Author: Su Zi

Su Zi is a poet, writer, artist, and editor of the artist-book poetry chapbook series Red Mare.
Culture by Su Zi
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A stylized shot of the brick city gates of St. Augustine, Florida, as discussed by author and critic Su Zi.

Disabled Girl At The Waterworks (St. Augustine, Florida)

Sometimes, Disabled People are seen in public. That they exist is usually reinforced by signage and the arrangements for public biology stations we call rest rooms. After that, we might encounter an occasional wheelchair. Whether or not people who stumble about with their dog or pony on a lead in public spaces are disabled or not, they do not throng normatively, and public spaces are about normative gathering. One of the jokes that circulates the disabled community is that line about how you can join us at any time. Indeed, disability—the medical conditions of the human body that don’t fit the bell curve of human activity in modern society—crosses the typical social boundaries of race, class and gender. Thus, seeing a disabled person in public might be so rare for some that children are told not to stare.

Public event spaces were, for a generation, required to provide access to disabled people: some of these efforts are visible to the public by curb cuts, ramps to buildings, wheelchair accommodating elevators, braille signage, and sign language interpreters alongside public speakers. Of course, these architectural modifications to public spaces are predicated upon the notion that the disabled person can physically get to those public spaces, and transit problems abound. That transit problems are a typical issue in the disabled community is not part of public discourse, but an obvious factor on why disabled people are not a common sight, especially since a good third of the population has some sort of limiting physical condition.  It’s big work to attend events. Humans are hardwired to herd up, and deprivations—solitary confinement that is so typical of disabled life—are seen as a form of torture, psychologically; therefore, disabled people too must sometimes attend some kind of gathering. […]

Music by Su Zi
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A shot from a Liverpool Legends (The Beatles cover band) concert, as described by disabled and deaf art critic Su Zi.

Deaf Girl Listens to Live Music: The Liverpool Legends

Humans are communal creatures. We gather, we flock; to do so means that we array ourselves for the event: there’s a location and a time. Perhaps, certain circumstances might also be of influence—the lure of live music on a summer evening has been a pleasure of gathering humans for centuries. Some summertime concert series now have decades of fame.

There are now musical works of modern composers that have decades of fame and there’s merit in the investigation of how a work of art becomes resonant out of its creational context. Evidence of a work’s enduring merit exists in how that work becomes internalized in subsequent generations—how it is copied, included or imitated—how the work exists within the lineage of art, within or beyond its genre. Because modern times are what they are, one form of evidence to a work’s enduring qualities involves a form of theater generally called impersonation. Perhaps the impersonation exists in the manner of a small town, a historic theater, and a master of ceremonies who impersonates Ed Sullivan. There are some people who will have to research the significance of Ed Sullivan now: there are some people for whom memory is history. In the realm of impersonation, not as much research might be needed for a theatrical tribute to the musical works of The Beatles. […]

Music by Su Zi
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A classic, sepia-toned photo of The Rolling Stones in 1963, with the text "deaf girl listens...Rolling Stones", from Su Zi's essay on a disabled author listening to classic rock.

Deaf Girl Listens To The Rolling Stones

There’s music that we find personally significant, and then there is music we have in heavy rotation—over and over again.

It ought to surprise no one that any playlist would include the Rolling Stones, for theirs is a lifelong output, and many of their compositions have found their way to accompany a variety of circumstances. The list of significant songs is a long one, spanning in length that of those cultural revered in more classical canons. Everyone has a favorite Stones song.

There are those who might minimize the musicianship, even while acknowledging the solid ear of each of the core band. Nonetheless, the architecture of each song is held together, most of the time, by the steady hoofbeats of Charlie Watts: there is always some mathematical grounding based in a beat of four. […]

Film by Su Zi
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A stylized shot from Olatunde Osunsanmi's "Star Trek: Section 31", depicting the Star Trek logo.

Constellations As Ashes: Reviewing “Star Trek: Section 31” (2025)

Star Trek is more than a fifty-year entertainment franchise. The half century of various Star Trek offerings have gone beyond a brand; it’s a modern mythology. Even the most rudimentary search reveals an AI summation that includes the phrase “global pop culture phenomenon”, and a search for specifics of mythology within Star Trek reveals a battalion of commentaries. In fact, everything Star Trek reveals battalions of engaged people—from social media memes to dedicated conventions, there’s nothing niche about Star Trek.

Lest a modern viewer fear the painted plywood of a fifty-year-old television stage set, Star Trek’s later iterations offer all the computer graphics available to enhance the off-earth setting. Keeping up with the culture has never been a consideration with Star Trek, as it has often led certain subtle aspects of cultural expectation: there’s a rumor that Star Trek was the only television Dr King allowed his children to watch because of the presence of a black woman playing a bridge officer on mid twentieth century television, the Uhura character. Subsequent characters included the shock of a shaved-head woman as a sexual entity, and, as there has been increased sophistication in prosthetic makeup, Star Trek routinely features characters who might be blue with mobile antenna, or have very large ears, or forehead ridges and leather armor. […]

Music by Su Zi
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A painting of Sergei Rachmaninoff, with the text "a deaf girl listens to RACHMANINOFF".

