And it Was Good

 

On March 4, 2023, three days before Gerardo took his last breath on earth, an ambulance brought him back to our home from UCLA hospital.

Gerardo's sister Lily and I raced home to beat the ambulance and to be ready to receive Gerardo and help him shift into hospice care. Everyone on that ambulance who brought him into the house did so with so much love and care that I still get welled up thinking about how beautifully they transported him.

As soon as he was placed in bed and before the hospice staff arrived, a parched Gerardo asked me for his usual beverage of choice: a cold Topo Chico with cranberry juice. I brought it for him and watched him take an unforgettable swig. His face lit up with a gigantic smile and he said "ahhh ... that's good."

He said it not necessarily to me or to Lily. His gaze was somewhere beyond the room. He loved how the cold drink made him feel and he was giving thanks. Thanks for its existence. Thanks for having tasted it. So simple. 

Lily urged me to get my phone to video record him but I didn't. Maybe I would love seeing that moment on video today. But even if I had reached for my phone, he didn't repeat that extraordinary swig and he didn't repeat what he said. It happened. And then it was gone. And his transition almost immediately started to happen. 

I am grateful that my memory bank has played that moment for me almost every day for the past three years. It remains vivid.

Recently, I was discussing the book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin with my book group and my good friend Crisynda pointed out a passage when the character Marx is dying. That passage masterfully toggles back and forth from past and present and at one point takes us to a time when Marx and his friends are eating peaches so delicious that it is impossible to describe how delicious they are. Marx says of the peaches: "I'll probably never have to do a single other thing in my life, because I tasted this peach (304)."

Crisynda is a retired nurse who has been able to witness beautiful and simple moments of people letting go. No fanfare. No melodrama. Just a simple goodbye with a recognition that they have tasted the peach. And it was good. 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 

Dear Sam,

When I read the interview you gave to Kotaku magazine in 2017 about Ichigo, I felt that you were finally saying what I've wanted to say about the topic of appropriation as follows:

The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you? I'm terrified of that world, and I don't want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don't own or have a particularly rich under understanding of references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn't be a problem for you, I guess (p. 78)?

Why I've not been able to say what you've said has something to do with the pressures of political correctness. A correctness that posits that if I don't belong to a group, I have no right to reference or depict that group in my art. Or my writing.

Shortly after I underlined this passage, I read it to my adult son who is half Korean and half Mexican. After listening intently, he said,  "Mom, I'm so glad that that paragraph exists."

As I teach middle schoolers and high schoolers at a public charter school, I find myself encouraging them to be curious and observant about the world around them. To not be oblivious. To not be overly self-absorbed. To notice things. When I ask them to tell me what they have observed and noticed, not all things that they come up with is purely about them. Thank goodness. I want them to express what they notice not just about themselves but about others. 

Contrarians could point to examples of plagiarism and explicit replication to push back on the thesis of your argument, which is that to make true art, we need freedom. Freedom to be inspired by what we observe and experience, not just what we purely belong to. I don't hate contrarians. I hate that there is never enough time.

I was grateful that you revisited the topic of appropriation toward the end of the book within the context of how technology simultaneously frees and constricts us:  

Well, if we'd been born a little bit earlier, we wouldn't have been able to make our games so easily. Access to computers would have been harder ... We wouldn't have made Ichigo Japanese, because we would have worried about the fact that we weren't Japanese. And I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren't even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game (p. 394).

Earlier in the book, this paradox about technology is brilliantly addressed by Marx's mom, Mrs. Watanabe, in response to Sadie's expressed interest of learning about her rich experience with textiles: 

Mrs. Watanabe loved hand painting, quilting, and the discipline of woven textiles, but she worried these techniques were a dying art. 'Computers make everything too easy,' she said with a sigh. 'People design very quickly on a monitor, and they print on some enormous industrial printer in a warehouse in a distant country, and the designer hasn't touched a piece of fabric at any point in the process or gotten her hands dirty with ink. Computers are great for experimentation, but they're bad for deep thinking' (p. 229-230).

She goes on to explain that a great textile like the William Morris Strawberry Thief becomes great not just because of technology's role, but because of the dirt in the garden that he tends to in order to grow the strawberries depicted in his designs. And because he experiments with fabrics to understand which fabrics can bear which dyes. And because this process is riddled with sweaty and agony-ridden failures. And because failures teach as the artist tries again. She points out that the resulting fabric is "the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist (p. 230)." 

If it is true that "in games, the thing that matters most is the order of things (p. 171)," I think it also matters most in life. There is only one order in which you and Sadie gave the unique shape you did to this book. There is only one order in which I've taken my steps of yesterday that brings me here to the present, ready to take my steps of tomorrow.

Thank you for creating games I ache to play. Thank you and Sadie for expanding and reshaping the concept of love.  

Jenny

The Courage of Carole Caroompas and Emily Brontë

 

These are my complete remarks prepared for the closing panel discussion with Exene Cervenka and Shana Nys Dambrot on July 12, 2025, 6PM at the Laguna Art Museum. This event marked the closing of the Carole Caroompas exhibit at the museum.

Wuthering Heights is one of the only artifacts that serves as evidence of the existence of 19th Century English author Emily Brontë, who passed away at the age of 30. Of course those of us who exist in the world of creativity know that to publish one novel before the age of 30 is no small feat. Especially given that (like most artists) Brontë had many interests. She played piano. She sketched. She painted. She cared for animals. She walked. She kept house. She shot guns. She studied languages.

It reminds me of what Carole Caroompas (who passed away at the age of 76) said in 1987 as follows: “I wanted to be an archeologist … then I wanted to be a poet … and then I was going to be a writer … and then I ended up being a painter, and the music and the language and the paintings all got thrown together.”

