BRINK LITERARY JOURNAL
Issue no. 11
Obsession
What it actually means is to besiege, or, as we might call it, to sit. When you obsess, you intentionally place yourself before something—an object, an idea, a task. It is not a passive posture; it is an active one. Your presence indicates your investment. Your presence affirms your desire to absorb, encompass, or command. To learn. Won’t you dig in? Sit with us in the center of that which fully captures our attention.
VIDEO ESSAYS AND CINEPOETRY
Now You See Here
If you watched them in sequence, sitting beside a friend or a lover, the next three pieces might convince you that the tonal range of the video essay, the cinepoem, the lyric video, remains woefully unmeasured. One video is the size of a brick wall, the next is sung in a swaggering round, the last one wears a troubling mustache. Each piece wields a very different definition of the genre but also leaves behind a similar residue–a tickle, a pain.
Maybe you look at your friend afterwards. Maybe he laughs? How could a video essay make you cry-not-cry like a poem? How did the silvery feeling of reading find you here with no page to see? Which video will you send to your work wife? Are you, like, obsessed with us yet?
In “Not Included—Embedded” Troels Steenholdt Heiredal uses the accessible image description as a writing prompt. Dancers perform for their reflections in the storefront glass of Taipei, where the sidewalk is more restaurant than street. Silhouettes scatter through city parks, which “echo of the collective tending to the body.” Through “autistic perception,” a new vernacular of space spreads across the screen and Heiredal teaches the viewer, again, how to see.
In “signs of life” the speaker is grieving, pacing in her own interminable shadow, engraving the pavement with chicken bones. Shooting on an iPhone, Sloan Asakura writes: “And the omen, also lonely, croaks a song.” Her recycled lines remind us that each season is a form of insistence, a life reasserted by its shadow.
In their three-part collaboration, “Candidacy,” Ginger Ko and Katie Jean Shinkle wander through a funhouse where vaginas are made of H-E-B bags and women are fluent in intrusive thoughts. Simple props turn the actors into their own ventriloquists: “Why are you so focused on how he talks about you?” “It’s not his fault he likes skinny, pretty, sweet things.” The script descends into pearly wigs “trapped in ritual time, your Tupperware party, your onboarding training,” speaking through the fake beard of a hegemony fully internalized.