#Grid Iron Studios

[gijoe-forever]

[simeonscott]

"Can't Take a Bullet? ...Guess it's Time for Old Faithful."

[themetaphoricalcouch]

Before and after with parts by Pixis Designs and Grid Iron Studios

[conkreetmonkey]

genuine question, what's Vintage Story like (and what do you personally like about it)? i looked at it and it feels sort of like a mix of Wurm and Minecraft which by itself is neat already but it'd be cool to directly hear about it from someone who played it :]

or in other words, grabbing you by your shoulders and shaking you politely to hear you talk about a cool looking game grrrr

Ok so like what if Minecraft had 10 times the lore and was 100 times more complex. It's the "infinite block world where you build and craft on a grid system" concept but with a zillion times the content and depth. You have to eat all five food groups to have maximum hp. There's a temperature system and you can craft and layer clothing. Animals have to be domesticated over many generations and will slowly become more tame over time. There's seasons. You can chisel blocks into itty bitty microdetailed voxel art. You can forge steel as a late game material but you have to do shit with blister iron and anvils and blast furnaces and crap that I've honestly never been able to wrap my head around. Soil fertility is a thing. Grass grows in real time. There are horror elements. There's an absurd amount of bricks you can make by combining different dyes and making them different shapes. Different regions and depths have different rock types, which are good for different things just like irl; only hard types for certain tools, only slate for slate roofing, only limestone and chalk for the creation of lime, and thus mortar...

And the MODDING SCENE. Oh my god the modding scene. Somebody wrote a system where the chicken colours and patterns have realistic genetics. Somebody made a mod that adds every crop you can think of to the game, and it's cross-compatible with the mod that adds an absurdly vast cooking system to the game that lets you make stuff like sausages and candy. There's a mod that makes it so there's like 50 different species of tree that all grow in realistic climate zones and have their own wood types.

AND IT'S A SMALL INDIE GAME WITH A BUSTLING ONLINE COMMUNITY. IT'S THE KIND OF STUDIO WHERE THEY STRAIGHT-UP HIRE THE REALLY GOOD MODDERS. LIKE THE ONE WHO CAN'T STOP ADDING ENTIRE FAMILIES OF ANIMAL TO THE GAME, THEY GOT HIRED TO HELP WITH THE DEER UPDATE I BELIEVE. OH YEAH THERE'S DEER. THE MOOSE ARE REALISTIC. I REPEAT, THE MOOSE ARE REALISTIC.

I will never shut up about how good Vintage Story is and everybody needs to play it with me right now (<- haven't played in months because I got too into a server and would spend hours a day hand-sculpting and firing roof shingles, which eventually burnt me out)

[hometoursandotherstuff]

This 2017 Pueblo style home in Harriet, AR looks like a regular build, but it's actually an Earthship, and is completely off the grid. 2bds, 2ba, 4,662 sq ft, $2m.

This place is huge, so it's a good thing it's off grid.

As far as earthship's go, it's surprisingly beautiful. Usually, they look very DIY and lumpy. This one is colorful, has nice stone work, iron grills and some wood floors, which is unusual.

Nice living room with a stone fireplace. The floor is beautiful. This home had to have been professionally built.

The built-in dining area. Love that table.

Isn't this pretty?

Kitchens in DIY earthships are usually very spare. This one is fully equipped with gorgeous tile.

Very nice, lots of storage.

Nice dining area. Love the big rock.

Beautiful decorative old stove and tile. Love that tree on top of the rocks on the left. This is so beautifully done.

The primary bedroom is very large, and it's open to the rest of the living area.

Door to bath #1. The other bedroom and bath are in another building.

Usually, earthship homes don't have such luxurious baths. This is fabulous.

I've never seen an earthship with a walk-in closet, either.

Fenced garden and an outbuilding.

This could be a sun/plant room or art studio. It's a nice bonus space.

The power setup.

This looks like a dog kennel. The address is Schnauzer Ln, so I'm thinking that the owners are breeders, maybe?

