it's

words by eugene kim photos by nicholas tam and kelsey ngan phung

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart."

There’s a pigeon pecking away at what appears to be a spattering of puke. With two fingers I pinch the screen of my phone and snap a photo of the winged rat. A less disquieting version of Morrissey croons delicately in the background, an immortal plea for satisfaction. The timestamp on the liquid-crystal display slowly ticks away. Snaking out of the headphone jack is a dirt-cheap pair of earbuds, coiling and tangling as they slither into my ears.

The portable CD player, a CD-Walkman D-E220, cost me 25 dollars and 15 minutes of browsing Kijiji. It has a thick, yellowing label on the bottom with faded letters spelling out ‘REFURBISHED.’ I bought it off an old man named Eddy, who still uses Hotmail, at a subway station, where he sat in his green Honda Civic just off the curb at the side of the half-empty parking lot. Of course, there are liabilities to purchasing items from strangers, and even more so to meeting up with them in public, but I wasn’t particularly concerned about either risk. I just needed to feel that glossy plastic shell and the weight of its mechanical organs nestled within my palms.

In that psychical lull situated between the puke-eating pigeon and 1984 Morrissey, I began to ponder the circumstances which brought upon the insatiable hunger in which I desired more than anything the distorted notes stored within the pits and lands of a compact disc. Consumerism, nostalgia, individualism, I considered all of these possibilities. They all made sense, perfectly plausible realities, no matter how shameful. Admittedly, in my shame, I was desperate for an explanation that didn’t sound so plaintive.