CZM Book Club: Girls Who Look Through Glass, by Alex Smith

0:01 Cool Zone Media.

0:06 Book Club book Club book Club. Hello and welcome to the Cool Zone Media book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. And this week we have a tore the force from an author, artist and musician named Alex Smith. It's called Girls Who Look Through Glass and it's from Alex's phenomenal twenty twenty two collection Arc Dust from Rosarium Publishing. There's so much in this story to be excited about. It has incredibly niche, radical cultural references.

0:42 It has a main character who brandishes a box cutter as her blade of choice. It has white people being extra white. It has divine metaphors for the experience of grief or of being newly called into radical movements. I don't actually totally know what the metaphor is exactly about. It's up to you because that's the beauty of reading, and it's what makes this story so good. So let's get into it. Girls Who Look Through Glass by Alex Smith.

1:14 Packs of artismal biscuits stacked in several rows, shrink wrapped and dusty rows of organic pickled sour kraut and reclaimed mason jars. She wields her box cutter over these items, like a samurai with her sword, ripping through splintered cardboard boxes down the aisles decorated with rows of burlap sacks filled with bacon infused, gluten free Sarascha bars and oatcakes, and cellophane bags adorned with pictures of old white men on horses. She slits the top of a package with one precise, gentle glide, ignoring the picture of a knife with a ghostbuster slash through it, her blade gently grazing a packet of caramelized satan chips. She then snaps the blade back in its metal sheath and glides the thing

2:06 into her back pocket. It's a delicate act of violence. The aisles are quiet tonight. Minutes ago, they were a yammering mix of gentrifiers glued to their cell phones on conference calls and soccer moms shrewish in their investigation of every ingredient in the packs of incense and the bags of frozen kale lining their carts. The only time it seemed to her that any of them cared about whether something was organic or free range was if enough of the horde was within earshot. They all seemed to compete for airtime, bearded hipsters with their own grocery bags made of hemp rope, hipping nannies and thrifted sun dresses, still caked in dirt from repairing bikes all day or planting back CHOI in the hydroponic garden they started in the

2:55 cemetery behind a school. Ma'am, that's it's not free range, it's lettuce, she'd say, talking a whittled down pencil behind her ear, straightening her apron, backing away incrementally, trying to blend back into the background, as if she never existed. But I do exist, she says out loud, snapping out of her reverie. Where am I? A quick look around at the shelves, some barren and scattered, some so sloppily haphazard, now melting frozen soy shark fin dangling over a row of Newminow's cookies and botanical powdered nutrient bath supplements tossed behind cans of overpriced Amy's three Bean soup that she might have wandered out loud if any of that postgraduate school money they were earning could afford her customers some manners,

3:50 she let out a snort, Oh yeah, inventory, She lifts herself off of her knees, dusts herself off habit, checks for her box cutter. Get hold of yourself, Vanda. Most nights were spent in the back room, sitting with Chef, watching her chain smoke as she scrolls through reels of security tape looking for anything odd she might have missed on her shift. Hey, baby girl, Chef calls to Vanda, patting the chair beside her as if to say sit, letting out sick ropey streams of smoke with every word she barks. A white girl from the Northeast who battled through the meth epidemic unscathed. Chef's presence is commanding. Her belly is a mound of asymmetrical flesh easing around her overalls in a liquid swim. Chef's fingers are sawn off

4:42 sticks racked with jaundice and dirt. Her hair a swathe of tangled grease. Chef laughs, points a cigaretted hand at her monitor while Vonda eases into the doorway. This girl, she says, still chuckling. This girl on the goddamn trench coat. What a god damn creeper. Vonda takes a step or two towards the monitor. She pulls back her long dreads and squints tightly focusing. There's a woman on the screen and a long black trench coat, yes, and a black, wide brimmed hat. Vonda thinks the woman on the monitor looks ridiculous. Who is that? She asks Chef what, I don't know? I thought you knew. Chef retorts, more amused than astonished. She just sort of appears on the screen over here every time you do, like she scrolls, yeah,

5:33 like right here, you're spraying down the apples, and she just sort of stands there, like hovering or some shit. I don't know. You're telling me you don't know her. Nah, Wonda whispers, as the hair on her back gently ripples. Nah, I don't know that woman. Oh Jesus Christ. The woman on the screen seems to chruscade as she moves, Her body smeared with traces of staticky black lines. The mystery woman, this vague creature. She looks like a smudge of clotted ink, barely cohesive, her every movement a streak. Did you just see that? See what? She's just standing there?