Definitely a facility set up for doggos, and there's a schnauzer plaque. I've had 2 of them- they're cool dogs.

There's also a guest facility. So colorful.

The property is like its own little town, measuring 80 acres.

https://www.zillow.com/homes/2115-Schnauzer-Ln-Harriet,-AR-72639_rb/109082371_zpid/

[samheughanswife]

Sam

Sam was in his element. With friends, Steve and comfortable in the auditorium.

Refreshed from a week of sun,sand and sea. Add in off the socials grid. No random blondes in bikinis, or the gym blonde rats at the North Bondi open gym breathing the same sea air as him instantly given a nickname and assumed bumping curlies.

He shared that he had a session with the famous Bondi Beach lifeguards. He was encouraged to dive off the rocks at the South end of the beach- Bondi. He shared he had never dived in his life( sure that’s not true, just not into the Pacific Ocean) He was shown how to swim back to shore in a rip, ( that’s what drowns people not understanding how to get out of a rip). And generally living a beachside life. He joked that he didn’t sleep in the sand, he had a house (?? 👀).

Loves 🇦🇺. Not the snakes he revealed to an answer re the snakebite episode. Met all the famous animals. And shared that he felt the walk to the top of the bridge more now than when he did it eight years ago ( doubt that). Mentioned the bars he hit up and the restaurants.

A week well spent. As you all have seen he has the tan to show for it.

Two afternoons were lost to late summer thunderstorms. What did he do then?!

He answered the expected questions regarding the end of OL. He is ready to say goodbye. He has been in discussion regarding work. He wants to continue to travel after the S8 wrap.

Mentioned going to Everest and working on getting distribution in 🇦🇺 for SS. And other countries.

Shared a tidbit that when he went to the studio his “things” had been moved for a new younger cast. All tongue in cheek. Said he is looking for to BOMB.

This was a contented man. It was all easy conversation and engagement with just under 945 fans. The auditorium capacity is 945 and there were about 20 empty seats.

He did not bring up the spirits unless asked. He didn’t have a bottle on stage. That bag on the table was Steve’s- with a drink bottle in it and a place to put the discarded written questions. He was not selling his booze, he was riffing. Laughing and just being relaxed.

Asked about Caitriona ( got to say that the audience was a Sam only) and he discussed her getting prepped for directing. Said they had FT her the night before, all the guys and showed her what she was missing. He said how much they had shared and that really “ THEY WERE LIKE BROTHER AND SISTER” ✅ ✅. Crowd liked that.

He said that it will be difficult working away the final time. Very poignant. But he said he is ready.

The rest was the same questions and answers. The event organizers said there will be a USB to buy. So the rest will be there for those who will buy and then share here.

I’ve been told that on the soulless account comments have said that the guys were disheveled and looked unwashed. BULLSHIT. All their clothes were ironed( I am that woman who judges unironed clothes. Sam had ironed his T-shirt and pants. His hair was not oily. And his eau de parfum was that of a man who had showered early and had used deodorant. Those hollow jealous haters were truly reaching for something- anything.

I’m guessing that the Melbourne audience will be just as thrilled and appreciative of the chance to be in conversation with the OL lads. There is a song from one of my teenage favourite 🇦🇺 band Australian Crawl. It’s called The Boys Light Up. It’s the perfect song for the fun day yesterday. The boys did light up.

[ametunns]

THIS CONCEPT IS SO FAMILIAR WITH THE CAGE. And this idea can't leaving me-

Below I'll discuss the character Keeper in the BATDR; some guesses about the role of this new character in the Cage. Enjoy reading!

# The Keepers. In the BATDR >>>

ofc in the ink world this versions of the Keepers are works because -

a giant gear in the spine is not bad for balance when picked up a weight stuff in forward;

the third hand is nice for supporting a thing or a person (not just for correcting its back lol/j);

ability to flying is actually about movement, way to make a painful high-speed strike by massive left hand / catching by right hand. Рerhaps "crawling" on appendages rather than legs makes it easier to walk around the ruins of the studio. And once again - they can fly.

