#How art can be something so legendary to an entire community of people purely because of how it makes them feel

[ronithesnail]

When i say art is less about the quality of the thing itself and more about the impact on its audience (a very cliche statement yes i know), i mean like an iconic tv show is less about the quality of the actual show and more about how feral it makes the fanbase

[queerenteen]

Your top five 🌊 Fanfics? Any fandom works

Running on Air by eleventy7

Draco Malfoy has been missing for three years. Harry is assigned the cold case and finds himself slowly falling in love with the memories he collects.

This is one of the first fanfics I read seriously, and I did it the day before my prelims paper.

I still don't regret it--this is one of the most hauntingly gorgeous things that I have ever read and builds up in a fantastic slow-burn with a shroud of mystery wrapped around it. Cannot recommend it enough.

Until My Feet Bleed and My Heart Aches by reiya

‘…Of all the rivalries in the world of sports over the years, perhaps none has become so legendary as that of Russian figure skater Viktor Nikiforov and his rival, Japanese Yuuri Katsuki…’

A single event changes the course of Yuuri’s life, throwing him into a bitter rivalry with Viktor Nikiforov that spans across his entire skating career. But as the years go on, rivalry and hatred begin to develop into something very different and Yuuri doesn’t seem to be able to stay away, no matter how hard he tries.

Hatred and love are two sides of the same coin and even though everything changes, some things are still meant to be.

This is beautiful. I absolutely adore this au, with an amazing enemies to lovers scenario.

It is a what it could have been, perhaps even more dramatic than the original, and somehow, some things turn out the same anyway.

The Art of Burning by @hella1975

Zuko had never excelled at anything. Azula was a prodigy. Uncle always knew what to say. And Father... Father was strong, iron-like. But Zuko had only ever been good at surviving. Putting one foot in front of the other in a grim show of stubborn determination, gritting his teeth and bearing it. Survival was all he had ever been taught. He knew how to do it. So when he was kidnapped by the Southern Water Tribe, he expected to fight as he always had. He didn’t expect to be taught instead how to live.

In a warring land, the Water Tribe forgave the enemy in an act of defiance. For this, he was torn from them, and this time, his wounds won't heal so easily.

Forced back into nothing but survival, the last person Zuko expected to see was Hakoda's son. Hakoda was a promise of safety. The relentless blue of Sokka’s eyes was a promise of happiness. Zuko could have both if he just reached out his hands, but he found them clutching into fists. After all, he’d been burned one too many times.

But hey, at least between Hakoda and Sokka, Zuko could appreciate the family resemblance of pure, asinine stubbornness.

Can I just say how amazing this fic is?

I went into it for the zukka and instead got an absolute masterpiece, with some of the best character dynamics, plot and stunning writing.

I love it so much and I know that this is another one that I will keep coming back to when it's done.

Anachronism by chellethewriter

Catra clenches her fists. She won’t let it happen. She won’t endanger their future. “We can’t change anything. We’ll just have to wait, and do everything the same way we did before.”

Adora grabs Catra’s shoulders. Her grip is so tight, it’s nearly painful. “But do you realize what that means for us? Playing along. Letting things go the exact same way as before–”

Catra’s expression darkens. “I know,” she says, struggling to keep her voice from trembling. “You’ll have to leave. We’ll have to be enemies again.”

*** Years after defeating Horde Prime, Catra and Adora inexplicably wake up in the past—on the day that Adora first found the sword. If they're going to make it back to the present, they'll have to relive their past from start to finish, pretending to be enemies despite being in love. Despite being married. Despite knowing exactly how the story ends.

But it's not easy, waging war against the person you love most.

Okay, it's not easy to make Catra and Adora's past even more painful but this one really takes the cake.

Going through these horrible, painful events--pitted against the person you love most once again, just to get back to the future you remember?

It is breathtaking, highly recommend.

area cryptid upset no one bothered to inform him of his tragic backstory by crimsonseekers

“My life is a nightmare,” Dabi muttered blankly.

“Nah, this is hilarious,” Hawks said, and while he wasn’t explicitly laughing, Dabi knew that those weird little chirps he was letting out were pointed at him. “Imagine if we go through all this effort and you don’t even have some sort of dramatic background or tragic backstory to justify you being this emo, you’re just a hot topic junkie or something.”

“That’s fucking worse.”

Or,

Dabi has amnesia and keeps reading conspiracy theories about himself in an attempt to figure out who he is, gets the League in on it, and they dismantle organized crime, revolutionize society, and ravage the hero system in the process. Hawks suffers.

Dabihawks is such a good ship and this is god tier content right here. I read this fic and then two days later immediately reread it. Enough said.

(I really shot myself in the foot with the whole top 5 so instead, I'm just giving all the top fics from the fandoms that I have)

Lynchpin by @shanastoryteller

He can’t get Jin Guangyao’s words out of his head.

If he’d only believed in Wei Wuxian, if he’d only been willing to stand up for him, could it all have been avoided?

Yunmeng Siblings get to live happily ever after because Jiang Cheng changes the timeline.

The fix-it fic where the entire cultivation world is saved from ruination with the help of time travel and a good bit of communication.

Company by galori

You’ve never minded eating alone (before.)

Or: Asami and Korra are both intelligent, just in different ways.

Modern au where Asami is the CEO of a company with the stain of her father's legacy and Korra is an ecologist who wants to create and protect to the best of her abilities. Their paths intersect and once they do, there is no untangling them.