6:11 What?

6:11 Chef looks at Fonda with concern. You are right, baby girl. Wonda usually balks when Chef calls her baby girl. It feels unfamiliar and a little forced, ripped from a butch to English dictionary, But this time, feeling a little woozy, Wonda lets it slide without any remarks or turn of the lip. Wonda is transfixed on the security monitor. The woman of static stops moving suddenly in the middle of rummaging through apples, straightening up and smoothing out her coat, turning until she seems to be facing the camera. Peering through the monitor screen. Her eyes are small beads swimming around underneath thick horned rims. She looks directly into the camera, her lips like a total blur, moving rapidly as if

6:59 speaking in tongues. WHOA okay, that's different. Chef yells, is this some kind of prank, Vonda? It's like she knows we watching her or some shit like now in real time. Chef's voice quiets, as if she realizes the ridiculousness of her own statement. Honestly, I swear I've never seen her in my life, Wonda exclaims, panicking. Vonda can feel her breath getting shorter, her words, quavering, bouncing and tingling off the back room walls like metallic feathers. She moves nervously closer to her Chef's sitting, bending down and nearly shoving her face into the screen. Wonda gets so close that a waft of the smoky husk it's cardamom and carcinogen emanating off of Chef seems to float there in the space around her, like an aura. The woman in the

7:49 trench coat leaps suddenly at them, her mouth wide, gnarled and grotesque, her fingers long and wiry. They both jump. Chef loses her cigarette, nearly out of her chair. The screen turns to fuzz and static, then black, and then back to the serenity of the co op, where hippies and stay at home dads with large headed white babies and cloth sings on their backs, frolic amidst vegan peanut shoes and kale chips. But you saw that, though, right, Fonda asks Chef, with a tremor snaking through her voice.

8:23 I'm not. I'm not just seeing things, am I? I don't know? That was fucking surreal? What am I even seeing? Baby girl? Wonda unfolds a chair leaning on the wall and slumps down in it beside her coworker. She cups her face in her hands and sighs deeply after a moment with Chef staring at her as if Vonda would provide an explanation somehow magically, perhaps to the weird shit they'd both seen. Chef, I don't know, Wonda huffs. She leans back, reaching for Chef's pack of cigarettes, one left.

9:00 She pops the lucy out and gently tosses the pack at Chef, who startled, catches it in her nicotine stained, yellowing fingers and stop calling me that, now call everybody that, Chef responds, turning back to the monitor, her voice a muted murmur. And do you know who will always call you baby girl? In a maternal but still kind of stilted way. That's right, it's the products and services that support this show because they love you so very dearly, But the confines of capitalism must always keep them at arms distance. Here's ads, and we're back. Vonda Ray leans against the wall behind the co op. Her backpack is filled with pre rotting potatoes, some bottles of a discontinued brand of cumin, coriander, or regano allspice with Gwyneth Paltrow's

10:07 face on them and a bundle of scallions that were She finally admits to herself just cold jacked off the rack. She smokes a cigarette. Chef leaves the store too, with two other coworkers. Hey, Vonda pulls a head off the cigarette. Hey, all done in there? Yeah. Chef bangs the heavy door shut, then pounds at it with her fist. This bitch is secure.

10:34 She leans into Wonda's ear. No fucking ghost creeps in this rat trap on my shift, believe that. Chef smiles a breathy smile, puts her hand on Vonda's shoulder. You're gonna be all right, yeah, Vonda manages to smile back. Yeah, I'm good. She watches Chef and their two co workers amble down forty ninth Street, recounting their day, ruminating about shitty customers and the dilapidated point of sale systems, repeat failures, and as they disappear around the corner of Florence Street, she turns her attention to the tendrils of smoke. She blows into the crisp night air. The moon is out a reflecting pool of milk suspended in black a weird mirror aimed at our hearts, so we can see in the darkness, so we can see our own souls. Vonda

11:25 gets a text from one of her roommates. Are you coming? You're supposed to bring cardboard from the co op dumpster. She texts back, not tonight, You, of all people, should be there tonight, with a frowny face emoji. She starts and stops a message several times, struggling to articulate what she feels. It's the same weight of emotion whenever she neglects a chore on the chore wheel, or whenever she's a day late for rent, or when she's playing music a little too loudly on her laptop tucked in her room, wishing the day away. When she's sitting in the living room having cheerios with a friend and watching Akira on the so called community VCR, she's taking too much advantage of the space. When she's in her room smoking weed

12:10 with her on again, off again Caroline, she's being antisocial. Being the black girl in an all white community house in West Philadelphia feels like being stuck in the gravitron at a carnival, dizzying, crushing weight, slamming her against the wall, a palpable gravity with no tangible manipulator, just constantly being betrayed by an unseen force. I'm erased here, she told Caroline over a bowl a few nights ago. Just I don't know, Like, how did I get here?