Despite the fact that they have yellow inside, which indicates the presence of a soul, they do not react to the Signal Towers. I can only suggest that Wilson created "Yellow ink", and inside Keeper are not "Golden ink". Otherwise the Golden ink would have provided a link to Demon power, and metal octopus would have been against Wilson sooner or later.

...I personally think that it is easier to get the lost one's soul with the help of saws, and then start changing the soul in order to place it inside something. Like make a "soul semblance" - "Yellow ink" as I called it; get fairly similar minds, which is ideal for Keeper.

In case he's design looks silly, slowly moved, pretty blind because of the game mechanic-

but if you take them as those who can:

performs certain tasks,

move through space almost without interference,

catch the intruder,

conduct an experiment,

or even performing small construction work (for example, conducting power grids through a train tunnel)-

Within the framework of the lore of the world, these creatures, as they are, have done a lot.

# But what about the previous version of Keeper? Let's check out >>>

This creation is much more complex than would be seen...

Yes, we saw how Boris was turned into Brutal. That the mind can be partially rewritten. The sawing process also has a rewriting process. But-

A hybrid of a living mind and metal structures for the first experiments...it sounds like rewriting biology so that the body doesn't go crazy and start self-destructing because of unperfected souls and the realization of what they has become. And even Wilson can't make a perfect soul if he invited Audrey in the Cycle.

...Aaa-and also can tell about the REAL HUMAN in IT'S CREATION AND BLOOD...but a little later-

Attempts to create Wilson own being is unstable...and that is why we'll can meet them in a Cage!!! :D

# Details in the photos >>>

First thing - is another hoses behind;

Second - he had 3 hands, and maybe one of them (as possible 4 hand) is free from the lockers; you can also see that the lower hand is thinner and the plate on the outside of the palm glitters;

Last thing - a familiar detail.

Nothing more...

but a general similarity to the concept

# His role in the Cage. Theories and thoughts >>>

It's interesting things...Let's back to the thought that it can be a human. How much it will affect the story? Well-

Role #1 - He's a living proof about experiment of humans.

...the Gent corporation literally drowned people in ink ("Fade of Black");

And there is a temporary antidote to ink in the form of the chemical "iron oxide", which also resembles blood ("The Lost Ones");

It seems that through chemistry and past research, Wilson was able to create colored ink, a way to get back to the real world, and in collaboration with Alice, who lives in half of his house, and with Ink Machine, he was already beginning to think about creating a Keeper. About getting "the first good soul"...Pick out the right clothes, became anyone from Arch Gate Pictures, not just a humble cleaner. But after understood the difficulties (let's say, with blood) and maybe managed to update the methods for creating ink creatures...And my theory "Yellow ink" from Lost Ones.

Due to the details, a human being in the creature is doesn't't look like something unexpected, but it would definitely be intriguing.

Role #2 - If he's able to talk, new information about the corporation. Maybe even about Alan Gray. Maybe gives some hints of how getting away from the Cage idk just a thought-

A human being who was trapped into a monster for someone else's purposes it's pretty similar to Henry...ahem

Role #3 - Abilities of the blood. Perhaps we'll see hints of blood power in Lone Wolf. But in essence - there will definitely be something new...and something more powerful.

...What role will he play for the Henry.. it's unclear:

It's easy to say - this is the enemy who thoughtlessly wants to kill the hero.

It's easy to say - we can have a possible "free it" quest for game necessaries.

Possible to say - two points together 🤝

The last thing what I wanted to say:

‼️ I'm praying LIKE HELL he's not leaked FOR A COUPLE OF SECONDS like it was with all the new BATDR characters. Like Sammy-🥲

---

thank you for reading! If you have any ideas or thoughts, comments please! I'll be interested ⭐

☕ Have a good time!!

