by Beina Xu
with a note from Liza St. James
Shortly after the Fourth of July, I received a message via WhatsApp from my friend Beina Xu, a Berlin-based writer and filmmaker. She was sharing photos with me from her trip to P-town earlier that week. I replied with an update-photo of my own, as well as some questions. “Speculations re the tooth-comb specimen?” I asked. “Some kind of ray-like thing??” Beina texted back. “Or massive fish? The rest of the carcass was nearby but so pulverized I couldn’t tell even a shape.”
The photos had an uncanny quality, especially in light of the much-advertized U.S. semiquincentennial. Curious, I looked up the tee shirt pictured in front of the Pilgrim Monument in the last image—merch for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, proceeds from which go toward preventing gun violence. Mysterious and more compelling the more I considered the suite as a whole, I asked Beina’s permission to share her triptych with Farewell Transmission so that this image-story might reach screens beyond my own.
—Liza St. James
Beina Xu is a writer, editor and filmmaker based in Berlin.
Liza St. James is a writer, editor, and translator from San Francisco.