12:44 You know?

12:45 Caroline followed Vonda's grand gesture of here by looking around the room, posters of Pat Benattar, a book on the situationists, a pile of band t shirts with names like filth and pig Destroyer littering the floor. I don't know, cuz, Caroline hummed, exhaling her slow Southern draw, untainted by two years of living in Philly, eking out across lips so dark they were black. Seems like you'd fit right in here, Vonda smiled. She liked the way Caroline's voice reminded her of the women she knew from the South, women who could weave a mosaic in corn rows, whose sweet tea poured out of a jug like cotton candy. The question is miss thing, Caroline said, putting the blunt out on a makeshift tin can ash tray and removing her oversized

13:35 African print top and what seemed like one motion, what the hell am I doing here? They grinned at each other. Vonda's foot graced Caroline's leg, her toes walking up her friend's shin come here and find out. And now, while her roommates gather in the living room, hands sticky with glue and palms covered in ink, She's in that space again, desperately seeking something to give her control over her life, to give her space to scream. Vonda turns her phone on again. She's going to put an end to this shit. Yeah, she'd worked enough hours at the co op, saved a little cash. She'd stay on Caroline's couch for a week or two until she could come up with the remainder for a deposit. The worst she figured was that, yeah,

14:23 she had stayed at the shelter before, and yeah, she could sell her cousin's broken bike for parts. So it was okay. It was time to go, and she was going to do it through a text message, sure, a taste of their own note leaving angry text messaging Facebook shaming medicine in all caps. Wonda would scream this time for sure, not just in pursuit of a metaphorical truth on her phone's screen. The letters swirl around in a strange soup. They danced like embers, then erupt, leaping from the phone itself. Pixels form a dust cl like a swirl of one hundred star particles pulled from everywhere, coalescing until they are a static body. A girl, A girl of static meshy dust and cosmic ephemera appears before Vonda,

15:13 radiating shattered light. A ghost.

15:18 Do not be afraid of me, please, I don't have much time.

15:23 This can't be fucking real. Wonda sinks to her knees. The ghost being swirls about her, an ionized creature half there, flickering. Vonda reaches to touch it, but.

15:34 No, I don't think you should touch me. Please, we haven't much time.

15:41 What are you? The woman from the store from before?

15:46 No, I am not wait, there were.

15:48 Others, panic strikes, the ghost woman's already tiny, darkly radioactive voice. She's phasing in and out.

15:57 Please, we are beings of light. We mean you no harm. But the dark ones are coming. The Ragnar Rocks, the trimetric Camara, the monastic order of the temporal Nights. Those who bear no name except the name of the all acclaimed everything.

16:18 The men, the radiant being cast its gaze up and behind Vonda. It freezes, hovering there. It's lightning pulsing now in and out, from bright flash to dull glimmer. If it's possible for a ghost to turn pale, that's what Vonda would be seen at. Do now. But do you know what will never jump scare you? It's certainly not these corniass ad transitions that we write in that disrupt the flow of the narrative. Couldn't be them. All of the products and services that sponsor the show are the perfectly approachable kinds of divine, and not the scary kinds of divine. Here's ads, and we're back. Vonda slowly stands up, turns around. Two bodies emerge from the black void of a shadow. They're every step like a scratch on concrete.

17:22 Their faces, not quite like those of men, partially obscured by scarves hidden under long brimmed hats and high buttoned trench coats and horned rimmed glasses, are scaly and wet set. One of them hisses, sirie, it's a child. The other whispers a husky, dark scratch of a voice where the men who's an ape?

17:45 Is pitched black?

17:46 We're the ones who drink to death the stars. Then a third emerges, the woman from the security video. Her form like a lump and snake, a stepless shuffle of feet, obscured by her trench dragging the floor. Shay, who we are, she demands.

18:06 No, perhaps you will drink.

