YEEHAW

Happy Year of the Fire Horse! I’m feeling inspired and ready to tackle the new year in spite of being immediately cut down by an unforeseen setback upon my return home today. I’ve accomplished more in the past month than I have in the second half of 2025, where I did nothing beyond the minimum to get by. I’d been feeling clogged, much like my kitchen faucet, which had slowed to a trickle for the better part of the year, but I’m moving into the new year with renewed focus and intent.

I put together the following image for the Lunar New Year. I browsed through a couple thousand horse-related artworks from the Getty’s collection—becoming a horse girl in the process of viewing the handsome, majestic beings—and superimposed a flame on the selected painting. An orange flame did not look good on the yellowish painting so I made the flame blue and then realized it’s a gas fire and added a range knob.

I understood later that I had inadvertently made the fire horse into a cyborg by endowing it with a gas fire. I’ve been considering embracing a cyborg identity lately and remembered that I practiced becoming one with Siri for my song “Jesus Christ Is Bored,” flirting with cyborgism without being aware of it. I started reading Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” and wished that I had people—who have more context for the dense text—to discuss it with, when I recalled that I have quite a few friends who majored in relevant fields like ethnic studies and gender & women’s studies. I’m excited to share that a couple friends and I have formed a cyborg reading group!

I’ve also resumed study group with producer Dre, having finished the tome that is “The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms” and am looking forward to all that we’ll learn, process, and create together through the project. The reading and discussions have been eye-opening and I can see now how two-dimensional my understanding of futurisms, and therefore also history, was a year ago. I don’t know what I don’t know.

It’s always Black History Month (as it should be for anyone in the Americas) when pondering CoFuturisms, and since it’s also the second month of the Gregorian calendar, I’d like to share a poem that’s helping me understand Black history in America. As many of my resources will be in the months to come, this poem was referenced in the CoFuturisms handbook. Poet Nikki Giovanni makes the case that the Middle Passage set the precedent for a trip to Mars in “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars).”

Back to the gas fire-breathing horse: if you have a gas stove, please be careful to turn on the vent hood and open a window when cooking. And a couple more links: my song featured on the platform Disco’s Fresh Spins playlist and an article on the Oberlin concert last fall.

I’m signing off with a digital postcard of me and my friend Liza with horses at the Autry Museum of the West!

🐴 About to watch Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You”