[rosesutherlandwrites]

I walked into my employer's home for the first time today. What you need to know about her is that she is a sprite of a woman in her early 70's who has a gift for making things that everyone says cannot possibly be done happen as if by magic (in reality a lot of hard work but somehow she makes it appear magical). She built this house with her own hands in the late 70's/early eighties. it is entirely off grid and almost a kilometre off the main road down in a hollow in the middle of the woods and it was like walking straight into every studio ghibli-esqe witchy cottage-core moodboard you have ever seen. Plants EVERYWHERE. Exposed beams with dangling copper pots above a 1940's enamelled cast-iron woodturning cookstove, A massive, fieldstone fireplace that would not have been out of place in the 18th century weird art, antiques, oil lamps, and a magnificent room she "added on when the old greenhouse collapsed" that is entirely windows with a 12 person wooden dining table in the middle of it. Separate gardens for flowers and veg "and the little one in the middle is just for my pot". She put in a root cellar 20 years ago and because she had a huge church door she wanted to use, she built a FIFTY FOOT TOWER above it, and put a little guest room at the very top, like it's Rapunzel's bedroom. The entire thing is sided in silver-grey wood and I am OBSESSED, it was like walking into my own DREAMS oh, also she had to feed her chickens while I was there, and literally handed me two still warm eggs straight out of a nest box like "here, why don't you take those home for your breakfast tomorrow" like. Ma'am I'm already sold on this lifestyle you don't have to keep trying to convince me I want what you have lol

[optikes]

an Australian painter in the streets of New York...

John Firth-Smith (born 1943) Australia

1 White Street # 3 (1982) acrylic on stretched 300gsm rag paper, 104cm x 104cm

2 Black Street # 27 (1982) pulp paper and mixed media, 35cm x 35cm

3 Place, Orientation and Navigation (1983) oil on linen 305.0 x 335.5 cm

4 Winter Rounds (1982)

5-7 the artist connecting dots & lines in New York

8 the artist’s photo-documentation of line and shape on New York streets

9 Marshall Islands stick chart

A   Professor Peter James Smith   from  menziesartbrands.com

In 1981 John Firth-Smith travelled to New York to experience the city, to paint there as a local and allow the powerful New York art scene to wash over him. It was a time in the city (that the writer experienced first-hand) when graffiti clogged West Broadway and adorned the walls of the cross-town subway platforms. The locals were producing abstract paintings that had active, brushy surfaces. The curator Barbara Rose, in 1979, produced a show of such work called American Painting: The Eighties that looked like Abstract Expressionism with a college education, and heralded the rise of art stars Susan Rothenberg (1945- ) and Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007). It was the perfect time and place for Firth-Smith’s painterly surfaces to evolve.

From his studio on 20th Street, Firth-Smith could look down on the first winter snows in the city. In the early morning the snow appeared as a soft white blanket, a shroud that covered everything, but later in the day it was stained and marked by the black tracks of car tyres and the footfalls of passers-by. He became fascinated by the ethereal gothic nature of what he saw: steaming ventilators were often to be found in the middle of busy streets, their smoke stacks rising through the traffic, their warmth contradicting the presence of winter snow and sludge. Such is the sensibility that is vividly painted in Winter Rounds 1982, an attractively-proportioned canvas that effortlessly supports the New York dynamic.

Winter Rounds 1982, is ingrained with the gritty, wintry ambience of the city. Like schematised patterns taken from a subway map, or a diagram drawn in an attempt at directing a stranger, there is a frenetic congested intensity in the work that is broken by dots and splashes of colour.’

This painting shows Firth-Smith’s familiar arabesque line, sweeping through the rising red veils of smoke and graffiti, to challenge the gridded infrastructure of the city. Notions of infrastructure usually revolve around trains, bridges, roads and buildings; however with a different kind of infrastructure in mind, the artist deploys a series of connected straight lines and dots to the heart of his picture. In his monograph on Firth-Smith, writer Gavin Wilson describes how the artist had become fascinated with the Victorian cast iron manhole covers found at street level. They often had elaborate decorative surfaces and had holes drilled through them. Firth-Smith tied small weights to the ends of strings, and dropped the weights down the holes making the strings pull tight between the holes; so the sequences of dots and connected lines were born. He later photographed these microcosms, and like an industrial espionage operative, these found their way into his painting process. Ironically, these patterns are reminiscent of stick charts from the Marshall Islands – structures formed by tying small sticks in a gridded pattern to represent the sea, with shells knotted at the intersections to represent the locations of islands. The sea is never far away from the artist’s concerns.

