HOW MOST OF THE DREAMS GO, ADA LIMÓN

you know those dreams so powerful they seem to break into your reality, disrupting everything it’s founded on? in dreams, i've seen people i've never met, i've called things by the wrong name, i've even felt emotions i haven't encountered (yet?) in real life. there's an immersiveness to dreaming that’s so pure it continues to affect us when we're awake, making us see ourselves or other people or our relationship to the world in a new light. like a dial has been turned slightly, and suddenly, we're aware of the earth spinning and how strange that is. everything is vulnerable to questions that wouldn't have been asked before. even if the subjects of the dream are just a dog, a baby, a pool…this poem makes me think about how easy it is to get lost in realms we might not fully understand, and how that lack of understanding might be necessary to the emergence on the other side.

-liv

NEW ROOMS, KAY RYAN

this poem is concise enough to speak for itself, though reading it has the effect of when you truly UNDERSTAND a lesson after being TOLD said lesson your whole life, some call it “learning the hard way” I think. i’m thinking of fitting circles into squares, keys that don’t fit because locks have been changed, immersed with incapacity, a need to adapt in order to emerge. it’s not so easy to let old habits die to make room for the new. we have muscle memory, we have regular memory! we remember the life we know how to live and we tend this way. to set your mind up wherever it goes is not to pitch a tent in the old house, but maybe to build a new one entirely. begging the question... where will the windows go?

-sum

LIV

▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။|||| |

tracklist:

1. Future People - Alabama Shakes

2. Blew Its - Hippo Campus

3. Leon - The Japanese House

4. Hollow - Flipturn

5. Frog in Boiling Water - DIIV

6. In Your House - The Cure

7. Subterranean Homesick Alien - Radiohead

8. Infinity Repeating - Daft Punk, Julian Casablancas

9. Cherry - Jungle

10. Underwater - Porches

11. Garden of Allah - Glüme, Sean Ono Lennon

12. True Faith - New Order

13. The Synthetic Love of Emotional Engineering - Vicky Cryer

SUM

♫⋆｡♪ ₊˚♬ ﾟ.

tracklist:

1. Free - Florence + The Machine

2. God is Alive Magic is Afoot - Buffy Saint-Marie

3. Zombie - The Cranberries

4. The Killing Moon - Nouvelle Vague, Mélanie Pain

5. Something In The Way - Nirvana

6. Pitseleh - Elliot Smith

7. These Are Days - 10,000 Maniacs

8. Drown - The Smashing Pumpkins

9. Lightning Crashes - Live

10. Fade Into You - Mazzy Star

11. Dreams - The Cranberries

12. Rescue Me - Madonna

13. No Room for a Nihilist in Hollywood - Peachy!

14. Past Not Forgotten - The Parachute Men

15. Ready to Go - Republica

16. The World I Know - Collective Soul

17. Down By The Water - PJ Harvey

18. Stree Spirit (Fade Out) - Radiohead

19. Today - The Smashing Pumpkins

OK COMPUTER, RADIOHEAD

there's no record that screams 'immersive' like radiohead's ok computer. i was born almost exactly two months after its release, the album ushering in a digital future i was both destined and doomed to live through. unlocking this album is like choosing to get knocked around in a spaceship careening toward a planet that might not even exist. at its very core: a glitching matrix of awe, bewilderment, pure intoxication. there's no use explaining the sounds that make up this album - they shapeshift from cavernous and enigmatic, to melancholy and dreamlike, to blaring and foreboding. ringing with as much promise as impending catastrophe. this album holds the keys to an entirely distinctive sonic galaxy, but first, you have to dive in.

- liv

DEEPER WELL, KACEY MUSGRAVES

i love this album, i feel like it came out at just the right time. the first single off the record is the title track, and i remember when it came out i had that “this song was written for me” moment. because she talks about how there are all these ways she has been filling her days, her mind, her body, that she’s simply outgrown, ways of experiencing the world that kept some level of abstraction from really feeling it all. the deeper well inside herself as her way of emerging. this album is meditative, questioning, full of back porch musings, dinner table secrets, soft calls to what once might have been a void, what has revealed itself to be the wind at your back pushing you forward. make it through the tears to see that miyazaki sky!

-sum

DO THE RIGHT THING, SPIKE LEE

this is a film that holds you tightly up against the window into its world. a world that isn't so different from the one we walk around in every day, even now. and the characters mirror that feeling - that they're caught in a net they can only struggle against. maybe sometimes, being immersed is being trapped. it comes from the outside, from something we can't fully control on our own. all we can do is try to break through it, on our own or with those around us, until there is release. in do the right thing, as escalating racial tensions pit neighbors against each other, the ‘right thing’ might not ever be as important as the act of doing it. perhaps that’s where immersion meets emergence here - this time not as an outcome, but as an action: emerging.

- liv

TIME IS THE THING A BODY MOVES THROUGH, T FLEISCHMANN

i read this over the course of the last few weeks, in the earliest part of the mornings at a time when i should have really been trying to sleep! this book made me feel a lot. the line that stood out to me and lives in my spirit rent free now is a particular moment when T talks about the imagined versions we have of our future selves, the self that a younger version of us thought we would be, and what this imagined self might teach the person you really are, in “real time.” what it means to let your dreams keep you growing after the window of opportunity seems to have passed. this book is poetic and insightful, community-centered and tender in its discussion of the body’s movement through time, our relationships to commodity, sexuality, self, other, art, freedom, solitude, intimacy beyond the scope of definition. an emergence of the self in time.

-sum