A Deaf Girl Listens To Rachmaninoff

There are pieces of music that follow us our entire lives. Perhaps we have an echo of memory from pre-speech of music and light on leaves; or a fragment half-heard, half-remembered. Perhaps there are clues to memorable music, details that may resonate personally.

Often though, the listener might not have formal music theory education—even if they had some sort of training in the playing of an instrument. The listener might just have habitual genres for their music and occasionally stumble on a song they like. Sometimes, a tune does not stand up to repeated plays; the attracting elements do not sustain repeat experiences. And sometimes there’s the history of music itself: predating written history, often erased in colonization or cultural eradication, waiting like a seed to bloom to consciousness.

Perhaps it is a sense of atavism, some ancestral echo, that allows a four or five generation leap in temporal awareness to find fresh joy in a piece of music written over a century ago. Nonetheless, even Wikipedia acknowledges the longevity and complexity of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor. Some listeners may have half-heard this music in a variety of films, including Schindler’s List, while the minor key might hark listeners back to folk music. […]

Art by Su Zi
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An African folk art mask tinted purple, with signage that reads "The Collectors".

Art for Art’s Sake: Interviewing the Cheer Collectors

As the inundation of artificial imaging finalizes the mass production of industrial influence on design, there are those who yearn for the individual, the bespoke, the rare. Given the beleaguered economic circumstances of many, that desire might be as modest as a want of a bit of cheer, something to brighten the soul-deafening and ubiquitous Greige that speaks not of neutrality, but oppression. While some cultural sensitives might look to the runways, to the pantone color choices, to the design awards for their aesthetic inspirations, there’s an ouroboros aspect to these products that reflects an almost morbid sense of disassociation, a dreariness that might have luxury retailers posting despair. Obviously, if big box shoppers want plastic handbags that imitate a historic, heirloom design—that, in original, costs as much as a used car—then many people feel the hunger to own something nice.

Collections of nice things are the bread and butter of museums and auction houses, and of estate sales. Of these, a prosaic errand trip is more likely to stop at the estate sale, or its cousin, the sidewalk sale; though there are craftspeople who will set up at empty corner lots, local sales events and various outdoor markets. Any vista of such a gathering will yield a sharp view into that region’s economy—as if the colonization of dollar stores weren’t clue enough. Nonetheless, someone in perpetual sticker shock at the grocers isn’t exempt for also wanting a bit of cheer, but how that is accomplished requires an awareness of how each of us relates to a concept of home. Yet some people do cherish where they live. Whether or not they have elaborate or modest residencies, whether or not they host guests, there are those for whom their home is a cherished retreat. What bit of cheer feathers such nests? […]

Art by Su Zi
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A stylized image of artist Sara Carter, with a background blur and "Sarah Carter: a retrospective" as its text.

In Consideration of Color: the Paintings of Sara Carter

Painting, as a genre, is utterly intertwined with human civilization, yet modern culture has shunted the form to a niche concern: ours is a landscape of careful neutrality and traffic flow, and distinctiveness is often exiled. The very use of the term painter often leads to semantical confusion with commercial uses of suspended pigment; a person who uses paint on a canvas these days is an artist—a broad description that still carries social stigma.

Nonetheless, there are places to go see paintings, specific houses of art. Beyond this physical reality, paintings—and all art forms now—can be view remotely; most established of these views is the art book. The art book is perhaps the most traditional means to view art from a remove, as humanities classes relied upon such texts for the past century or so. Art books themselves, at one time, were seen as decorative—as signs of affection for a world where art matters, as displays of class aspirations or alliance—and were often deliberately large and heavy. […]

Book Review by Su Zi
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The stylized cover of Jillian Weise's poetry colleiction, "Pills and Jacksonvilles", which touches on disability concerns.

Ultimate Marginalization: “Pills and Jacksonvilles” by Jillian Weise

Social erasure is the aim of marginalization, and there’s no greater social erasure than disability. Recent folk heroes notwithstanding, in the exhaustively annotated essay “No Planet Without Us”, Anna Landre states “…we need to become comfortable with the fact that disability will become part of all of our stories. Every single person will become disabled…Disability is as universal and inevitable as our changing climate.” And while a Rolling Stone article gives the aforementioned folk hero his disability card in the essay title (“Luigi Mangione Wrote Online about a Spine Disorder. Other Patients Say It’s Hell: Spondylolisthesis, or a slipped vertebra, can have devastating effects on the body—and the US health care system often makes things worse”), being disabled often results in erasure; reports from disaster areas highlight failures in disaster management that are often fatal to the disabled. And while current mob-think scapegoating has bubbled into bloodthirst, the institutionalization of the eugenicist view has resulted in denial of care and medical execution. […]