Colin Self is an artist, composer, and puppeteer based between Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany. They create music, performances, and new systems for interfacing with the human spirit, across a spectrum between the living and deceased. As many of their practices revolve around the temporary assembly of communities, their work envelops collaborative and dialogical experiments into play. Self has been running XOIR since 2013, an alternative modality of group singing, and co-founded TIAPS, a performance school in Lincolnville, Maine in 2023, with their collaborator Monica Mirabile. Their most recent commissions include Where The Souls Go (2024), a play commissioned by the New Theater Hollywood, Kompass (2023), a trilogy composed for the Hannover State Opera, and Tip the Ivy (2022), an opera that premiered at Performance Space NY in 2022. Last year, they were a resident artist at Callie’s Berlin and will be an artistic fellow at La Becque in Autumn 2024. Their third LP, respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis came out in February 2025 on RVNG Intl. Photo credit:

(This show originally aired on WGXC on Sunday, August 9, 2026.)

This was one of the episodes that we talked almost to the very end. If I had played my closing playlist, I would have played their song “The Great Refusal” from Colin’s record Siblings which has a personal significance to me.

I am going to squeeze in this section of a performance Colin did a few years back at Pioneer Works that exhibits how his performance collaborations that we discuss work out on stage. And, also just to give a taste for how delightful it is to experience a Colin Self performance.

and then I would have closed with this song from an incredible record by Patrick Belaga called Topic that Colin suggested. They described it as ‘good music to think to’ and I completely agree as this entire record has become my writing record of the moment.

I hope you enjoy as much as we do.

Zivar (زیور) Amrami is an interdisciplinary artist born in Minnesota to an Iranian father and a mother of Norwegian descent. Steeped in Jewish mysticism from birth, her work is shaped by a sustained curiosity about what unites and differentiates us. She is a writer, healer, and nurturer of women’s voices, and the creator of the Wisdom of Birth deck. She currently lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and two children.

(This show originally aired on WGXC on Sunday, July 12 2026.)

For my playlist, I took a first thought best thought approach to think bad ass musician moms and came up with:

1. Madonna & Lourdes Leon - The Test

2. Neneh Cherry & Michael Stipe - Trout

3. Lauryn Hill - Tell Him

4. Bjork - Hyperballad

Zivar’s Bookshop List

Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can Caroline Myss

Everybody Needs a Rock Byrd Baylor

As promised, pt. 2 of last essay / June radio post which I will keep as brief as possible. I am taking a break on the essay posts until around October and then assess where I am in my work load.

Right now, my creative focus is on my book until the semester begins again. Above, is a picture from a performance I gave in Kingston at the gallery Roundabouts Now as part of my darling writing group’s summer reading series.

This writing group has been so important to me in the past year as I balance art therapy school with everything else and even though school is definitely benefitting this project, having the group to keep my head around this project. I read this essay Please Scream Into Your Heart that originally appeared in FENCE with embedded links to correspond to what I am talking about (not all the Twin Peaks scenes work anymore but you get the idea - I will update them for whatever iteration this piece takes next).

Ironically, earlier that day I read from XO and a new poem that is now up on periodicities at the FENCE summer release party in Hudson.

So, while I am working on book stuff and some other projects that are still in gestation behind the scene, I will still be posting the radio show - The line up for MISSIVES on Wave Farm for the rest of the year is so awesome - the next two months absolutely FIERCE, can’t wait to announce & TAROT CLUB is returning in August at Pocketbook Hudson.

paying attention

Another year, another Las Culturistas Culture Awards. :)

This opening sequence I watch on repeat just to remember how to smile. Some of my favorite episodes from recent past, John Waters was incredible and Dr. Orna Guralnik, the therapist from Couples Therapy were some personal standouts.

I really loved Ryan Murphy’s latest series. It made me think a lot about my earliest years in NYC when I used to assist the poet Bob Holman at his loft in Tribeca which was only a few blocks away from JFK Jr’s loft. It reminded me how he truly was the prince of the city, and honestly how truly stunning he was to behold in person which weirdly for me was always in a deli.

Both of the stars were perfect and the soundtrack in particular is great, with my favorite Slowdive song in a perfect falling in love driving sequence as just one highlight.

My only critique is that the portrayal of JFK Jr’s previous girlfriend Daryl Hannah was really unnecessary in presenting her as a complete airhead and cokehead. Particularly disrespectful considering how much Hannah has done to name inequity and sexism in the film industry and all the environmental activism she has been involved in. It felt a little tone deaf considering the narrative arc leads us to a place to find empathy for Carolyn when the media becomes committed to painting her as a monster and how that affects her mental health so deeply. So, it doesn’t really make much sense to do that to another woman within the context of the same show, no?

Ok, on the night I write this, this record is #1 in the United States and 63 other countries. I am not stating anything particular original by saying that Madonna’s Confessions II is a masterpiece and a lot of people are feeling it.

I keep my personal practice of devotion to Madonna quiet on this front but for those who know me, you will know this is a life long thing for me. If I were ever to be asked the seminal question on Los Cultch , what culture made you say culture was for you? My answer is unequivocally the moment I saw Like A Virgin when I was six and decided I wanted to be that woman writhing on a gondola and running away with a lion man. I basically still do and that is something I am still processing which is why this particular artist has had such a hold on me for so long.

If you’re not a fan or never really gotten the appeal, that’s fine. I am not here to convince anyone of anything. But you have to understand that Madonna fans have been through a lot. She hasn’t put out a banger of a record since Ray of Light and Confessions on a Dance Floor was pretty good but only saved by the remixes which sort of felt like a default that the DJs would make her music come to life that she seemed to forget.

There have been several others and outside of a song or two, it’s been bleak.

