Empty Ambition

It’s 2024.05.01 on the lunar calendar today.

Hello from a supine position. “Empty Ambition,” the newest single and a primer to the rest of the album comes out at midnight—but you can watch it at will below. I wrote the lyrics to use lie/lay/lain/laid, so this is a good one to share with fellow grammar geeks or to surreptitiously feed proper conjugations to others.  

“Our beating heart drives us downward, far down to the primal ground.” —Paul Klee

The album and book are now available for pre-order on Bandcamp! I’ll release the music on July 26th and deliver the book several months later. The book/journal will be filled with lyrics, chords, and the story behind each song followed by a journal prompt, like the one below, which explains the album title “Orange Hour.”

One time I was eating an orange. When I was finished, I looked up at the clock and was perplexed to see that over an hour had passed since I started with the citrus. Had I really spent an hour eating an orange? What happened to that hour? Had it slipped through the cracks to another dimension?

I was in Korea then, spending time with my aunt whose body was being consumed by cancer and radiation, and it felt like the heavens were starting to open up to take her. I wonder if existing in that liminal space granted me access to the other side for the duration of the orange, allowing an hour of our linear time to slip into deep time.

Deep time is a concept I read about in “Falling Upward” by Richard Rohr, and I think that was what I had experienced during the orange hour. It’s also not unlike the concept of slipstream in Indigenous Futurism, where pasts, presents, and futures “flow together like currents in a navigable stream.”

Can you remember a moment when you got a glimpse of deep time? And if not, what are ways or activities that may allow you to momentarily untether yourself from the ticking clock, tap into a flow?

More on “Orange Hour”

*Call for spinning clips*

I’m putting out this call for 10–15 second video clips of things spinning from anyone who’d like to contribute to my music video for “Spin” (for the album track, which shares lyrics with the remix).

To give some examples: I’ve got the pictured gelato being spun, a salad spinner, windmills, those whirling rags inside a drive-thru car wash, the teacups at Disneyland (I have to figure out if I can use the clip, given that the Mouse is extremely protective of its brand, but thanks to Mal for procuring it for me!), someone doing cartwheels, a load of laundry being tumble dried … it could be most anything.

Ideally, it would be in HD (1920 x 1080, my iPhone’s default) and is probably best in landscape orientation—but I should be able to make any clip work and would appreciate all sorts to make my collage video. If you’d like to send over a spinning clip, reply to this email or write [email protected] in the next few weeks. Thanks!

I doodled oranges while listening to a panel on stateless adoptees before performing a voice & gayageum set the past weekend, learning about the plight of Americans adopted as babies, who discovered later in life that they were never naturalized as US citizens. Please consider signing this petition to pardon two adoptees so that they may live without fear of deportation and make their dream of home come true.