Not enough people have read this--everyone go read this now, it is absolutely amazing.

Okay, I have so many more fics that I want to talk about because these are all my novel-length fics but for now, here's my bookmarks (I love them all)

[captainkurosolaire]

I challenge you to pick five Tumblrs in your social circle and tell them something you admire about their blog!

Only 5? I could probably do 500. However, that's determined by what's considered my social circle. I'm often in my head being incredibly social continuously is really a challenge of mine. I'm always actively marching to something, my flame of passion when I have it, I can do some crazy stuff but it diminishes relatively quickly, so I try to cling. But I'll up your thing and list 25 of my fave people. Ask me this same thing in a Month, I'll keep doing 25, until I do all the people. How about that? (If anyone wants to be taken off mention let me know.)

@eligos-venator

- Has one of the most intelligent and sophisticated minds, I've had the pleasure to know. Literally admire all his aesthetics, work, head-cannons, ideas. It's only a benefit that the dude shares some OC characteristics to my own (Winning features). I really enjoyed the short-thread we did. It was incomplete, mainly because of my faults. I want to actually be better to give him a proper delivery and RP worth his time, but he's incredibly worth the investment of eyes.

@mischiefandmystics

- If there was a Mount Rushmoore of writers who kept me in this endeavor, encouraged me. Sun'ra is one of them. His characterization skills, writing, the delivery and how believable his character is, they're masterful acts.

@mishivymendi

- I wouldn't be nearly tamed or as creatively freed if it wasn't for this gem. She broke my shell, I really didn't at a time ever see myself being anything really beyond a smut writer, but Mishi not only saw potential in me, but brought it out. Her stories and world's she brings to life are so majestically colorful.

@asymphonyofash

- My go-to. He's another pillar individual who saw things in me past just the obvious perception, (Probably second longest XIV RPer I know.) Taught me a lot of the lore, I shot him up and he's sort of become my stapled rock. He's right aside Sun'ra met them about the same, both took me under their wing's as I quietly observed and absorbed.

@lavender-hemlock

- We're always up and front with each other, never feeling like I couldn't say anything around, extremely rare to share that these days. Her gif's are legendary, something on my own terms I want to soar in quality. The writing she does is astounding. Character has so many mysterious pages that are quite addictive to want to explore and learn them. (Encore 20 below-cut)

@under-the-blood-moonlight - Her sweetness and artwork and overall is just a friendly presence to be around. I cherish them so much. One I can jive with more darker undertones with. She's one the most hardworking and ambitiously creative people. I'd mail them infinite hugs if could. Thanks for being you! @roxinova - I owe a lot of credit to her. She's constantly OOC and everything was nudging me too be more inclusive to things and involved heavenly. It's rare for me. I'm really horrible about that my autism sets me back socially, I constantly will be drowned by the next day and be reverted back to better off alone, that's my major crux and weakness. But her thoughtfulness, these things, aren't ever foreign to me, I do pay attention probably better than any would ever give me credit. She's a beacon model to have as a friend. @corpse-dancer - Haven't ran into many words with them, but her character, screenshot game, expressiveness, they're all a marvel to constantly see, alongside her attitude and bringing life character. I do think if I were better, we would click quite splendidly. They've recently reminded and motivated me to pick-up my daily-practice, or try too. Keep being a rockstar. @fair-fae - Few who wouldn't know who she is in this community. She's been in my opinion a huge core. I'm certain she's inspired many who weren't even RPers too try it by seeing her at the Quicksands or elsewhere, a tyme ago. Making no exception, I was even one of those. I used to be in QS every-single day and was often doing my shameless stuff. Though her presence first did show me there's a lot more. I admire her in all fields. Also appreciate her adopting me to the FC and her always thinking of others and giving events, or her aesthetics and portrayal, its the epitome of swan elegance. @thorcat - One of my most treasured friends. Been RPing with them for a longtime. There's never anything complicated between us or a rift of drama, it's just let's go and have fun. We really mesh well, I've welcomed nearly ever character and got the privilege to RP with nearly all them. They always open up envelope and help me, settle on back and just laugh. Whether used to be waking up to their characters humping my afk one or use randomly having a hardcore banter between Ufah and Captain and capturing them as a voidal pet. Memories with them isn't something I'd ever want to lose. I love ya! Never stop enjoying life for anything. @lukawarrioroflight - I get in the gutter find myself lacking motivation or writing, discouraged even... But I never have felt, I could ever do any wrong with this person, they bring the light out of me. So no matter what, how many hospital-beds I yearly visit, it's because of this rare nature, that I come back, even if they're the only one's ever to read my stuff. I would do it for them alone. @scholarlybreadbun - I've only been back recently and they've so much warmth. Their presence is the sun of inviting. The couple and posing all the shipping that stuff makes me even melt. I'm not particularly talented in regards to posing couples, but I took notice of them along time ago and set on quietly improving. Really like them for them, wouldn't ever want them to change that. Ideally look forward to be in their orbit longer so I can bask in them. @seascrapes - Been mutual with them for a while. Their aesthetics and character is all S+ level. I appreciate throwing back tagged prompts with them, one of many people I really think would be enjoyable to collab with any other seafarers. The artwork and pieces of Tal Brook, are breathtaking as ever exceptionally too, not to mention. Love your stuff matey, you're a king. @mai-takeda - Is a myth. Her absolutely sheer friendliness and her attitude, are so positive influencing, I was so thrilled to be welcomed with her and boosted by them early on. I couldn't see myself, wanting to exist where they didn't have happiness like the same she always delivers by just doing so many soft-things. Not to mention her writing... She's a whole world to throw yourself gazes