18:09 But not of this light. The ghost woman bursts into a searing light, an explosion that shatters the car windows around them. When the light dims, there's blackness. The ghost woman is a crystallized glass shell, her torso large, smoky black onyx. She falls to the ground. Vonda lunges to grab her, bracing herself for the catch. The ghost woman looks heavy, but when Vonda embraces her, she realizes that the ghost Woman is soft as gossamer and nearly as light as the air around them. Veinlike cracks weave up the creature's arm and shoulders and back. From only such a gentle touch of Wonda's well worn box, tearing blunt rolling fingers, give her to me, child. The men in black coats are hovering over them, opal shadows warp around them. No,

19:05 they scream when they sense that Vonda has no intention of handing over the ghost woman, so freely they lurch for her. With one swift motion, Vonda snatches her box cutter from her back pocket with one hand, holding the ghost woman with her other. And Vonda is on a patchy grass plane. She is being carried in a cage like carriage by hulking men, all smoldering, all coal skinned, and barely clothed. The sun rides high and drifts on its own vibratory heat stroked mirages. The men stop as Vonda gasps wildly, as if she has emerged from the sea itself. Her eyes search the space. In the reflection of shiny tin bangles that adorn the carrier cage, she sees herself. She is draped and shimmering, playful accouterments like

20:02 a North African queen, perhaps jewelry and colorful clothes wrapped tightly around her. But is that her? She looks closer, and the woman reflected back as jet black, shaven, with eyes so watery they seem about to burst. She's beautiful, Wonda whispers, raising her hand to the reflection, the reflection doing the same. We must protect the virgin princess Virgin Vonda says aloud. She opens the curtain, and through its veil she sees an army amassing over the horizon, whom the carrier cage lands with a thought on the ground.

20:43 A hatch is opened, and a wrinkled, gnarled hand pokes its way through to her protect the Virgin Queen. A cackling voice emits. The hand gently yanks Vonda out into the sun soaked world. She is the one who should be protecting us. She is the one who has spent her life in the King's glass house, fed the knowledge of the ancestors. She who has fought dragons in pits of living entrails since the age of two. Let her pass her sword through the bosom of our enemy with the might of isis herself. The woman is frail, a small thing, hunchbacked, her gowns heavier than she is. The old crone of a woman ambles over towards a small thatched quiver and pulls from it a small sword. She hands it to Vonda, staring deep into her eyes, past

21:37 the eyes of the Virgin princess that crone perhaps once knew, and into the eyes of Vonda. The co op girl herself. It's time now, child, the old woman says, calmer knowingly, one bony hand atop Wonda's with her other hand holding the unsheathed bladed end of a sword. Vonda takes the sword reluctantly. She looks from it, and then to the soldiers, to the woman, then finally to the gathering of large, grotesque white men carrying horn shaped muskets across the horizon, edging violently ever closer, the hoofs of horses and giraffes and elephants sounding through the velt, getting louder until they're like jackhammers on the West Philly Street at six thirty in the morning. The white men's muskets crack the still

22:27 quiet air, and beside Vonda the men in war paint and loincloth fall. They are black drops of rain hitting the earth and death. Vonda faces the old Crone, who has gone into a smile, even though her soldiers fall to an unknown magic with a sulfur discharge. Now, the Crone whispers. Now she steps aside to let Vonda face the war as it swirls around them. A pale ashen, snarling, bush faced man on a harnessed lion right in her face, the beast's tongue licking her eyebrow. Strike. Now, Fonda, the Virgin Princess, swings her blade at the lion, catching it in the belly, and with the same twist of the box cutter. One being in black falls down to the ground in a heap blackness spewing out of him, once as thick bloodlike liquid, then as evaporating inky shadow stuff.

23:30 A deafening scream emits from it, as if it has never experienced harm before. Around the corner, a stream of men on motorbikes blast up the street. A gaggle of frat boys, drunkenly looking for a pub stumble up the sidewalks. An army of gay boys laughing at women loaded down with grocery bags, and a few children shoulder past them.

23:54 The perfect cover to get away, Vonda, on instinct, grabs the now of fine glass ghost woman eschewing the streets, cutting through backyards and over fences, Vonda races forward, eyes ahead, her one free hand on her box cutter, now searching for her keys. We're going out the vigils tonight, but it's almost midnight. Oh my god, it's an all night vigil robot squad is going They're doing a puppet show.

24:25 Isn't wait? Isn't this a peaceful vigil put on by Black Lives for Justice? What is that? An art project? Vonda forgot that she's holding a glass woman in her hands. Yeah, she says, looking past her nosy roommates to the stairs, an art project. Sure. She beats a path up the stairs, leaving unspoken chides lodged in the agape mouths of her judgmental roommates, and into the hallway, nearly knocking her room door off the hinges. She closes it behind her, tosses her bag on the floor, and lays the ghost woman on her mattress. Vonda can see her now. The ghost Woman's hips are wide, her chest ample, her lips lush.