Admittedly, she’s been busy raising all those kids and dealing with the affect the rigor of her dance practice and years of touring have taken on her body while just being dragged with blatant sexism basically since she turned 40 so as a fan, its been hard to sit through and wonder how much of the negativity was really affecting her.

As someone whose whole persona is about not giving any fucks and operating with voracious tenacity, there was a silent veil of disappointment over many of our heads that maybe they were getting to her. Then she comes back with this - going all the way through and out - with a work of art that is so pure and true. And one of the most beautiful things about this record is how she calls back to where she comes from (most notably with the song “Danceteria”) speaking to the amazing culture of artists she came up with.

Above is a video of one of her first performances in the club performing her very first single, “Everybody”. (Dec 16, 1982)

I can’t explain it but it makes me feel so tender to watch after experiencing so many shows like this by my friends and doing my own time doing weird performances in clubs in the middle of the night. Also, here is an amazing archive of Danceteria footage for those who are not familiar with the space and what it was about.

The other day I was listening to the Whitey Album (a side project of Sonic Youth) with a friend who I go to mostly noise shows with and found myself trying to explain badly how this record in particular that includes two Madonna covers which were in essence taking the piss out of her, but as time goes on, proof to actually how good her music is and how translatable her songs are to more experimental and rock adaptation to speak to what the culture actually was as a merging of sonic tension that she has always been very much part of and contributed to, which becomes more apparent here when you realize that the entire current landscape of weirdo queer rebel pop stars like Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Kelsey Lu, Caroline Polachek and Sam Smith could not exist if she and Sonic Youth hadn’t.

Since this record has come into my life, I have found myself on the Threads processing with fellow fans who are all going through some kind of emotional rebirth and one particular favorite is one that was literally about how impossible it was to not listen to Confessions II from beginning to end. But also how hard to find the time in the day one sitting of 63 minutes to do so. And what I loved was how many people responded to how they are reorganizing their day to make it possible to do so because they also feel the struggle. (I know, major first world problems.) I deeply relate and will stop there due to an uncontrollable urge to listen to Love Sensation and probably the rest of the album. peace »»>>

On the June episode of MISSIVES, I played the track above from one of my most favorite records of the past few years by interdisciplinary artist Jacolby Satterwhite in collaboration with musician Nick Weiss—one-half of Teengirl Fantasy.

PAT takes its name from Satterwhite’s mother Patricia, who suffered from schizophrenia and died in 2016. She left behind hundreds of a capella recordings on cassette tapes as well as abstract drawings of home goods, such as wet wipes, sugar cubes, and toothbrushes. Incorporating her recordings into their work, Satterwhite and Weiss remixed and manipulated Patricia’s voice into propulsive, electronic dance tracks featuring a range of other collaborators of house music legend.

Cannot recommend enough. Another record to just put on repeat.

AND that’s it for now…..more in the fall! xx

I know I am not the only one having a low key existential spring into summer so I will hold off on the apologies for missing posts last month. In Substack land, I got the retrograde news last week that AI bots ate the recording of last month’s episode of MISSIVES on Wave Farm with the artist Daniele Frazier. Initially this threw me for a loop in a moment of spiral I was already having but the more I thought about it, I also did have a feeling that it was meant to be, simply in that this was one of the rare times I have brought a complete stranger onto the show. As of late, I have been noticing during this spring’s tapings, my overall comfort within the conversations with guests has been expanding - so relaxed that I sometimes forget we were on the radio because I like talking to friends. So, I was excited to chat with Daniele because I didn’t know her at all. I fell in love with her work through her gallery’s IG and went to her artist talk and just invited her to come on out of the blue. Basically, I stalked her but was excited because I felt it would keep me on my toes this time during the interview. What happened was that we had one of the most personal and tender conversations that has happened so far and knowing that AI ate it makes me really see that one was for us and whoever happened to be listening live because we were doing something much more important. Besides, I also forgot about checking time until exactly 4pm so we never really had an end to that conversation either.

But Daniele is an artist you should really know about and I am also disappointed the recording is lost.

Daniele Frazier is a New York-based artist, published writer, and educator dedicated to a practice marked by rigorous formal aesthetics and a profound engagement with materiality. Her conceptually rich work balances a deep investment in craft with serious inquiry into phenomenology, the texture of everyday life, and the politics embedded within public space and the definition of ownership. Frazier employs a diverse material vocabulary influenced by a passion for collecting—from metalwork and textiles to alternative camera-less photographic and darkroom processes.

Frazier’s work has been exhibited widely at institutions and galleries including the Whitney Museum, The Queens Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Guild & Greyshkul, Museum 52, Rivington Arms, Ritter Zamet, and Gavin Brown’s Passerby, among others. With 10 years of experience creating public sculpture in NYC, she brings her materially informed artistic life into direct dialogue with the social and political landscape of the city. She further extends this commitment to public memory, craft, and social practice through her work for the NY AIDS Memorial, where she facilitates the creation of new panels for the AIDS Quilt.

As an educator, she lectures at numerous colleges and currently instructs at the Buxton School.

Frazier’s current studio practice pushes the boundaries of photographic media. She has begun to color-process photograms in order to activate expired Kodak Ektachrome paper, leading a profound exploration into optics, light, chemistry, and color theory. This experimental work exemplifies her commitment to leveraging material constraints as a basis for unprecedented artistic invention.

Below is an image from her last exhibition Night Writing at SEPTEMBER gallery. Check out her other work here.

For this post, I have decided to do a combo essay/radio show post by talking through the spread, which is actually something people have asked me to consider doing more of on here.