Only in New York could Firth-Smith have had such fertile exposure to the early stages of neo-expressionism. He embraced many deterministic methods of applying paint with drawn lines and dots, then overpainting, then re-positioning more gridded lines and dots; but these methods always relied on chance and randomness. He painted and repainted layer upon layer. ‘The effaced surfaces of the completed work were like a palimpsest, leaving only the faintest trace of his earlier marks.’  It is the beauty of those effaced surfaces that captures the imagination with their daring trails of snow-lines, and the monochrome expanse of restless white.

search @ www.khanacademy.org    www.smithsonianmag.com

[theblackshit]

↳ Exhibitions

David Ostrowski at Sprüth Magers

July 24, 2024

Artist: David Ostrowski

Exhibition title: Parliament

Venue: Sprüth Magers, New York, US

Date: June 4 – July 26, 2024

Photography: Images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers

In David Ostrowski’s paintings, minimal gestures create maximum tension. His spray-painted lines break apart monochromatic backgrounds, both emphasizing and negating the painting’s flatness. Surfaces often built from plain house paint reveal underlayers of studio detritus that complicate the presumed emptiness of his abstract compositions. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Parliament, Ostrowski’s first exhibition at the New York gallery, which furthers the artist’s relentless questioning of the medium of painting and its constitutive elements via the recurring figure of the owl.

Ostrowski’s first owl paintings date back to 2009, but he did not exhibit them until 2019. Now, five years later, Parliament combines early examples with several new works of varying scales and dispositions. Among backdrops of off-white and dusky blue, one, two, three or many owls appear, rendered in an array of visual styles from realistic to painterly to pictographic to cartoonish. Because of Ostrowski’s deft play with layering, overpainting and placement, they seem variously to be affixed to the work like a collage, or to emerge from the background, always bringing attention back to the painting’s surface. Certain canvases contain only a fragment of the animal, where others are nearly filled with them.

Owls are creatures endowed by humans with a long list of spiritual and symbolic attributes; they are said to be wise, melancholic, mystical, ominous. Yet, though owls are undeniably figurative, Ostrowski approaches them like he does his abstractions: as pure shape and form that coalesce through line, gesture and color. By continuously repeating them, often in humorous positions and attitudes, Ostrowski demystifies the owls, as he noted in Mousse in 2019: “The symbolism of the bird of wisdom, the allegory of good and evil—I want to dismantle these things.” His repetitions likewise empty the figurative form of its meaning, calling into question how images are conceived and understood.

The ambiguity between figuration and abstraction unfolds further in the eyes of the owls, which in most cases peer outward, watching the viewer in the gallery just as they did Ostrowski in the studio. At first, it was unsettling for the artist to paint owls while simultaneously being observed by the very creatures he was painting. Motionless, their eyes look stunned, dumbstruck, void of life and pathos—not unlike those of humans in our media-saturated world, where we are also being watched. Their gazes even evoke fear and anger, reflecting the anxieties of today’s world. Amid this uneasiness, something is activated; Ostrowski’s owls offer a view onto something new, albeit unknown.

Ostrowski’s titles have always played an important role in his work, adding an additional charge of meaning to each canvas and questioning it at the same time. The paintings of Parliament continue this practice, creating tension between image and text through wordplay and allusion. Drawing on one meaning of “parliament,” some titles relate to government activities, such as Einkommensteuer (“income tax”) and Denkmalgeschützt (“designated a landmark”); others ironically reference art, including The Grid Method (a way of reproducing pictures square by square) and Early American Painting. Each confounds any easy interpretation of the owls and their manifold stares.

With this body of work, David Ostrowski demonstrates his unique role within the history of abstract painting, which pulls both from minimalist painting traditions of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the late-twentieth-century urge to dismantle the medium’s heroism and beauty. The owls in the Parliament Paintings don’t work to destroy painting, but rather to tip it—and us, as viewers—off-balance, making the medium dynamic, poetic and strange.

