphan then. I made sure that you never went without a
meal. I taught you to count to one hundred
in Vietnamese. You played in backyards,
on swing sets, bright shards of grass at your feet. I tried to give
you the safety I never had. And now, you tell me
that you are afraid of me? You lock yourself in your room
and write my story. I’m here, waiting to
be acknowledged. Can you hear me breathe?

For years, I continued to write about my parents’ lives as a way to understand them and our rift. Though I was deeply sad, I felt empowered to write about my parents, understanding that our stories overlapped, that I also had a right to tell these stories. Eventually, my mother stepped in and brokered a fragile peace between my father and me. It made our family gatherings less awkward, but there was still an uneasy tension in the air. We would deliberately avoid one another in order to prevent another confrontation. When I met Chris Radcliff, who would become the director and editor of the film, things between my father and me were still stiff. When Chris asked if I might consider making a documentary about my parents’ involvement in Apocalypse Now, I was taken by the idea of making a short film but anxious about what it would entail. I knew my mother would agree to it, but I was afraid of my father’s reactions.

At the dinner table, I asked my father, “Can I film you? I’m doing a project about you and mom playing extras on the set of Apocalypse Now. You’d just tell your story.”

My father shrugged and replied, “Whatever you want.”

He resumed eating. I was relieved.
Who are we to one another when we are no longer in each other’s lives?
After we wrapped and completed postproduction, friends would ask what my parents thought of the film. They kept insisting that my parents must be so proud. Proud? I thought. I hadn’t considered sharing it with my parents, and I hadn’t considered the idea that my parents would ever tell me that they were proud of me.

But an editor for USA Today asked me to write up a piece about our watching the film together for the first time, and I agreed to do it.

On Christmas Day, we assembled as a family to open gifts and to eat dinner. I suggested that I screen the film. We all watched it together in the living room. While my brothers and oldest nephew were rapt and curious, my parents watched silently. I recorded their reaction on my phone. I was pleased by my brothers’ responses and waited anxiously to see what my parents would say. I couldn’t imagine them saying they were proud of me, or congratulations. But, maybe I was wrong? Maybe they’d surprise me.

Once we reached the credits, my mother clapped her hands together and said, “Okay, time for dinner!”

My parents said nothing else about the film that night. Instead, the family admired my mother’s gorgeous Christmas turkey, stuffed with sticky rice and Chinese sausage. We took photos of my mother’s achievement. She spent the evening serving others while the rest of the family ate, and we complimented her cooking for the remainder of the meal. I realized that this was my mother’s great art, not just the delicious food but the way my family gathered around it.

Eventually, we would screen the film, We Were the Scenery, at festivals to different audiences who had the chance to feel the pleasure of sitting with my parents in the living room as they told me their stories. My brothers attended the premiere at Sundance and were there when we won the short film award.

Still, that evening, it did sting a little, my parents’ total non-reaction. I had made the film to honor them, perhaps even to save them from narrative erasure. But that night, I realized that my parents didn’t feel particularly honored, and they certainly didn’t feel like they needed me to save them. Their lives were full of their own stories. For my parents, storytelling was a way for their children to understand who they are and where they came from. They participated in my interviews out of love for me. They understood their participation in my poetry and film as something that I wanted. Our storytelling has different priorities and different aims. I realized that I made the film for me and for people like me — people who felt the importance of this story in a world where it was not available.

The film didn’t have a strong effect on my parents because they didn’t need it. As we ate dinner that night, I could see that my parents didn’t feel my sense of their marginalization. They were already the stars of their own lives.

The Pure Street Photography Competition Spotlights Humor and Chance Amid the Ordinary - Colossal

2025-04-25T13:30:24.000Z

Founded in 2020, Pure Street Photography celebrates a diverse array of captivating sights and image-makers around the globe. Coincidental timing, uncanny interactions, and moments that are stranger-than-fiction figure prominently in the platforms’s curation.

To support their community, founders Dimpy Bhalotia and Kamal Kumaar Rao launched a grant competition earlier this year, with winners announced this week. Topping the contest is Ayanava Sil’s “Crown of Fire,” which captures the instantaneous chaos during a Diwali celebration as a child dashes with sparkling streaks trailing behind. “It’s a flash of magic caught in time, where light, joy, and imagination come together in one unforgettable frame,” Sil says.

Ayanava Sil (India), “Crown of Fire”

Other finalists include Amy Horowitz’s bizarre photo of an older woman clutching her bag while an enormous snake slithers up to the window where she’s seated. Joanna M. similarly builds curiosity tinged with the absurd as she photographs a proud beagle posing for paparazzi.

See more of the contest’s winners below, and follow Pure Street Photography’s Instagram, a trove of visual wit and chance encounters.

Anna Marzia Soria (Italy), “Optical Illusion”

Joanna M. (United States), “Celebrity”

Holger Kunze (Belgium), “The Double”

Valeria Ciardulli (Italy), “Spectators”

Julachart Pleansanit (Thailand), “Rahu”

Mary Crnkovic Pilas (Croatia), “Sweet Bird of Youth”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article The Pure Street Photography Competition Spotlights Humor and Chance Amid the Ordinary appeared first on Colossal.

Skye's Curatorial Corner - BlogFlock

Delaying Retirement via Procedural Shortcut: The Fragile Promises of China’s Lawmaking Reforms - Made in China Journal

‘Scientific, Democratic, and Law-Based Lawmaking’

‘Breaching the Contract with an Entire Generation’

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