Serpentine Magazine

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Our Photography Issue begins with American-Norwegian photographer Rivkah Gevinson. Having spent summers in Norway growing up, Gevinson traveled to her mother’s homeland in 2009 to study in Hordaland, on the island of Halsnøy to be more exact, just off Norway’s southwestern coast. She later returned to the island when she took these photographs. [Click for more.]

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Coming this January: THE PHOTOGRAPHY ISSUE. Interested? So are we! Submit your photography and photography-related essays.

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“In 3 Words: Life” by GENEVIEVE ARLIE

Ever a lover of thought experiments, my college boyfriend once asked me what, in three words, was my life philosophy. I no longer remember my exact answer, but I’m almost positive it was “Be here now,” a collegiate attempt to live in the moment while simultaneously paying homage to the 1997 Oasis album of the same name. As for his philosophy, so clearly do I remember what he said, I remember how he said it. Lifting his piercing eyes (cf. his mother) to mine, he pronounced with due gravity, “Don’t ever stop.”

Don’t ever stop. I considered the phrase. It didn’t sit with the fledgling editor in me. It was inefficient. I hazarded a correction. “Don’t you mean ‘Never stop’? You’ve still got one word!” If you’ve only got three words to encapsulate all of life, I figured, hell, each had better count. That stumped him. Because his phrase needn’t have stopped at “stop.” He might have specified an action never to stop, in the manner of The North Face’s company motto, “Never stop exploring.” Or strutting, yodeling, flambéing, hitchhiking: whatever gets you up and at ‘em in the morning... [Click to read more.]

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Contributor Ryan Blocker dissects representations of gay Black men on television and what it means to have identities complexly portrayed in media. [Click to read.]

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Editor Joshua Michael Demaree explains his reasons for deciding that this past week was, in fact, the worst week ever. [Click to read.]

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Contributor Danny Floyd on the delicate and dangerous connections between art, life, music and religion when centered on the body and ableism. [Click to read.]

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We might be past our Music Issue, but we're not done with sound yet: Elliott Mickleburgh dissects the harmonious relationship between music and skateboarding. [Click to read.]

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To finish out our Music Issue, we have a powerful piece from co-editor Patrick J. Reed: a reflection on a life built on and lived through music. [Click to read.]

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Serpentine is proud to debut this exclusive mix from Chicago-based artist Kekeli Sumah. We give you: 'The Serpentine Mix'. [Click to listen.]

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From poet Candice Wuehle and musician Andrew Morgan comes MOON CRADLE: Gemini, a reflection on those twins—the gods and lovers—the Geminis. [Click to read.]

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Pianist Jade Conlee reflects on the music of Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono and his progressive use of sonic inspiration and contemporary technology. [Click to read.]

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Our final featured musician in this round is Iowa native, Brendan Hanks. Formerly known as Ex-Action Model, Hanks has graciously provided us this SERP-exclusive ambient/dance track, "Boneclock" (named for David Mitchell's latest novel, The Bone Clocks). [Click to listen.]

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Our next featured musician, Katie Armstrong, perfectly melds thoughtful songwriting and a powerfully emotional voice with her visually astounding ink-on-paper animations. [Click to watch.]

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As part of our Music Issue we will be featuring several musicians whose work we admire. We are proud to debut a new SERP-exclusive track, "Noetic Droplet," from Cuticle. [Click to listen.]

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Brandon Goei discovers that true beauty is in the density: an entire childhood’s worth of wonder, longing and energy can be portrayed with the 15-second “Sock’em Boppers” jingle. [Click to read.]

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This month Serpentine Magazine reveals our Music Issue. Throughout June we will publish critical essays and projects that explore the multitudes of our musical existence. Taking a cue from John Cage, we define music as “the production of sounds” and so, in this light, our purview for the month will range from the ambiance of everyday life to commercial jingles to contemporary music.

Music—mousike (“the art of the muses”)—is perhaps the most transcendent form of art. From the Divje Babe flute, which was carved from the femur of a bear and is thought to be 40,000 years old, to the commercial struggles of TIDAL, music has entranced and soothed the soul. It’s in this expanded field of musicking, a phrase coined by sociomusicologist Christopher Smalls, that we can understand the immensity of music’s influence over man and animal:

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world.

When John Berger wrote, “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” his observation was shortsighted. The child listens and knows before anything else. With partially formed ears at 18 weeks, she can hear the first music: the woosh of rushing blood. By 25 weeks, she can hear the muffled world outsider her mother’s womb. It is from these earliest moments that music takes hold, providing the most incipient stages of culturation.

In Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film Out of Africa, there is a scene which is meant to endear the viewer to Robert Redford’s gentleman-turn-wildman Denys Finch-Hatton. While on safari with author Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep), Finch-Hatton uses a length of twine to introduce two unsuspecting primates to the wonder of music. The monkeys startle, but don’t run—to Karen’s amazement. When one becomes too interested and scratches the record, Finch-Hatton chases them away, turning in sublime awe, he looks into the distance and says, “Think of it: Never a man-made sound and then Mozart!”

That leap, the aural equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s seminal bone-to-spaceship match cut, contains within it the mass of our entire existence. The scene speaks to something deeper of the film’s thematics: no matter how far from our own cultures we wish to stray, we remain inherently—and perhaps destructively—entrenched within it. “He even took the Gramophone on safari,” Karen says in the film’s opening narration, “Three rifles, supplies for a month, and Mozart.”

How we get from womb to Mozart is the story of music itself.

The poet J.C. Bampfylde wrote, “rugged the breast that music cannot tame,” though we know it’s more complicated than that. And so, by devoting this month to music, the editors of Serpentine Magazine hope to lay open and reveal a minuscule cross-section of that complication. We believe it is by studying music that we can study ourselves, and come to know, at least, that “without music, life would be an error”.

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"When I write to you now, although less and less often, I draw my words in a blue ink."

The final installment of Bradshaw Stanley's moving meditation on life, performance, love, and blue. [Click to read.]