We Want it All.

Joan Bibiloni is primarily a guitarist and his music is technically some kind of jazz fusion, but I would describe it as vaporwave that got a PhD in musicology. I discovered his music through a SoundCloud annotation by way of a sample on a particularly cherished deep house mix. I hovered over the comments and saw that the ethereal soundscape was from “Sa Fosca,” the first song on Born (1989), an album full of similarly brilliant and airy jazz. It’s a smooth mix of synthesizers and guitar — both nostalgic and timeless. It really helped me bear down and write during a difficult time in my life, and is great for deep thinking and creativity. —Mike Pepi

“When you study olfaction,” Glasgow-based perfumer Clara Weale writes on her website, “it reveals a kind of truth about the world — that everything is construction.” Every scent is made up of hundreds of molecules; if a perfumer can reconstruct any natural smell, the authenticity of the original comes under question. Fittingly, Weale does her best work on hyperrealistic accords. Celadon, my favorite from her tiny collection, recreates the crisp dewy sweetness of romaine lettuce and grounds it with notes of black pepper, wet clay, and chalk. It’s smart and delicious, a reminder that we all make ourselves out of many little decisions — how we want to walk, how we want to sound, how we want to smell, each an accord. I recommend that yours includes smelling like lettuce. —Asya Sağnak

Duct tape advertises itself as a solution: heavy-duty, all-purpose, capable of bearing the strain placed on it. In Bob Flanagan’s 1994 performance “Visiting Hours,” Sheree Rose suspended the performing artist upside down from the New Museum’s rafters, his body intermittently convulsing with coughing fits from cystic fibrosis. To honor the thirtieth anniversary of his death, performance artists Empress Wu, Ione Wang, Riven Ratanavanh, and I mummify Kerosene Jones in duct tape, strip by strip, until he is completely cocooned in the black adhesive. Wu works the crank, lifting Kerosene by the ankles. The tape strains against gravity, its fabric mesh interior peeking out at the seams. Suddenly, the encasement splits; we slice Kerosene out. The tape, liberated from the drudgery of being useful, falls to the ground. Though duct tape often fails to live up to its heavy-duty promises, it cleaves together performances of bodily constraint across time and the quotidian patchworks in which life is, tenuously, held. —Rebecca Teich

The entwined narrators of the 2022 novel Diego Garcia start out in a muddle, grammatically and otherwise. We/she/he (depending on the sentence) struggle to make rent, to rouse themselves to get to the library before it closes, to make sense of an encounter they have with an itinerant Chagossian man whose family was expelled by the British from the island of Diego Garcia in the 1970s under a secret deal that handed the territory to the U.S. military. Coauthored by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, Diego Garcia is a collective effort (with the emphasis on “effort”) to write about the right to write about others. All its intellectual layers add up to something unexpectedly moving, a reflection of their pain and the world’s. —Cora Currier

While no official Ecoterrorist Miffy merch exists, if you bootleg some swag, this bunny won’t narc. In the 1990s, the radical environmentalists of Earth First! appropriated Miffy, a cartoon rabbit popularized in a series of Dutch children’s books, as their mascot. Ecoterrorist Miffy wields a monkey wrench and conceals her antics behind a veil of weaponized innocence. A cult icon, Miffy inspires direct action toward the liberation of bunnies the world over. My friend and I have matching Miffy tattoos: She has Princess Miffy, and I have Earth First! Miffy. —Adina Glickstein

There is little in this life more consistently rewarding than being a Sarah Maldoror fan. Recently, at an organizing meeting, I mentioned rewatching her 1972 film Sambizanga. Within days, multiple friends and comrades were giving it five-star reviews. One started revising an essay they were writing to include Maldoror’s work. Another assigned her on a syllabus. This evangelizing passion you too can share. If you’ve never seen any of Maldoror’s lyrical, anti-colonial films, start at the beginning with Monangambée (her first take on a Luandino Vieira text, with Sambizanga being the second). In 17 minutes, the film says more about the work of decolonization than, frankly, can be explained in months’ worth of Zoom meetings. I don’t mean that it’s didactic — although I will say that the score, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, stands as a riposte to Adorno on jazz. I mean that it’s kinetic. A good-quality copy is hard to find online, but if you email me ([email protected]) I will send you the file, I promise. —Sarah Nicole Prickett

The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) by Powell and Pressburger is a film that tells three boy-meets-girl stories. It is also a work of high-camp artifice, knocking on its own wood paneling to hear the lovely ring of something hollow: Dancers move across static painted backgrounds; Hoffmann falls in love with a beautiful automaton seen through trick glasses; reflections distort and perceptions shift. The credits reveal that most parts are played by a separate actor and singer, who acknowledge one another from behind blue velvet curtains. If this sounds anything but enchanting, then I don’t know what to say to you. —Avery Curran