https://tapedrive.gallery Tape Drive Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:46:54 +0000 https://tapedrive.gallery en https://tapedrive.gallery/1_GreenSoup Sun, 01 Oct 2023 12:58:50 +0000 Tape Drive https://tapedrive.gallery/1_GreenSoup ✇ Green Soup Oct 23, 2023 I was born a mollusk, a lone slime circulating in my own galaxy. A porous child, I bathed in a deep green soup of memory and decay. Last year, I started to smell. I became self-conscious over the reek in my molar cavities, my inner thigh, and my wet feet in netted sandals. Still, I relished the funk. My armpits were my favorite, a froggy gloss oozing over girlish stubble. They smelled a little like chap chye, a braised vegetable stew from my childhood. A Nyonya stew, I later realized, of Lunar New Year carcasses and browned napa. It reminded me of my grandmother--a frail circuit of twigs in my home. Her eyes are watery, which worries me, and I hear she doesn’t pass stool anymore. Popo was a devout Buddhist in my youth. It was prayer beads, holy water, whatever the fuck. She was also many things; my apple slicer, my muse, and a regretful gambler. Right before I moved to San Francisco, she’d started wearing only white frocks. Popo delivered Chinese sermons daily, desperately, purging herself of her past. Reborn, redeemed, and heaven bound. I wonder if she thought Jesus invented Mahjong. In the haziest corner of my time here, I find myself staring into a Tupperware tumbler of floating grey silvers. Against the dark teal, the ash flakes seemed almost lonely, wafting in plastic ether. Sometimes I let the sediments rest, and other times I swirled them like a snow globe. Popo fed me burnt talismans, and siphon them I did. I never knew what blessings these talismans carried, but I later learned they contained lead. I would think of this often. Against my new life--of Oakland woodshops, quarterly goals, and Halloween parties--I found this too esoteric to divulge. Too foreign, almost, even for my Asian friend from Saratoga. I cradled this memory close to me, submitting myself to the metallic crush of Popo’s ash water in secret. https://tapedrive.gallery/2_Christmas2005 Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:46:54 +0000 Tape Drive https://tapedrive.gallery/2_Christmas2005 ✇ Christmas 2005 Dec 25, 2023 My mom sent me the home videos on Whatsapp, as I had requested. Each of them shakily extracted from her archaic Samsung TFT Color with her iPhone camera. I guess I thought they would be good for my Visual Studies final, talking about my immigrant roots or whatever. Those seemed to get the best grades.&nbsp;The videos came to me in waves--5:48, 1:24, 1:09, 5:02--a heavily rewatched montage of my first day in preschool. I wondered if my mom had filmed it in bits because her wrist was getting tired. My father, smiling with his square jaw and overbite, whisking me away to school bouncing on his left forearm. Then there were others--6:29 (me being pushed around Orchard Road in a stroller) and 0:23 (me, around 4, in a department store). I sat in the back of this bus watching, lurching over speed bumps from the 22nd Street to 4th Street Caltrain station. I crossed plain after plain of cloud software billboards, ExxonMobils, dented white Teslas, a dry vastness that seemed inbetween light khaki and mustard. The videos my mom sent were all silent, but I was hesitant about troubling her with the task of re-recording all of them with sound. For me, there was virtually nothing to listen to, aside from this big bus grazing over asphalt, and some person’s Instagram reel in the distance. I watched and re-watched all of the home videos, except “Christmas2005.svi”, which my mom had to email me because it was corrupt. When I tried decoding it on my Macbook, this file flickered in grey bursts. It was all nothingness, an esoteric brutalism.&nbsp; It was a true Ghost in the Machine moment. What exactly was on this video, and why couldn’t I access it? Did the moment exist if nobody remembers it? “Christmas2005.svi” left me with profound abysses in my understanding of time and existence. Most of all, I felt sorely left out. I wonder what had been seen through my parents’ tired eyes, through the mechanical chirp of a digital camera, through the burr of my mom’s old media player. I simply don’t remember. All these entities had bore witness to me, which I could never access, even if I synthetically downloaded them into my brain by watching them. It was like Christmas 2005 had existed for everyone but me. What do I remember of 2005? It was a good year, as I had topped my cohort in Mathematics and English. It was also the year my now-estranged father gifted me my first present. The white snow globe was only about three inches wide, but it weighed a lot for an eight year-old. It felt expensive. I received it on my birthday, beaming on my parent’s bed as I watched the plastic confetti waft across the snowman, weightless. As if floating in space, this gift, and its giver’s sentiment of love, was salient throughout my parents’ innumerable conflicts. This old vignette finally shattered the day I picked glass shards out of my toes. It cut way more deeply than I had expected. https://tapedrive.gallery/About-Tape-Drive Wed, 14 Jun 2023 01:18:45 +0000 Tape Drive https://tapedrive.gallery/About-Tape-Drive Tape Drive Intimacy ✇ Fluidity Tape Drive is an experimental log for amorphous projects and writing. <img width="1518" height="1782" width_o="1518" height_o="1782" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7ad7da9c9d10acd22121c153ed05941f48c8e8bb2507a1ea9de7d3749ab6fd93/Screen-Shot-2023-06-13-at-2.55.58-PM.png" data-mid="181996704" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7ad7da9c9d10acd22121c153ed05941f48c8e8bb2507a1ea9de7d3749ab6fd93/Screen-Shot-2023-06-13-at-2.55.58-PM.png" />