under. @zhauric - It doesn't go far either without the same breath of Mai, I could say about Zhauric. He's someone worthy to look-up and also recognize they're passionate and inviting, hoisting up literally everything. Could easily find any of their characters comrades with my own, or jiving alongside. Not to mention last XIVWrite, they slaughtered it. So enjoyable to read them all. I like how organized their blog is too, motivated me recently to redux my entire thing. @cadrenebula - They have so many diverse characters and their entire roster is vibrant and is imbued with a massive flux of life. They are able to encapsulate so many character's voices and portray them so effectively too, I really admire that greatly. They've made me think bigger and try myself recently at actually undertaking a huge roster of characters too. I've taken many breaks, but I always am so graciously returned often with them close-by and that's so incredibly sacred. I've seen a lot of people get discouraged or quit, leave, departure, etc. But they always seem to have a bigger house then they had last I took a break and I enjoy peaking in. @silvernsteel - Her artist and gif-work are awe-aspiring, there's little unrecognizable by her photo-sets and edits. They helped me even tip-toe into uncharted with giving me the recipes to try incorporating gifs into my arsenal. Plus so delightfully pleasant to actually talk with and just chill. I want nothing less in life, than the beauty they give, to be returned to them for eternity in all their glorious air. If ever needed anything of me, they've got me. @spotofmummery - We talk about passion or friendliness or overall a person to even remotely try to be, I got to include them. Their web-series and writing, screen-work, everything they do is fantastic. And that's furthered back nearly any I've met showcase or immortalize how just genuine of stellar person they are. I wish them always the energy to create and sparks. @snow-covered-moon - They've never been anything less but absolutely a diamond to know. I enjoy their character, their almost always abundant of energy that's very rub inducing. Their WoL character stories, writing, screen-shots, everyday they open up a new pandora box of joy, there's no mistaken love behind their character and that's infectiously easy to also enjoy something when the author does too. Always healthy to be around, I never feel short of vitality when they're close-by. @letheofthelost - Always cheerful or least encapsulates with me, they're a carnival ride. Just pure epic story-telling and engaging equally as passionate, constantly writing characters, not looking for anything outside of RP or anything really just being their selves, they fade all others. I love their presence, them as a person. Enjoy any character they'll ever come and throw under me, or a change of pace. Always feels easily understandable between one another. @crow-iv - Together we're an unfiltered, unstoppable wake of pure passionate writers and art. But I would say they're far ahead of me, in every regard. Already able to portray multiple characters in a scene and do such in-depth thinking, alongside even sketch or draw right afterwards or a scene. They're so talented, huge reason I set-out on giving them a Crew of cast and actual stories to-tell when I'm actually caught up and if they interested and we both have the room, I really think if further myself, I can be better and supply more for them to draw and I want to see them soar. I want to give them all my improvements and effectiveness. @trishelle - They've such a reinforcing personality and aura around them that easily bolsters anything that dares thinking they're about to be depleted so energizing. Aesthetics, characters, all them are so lively that further compliment their own mun's great welcoming presence. Worth hundreds of smiles and stars, keep high. Wish I had more time to dedicate to learning you! But I do notice and appreciate you. @fracturedfantasia - One of my people, I like to retreat and just talk my full

head-cannons with or learn, share insightful and inquisitive thoughts about philosophies and multi-culture things. Or plotting and in-general, they're a well of information and brimming ideas, they are every making of what makes a quality friend. When you can generally be open-about-all that's a real one right there. Their characters and tarot readings, I always would implore if they're offering. Thanks for giving me any-time. You're truly a treasure. @violet-warder - Never have even came to words with them yet unfortunately but didn't mean as a mutual, I haven't admired all their screenies, writing, or the aesthetics they bring of their character. Glamours is real end-game, I like all what you've done and put together. I care strictly about what represent and give, I don't want to see them ever think anyone want's them gone, they are abundantly so talented and possess things only they can deliver. I think recently came back too, and I'm glad to share, hopefully, overtime I can build you better up. Or eventually even talk, but I'm certain you are a busy-body person too, so we're relatable. @layla-grey - I have a lot of underline issues that set me back as a flawed person, but I've never not been anything but someone who's open, it's why I always do include my f-list in anything or etc. I'm not here to present this facade, and really don't care to be an image crafted by another. No one as of recently or now, am I close with as an RP partner or friend with then this stunning masterpiece. I never let-up on story-telling or anything so I can eventually use my Crew or other Characters, to give them anytime a master entertaining day, they push me to not be short-changed. IC and OOC I would devote my full attention too cause they've never shed from me. Didn't ever matter how much silence or anything, they're always around. And don't expect anything out of me or pressure. Just accept me and I equally share that sentiment, I want you to have everything in this world has to offer. ----- This is just a fraction of people, I've paid attention, noticed or know. I've been around in this Community for many years. There's a lot of things I could say about it, more probably then anyone else. But what matters to me, is recognizing the people who are here, that work hard, build others up, support, constantly are a beam. I don't need to interact with everyone, to know when someone is generally out for good. Or they're out for bad I've learned inquisitiveness longtime ago, I had to survive and remain afloat. I just go out and be me, and along the way, I get to find people like these, who help bring out the best me. I am nothing without these people, creators, writers, artist. I'm a terrible friend, horrible person, I don't have the energy to interact NEARLY with as much as I'd like with you all, If I could clone myself, or if things were different, I would drop it all to be in your orbits more if could. But, do know I appreciate you. And even if you ever do depart from this whole community or anything, know that anything you share, or give, that stuff does matter, somewhere, someone was aspired, if nothing else, by me. ONLY you can give the worlds you see and I am thankful. Do love yourself.