And here we are in this room to witness her body of work, where we can see firsthand the ways in which everything did get thrown together. Textiles. Paints. Literature. Prostitutes. Nipples. Ejaculations. Desire. The male gaze. That gaze volleyed back by the female. Heathcliff. Punk rock. Coercion. Free will.

This practice of juggling many interests as we work to beat the clock of mortality is something we all eventually confront. Surely Exene Cervenka doesn’t just tidily sing and only sing. Surely Shana Nys Dambrot doesn’t just tidily write art criticism and only art criticism. And surely all of us feel the tension of our impending end and our infinite interests. We write. We paint. We sing. We teach. We cook. We raise kids. We clean our cars. We have lovers. And maybe some of us shoot guns.

Emily Brontë also published several pieces of poetry and is said to have had a second manuscript for a novel that upon her death, became purposely set on fire and destroyed by her sister Charlotte Brontë. 

(Charlotte published eight novels including Jane Eyre and died at the age of 39.) 

(Another counterpart in that era of authors was Jane Austen who published seven novels including Sense & Sensibility, Emma, and Pride & Prejudice. Works that could be characterized as frilly romantic love stories. She died at the age of 42.) 

So comparatively, Emily’s literary footprint is small. But when we consider her wide and varied interests, we are called to imagine that her ambition was not small at all, and her ideas were enormously messy, as evidenced by the untamed, complicated, rage-filled and downright unpleasant characters and plot tentacles found in the pages of Wuthering Heights.

As Constance Grady (Vox) points out, Wuthering Heights is not a frilly romantic love story. It’s about the cycle of generational abuse that is rooted in the rage and vengeance that Emily Brontë allows Heathcliff to exact throughout most of the book.

HEATHCLIFF

Heathcliff was a dark-skinned outcast raised to be a servant for the Earnshaw family, and as he lived in proximity to his sister figure Catherine Earnshaw, the two fell in love. But that love was not allowed. And so Catherine ended up marrying Edgar from the Linton family instead. The rage that consumed Heathcliff based on this course of events is understandable. Understandable and unpleasant. Because no matter the injustice, vengeance is unpleasant. Vengeance creates monstrous behaviors that replicate generationally. But the irony is that it’s understandable. So is rage.

HEATHCLIFF & THE FEMME FATALE GO ON TOUR

When we learn about Carol Caroompas the visual artist, we learn that like Emily Brontë, the artifacts that she left behind to serve as evidence of her existence is also small. Her body of work is not as vast as some of her contemporaries. But when we look closely at this exhibit in particular: Heathcliff & The Femme Fatale Go on Tour, we experience an echo of Emily Brontë’s signature work, Wuthering Heights, which is that Caroompas’ ideas and her ambition were also not at all small and hugely messy with lots of plot tentacles moving here and there, some unresolved and simply presented to the viewing audience to assault our senses. Because for Caroompas, it is to “assault the senses and change the world” that is at the nexus of an artist’s purpose. 

And how exactly do we assault the senses? Caroompas would probably say:

• By not keeping vintage tapestries at arms length and tidily nestled in a drawer.

• By not keeping separated, the images of modern sex workers from the shapeshifting embodiment of Heathcliff from the 19th century English novel.

• By making us grapple with the paradoxes of gender norms when we overlay issues of race and class and unrequited love all squished together, inviting us to consider that enslavement and freedom affect not just Catherine but also Heathcliff. Not just the femme fatale but also the resurgence of young devout women aligning with the ideas of rejecting ambition and embracing gender norms of modesty—so ancient that they are modern again. 

Assaulting the senses doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to shake us a bit. It startles us and causes us to lose balance. And it causes us to experience compassion and understanding for unexpected actors. 

Ultimately, I would say that we change the world by doing what Brontë did with Wuthering Heights and what Caroompas did with Heathcliff. To lay out onto the table all the grudges, all the rage, all the screaming, all the flaws along with all the passion, all the love, and ultimately, all the end to the commotion. Intergenerationally. By crossing genres from literature to music to visual art and throwing it all together.

I think the responsibility that Caroompas is potentially imposing on me and you and we, is for us to interrogate all the untidy tentacles of the world, particularly in relation to the roles that men and women have occupied. Do occupy. And will occupy. And to examine the impulses of vengeance and rage.

How does our gaze upon a man such as Heathcliff, along with our gaze upon assorted women of the night assault our senses and change the world?

Pragmatically, it does so because vintage textiles in most of our minds stay in a drawer not to be used in paintings but cordially considered as something that used to serve a purpose and that now exists to help us remember a time other than now.

Audaciously, those textiles become completely redefined and reused. They become the substrate that holds breasts, phallic symbols, ejaculations, innocence, corruption, bondage, pleasure through bondage, and freedom.

That Heathcliff is included in this narrative tells me that Carol Coorumpus is examining her own ideas about gender stereotypes, perhaps a nod of compassion and understanding of his suffering as she juxtaposes him next to the femme fatale who also needs compassionate understanding of her suffering. Perhaps each art object captures the stereotypes forever as we anticipate an exit strategy that might be found, out from bondage and into freedom.

No Coward Soul Is Mine

By Emily Brontë

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere

I see Heaven's glories shine

And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast

Almighty ever-present Deity

Life, that in me hast rest,

As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,

Worthless as withered weeds

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thy infinity,

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of Immortality.

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be

And Thou wert left alone

Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death

Nor atom that his might could render void

Since thou art Being and Breath

And what thou art may never be destroyed.