25:09 She seems quite large, almost seven feet tall. The cracks in her shell slowly closed, sealed with dim thinning radiance. Vonda sits in the corner, murmuring to herself her roommates, They of the chore wheel, of the dumpstered vegan shrimp, of the combination organic cotton knitting circle slash China Mieville book Club will never understand any of this hell, she thinks, to herself. I don't even understand this. Yea, what the fuck is any of this? She edges closer to the still frozen woman of ghost and glass. What are you, Vonda whispers to her. She gets a buzz on her cell phone. It snaps her out of her trance. Vonda scrambles for her phone, Digging through her bag, she finds it, and on the screen is a glowing face. It's her.

26:01 I am a ghoster.

26:03 The phone speaks with pixelated digital lips, the crackle and buzz from before gone and replaced with a voice, warm and weighty. I know, I'm sorry, this is very startling.

26:14 I had to warn you. They are here to erase you, to take your stories, to fold them into the secret tombs of the past, and then toss them into the abyss of forgotten knowledge, deep within the wells of nothingness of the no universe.

26:33 Crap, Vonda snaps. She's suddenly angry at herself for not paying attention to her little sister's relentless, meandering soliloquies about star wars and hobbits and warp drives and other nonsense. It would help, she opines, if I had some kind of frame of reference, for this shit. I what do you want from me? I'm just a girl who works at a co op.

26:55 You are no mere girl, Vonda Alicia Ray of Eastern Philadelphia. You are the steam child, the slave liberator, the two spirit warrior woman, the planes walker, the death dealer, the comedic, mimetic virgin princess who rides the dragon beasts from the east.

27:16 Right, the Virgin Princess right back there behind the co op. It was like I was transported to another place, like I traded bodies with someone.

27:23 And yes, you are all of those things, my child, and I am a ghoster, the physical manifestation of the ephemera of the souls of lost guardians of ancestors, said here to protect you by a powerful sorcerer, to guide.

27:38 You on a new journey, my new journey.

27:43 Yes, you will save memory, you will save all of us. You will save the Universe's.

27:51 A knock at the door. Hey, you in there, it's chef. What's she doing here? One minute? Are you naked? Chef sings? Come on, I'm just playing. I came back here to check on you. You all right, I'm fine, Vonda says, scrambling for a blanket or something to throw on the fragile lump of the ghoster. I'm fine, just give me a minute. Her phone turns brighter and brighter until a burst of light plunges from it. Sparks fly out of it, and light loops towards the ghoster, coating it with living energy.

28:25 Goddamn it, this thing is not subtle at all, Wonda yells, as the ghoster rises towards the ceiling. It is a swirl of cosmic brightness, of neon on fire. Wonda, what the fuck I'm coming in, Chef barges in. Just as the ghoster explodes. It's eruption is high, piercing the ceiling, blasting through the roof and into the night sky. Whoa, that's that thing from before. Not exactly, Vonda retorts, bracing against the shaking walls. It just fucking blew up, yeah, Wonda affirms over the din. She she does that. A swirl of energy beings pulse from the ghoster's rising body.

29:09 As the roof shards crumble and burn in the afterglow, the ghoster is sucked up into the vortex, along with shoes and coats and pencils and records. Chef and Vonda cling to each other, tears streaming from their faces, and then vump. The light disappears, the debris falls to the ground, and they are surrounded by darkness. They sit on the bed, huddled together, whimpering, quivering. Chef pulls away and looks at Vonda a loving, calming look, the kind of look that acknowledges that the life of the person in front of her will never be the same. Wonda looks at her coworker for a second, and in Chef's deep, cigarette soaked visage, she sees beauty. She sees the commonality between them, dissipating

29:55 by the second, and then, after a brief pang of dread, remembering she left a few containers of oat milk in an unopened box, but by the dairy fridge in act, Vonda is sure she'd be written up for her eyes narrow in focus as to all of this, she sees an ending, and that's the ending of the story. The story has ended. Welcome back, gentle listener. This is a rich story. It is bursting at the seams with characterization and scenery and metaphor. Hazel, who helps behind the scenes, says about this quote, I also have worked at multiple bougie food co ops. So Vonda struggles with the hypocrisy and just plain silliness of the food she's selling and has implicitly packaged politics really grabbed me. This was a

30:44 time in my life that I was also being radicalized by grief, and I remember so firmly feeling that everyone who went out of their way to buy cage free eggs needed to also be a prison abolitionist. Still do. The Alice in Wonderland Stranger in a Strange Place format is a staple of short fiction. But the way that Alex uses this structure to describe, at least as I'm interpreting it, the feeling of being pulled into the movement, of being called into a struggle between the forces of justice and injustice, one so bigger than yourself and so far beyond your own control. Yeah, it's just fucking compelling.