[certifiedskywalker]

My Feelings on TROS

There are simply too many places to begin. However, I’ve narrowed down my issues with the final installment in the Skywalker Saga to three major points that, I at least deem, worth mentioning.

Below the cut are said points. This review INCLUDES TROS SPOILERS, so if you haven’t seen the film, DO NOT READ.

1. Pacing (1a. Palpatine)

As a past runner, when I say that I was winded walking out of this movie, that means something. 

However, I feel like this issue is not entirely TROS (or JJ’s) fault. I feel that Rian Johnson, when filing The Last Jedi, could have done more to give Abrams and The Rise of Skywalker more wiggle room to flesh out the future storyline. 

Had there been more open screen time to fill, Palpatine’s introduction wouldn’t have had to be thrown into the opening scroll (hence why Palpatine is an issue in and of himself). If Rian had included a scene in The Last Jedi as simple as Kylo Ren or Hux walking in on Snoke talking to a hologram of a cloaked figure with a voice eerily familiar to Palpatine, the undead Emperors’ rushed introduction would feel more organic. There needed to be more hints that Palpatine was behind the scenes in both The Force Awakens and, most importantly, The Last Jedi. If there were more hints there would have been less time needed to explain Palpatine’s survival; thus there would have been more time to dedicate to a fuller, more satisfying ending of the movies we love. 

There is more I could say on this topic, but I feel that there are other outlets and people more qualified to speak out on this subject.

2. Rey Palpatine turned Skywalker

I have no problem with the idea that Rey is a Palpatine (although, like introducing Palpatine himself, I wish that there had been a few more hints either from Luke or Leia on Rey’s heritage). What I do have a problem with is, at the end, she names herself a Skywalker. 

I understand that she means it as an homage to her Jedi Masters, Luke and Leia. I also understand that ending the Skywalker saga with a continuation of their line shows proof that ‘good people prevail over the bad’, that ‘family is more than just blood’ and ‘you make your own destiny’. As a writer, I also understand JJ’s want to connect the beginning and end of the Skywalker Saga by reinvigorating the Skywalker name and ending it all with the twin suns that started it all. As a writer, and in a poetic sense, I like this ending and I respect those who find the fact Rey calls herself a Skywalker brilliant and a good ending. 

As a fan, I hated it. I love the Skywalkers, I do, but this movie was the end of their story (stories). To continue their name, thus continuing their story, feels cheap. While I enjoy Rey as a protagonist, there was another, living Skywalker: Ben Solo. Keeping him alive, without the last name of Skywalker, would, arguably, make more sense. 

That being said, I did love what they did with Ben Solo and Kylo Ren. Killing Kylo Ren so Ben Solo, the LAST Skywalker, could rise was powerful. His death was bittersweet as we had so little time to see Ben Solo as himself. So, by already ‘raising’ Ben, the title The Rise of Skywalker was fulfilled. Giving the Skywalker name to Rey made Ben’s redemption feel...less impactful.

I would have much rather her either embraced her lineage as Rey Palpatine or chosen Solo as her last name to honor Han and Ben. Even better, she could have just stayed Rey, just Rey. 

I know Star Wars is about the Skywalkers, but at its’ heart, Star Wars is so much more. Star Wars started with people with names not yet carved into history. Star Wars took nobodies and made them legendary. Who would we be without knowing Mace Windu? Obi Wan? Commander Cody? What about Hera Syndulla? Boba Fett?

Why couldn’t the same be done with Rey?

3. Poe Dameron

My boy, my wonderful, beautiful boy. How dirty did The Rise of Skywalker do you? Very dirty, in fact.

Poe, as a character, was not the problem. It was the way he was written by JJ and the way he was limited by Disney.

I am OVERJOYED that Oscar Isaac has made a point in exposing how Disney hindered his expression in making Poe gay. It would have been so refreshing, so groundbreaking, and perfect if a mainstream platform, a monopolizing company voiced support for the LGBTQA+ community using one of their most profitable properties. Can you imagine how liberating, how wonderful that would have been? 

Now, we’ll never know. At least not in Star Wars.

I was appalled by the inclusion of Zorii Bliss as a means to convey a straight, hetero-normative relationship with Poe. My dad pointed out that Poe could be bisexual, but, knowing that Disney wants a profit more than anything else, they were purely trying to ‘straight-ifiy’ Poe Dameron. Poe deserved better than to have a beard for his sexuality and Zorii deserved more than being a character purely for bearding Poe. As a member of the LGBT community, it is disgusting to see that the voices of the actors and fans, who yearned to see a progressive, gay character on screen, were overshadowed by the idea of making a profit.

Then there is the issue that Disney, that JJ Abrams, decided to recon Poe’s backstory and make their Latino leading character a drug runner. I know I may sound like I’m trying to be ‘woke’, but this was horrible. Marginalizing the gay community by not making Poe’s identity canon? Okay, not fine but we can recover; but making your SOLE, LEADING, LATINO CHARACTER A DRUG RUNNER? In this political climate (at least in America), this is harmful as Hell!