Daniele’s spread was interesting because it really maps out the stages of the mid career artist especially in regards to coming to terms with the need for resource as one gets older and how difficult that can be in a climate where artists are expected to want for nothing while those who have support in other places get to perform a “sustainability” that isn’t even real which connects to some thoughts about how that smoke and mirrors reality gets troubled as artists age.

I have been thinking about a story that has been on my mind in regards to all of this. It’s a short story by Franz Kafka called The Hunger Artist which is about a professional faster whose art of self-denial falls out of public favor, leading to his eventual neglect and death in a circus, exploring themes of alienation, the misunderstood artist, and the futility of seeking meaning.

I taught this story throughout the pandemic to my English classes over Zoom. It is beyond bleak and I would not recommend teaching it online when it feels like the world is coming to an end like I did. It definitely left an imprint and I have been thinking about it every time the conversation about the state of the arts comes up.

The story follows the artist from his days of fame, where he fasts in a cage for adoring crowds, to his final days where he is forgotten, replaced by a panther, and dies alone, revealing his true hunger was for understanding, not food.

Like most of the conversations I have been having these days about all the art worlds and academia in general, it is beyond morose. Which is why I will be taking a break from the essay posts until October to focus on projects behind the scenes and just get some peace before the semester begins back up in the fall.

Now on to the spread!

Before I begin, I want to state that I firmly believe to my core that there is no prescriptive path to an artist’s life. These interpretations are based on observations of my own journey and the paths of the intergenerational community of artists I am part of.

In the PAST position, we have reversed King of Swords from The Modern Witch tarot by Lisa Sterle and The Cave from Kim Krans’s Archetypes deck. The King of Swords reversed represents the dark side of intellect and authority. I see this card in parallel with the Cave to represent the myopic focus required to set one’s self apart in the emerging state of an artist’s career. The time of ‘thirst’ where compromise and sacrifice come into play - where there is no question of compromise on various indulgences like relationships, eating regularly, health care, running water and not running your life into debt.

In the Present, we have the The Seven of Wands which is a tarot card of courage, standing your ground, and defending your position which is in relation to the Creator which I feel is the ideal state of a mid career artist in that it represents seeing the rewards of what you have achieved, maybe even becoming known for a certain things and how one does it, and also names a state where some lessons have been learned about where and how one wants to continue being an artist in the next phase of life.

In the Future, we have King of Pentacles which represents financial stability, abundance, and worldly success in juxtaposition with the Eternal Child!

Seeing this made me feel deeply affirmed in telling Daniele that her new teaching job was a well earned gift and container for her artistic freedom to do whatever she wanted in the studio and how magnificently ok that is to not put financial pressure on her practice at a time of transition in mediums. So she can just play!

This is something I am seeing a lot of right now in artists around me, especially those who have moved out of the major cities and are just ready to not compromise so much. Many of them established in a certain discipline but are now trying something else. Maybe just for themselves or maybe just a few. I am starting to feel this, outside of real estate, is the real reason so many artists from NYC in particular gravitate to the Hudson Valley.

I can personally attest that the writer to painter pipeline is real, seeing it a lot as of late and I am dabbling on that one myself but more on that later. :)

Anyway, not the same as the audio but hope you enjoy!

Will be recording backups in the studio from here on out.

Will be posting a pt. 2 with my culture list next!

Sasha Wortzel is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist using video, installation,sculpture, and sound to explore how past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Raised in Southwest Florida and based in New York, Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories. Wortzel is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video. Her films have screened at venues world-wide including atMoMA DocFortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False, Margaret Mead, San Francisco International, and Dokufest.

Her expanded cinematic work has been exhibited at the New Museum, The International Center for Photography, The Kitchen, and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery. Her debut feature documentary RIVER OF GRASS (2025) won the Pare Lorentz Award from the International Documentary Association, Hot Docs Joan VanDuzer Special Jury Prize - International Feature Documentary, and Mead Audience Award, among others. Wortzel has received institutional support from Sundance, Ford Foundation, Sandbox Films, Knight Foundation, Doc Society, Field of Vision, and Chicken & Egg Pictures. Her short films include HOW TO CARRY WATER (2023), an IDA Awards nominee for best short documentary and currently streaming on Criterion Channel; THIS IS AN ADDRESS (2020) distributed by Field of Vision; and HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARSHA! (2018; co-director Tourmaline) which won special mention at Outfest and is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum of Harlem. Her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. She has participated in residencies at MacDowell, Fine Arts Work Center,ISCP, and Artists in Residence in the Everglades (AIRIE). Wortzel has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America. She is Assistant professor of Film and Electronic Media at Bard College.

(This show originally aired on WGXC on Sunday, May 10th, 2026.)

Sasha’s Book List:

1. The Everglades: River of Grass, Marjory Stoneman Douglas

2. The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, Michael Grunwald

3. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neal Hurston

4. Buffalo Tiger: A Life in the Everglades, Buffalo Tiger

5. Swamplife, Laura Ogden

6. Florida Water, Aja Monet

7. Florida, Lauren Groff

8. Swamplandia, Karen Russell

9. The Florida Room, Alexandra T. Vazquez

10. The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean

https://www.sashawortzel.com

Raechel Anne Jolie is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in Playboy, The Baffler, Bitch, Teen Vogue, among other publications. Jolie is also the editor and co-creator of The Prison Arcana tarot zine, made in collaboration with incarcerated artists. Her memoir Rust Belt Femme received recognition in NPR's Favorite Books of 2020, was a finalist in the Heartland Bookseller's Award, and was the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction. Find her @rebelgrrlraechel and sign up for her newsletter at raechelannejolie.substack.com.

