1 (THE DARK SIDE OF) THE WIZARD OF OZ

In the grand tradition of fairy tales throughout history, The Wizard of Oz, both its literary and cinematic versions, is much darker than it seems at first glance. 

I'll admit, I am attracted to how something so colourful and wonderful could hide so many sinister secrets: like the many on-set disasters and tragedies that occurred during the filming of the movie, the true story of the tin man reading more like body horror than children's tale, the forceful starvation of a young actress so she would remain childlike, the use of technology to craft an illusion foretelling the proverbial wool being pulled over our eyes to shape entire societies, the sly change from silver to ruby shoes to "make it pop", the emerald city's folks with green-tinted glasses chained to their heads to maintain the illusion that the entire city is green when it is in fact, not. The amount of massacring happening in a story for children that, if book accurate, would surely be rated R, more Tarantino than Mr Rogers. I could go on.   

The movie was one of the first of its kind and the precursor to filmmaking not just as a glimpse of the world captured and replayed, but a heightened, almost hallucinatory vision. A children's fairy tale paving the way for fantasy and science fiction stories. It wasn't just ahead of its time. It made the times. Little known fact: the tin woodsman is essentially the first android to appear in popular culture.

2 COLOUR AS WORLD-BUILDING

Something about the world changed when film was invented and then again when we moved from black and white to colour. And nothing puts that on display better than going from Kansas to Oz. The irony is now that we are inundated with colour everywhere, somehow we have chosen to build our homes in 50 shades of Millennial Grey. Somehow our cities feel like we're back in Kansas again. And then somehow we are facing a crisis of ennui. Hmm.

3 INVENTION 

Everything is invented. Everything we take for granted, everything we use, everything we abide by, everything we know. How some of these invented ideas fester and ruin and undermine while simultaneously exalting others, depending on who is doing the inventing. There is always a curtain. Who is behind it? The truth or just some men.

4 CURTAINS

Speaking of, I've been obsessed with curtains lately. Literally I mean, how they heighten and dress up a room and give all the vibes while also being extremely functional for a first floor condo, but also metaphorically. I especially love these tin look curtains that deliver the impression of being sculpted rather than a fluid piece of fabric. Not everything is as it seems.

Source: Steel Mirror Curtains from &Drape

Source: EunJeong Yoo

5 "OUR PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD IS A FANTASY THAT COINCIDES WITH REALITY" (PSYCHOLOGIST CHRIS FRITH)

"She wakes up and it was all a dream." That's how it ends. Most of us don't question the idea that our dreams aren't real, but rather a figment of our subconscious. But the idea of a consciousness hasn't been around forever. It was the ancient Greeks who discovered/invented it, traced gradually through centuries via Greek literature. "We moderns take it for granted that each of us has a unique, private, inner world of thought, an internal space where memories, thoughts and plans play out: the arena of consciousness. We might assume that human minds have always been structured this way. [...] That we are now autonomous and introspective is due not to changes in the brain's hardware but rather to software developments wrought by social and cultural change." (From "The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars" by neuropsychologist Paul Broks)

In other words, the myths, hallucinations, and gods we may have taken as truth thousands of years ago we readily accept as imagination, interior thinking, and even mental illness today.

But I don't know, what if we're not at the end of that journey? 

In the 1999 book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (one of my favourite reads of 2024), author Margaret Wertheim writes about space and how the idea of it over time has changed to reflect and shape how we view our selves. On poets Dante and Virgil in The Divine Comedy:

Theirs is not only a journey through physical space (as in science fiction), but also through spiritual space, as conceived by the Christian theology of the time.

Turns out, Dorothy's journey, symbolically represented through the yellow brick road, was a dream sequence. Does that make it less real? In the end, we find out that Dorothy's way home had been available to her all along, and that she herself had the power to enact it, not some fake wizard or magic wand or fairy godmother. As the first great American fairy tale, that message was probably not a coincidence. Compare that to the picture Broks paints on selfhood before consciousness was "invented":

You might be less certain that thoughts, utterances and intentions were your own because the very idea and sense of "your own" was less robust.

6 MOVING HOME

My prequel collection started with the concept of moving on. And this set of poems follows with moving home. Which I did. I bought a home a few years ago that finally finished construction this year, so we moved in. It's in my childhood neighbourhood, just an 8-minute drive away from my parents, and walking distance to my high school. I remember desperately wanting to leave when I was younger, to get out and see the world. In Dorothy's story, I guess I saw my own.