If what I’ve read is true and Oscar Isaac is not returning to Star Wars or any Disney property, good on him! He deserved to have his voice heard; he wanted to give people a relatable character; he was willing to take the heat of making Poe gay in a conservative world; and Disney didn’t take the chance.

So, screw the mouse and give all your support to Oscar Isaac’s future cinematic endeavors!

My Final Thoughts

I like The Rise of Skywalker, in spite of it’s many, many issues. Some of the other issues I saw were: noninclusion of Rose Tico and the truth behind Palpatine's survival(?).

Few movies are perfect and this one was far from it. However, it is an ending to a series, a saga, or movies that will live on, longer than we ever will. Star Wars, its characters, its worlds, its cast, have changed my life. Even if the movies weren’t amazing or left me wanting, they inspired me. I’ve created art and this blog because of the stories because of a galaxy far, far away. 

For that, I am thankful to have seen this movie and have a voice strong enough to give my two-cents. I feel in my bones, my heart, and soul, that, if Carrie Fisher hadn’t had passed, this movie would have been wildly improved. Rest in Strength, Spacemom.

I hope that some of you see and understand my thoughts. To those who don’t, I’m interested in hearing what you think! Let us be civil and leave the blasters alone. Here, in this galaxy, everyone should feel at home.

[muschiosa2]

Experimental choreographer Anna Halprin singlehandedly transformed the language of dance, shocking the status quo with radical new forms of self-expression.

Text by Caroline Ryder

After WWII, legendary dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin decided that everyone is a dancer (even if they got no rhythm), and that every movement is a dance (even the act of putting one’s socks on). With that in mind, she founded what we now call “postmodern dance” – an art movement whose egalitarian, anti-authoritarian ideology had more in common with future phenomena such as punk rock, street art and flash mobs than with the ballet or modern dance of her time. Unlike her predecessors, Anna Halprin had a warts’n’all approach to dance. She and her dancers were sometimes naked during performances, and they refused to be corralled onto a stage, performing their dances in the streets, in nature, among audiences, or wherever they felt like it. When invited to dance at a lunch for important art patrons, they made a stage in the middle of the room, sat at a table, and forced the audience to watch them eat lunch. Sometimes they gave audience members a “score”, instructing them to get up and join the dance. This approach was seen as inclusive or insulting, depending on your viewpoint. She really infuriated those who believed that dance was purely aesthetic – something pretty, polite and non-confrontational. Not that she cared what they thought. “I never make my choices on the basis of whether people are going to like it,” she says, speaking from her home in the coastal forests of Marin, northern California. “I have to make my choices based on whether it is good art.” By constantly challenging authority and shunning homogeneity, Halprin and her peers helped lay the groundwork for the hippie counter culture, as well as for punks, culture jammers, hipster aerobicisers and iconoclasts the world over (if Banksy had been a dancer, he’d probably have danced with Anna Halprin. And did we mention her daughter was married to Dennis Hopper?). Today, she’s still dancing (still sometimes naked), still pissing some people off, and still inspiring most of the rest. In fact, Anna Halprin is, without doubt, one of the most badass 90-year-olds you’ll ever meet.  Born Anna Schuman on July 13, 1920 in Winnetka, Illinois, Halprin started going to ballet classes at the age of four. When the other kids laughed at her euphoric, energetic style of dancing, Anna’s mother took her out of that class, and enrolled her in a modern dance class, where she studied the techniques of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. It was a much better fit for Halprin’s freeform tendencies. “We had lots of fun skipping and hopping and waving balloons and moving scarves through space. I liked it very much, and people didn’t laugh at me,” she says. In high school, she was introduced to the techniques of second-generation modern dance goddesses, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. By this point, Halprin was already sure she had found her life’s path. Aged 18, she was invited to move to New York City and join Doris Humphrey’s dance company – a huge honour, but her parents said no – they wanted her to go to college first. She hoped to get into Bennington College, a women’s college in Vermont, but the school had already met their Jewish quota, so she was rejected. “In all the private schools in those days they had restrictions on Jews,” she explains. “If the Jewish quota was filled and you were Jewish, you didn’t get in.” She was depressed about not getting into Bennington, but what felt like failure turned out to be a blessing.  The rest of the world woke up to her revolutionary approach in 1965, when she and her students (including both her daughters Daria and Rana) performed Halprin’s “Parades And Changes”, one of the most controversial dances ever seen, at the time. It’s a sweet, innocent dance, in which the dancers happen to become entirely nude. “I chose the task of dressing and undressing as my inspiration,” she explains. I thought that this would be very beautiful, because you could see the body as it undressed in many different forms, and it would have a sculptural feeling.” Her studio in Marin, where she still works today, had an outdoor theatre, a wooden deck built by her husband. “Out there, we were very close to the feeling of nature. It is nestled in a wooded area, and it is very private. It didn’t feel coquettish or seductive to be nude in that environment.” On stage in New York City theatreland however, the nudity was shocking. As they danced, Halprin heard members of the audience whispering “Oh no, they’re not really going to undress…are they?” But they did. In the corner of her eye, Halprin noticed a couple of cops lurking backstage. “I figured, ‘This is New York, maybe it’s a custom,’” she says. The next day, Halprin received a summons for arrest for indecent exposure. She left New York and didn’t go back for ten years. She and her students became outcasts of sorts, shunned by the modern dance circuit. But once again, just like the time she was laughed out of ballet school, or turned down by a college for being Jewish, being rejected by the establishment was a blessing in disguise for Halprin. No longer able to perform or tour heavily, she and her dancers had the space and time in which to fully explore, experiment with and evolve the artform they had created – postmodern dance – as well as the healing and therapeutic capabilities of dance. In 1978, Halprin and her daughter Daria, a psychologist and former actress, would found the Tamalpa Institute, teaching “personal, interpersonal and social transformation, teaching new models for health, psychology, art and communication”. If it all sounds very tripped out California, well, maybe that’s because it is. Had Daria not had such an unconventional California upbringing, perhaps she would not have been so well suited to co-found the ultra-progressive Tamalpa Institute with her mother. And perhaps she would not have been so well suited to play the lead female role in Antonioni’s cult classic Zabriskie Point – a 1970 art film that captured the essence of the psychedelic counterculture, featuring music by Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones. Daria was perfect in the role of a young California hippie chick tripping out in the desert – she had been tripping out all her life, playing and dancing with the most talented avant-garde artists of the time on her mom’s wooden deck, leading a childhood so bohemian, so unconventional, some kids weren’t allowed to come and play at their house… the Halprins were that far out. Daria was married to Dennis Hopper from 1972 to 1976, and had one daughter with him, Ruthana. That’s a long time ago now. Today at their Tamalpa Institute, Daria and her mother work with terminally ill HIV/Aids and cancer patients, as well as students of movement. Halprin has borne witness to the healing power of dance many times. One man, after a two-month workshop with Halprin, drew a selfportrait that showed fire coming out of the side of his head. Six months later he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. “I did a similar thing, made a portrait, and that’s how I discovered I had cancer,” says Halprin, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1972. “Your body is your instrument for expression, but your body can also lead you to information that can otherwise be hidden.” She has written a book about how to heal through dance, and made several videos. Maybe to some people, cancer isn’t something to dance about. But to Halprin, dancing is the only response to the realities of life. And perhaps its no coincidence that she looks about 30 years younger than her age, and is still as provocative and focused as she was in her youth. You can spend an hour or so of your life getting to know Anna by watching the documentary Breath Made Visible, made by one of her former students, Ruedi Gerber. It’s a touching film, especially when you realise that so much of Halprin’s life has been a love story, with Lawrence. The affection between them is palpable, and enough to bring tears to anyone’s eyes. When Lawrence became sick (he eventually passed away in October 2010), she created the dance “Intensive Care” – a haunting, nightmarish exploration of death and dying that evokes Japanese butoh horror dances in a hospital ward. “That was the most recent thing I did that people started walking out on,” she says. Still, you get the sense that shocking people is the furthest thing from Halprin’s mind when she’s creating a dance. Understanding the images in her head, as inspired by the emotional events of her life, and translating those into movement – that is her life’s work, and will continue to be. Whether it’s shocking or not is irrelevant to her. And even though she may be 90, don’t ever expect Anna Halprin to stop dancing. “Looking young, feeling young, I don’t know if it is in my DNA or it is the demon dancer in me that makes it so, but I feel I am working on dances all the time. I can’t stop. I don’t feel that my age is going to stop me from dancing. I just dance differently. I don’t dance now the way I dance when I was in my 20s or 40s. I dance the way I do when I am 90. And those dances are just as important.” 