Raechel is one of the few people in my life that I met through a virtual writing group and have developed such a lovely friendship with over the years by having wonderful conversations about writing and tarot while never having met in person which I think is just a testament to the level of authentic curiosity and interest in others stories she has as well as telling her own. We ping ponged around many subjects in our conversation on MISSIVES with one part I have been thinking about over the past few weeks about the drug of power. I hope you enjoy. :)

(This show originally aired on WGXC on Sunday, April 12th, 2026)

songs from the show

The energy of this month’s Tarot Club of The Emperor and Nettle feels pretty aligned to me because I’m not sure about you but everything feels kind of off but we somehow have to keep going through it….day after day after day…..swimming through more wrong.

Nettle is a perfect plant known for its leaves and stems covered in tiny, hollow hairs (trichomes) that inject histamine and other chemicals, causing a painful, itchy rash upon contact. Despite this, it is highly nutritious, edible when cooked, and used in teas, soups, and herbal remedies.

A well brewed pot of nettle tea is truly manna from Heaven.

The Emperor tarot card, representing structure, stability, authority, and control, signals a need for discipline and strategic planning to achieve goals. As a figure of leadership and grounded energy (associated with Aries), he advises setting boundaries and taking command of your circumstances.

Personally, I am taking that advice to heart by just implementing as much structure as possible to what I have on my plate. I was telling my friend last night that I am trying to soften my Capricorn impetus to set goals beyond the immediate because due to the circumstances of our current world, it just seems to cause more hurt than necessary.

It’s not the most sexy way to live but I am learning to find satisfaction in the immediate which feels really important right now.

TAROT CLUB is tonight from 5:30pm - 7:30pm est. (in person online or virtually)

Register here.

Jared Ashdown is a Kingston NY based musician who fronts the art punk ensemble Open Head. Their first record "What Is Success" was released by Wharf Cat Records in 2025 and his solo record of ambient compositions "Shape Unto Itself" came out the same year. This gorgeous record has become my go to record to listen to on my weekly commute to the city.

We talked a great deal about never settling in your art practice and how important it is to have good people around you when you are putting yourself through it.

It was so special to have Jared’s sweet and earnest presence in the studio last month & he compiled an epic playlist (hours of incredible music) and reading list for MISSIVES so let’s get into it. Enjoy!

(This show originally aired on WGXC on Sunday, March 8th.)

playlist

reading list

Point Of Origin, Valerie Piraino

Projections of Sound on Image, Michel Chion

Girl in A Band, Kim Gordon

Naïve. Super, Erlend Low

I feel strangely compelled and also annoyed to join the response wave to the idiotic and unnecessary statements by actor Timothée Chalamet. The response so far has been making me think it might be worth volleying what I keep thinking about in regards to why the various creative landscapes as a whole has been slowly eating their own tails for a very long time, way before the current administration came and decided to eviscerate whatever was left of the arts in America in general.

I think that now would be a good time to consider that part of the reason why things are the way they are is because the lines between what is culture and what is industry have blurred so distinctly.

For those unfamiliar with the Chalamet incident, he said “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore,’ ” he said last month in a CNN and Variety town hall opposite Matthew McConaughey. “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”

There is a lot to unpack within the reaction to his comment but what I would like to focus on is the ‘14 cents in viewership’ part as it speaks to one of the most culturally annoying ideas to me which is the attitude that film has more cultural value due to the enormous amounts of money invested/wasted on it when at the end of the day, it unequivocally has offered nothing but the most deeply minimal return than any other field I have worked in.

Some people may know this about me but I lost fifteen years of my life working in film/television production and I could write an incredible tirade about the lie of financial reward if you put in the work, but the fact of the matter is that my experience is not so special or singular as I talk to more and more people throwing up their hands and looking for a different path after devoting their lives to an industry that literally exists for only the privileged few. There is some interesting writing out there by film producer Ted Hope and doc filmmaker Penny Lane about how all the streaming platforms are at fault but thankfully, I escaped and reclaimed whatever I lost to continue to develop as an artist a long time ago so I am not super engaged in that discourse.

Sadly, the truth of the matter is this: all of the creative fields (film, art, publishing, music, fashion, opera, dance and the Almighty umbrella of academia that is still somehow considered the “dependable” revenue stream for anyone in the Arts & Humanities but actually acts as the greatest destabilizer) are economically set up to center the generationally wealthy. The only option to work around that is to marry into money to even get a shot at a creative life. The unspoken nature of this fact is the big lie that has created the deepest harm in contemporary creative life. The sad reality being exposed when you see an actor, musician of note post another Go Fund Me from their death beds. Celebrities, they’re just like us. They follow their dreams into unmanageable debt too. And I have zero solutions beyond that because a) I am just out here hustling like the rest of us and b) I would rather be giving more attention to my actual work.

But I am concerned by the distraction of belief that tells us that the only art that it is relevant are those centered in celebrity or ‘makes money’, which isn’t to say that I don’t want to make money but I have also been in too many conversations where I have been belittled and bullied for the actual amount or non amounts I have been paid or asked to be paid for a performance or screening by fellow artists who are actually usually just being competitive over the “14 cents of viewership”. And it’s a drag to even bring up any of this at all but it is just getting so frustrating considering that the amount is the same whether you go ‘indie’ or ‘mainstream’, for anyone who even remembers that as a construct of creative integrity and financial reward.

It’s fine if you don’t because that is not even real either.

One of the most important projects I know of is the The Creative Independent for a lot of reasons but mostly for normalizing the conversation about artists having day jobs and giving space to how problematic it can be to an art practice to depend on it financially. I am unbelievably grateful to this platform for creating this space so I can come to terms with the deepest wound from my time working in film/tv production which was how much I compromised my artistic self for the hope of eventually being able to know some kind of life stability by pursuing a path as a commercial director so I could make my own movies only to discover that narrative was only allowed for trust funders.

Men and women alike.