[gijoe-forever]

[svgoceandesigns1]

Dr Seuss Character Grid SVG, Dr. Seuss Christmas SVG PNG, Cricut File, Instant Download File, Cricut File Silhouette Art, Logo Design, Designs For Shirts. ♥ Welcome to SVG OCEAN DESIGNS Store! ♥ ► PLEASE NOTE: – Since this item is digital, no physical product will be sent to you. – Your files will be ready to download immediately after your purchase. Once payment has been completed, SVG Ocean Designs will send you an email letting you know your File is ready for Download. You may also check your Order/Purchase History on SVG Ocean Designs website and it should be available for download there as well. – Please make sure you have the right software required and knowledge to use this graphic before making your purchase. – Due to monitor differences and your printer settings, the actual colors of your printed product may vary slightly. – Due to the digital nature of this listing, there are “no refunds or exchanges”. – If you have a specific Design you would like made, just message me! I will be more than glad to create a Custom Oder for you. ► YOU RECEIVE: This listing includes a zip file with the following formats: – SVG File (check your software to confirm it is compatible with your machine): Includes wording in both white and black (SVG only). Other files are black wording. – PNG File: PNG High Resolution 300 dpi Clipart (transparent background – resize smaller and slightly larger without loss of quality). – DXF: high resolution, perfect for print and many more. – EPS: high resolution, perfect for print, Design and many more. ► USAGE: – Can be used with Cricut Design Space, Silhouette Cameo, Silhouette Studio, Adobe Illustrator, ...and any other software or machines that work with SVG/PNG files. Please make sDisney Father's Dayure your machine and software are compatible before purchasing. – You can edit, resize and change colors in any vector or cutting software like Inkscape, Adobe illustrator, Cricut design space, etc. SVG cut files are perfect for all your DIY projects or handmade businDisney Father's Dayess Product. You can use them for T-shirts, scrapbooks, wall vinyls, stickers, invitations cards, web and more!!! Perfect for T-shirts, iron-ons, mugs, printables, card making, scrapbooking, etc. ►TERMS OF USE: – NO refunds on digital products. Please contact me if you experience any problems with the purchase. – Watermark and wood background won’t be shown in the downloaded files. – Please DO NOT resell, distribute, share, copy, or reproduce my designs. – Customer service and satisfaction is our top priority. If you have any questions before placing orders, please contact with us via email "support@svgoceandesigns.com". – New products and latest trends =>> Click Here . Thank you so much for visiting our store! SVG OCEAN DESIGNS Read the full article

[lizzygrantarchives]

T: The New York Times Style Magazine, February 9, 2012

For some reason, Lana Del Rey and her sultry songs drive some people nuts.

CURVACEOUS AND PRETTY IN A DRESS, she brims with catchy songs, all a bit retro, ironic and modern. Without straying too far off the pop grid, she’s the perfect antidote to Rihanna-Gaga overload — dare we say, a skinnier Adele, a more stable Amy Winehouse? Since posting “Video Games” to YouTube last summer, she’s amassed tens of millions of hits, sold out concerts to fashion’s who’s who and now, finally, has released her long-awaited album, which is currently No. 2 on the Billboard Top 200 in America, and No. 1 in Britain, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria. If you were going to manufacture a star for this moment, you’d manufacture her. Some people believe that’s precisely what happened.

Sitting in her producer’s Chelsea studio in jeans and an oversize sweater, smoking Pall Mall Blues that share space — in a beat-up snakeskin bag — with an old Tennessee Williams paperback, Lana Del Rey tries to shrug off the suggestion that her father bought her success, that her face went under the knife, that she is some sort of industry creation, all accusations floating around the Internet. It’s absurd or maybe flattering, but despite her laugh and smile, it hurts.