[stimmyvillainarchive]

WHY does the android app gotta suck so much, when i click the faq link it just like refreshes the page,,,, this happens with all links in bios on the andoird app :[

NNNN lovin this broke ass app.

I’mma go ahead and paste the FAQ just under the cut, hopefully you should be able to read it now :’))

(FAQ is written by Mod Joker)

“Are requests open?”

We get this ask a lot. And while I don’t mind answering, it does get a lilll annoying sometimes since we’re essentially repeating ourselves constantly. Before you ask, please check our ask box! It will ALWAYS give our request status!

From now on if we receive requests when they’re closed, we’re going to delete the message entirely. You’re free to ask again when they’re open, but we need breaks!

“Can allistic/neurotypical people follow?”

Yes! So long as you’re respectful of stimming and understand it’s not an aesthetic or something to make fun of.

“It says there’s two mods, but I only really see Mod Joker post.”

There is! But Mod Boo is rather, well, shy. We both are, tbh. I’ve just gotten used to talking a lot on this blog. And to tell ya the truth I invited her to mod this with me because she considered making a blog but wasn’t sure how she’d do it, and was worried she’d be too awkward/quiet. But she actually tends to see your messages a lot! She just tends to let me handle things. But if you ever wanna talk to her, just say the message is specifically for her and I’m sure she’ll get back to you. She’s very friendly and tbh one of the best people to talk to!!

“How do you make gifs?”

I use the same method stimmybby uses! His tutorial’s right here!

“How do you make banners?”

I use photoshop and for backgrounds (depending on what type of background), I use paint tool SAI. I made a tutorial on how I do it here!

“Can we use your banners for posts that aren’t stim related?”

Absolutely! So long as credit is given and you’re not in our dni, then use it as you like! Discourse posts, art, vent posts, promo posts, whatever floats your boat!

“Can I use your gif/s?”

As long as there’s credit to us for the gif/s and you don’t apply to our dni, you’re free to!

“How can I credit you?”

There’s a few ways! Such as

- Including the credit in the post and/or under the cut (this is the best way people can access the original post and see the credit!