I feel that we, as art makers, have a lot to figure out in regards to reframing the lines of distribution (definitely, sure). That is true for every discipline at this point, a deep re-imagining and acceptance that we are not concepts but also economies working within or against other ones.

You will see below that I released a poetry book on Metalabel last fall and people keep asking me what I think about their podcast and the A Corp concept and some of the other theories and the truth is this: I don’t have time to listen to this podcast. Because I would rather be thinking about my work. But I do need a space where it is standard to make my work accessible and be paid for it. And they, like many others, are instigating an important conversation about empowering artists to be paid for their work in as many different ways possible.

And I am really into that. And I like how structured their platform is so I can stay on top of orders and I appreciate anything that keeps me organized.

I believe that we, as art makers, need to be way more intentional in how we think about the effects of industry on our creativity. We have to be more discerning about the attention we devote to our studio time and our art admin time, not just in our schedules but also in our minds. We also need to be way more committed to building our art communities by showing up and investing in each other with our attention by showing up and actually getting to know each other as people and artists.

In the same way, that some of us are coming to realize we have to disentangle from the concept of ‘empire’ to save ourselves as a society, I think we must also re-evaluate the value of ‘industry’ in the same way to bring art into the world going forward. And we have to because all the systems are falling apart anyway and I am starting to feel like maybe that isn’t such a bad thing because things have been pretty much garbage for a while. I know people don’t like to hear this because it would be so much easier to imagine that there is just one source of revenue that will validate our artistic identity/ego if we just rub the genie lap the right way but the fact of the matter is there isn’t and all we have as artists is each other.

EXTRA MOMENT OR PROMOTION

So like I mentioned above, I wrote these poems over the course of ten years and called it XO. Then I put it out on Metalabel.

Poet Angbeen Saleem wrote this about the collection:

“Cat Tyc’s writing lives in the space where lyric meets interference — where poems glitch, repeat, zoom in, cut away, and reassemble themselves. Her work often engages with media, technology, and performance, not as themes in the abstract, but as lived conditions: ways of seeing, hearing, and being shaped by the world we’re already inside of.

Through bodies, screens, memory, and desire, Cat’s poems are precise and playful, intellectually sharp and emotionally charged. There’s a real attentiveness in her work to how meaning slips, how attention fractures, and how the self is produced through language, images, and systems that don’t always behave the way we want them to.”

You can order it here.

So excited to announce that I am facilitating a series of Creative Tarot workshops upstate in April and May!

First, at Curious Kingston, this workshop series is designed for “artists and makers to immerse in Tarot’s rich symbolism and learn practical techniques to infuse our creative practice with new energy.”

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

April 11th: Tarot Journaling

(Ideal for beginners or for learning a new deck. We will exploring practices that invite ritual and self reflection.)

April 18th: Tarot Archetypes

(All stage of tarot experience. These prompts will be centered towards using chosen archetypes to sketch out or revive a creative project across disciplines.)

April 25th: Hero’s Journey Through the Tarot

(All stages of tarot experience. These prompts will be more writing centered and geared towards mapping out the narrative arc for characters in fiction/screenwriting or ourselves for non fiction.)

When: 3–5pm Saturdays

Registration fee:

$45/workshop or $100 for all three.

Email hello@curiouskingston.com for

more information and to reserve a spot!

On Sat May 16, I will be teaching a one day intensive of Creative Tarot at Bushel from 1-4pm.

Please come through & tell your friends!

(Tentative dates for Hudson and NYC forthcoming. Also, please reach out if you have a space that would be interested in hosting this workshop series. Travel is more possible for me in the summer but I can facilitate virtually any time of the year.)

PAYING ATTENTION

I found Shrinking on Apple TV and have been binging it season by season because I am obsessed with therapists and Harrison Ford.

Writer/filmmaker Naz Riahi has a brilliant Substack with some excellent insight about what it feels like to be Iranian right now

As a memoirist, the Lindy West controversy is tough to read through

ORGS TO DONATE TO:

Pretty much giving whatever I can whenever I can to Columbia County Sanctuary Movement

This month’s guest is David Garland, who is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and singer, and has actively been creating a unique body of work since the early 1980s. He has recorded music with Christian Marclay, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Sufjan Stevens, Sean Ono Lennon, Guy Klucevsek, Vashti Bunyan, Meredith Monk, Iva Bittova, and others.

He is also a visual artist. Since 2022 his photographs of reflected sunlight have been seen in four one-person gallery shows, and daily on Instagram. He has also been a professional illustrator and graphic designer.

He produced and hosted the iconic Spinning On Air, which for 28 years was a radio show of music and interviews on WNYC, New York Public Radio, and then until 2018 was an independently produced podcast. He has been an audio producer, presenter, interviewer, music programmer, writer, editor, engineer, and mixer.

He has released over a dozen albums of music, and, since 2019, eight albums by Garlands, a duo with his son. Listen and purchase on Bandcamp.

Every Monday morning from 8:30 until 10 AM he plays with the improvising ensemble Music for Furniture at Joust Cafe, 365 Main St., Catskill, NY, adding acoustic sounds to the otherwise electronic group.

https://davidgarland.com

(This post originally aired on WGXC on Sunday, February 8th.)

The Star is my most favorite card. When it comes up in readings, I often mention the infamous quote about the film star Ginger Rogers that states that she was a star because she could do every Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels. That juxtaposition feels parallel to me in how archetypal image of The Star illustrates a naked woman kneeling alone, unafraid in Nature. She navigates by her senses, the jug held to her left with five streams, and her subconscious, the jug pouring into the reflective waters of the collective.

She is outside, guided by the stars above and connected to the earth below.

Although the world may be chaotic, she still has faith. A faith not blindly built by ideas and the works of civilization, but a faith that exists outside and around all that.