“I mean, I met everyone who is anyone in the music industry over the last six years and I was unsignable,” she says. “That’s what I was told by everyone. I would play my songs, explain what I was trying to do, and I’d get, ‘You know who’s No. 1 in 13 countries right now? Kesha.’ ”

There’s a formula for a pop song and a prescribed length for radio. Nothing Del Rey’s written obeys either. “ ‘Video Games’ was a four-and-a-half-minute ballad,” she says. “No instruments on it. It was too dark, too personal, too risky, not commercial. It wasn’t pop until it was on the radio.” And even “Born to Die” — her first big video — was, with its double chorus that never lifts, described to her as “another monotonous depressing song.”

For an hour, Del Rey and her producer Emile Haynie play songs from the album. She points out jazzy idiosyncrasies, quirky lyrics and favorite melodies. Sometimes she sings; often she gets up and dances. The last song they put on is “National Anthem”:

Red, white, blue’s in the skies Summer’s in the air and Baby, heaven’s in your eyes I’m your national anthem … I sing the national anthem, While I’m standing, Over your body … Money is the anthem God you’re so handsome

It may not be her most lyrically complex song, but it feels emblematic. As she did in the “Born to Die” video (in which she wraps her body in an American flag), she equates her sexuality to the national anthem. And she knowingly conflates love with material success. It feels like a wink at the listener. The Twitter generation loves a wink.

There’s also more than a little of Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” in the song. Both you could play alone dancing in your bedroom, sing along to in your convertible with the top down or (it might surprise Cyrus’s Disney producers) find yourself gyrating to at an illegal warehouse rave. Whereas Cyrus’s song is a bland pop confection that somehow wound up cool, Del Rey’s track comes from someplace dark thematically and unstructured musically and ends up with pop appeal.

I explain my theory to Del Rey, in a roundabout way, and she nods, sings a bit of “Party in the USA” and ponders the matter for a few moments. “I really like that chorus,” she says. “I love an interesting melody.”

Haynie is more direct. “That’s the beauty of it,” he says. “That’s kind of the magic. She is supercool. The songs are as cool as it gets, sonically and aesthetically. But it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, this could resonate with the world.’ She started underground, small and kind of tight-knit, but some of these recordings are like, ‘Wow.’ I mean, that’s what I heard when I listened. It’s cool and it’s dark, but I thought, This could be big, you know?”

***

We head to a 10th Avenue Italian restaurant that her publicist has chosen. It feels tacky. “Do you want to just get a coffee across the street, and sit on a stoop? It’s not too cold?” she asks. I agree, though it is in fact too cold.

At the pizza place she orders a large coffee with no sugar, lots of milk. The server spots the old Tennessee Williams paperback in her purse, which sparks a conversation about 1950s movies and Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.

Then he asks, “Are you two a couple?” and looks at me and says: “Today is your lucky day. I wish I was lucky like you.”

The presumption doesn’t stop him from flirting with Del Rey. “Big cup for you,” he says, handing her her coffee. “Just a little kiss for me.”

Del Rey laughs and hits him right back with: “Sure. Just a little kiss. Where do you want it?”

There was no kiss, but the subject of Del Rey’s mouth is an irresistible one. So, sitting on the steps of a 25th Street brownstone, I ask the seemingly preposterous question. “It’s fine,” she assures me. “They’re real lips, I mean. In real life my lips don’t look that big. I think because I cartoonized the footage of myself in the video for ‘Video Games’ things look exaggerated.”

If that video is to blame for a pernicious rumor, it is also to blame for putting her on the map. What it didn’t do was get her a record deal. Not until Fearne Cotton, a BBC D.J., stumbled across it and played it on Radio 1 last June. Suddenly the world was calling.

“I was struck by the wonderful combination of spine-tingling video footage, her haunting voice and the simplicity of the song,” Cotton wrote in an e-mail. “I watched it about five or six times in a row and became slightly fixated with it. The lyrics then started to really stand out and it became my song of last summer. … I had been waiting for a song like this.”