- Include the credit in the post’s captions

- Include the credit in the tags

- Include a link in the post to another post that has the credits in it

- Saying you got the gif/s from us in the post

“What are bad/wrong ways to ”“credit”“ you?”

- Saying “I don’t own these gifs”

- Saying “credit to the original owner(s)/gifmaker(s)

- Straight up not saying you took these gifs from people/including in no credits

- Claiming the gif/s are yours/you made them

If I see any of these I WILL publicly call you out on it and you WILL be blocked immediately thereafter. That block will not be lifted.

“What does REG mean?”

Reactionary Exclusionary Gatekeeper. Meaning people who try to exclude certain queer people from queer spaces. Such a biphobes, transphobes, aphobes, panphobes, and so on.

“What does TERF mean?”

Trans/Transgender Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Meaning radfems who are transphobic and are violent towards trans people (especially trans women).

“What does SWERF mean?”

Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist. They’re radfems who try to exclude sex worker from their feminism and often treat women attracted to men as less worthy.

“What’s the ADT community?”

ADT stands for “Actually Dysphoric Trans/Transgender” and was created by transmedicalists/truscum to break off from the trans community. It’s an insult to the trans community, an insult to the creator of the transgender pride flag (it’s removed the white that was there for people who ID as non-binary/outside the gender binary), and is there purely to start drama and create rifts in a community that’s already got enough enemies for simply existing in a transphobic world

“He/Him lesbians don’t exist/they’re transphobic towards trans men”

As a trans man who doesn’t think the world revolves around me and who understands that what lesbians decide to do it literally none of my goddamn business: get the fuck over yourself you whiny pissbaby

“What do you mean by people in the true crime community?”

People who sexualize, romanticize, excuse, and/or support serial killers and their actions/crimes. This doesn’t include people who are INTERESTED in the topic of crimes, serial killers, etc but acknowledging how these people are disgusting and their actions are unforgivable.

“Why are you anti-cgl?”

Cause we hate pedophiles and are decent human beings.

“You’re bigoted to kinksters just like homophobes are bigoted to gay people!”

I hate to break it to ya bud but I’m proudly kinkphobic and you’re a giant homophobe!!

“I’m a SFW cgl(re)/littlespace blog so I’m following/interacting uwu”

No the fuck you aren’t!! You’re a kink blog, there’s no such thing as a “sfw kink” even if you’re remaining two braincells are too busy fighting over the last pacifier to tell you some fuckin common sense. Your ass is getting blocked and I’ll also be using your blog to take a look at the people you interact and block them too just for safe measure! Eat a cactus, fuck nugget

“You hate lesbians if you hate TERFs”

You owe every lesbian an apology for assuming they’re all mysogynistic, LGBT+phobic pieces of horseshit like you are. Eat a dick.

“aces/aros aren’t LGBT uwu”

Wow… that’s so wrong Alexa play Fuck You by Lily Allen

“Me/Someone I know/(insert user/s) has been blocked. Why?”

There can be a number of reasons why you’re blocked, and I’m not afraid to block people as I want this place comfortable and safe for the mods and followers. So there’s several reasons as to why.

- You apply to our DNI (see BYF)

- You’re a (insert harmless children’s cartoon) critical blog (I tend to block those due to them saying LGBT+phobic things)

- You get into kin drama

- You’re an ace discourse, pan discourse, bi discourse, and/or overall REG discourse blog (this does not mean I block inherently block discourse blogs! I block the shitty ones)

- You’re a spam/porn/etc bot (if I’ve gotten this wrong, lemme know! I tend to block shady and empty blogs for this reason unless their desc/url/etc says it’s empty/weird for a reason)

- You’re a blog that frequently posts/centers around one or more of my triggers

- You’re an aesthetic blog (though I tend to soft block for them. But this is NOT an aesthetic blog and stimmy is NOT an aesthetic)

- You’re an “anyone can interact” stim blog

- You’re a stim blog that steals/doesn’t credit the gifs they use

- I feel you and I are going to argue and I’m just saving us the trouble of future unpleasant encounter/s

- You’ve been shitty to my friends or just been shitty to people in general and I’ve noticed it

HOWEVER I’ve made slip ups in the past! If you feel you don’t apply to any of these, you can contact me through my main and ask why. Sometimes I don’t always remember why I blocked somebody (sadly there’s a lot of shitheads on this site I’ve needed to block) or I’ve confused one blog for another person’s blog. Or maybe the person was more chill than I thought. Please contact me yourself rather than ask somebody else to do it though so I can get all the details! Even if I don’t lift the block, I won’t report you for block evading or anything.

“You used to be kidheart friendly and now you’re not, why’s that?”

Sadly, Raven (the creator of Kidhearts) has proven to be a bully sympathizer and feels it’s okay to compare agere to kinks/cgl and sides with regressionuncensored. She condones bullying/harassment/the sexualization of minors and I am not nor will ever be okay with that.

“But Raven sai-”

I don’t care what she says. She made it abundantly clear that she supports regressionuncensored and I don’t care that it came back to bite her in the ass. Bullies deserve no support, no sympathy, no nothing. And if you side with her than don’t come near this blog. This is agere safe and I will not allow people who support sexualizing it to interact. Kidhearts WILL be blocked on the spot, no questions asked.

“I’ve left a community on the dni list, can I follow/interact?”

Yes!

“Why are you anti-(insert thing on blacklist here)?”