She’s decided to disconnect and reconnect. To something else. She has no fear because she trusts in herself, in nature, in the tools and navigational resources of her life’s path.

Jasmine means “gift from God” or “fragrant flower,”originating from the Persian word yasmin, referring to the sweet-smelling plant known for its beauty, purity, and grace, symbolizing love and spirituality across cultures.

With its intense, sweet, and heady floral scent, often described as rich, warm, and slightly creamy. Like the Star, it is famously intoxicating, which is why they pair well in helping us hone in what makes us special and giving that to the world which is the only way to combat the oppressive mindset that the only way to contribute to the world is by fitting in to a norm that is dictated by someone else who for the most part tends to have an agenda that holds nothing for us in the long run.

This is what we will be discussing at the next TAROT CLUB at GOODWITCH on Tuesday, Feb 10 at 5:30pm est in Hudson and virtual.

Ariana Reines is a poet and playwright. Her newest books are The Rose (Graywolf: 2025) and Wave of Blood (Divided: 2024). A Sand Book (Tin House: 2019) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She has created performances for The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Stuart Shave Modern Art, Swiss Institute, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Performance Space New York, and many others, and she wrote the Obie-winning play TELEPHONE. In 2020, as a Divinity student at Harvard, she founded Invisible College, where people gather to study poetry, sacred texts, and the arts.

Ever since I started this project, I knew I needed to have Ariana on and I was so glad when the scheduling finally aligned to make it work. We talk a great deal about the ‘fraternal twin’ nature of her two most recent books and how they hold the balance of processing her own emotional life with the collective grief and anguish of global events, most specific to the aftermath of Oct 7.

I didn’t specifically name this in the conversation but as we talked about this balancing act, I kept thinking about the practice Kintsugi (or Kintsukuroi), which is a Japanese art form where broken ceramics are mended with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, highlighting the cracks as beautiful, unique features rather than disguising them as a way to embrace imperfection, symbolizing resilience, history, and beauty in brokenness. This practice has been on my mind as I have gotten deeper into my art therapy studies this fall and have really been falling in love with the idea that the gold adhesive paint is the metaphor for what art making can do for the soul.

Anyway, all this to say, Ariana’s poems are the gold and hearing her talk about the practice of embodied living to write them is the balm.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did having it.

playlist

I broke the form of the show by having Ariana read from Wave of Blood at the top of the show but this live Jeff Buckley performance of his cover of “Satisfied Mind” was Ariana’s musical select for the show.

It’s a beautiful song so I thought I would share here.

At the end, I played ANONHI’s “Marrow” from their incredible record Hopelessness. We got to hear the beginning but due to Apple Music needing to be restarted, we didn't get to play the full song so I thought I would just add here as well.

I remember an ex of mine expressing confusion over why I was a reading a memoir by Diane Keaton. I think it is the one she wrote about aging. And this was an ongoing aspect of this relationship, always pinpointing something about me to ruminate on to make me feel strange and wrong and this time, it was for loving Diane Keaton which in retrospect just illuminates how dumb this particular dynamic was from the start. And I remember trying to explain what she meant to me - how it was more than her style and the fiddle dee dees & la di das but more about just her way of being, and how she was who she was. Flaws and all, so deeply she reclaimed them over and over in her real and imagined narratives. She committed to telling the full story of what it meant to be a woman in her body, in the time she lived in and her entire film trajectory was exactly that….from the beginning to the very end, a consistent stance of ‘take me as I am’ while refusing any other clock besides her own. The cherry on top of her delivery is the fact that she also did this with the most delicious awkwardness that somehow became less weakness and more an entry point that invited stumbling to be a relevant, if not the most important part of the living experience.

Weirdly, before Annie Hall or Manhattan - I think of Baby Boom as the first movie that made me love Diane. For those unfamiliar with the plot, Keaton is playing an 1980’s career lady Donna Karen wearing pre Girl Boss bs archetype who discovers she has inherited a baby girl from a long lost relative. Obviously, this predicament doesn’t land well in a world of men.

There is even a scene where her boss upon making her an offer to be a partner in their company expresses concern about the possibility of her eventually having children. Her super lame boyfriend leaves her and the partnership offer is rescinded. She runs away to Vermont with the baby and turns her homemade baby apple sauce into a very successful business - it’s all very Hollywood with a lot of painful saxophone soundscape interludes that were very popular in 1987. If you have seen St. Elmo’s Fire, you know what I mean. They are awful but you get used to it after awhile. Somewhere in there, she falls in love with Sam Shepard, who is the town vet ( <3 ) and Cary Grant charming and even though it is so unrealistic in so many ways, but Hollywood magic makes it all work because he is a small town guy and that makes all the difference (lies!) but who cares because their chemistry is amazing and Keaton maintains this perfect balance of vulnerability while also being sensual and present in every scene with Shepard, who is just kind of perfect even while telling her that she reminds him of a bull terrier which he makes weirdly endearing because he is so frigging hot and stoic.

Anyway….you watch a film like that & think about that moment - that zeitgeist of ‘women in the workforce’ etc and then you compare it to the incredible Looking for Mr.Goodbar which was made in 1977 and she is so brilliant and dark in this another version of the ‘Madonna/Whore’ narrative - this time a little more literal- where she plays this angelic schoolteacher who likes to pick up men in bars and take drugs because its the 70’s and that is what sexual liberation looked like. Another kind of zeitgeist.

I honestly could write a book of essays about each of her films as a narrative of womanhood in the late 20th century (and hmm….maybe I will, this is not a terrible idea) but all this to say I admired her ability to be the archetype in whatever phase of the journey she was in while also so determined to live life at her own pace.