31:18 And Vonda's frustrations with the roommates because they don't and on some levels can't understand that even if they do have books about the situations or whatever, because they're in it for the clout or the social aspect or for whatever. Yeah, Alex really just sticks the landing on that one. That's what Hazel has to say? What do I have to say about it? I liked the story even more on further readings. Right Like I liked it on the first reading, but on the first reading it kind of let it wash over me. And on the second reading I could kind of feel more what was happening, and yeah, it's just like it's really well done. I really like this story.

31:57 I like this idea of you know, being called into this larger than life thing, being called into you know, Oh, I suddenly am responsible for memory, against forgetting, despite the fact that like, oh, I'm just you know, some girl from Philadelphia. But I like stories that infuse our normal, everyday world with the weight that they actually carry, the weight that we are all part of history, that we are like part of this grand story that continues, and we're all on different sides of these struggles and we're all just like doing this thing. This idea of being like you of West Philadelphia, as if that's as like amazing of a place to be from, as like some you know place in North Africa or some you know,

32:55 far off and distant place, because it is right, like wherever we are from is something and we can have this weight in our lives if we acknowledge it. I don't know. That's what it made me think about. It actually made me think about a bunch of other stuff too, But that's what I'm gonna go with. Alex, the story's author, has this to say. The story Girls Who Look Through Glass first appeared in a long out of print split scene I made with Kamei Ioea, also known as More Mother from Black Quantum Futurism slash Irreversible Entanglements. We had been in a collective together called Metropolarity Metropolarity dot net.

33:37 They use sci fi and afrofuturism as a form of activism, knowledge seeking slash distributing and art practice, and we passed these out at events like More Mothers, Rockers and the readings I put together like Laser Life and chromeb City. When it came time to do arc Dust, which it self started as a zine, I knew this story would be one I wanted to refine a bit and include in the collect It's definitely one of the weirder stories amongst a whole lot of weird lol. I had been doing a lot of spoken word when I wrote these stories ten fifteen years ago, and I made a hard pivot to not only writing sci fi and fantasy but reading it in public. It's been an interesting journey. This particular story is mostly me wanting to write about a

34:19 woman who experiences strange future past, ancestral shifts, some time displacement, and just general atmospheric stuff like I wanted it to be about the fun SFF stuff, but I couldn't help but also talk about microaggressions and colonialism. It's difficult for me to shed politics whatever that is post Obama and just write pewpew, zapp zapp, especially because I write about marginalized people, because politics are our lived experiences, the way we move through the world, the way we exist. Apparently all that is political. Also, this story was written in like twenty twelve, but it shares some similarities to an episode of Lovecraft Country. I've never read the book, where there are similar elements. A black woman visited by a

35:03 metallic ethereal woman who enables her to shift into ancestral time in Africa. I love that episode, but the more I thought about it, I was like, wow, that really reminds me of my story girls. Maybe I'm doing something right.

35:16 Ha.

35:17 And then Alex Smith's bio Alex Smith aka Alexoteric is a writer, artist, curator, and quote unquote musician slash noise maker living in the cosmically kinetic city of Philadelphia. His work reflects that dichotomy stark beautiful, wrought with afrotopian tension, avant garde fashion and assemblage, and dynamic visual presentation. He is a founding member of the Philadelphia based sci fi arts collective Metropolarity, essential personnel in Philadelphia's early afrofuturist community.

35:51 Smith won the twenty twenty p Fellowship of the Arts, presenting work such as his short story collection Arc Dust, Orserian Publishing, his experimental art punk bands Rainbow Crime, Solarized, Spectral Forces, Glitch Proverbs, the cyberpunk superhero indie comics series Black Vans, among others. His work appears in anthology such as Stories for Chip, a tribute to Samuel R. Delaney from Rosarium, Black Quantum Futurism Volume two, Black Punk Now from Soft Skull, and The Black Fantastic Library of America.

36:25 He invites you to join him in the next chromatic exploration of the unknown, his art of visual portal to that liminal Space. Find Alex at Patreon dot com, slash they are birds, or they are birds on Instagram. All right to see you next week.

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