Hers is the typical experience. But falling in love with a video or a studio recording can set unrealistic expectations for Del Rey’s live performances. Look for her to break it down Nicki Minaj-style and you’ll be disappointed. Her turn on “Saturday Night Live” in January was widely criticized. She told me presciently about her anxiety beforehand: “I’m not by nature a showstopper. I love to write and play songs, but onstage, all these things come into play. I’m always saying to myself, Don’t mess up. Don’t mess up.”

Del Rey is a small-town girl. She grew up Elizabeth Grant in Lake Placid, N.Y., neither rich nor poor. She remembers as a kid asking herself cheesy meaning-of-life questions and thinking she was really special for doing so. Then, in high school, she took a philosophy class and realized she was like everyone else. While a philosophy major at Fordham University, she started finagling gigs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the East Village. At 19 a small indie label signed her as Lizzy Grant for $10,000. “It was amazing. I got my own place to live. I lived on that money, finished school. At that point I envisioned having a very nice career touring small clubs, continuing my studies in philosophy and volunteering,” she tells me. “It’s actually the same vision I have today. I have a serious life here. I have a really big family. You know, I’m needed here.”

Needed by whom? She hints at family, which makes sense given the darker, psychosexual context of many of her songs.

What about love and loss, the other dark note in her oeuvre? “I felt the same way for a really long time, and then I met someone who I guess I fell in love with,” she says. “I just didn’t know I could feel differently. That time with him became sort of a place that I fell back to in my memory.”

And the breakup? “Well, I mean, the breakup is a part of it in the way that in the midst of loss you try to still look towards the light and not fall to pieces or do self-destructive things.”

She grows quiet, looks at her watch. It’s getting late. She admits that she doesn’t have an important industry meeting, as her publicist told me, but has to baby-sit for a friend.

Before she goes, I ask her where she lives. She’s looking to buy a place, but for now is in Williamsburg. “Staying with my ex-boyfriend,” she says nonchalantly, then bursts into nervous laughter and admits, “I live on his couch.”

I give her a look like, You just told me all that about falling in love and breaking up and you’re on the dude’s couch?

She pins it on the touring, letting out another embarrassed laugh. “Because no, I’m busy though!”

Originally published on nytimes.com with the headline A Star Is Born (and Scorned), and in abridged form in the February 19, 2012 issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

[dustedmagazine]

Rob Burger — Marching with Feathers (Western Vinyl)

Rob Burger has played all kinds of instruments in his life and career, electronics and guitar, pump organs and synthesizers, banjos and music boxes, but it all started with the piano.  In Marching with Feathers, the composer returns to his home base with nine tracks that include many varieties of tone and drone, but center around the piano.

Burger has worked in a variety of contexts and ensembles, from major studio film soundtracks (he composed the music for Ocean’s 8), to John Zorn’s Filmworks series, to the experimental traditionalism of the Tin Hat Trio to a longstanding partnership with Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. His most recent album before Marching with Feathers, The Grid, pulsed and percolated with electronic energy. Its title track buzzed in shadowy dissonance, a rough friction grinding against dreamlike Krautish propulsions. The new record is just as mysterious, just as lovely but more organic.

“Waking Up Slowly” scatters ghostly, Satie-like keyboard simplicity across hallucinatory arcs of pedal steel (that’s Paul Niehaus, by the way). It stirs to sentience gradually, its parts whirling in a slow motion dance. “Hotel for Saints” is more emphatic, blasts of synth sound swelling around staccato piano motifs, a hard backing of drums keeping pace. “Still” is heartbreaking and distilled to essence, a melancholic piano drifting in from another room. And the title, “Marching with Feathers” splices unruffled sound washes with glitch beats, setting limpid pools of mood in motion. A string section warms up as the piece gains density (Teddy Rankin-Parker is credited with cello), and layers of tone shift on and over one another. A march implies purposeful forward progress, feathers soft sensuality and adornment; the piece merges both in a meditation that moves.

Still, the cuts that pare back to just piano (or mostly) wield the quietest kind of power. “Figurine”’s soft rounded notes float in like a dream of a memory, right there but also out of reach, with transience, mortality and regret in their slow progression.

Jennifer Kelly

[idraw-ulook]

More weapon upgrades.