So much is made about her refusal to get married to essentially the best trade Hollywood had to offer in her hey day - and she dated them all - but upon reading her memoirs, it becomes clear that this stance wasn’t some empty second wave feminist stance but really more about her dedication to self reflection and healing from the mental health issues within her family and her struggles with depression and disordered eating as a result. She inherently knew that playing into the classic hetero narrative wasn’t the way to find actual love so she chose the real thing, herself, and ended up being an amazing adoptive mother to two children at 50 which is something else I have always admired about her.

I write this in the window of my birthday week, and of course, Diane was a great Capricorn so its hard for me to not be sentimental and just think about how much she taught me just in that refusing the prescribed clock of important life events is possible.

As I teeter on the end of my 40’s and notice how much of my life is not how I expected it to be while simultaneously knowing it is exactly how I always wanted it to be, there is a lot to be said about the lens of expectation and more importantly, who’s lens? But I have to credit Diane, to a point, because I have always gone towards what interests me despite what anyone else thinks about that and yeah, sometimes that’s been messy but I have learned it gets easier to negotiate how to have less drama the more you learn to live your life and its just so strange to me, how you keep doing that, and you wake up and realize ‘whoa, I made a whole life out of this……’ and it’s just the wildest thing, it really is.

RIP Diane Keaton. So grateful you existed from the bottom of my heart.

promote

I have been sitting on this for a few months but am excited to announce that I am releasing my poetry book XO on Metalabel.

If you have seen me read poetry over the past few years, this is what I was reading. If you have read a poem of mine of online, it’s from here. Here is one.

There are print or digital versions. You can order here.

pay attention

Last fall, I saw this wonderful documentary called Monk In Pieces about the extraordinary Meredith Monk and besides being a narrative about her early days, there is a great deal of attention to what it means to be an artist in their later years and what it means to ensure one’s legacy once we are gone.

One scene that has stayed with me is in a rehearsal space. Monk is sitting next to the director of a re-staging of her seminal work, ATLAS, and the performer who will be singing Monk’s part is singing the piece above “Choosing Companions” and its hard for me to watch it and not think about how intimidating that must be for this woman stepping into Monk’s shoes.

One moment I particularly like is when Monk stops her because she wants her to be more attention to the bird call moments throughout the piece because as she says in her own words, “I did that rather well and I would hate for it to get lost.”

orgs to donate to

At a loss for words these days regarding the state of the world except yeah, the world is on fire, let’s love each other anyway.

Sarah Potter is a professional psychic, tarot reader, and witch based in New York City. Known for her warm, empowering approach to magic, she weaves tarot, ritual, and intuition into everything she does, from one-on-one readings to full moon ceremonies and her BUST columns, “Ask the Tarot” and Seasonal Tarotscopes. Sarah’s new book, Sober Magic: Using the Tarot and Ritual In Your Journey Away From Drinking (Running Press) explores the intersection of witchcraft, creativity, and recovery. Follow her moonlit adventures at

guest recs

I always ask guests what music they are really into and it was such a delight when Sarah named Mary Lattimore, who I also adore and we both said her song “Wawa By the Ocean” was our favorite song of hers so it was a no brainer that would be the piece we would open our episode with.

More rec from Sarah herself:

‘My book recommendations are Women Who Run with the Wolves, All About Love by bell hooks, 78 degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack, Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea.

I am wildly looking forward to Melissa Auf Der Maur's memoir which comes out to the spring and my psychic sense tells me it will be beyond incredible!!’

A Color Spell

I love choosing a color that matches the energy I want for my creative practice that day. Maybe gold for confidence, pink for sweetness, blue for clarity, and placing something in that color on my desk. It becomes a little energetic anchor that keeps me connected to the vibe I want to create from.

I was so happy when Remy texted me that she wanted to do the Devil card this month for Tarot Club. I texted back: ‘The misunderstood kinkster that just wants to eat chocolate ice cream for breakfast, they mean no harm.’

As a Capricorn, I have to admit I am also somewhat biased because the Devil is our card which I love for us because we have such a bad rap.

The Devil illuminates the path before us that extends beyond the body which is a different kind of light, almost like learning to see in the dark - using the sensorial spectrum to know where and how to step and also negotiating the boundaries of surrender to understand our chains.

Our plant comrade this month, Lobelia is a new one for me so I am excited to learn more but from a tiny bit of research, I have come to learn it has been known to be good for depression and smoking cessation which then leads me to thinking about the larger issue and affects of addiction and mental illness which seems to be a more consistent and glaring theme of late unfortunately.

The connection between the two feels very grounded in thinking about releasing false narratives by acknowledging the power we give them, appeasing people that don’t really care about us beyond their own needs and not advocating and prioritizing our own financial well being.

I am excited to do the spread tonight.

TAROT CLUB at GOODWITCH is tonight. In person in Hudson or Virtual

Link here to Register. xx

This month’s guest is Daniel Giordano, who is an artist based in Newburgh, NY. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fish Island Gallery, Fish Island, CT; The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY (2024); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023); Turley Gallery, Hudson, NY (2023); JDJ, New York, NY (2023); Ann Street Gallery, Safe Harbors of the Hudson, Newburgh, NY (2022), among others. Daniel’s work has been included in group exhibitions at High Noon, New York, NY (2024); Grimm, New York, NY (2024); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Bronx, NY (2024); Helena Anrather, New York, NY (2023); The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY (2022); The Dorsky Museum, SUNY New Paltz, NY (2022); Fortnight Institute, New York, NY (2022), among others. He is the recipient of the NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, via The Hyde Collection, New York, NY (2023); the Individual Artist Commission Grant, Arts Mid-Hudson, Kingston, NY (2022); A. Gray Magness Award, University of Delaware, Newark, DE (2015); and The Alan Greenhalgh/Laura Gurton Award, Woodstock Artist Association and Museum, (WAAM) Woodstock, NY (2014). Daniel, his exhibitions, and works have been featured in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Cultured Magazine, Upstate Diary, Two Coats of Paint, and White Hot Magazine, among others.

The two cards, without fail, that people hate seeing in a tarot spread are Death and The Tower. And I find myself consistently saying the same thing when they appear in a reading which is that they represent an ending that one already knows about, literally, the querent will have just told me that they are in the process of going through a divorce or moving to a new city, and then they shudder when they see the Death card and I am just like you already know this is coming.

When this card (or The Tower, for that matter) appears, it is really offering some insight about how the process is going to go. Since this month’s focus is on Death, I will just focus on that one and in that, the message is the time is done and its all part of life. Relationships end, they change and evolve. Jobs are temporary holds on our time and focus. Some of us are meant to call multiple places home. And eventually the big D will come for us in one way or another.

In that, is where the real message comes and why I think Black Walnut as a plant ally this season feels compatible. Mostly because it is notoriously the hardest nut to crack. This fact alone is enough to prove daunting in our approach but really the task of cracking this nut is one that offers a transformative possibility to imagine a new future.

We die many times in a single existence. And the longer we resist, hold on to what once was, the further we move ourselves into a land of illusion which is more painful to leave than reality.

What often gets ignored about Black Walnut is its healing properties, especially for the nails and the skin. It also can be diluted into the most gorgeous ink and I feel this is the iteration most worth focusing on in this moment: not resisting the struggle to break open so we can release the ink within to write the next chapter of our lives.

The next Tarot Club is on Thursday, Nov 12 from 6-8pm EST in Hudson at the GOODWITCH studio or online. Register here.

This month’s guest is Lea Bertucci who is an experimental musician whose work revolves around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music, often staged in hyper-resonant spaces.

Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since founded her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release. Recent collaborations include duos with Lawrence English, Olivia Block, and Ben Vida. She has released on a number of labels including Astral Spirits, Room40, American Dreams and Dinzu Artefacts.

She has performed both within the US and internationally with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Metropolitan Museum, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, ReWire Festival, Borderline Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. In 2018, she was awarded a Jfund for New Music grant from the American Composers’ Forum and a commission for a brass octet from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York. Lea has attended artist residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts and ISSUE Project Room. She has received commissions from the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin, and ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia. She is a 2024 recipient of the Gigahertz Production Prize from the ZKM in Karlsruhe.

This month’s Tarot Club will be thinking about the intersection of Yarrow, Justice, and the Four of Swords. I am going to break this down element by element but I think the correspondence between these three is about taking a moment of peace while we assess our current situations.

There is much said about how Yarrow’s healing properties comes into deep play at moments of initial wounding (both internal and external) but in a deeper, more spiritual level, completion marks the ability of us to reach a new level of internal development by taking our trauma and turning it into our transformation. The state of completion is reached when we learn to take our failures, challenges, and traumas and turn them into our teachings, of transforming the “poison into our medicine,” and thus helping us reach a greater state of spiritual maturity.

The Four of Swords is a tarot card symbolizing a period of rest, recuperation, and quiet reflection following a period of turmoil or stress. Upright, it calls for a pause to heal, meditate, and regain mental clarity, while reversed, it can signal a period of wasted rest, avoidance, or a need to communicate and resolve festering issues.

Personally, writing about a time of rest feels crazy right now as I am negotiating one of the most hectic phases in a very long time but I relate to this and hear this in others, where there definitely seems to be an editing process with dynamics and projects that we have the capacity we can take on based off of where our priorities need to lie at the current moment.

Our attentions are in the immediate which I think is a very good thing so we can really see what works and what doesn’t. This is why I think the Justice card is a good archetype as it signifies fairness, balance, truth, cause and effect, and accountability. When upright, it encourages you to make impartial decisions and take responsibility for your actions.

It is within these immediate actions that we can assess the affects and discern what we would like to do going forward.

I will write more about this next week in my essay post - so much to say and still don’t have all the words in my own life to make sense of this all so I am really looking forward to pulling some cards to maybe find some clarity tonight at GOODWITCH both in person and virtually. Register here!

This month, I hung out with my personal faves G. Lucas Crane who is a sound artist, designer, performer, and musician whose work focuses on media-chop-up collage, tape manipulation, sonic mind-control and time travel. His cassette-tape based archival sound practice explores the wild liminal spaces of hybrid analog sound worlds and new performance techniques for allegedly obsolete technology. His uniquely haunting Tape DJ style has been lent to a wide range of bands and projects over the last 25 years. In New York City, he has variously performed at the Museum of Art and Design, Pioneer Works, Roulette Intermedium, Issue Project Room and the Brooklyn Museum, and he has toured nationally and internationally as a tape-manipulation extraordinaire. He has been recognized for his sound design and compositions with a Henry Hewes award and a Bessie nomination, and was the co-founder of Silent Barn, one of the largest collectivist art space projects in recent history. He received a masters in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts from the Universitat der Kunste in 2023.

I finally did the math and realized that we have been having the on again off again conversation about collaborating on something for 11 years and now that we live in closer proximity, I have come to learn about our shared love for the tarot. Which ironically we didn’t chat that much about on air but our conversations did spark the ‘game’ we decided to play on air which was essentially that Lucas would pull the cards and I would pull a corresponding tape from the magical suitcase he brought and then we would align the card meaning with the narrative behind each tape which actually became less about the sound on the reels (which we did play) but more about the archive of memory it revealed in the telling.

Below is an image of how we were spreading out the cards with the tapes.

Stay tuned for more, we’re just getting cooking here. xx.