Camp Camp: It’s racist + antisemitic

Dragon Maid: It’s pedophilic

Killing Stalking: It’s homophobic, ableist, sexist, perpetuates rape culture, and fetishizes abuse

Your Lie in April: It romanticizes child abuse and it literally starts off with a gross pedo joke when we meet the love interest in episode one

Split: It’s ableist

Hetalia: It’s antisemitic

Harry Potter/J.K. Rowling’s works: Actually there’s nothing inherently bad about the story. I just don’t like it. HOWEVER: I can’t stand J.K. Rowling as she’s a TERF/overall LGBT+phobe, and racist. So none of her creations will be featured here.

Sonic Boom: Nothing inherently problematic. I just can’t stand the show because it just fuckin sucks

13 Reasons Why: It romanticizes suicide and the creators refused to listen to actual mental health experts and have made the show potentially dangerous to anyone who even slightly deals with suicidal thoughts/urges

Detroit Become Human: It’s racist + antisemitic

Voltron: Legendary Defender: It queerbaits/it’s LGBT+phobic

“REG is a transphobic term”

I, Mod Joker, am trans. Try again.

“A-specs aren’t LG-”

*buzzer sound* wrong. So sad for you

“You’re not LGBT+ because you DARED disagree with me because you actually acknowledged that tumblr didn’t credit the community sweaty uwu”

We get this shit because a lot of you assume I’m ace or at the very least a-spec. And… Ya couldn’t be far from it. I’m a pan, genderfluid trans man. Even with all your gatekeeper (sorry, BULLSHIT) logic; I’d still be attracted to multiple genders and not be cis. I’m p queer. So no matter which way you slice it, I’m part of LGBT+. Die mad about it.

“You’re comparing aphobes to TERFs and SWERFs you fucking transphobe!”

Wow I didn’t realize setting boundaries meant that I viewed y'all in the EXACT same light. I’m so glad I have the lovely aphobes that have told my friends that they should kill themselves to set me straight.

Asking people not to interact doesn’t inherently mean I think they’re the EXACT same thing.

“Mod Joker is a gif-thief and reposts people’s content without properly crediting them!”

I have made this entire post explaining that’s wrong. Idrc if the post is too lengthy for you. Don’t talk shit if you don’t even have all the details.

Additionally, if you send me somethin about this in a negative light I’m IP blocking you. One strike and you’re out. If you want to believe people with false info and false accusations then that’s your baggage. Not mine.

HOWEVER if I’ve accidentally mis-credited, forgot to/messed up on crediting a person for their gif/video, or so on let me know! I’ll make mistakes, but I never do it intentionally.

[markstrom]

The Canucks are Attractive 101

by @markstrom, @feistyteee, @tomiath, @nhlmarkstrom, @huttsybobuttsy, @pyatts, @baercheese

This is the ultimate guide for anyone who ever said the Canucks are not attractive. Say goodbye to the world as you know it. 

First of all: Swedes. We all know it, Sweden somehow produces the best looking people on this planet and the Canucks have some of them. 

1. Jacob Markstrom 

Our starting goalie is 6′6 and no one can look at him without melting away. His voice and his sweet Swedish accent is the cutest thing you’ll ever hear. Also: eyebrows. Also: eyes. The curved nose needs a shoutout cause it’s adorable. His face is just a masterpiece of art and anyone who doubts this has, well, no idea of art. We also love to mention his tattoos because damn. 

2. Anders Nilsson

Only a fool might think one Swedish goalie is enough. Meet Anders Nilsson, another 6′6 goalie from Sweden. He’s the absolute purest sweetheart, as you can spot a pride flag on both his masks. To represent his gay friends, he says. His hair/beard color combo is different but it works. So. Damn. Well. Plus: the freckles, we love them dearly. Our Swedish goalies support each other at all times, goalie controversy? We don’t know her.

3. Alexander Edler 

He looks like Alexander Skarsgård but on skates. Another sweet Swedish blondie who is also the sweetest dad. His hair always looks on point and he does indeed have a nice tan in his pic. Probably best dressed Canuck, his fashion is on fire. What a man. 

4. Loui Eriksson

A man also known as The Poodle. His fluffy and curly hair make you want to touch it. His look is sometimes very weird and intimidating and some people might think of Louis Vuitton when hearing his name but remember, this kind of fur is completely Canucks branded. 

5-6. Henrik and Daniel Sedin

These are our leading Swedish fish and they do look the same. Some people might say they aren’t really pretty, but hey if you’re into gingers, we got two identical ones for you. We aim to please. 

Next: the team dads (Disclaimer: this does not mean they actually have kids). We got plenty of them and they’re mostly cute and obviously good with kids – or still single.

7. Sam Gagner

Sam Gagner aka Gags is a really smiley. GAGNER WITH SCRUFF IS ICONIC. Also smirk smirk smirk. He likes to wear an all white mouthguard that makes his teeth look weird during the game but that’s okay because he needs to protect his perfect smile at all costs! Bonus: He looks so comforting like you can trust him with your life.

8. Brandon Sutter

His sarcasm is A+ comedy. He also looks like he could play the role of a guy everyone falls in love with on The Young and the Restless. He’s just very pretty, hair is soft, light scrub and eyebrows are 👏🏼. His eyes are pretty and they are very kind. Also that little smile/smirk is giving me all kinds of feelings ngl.

9. Christopher Tanev

He most definitely looks better with teeth than without. Tanev is the protective type of guy, he takes pucks to the face for you but mostly for Marky, literally. Long hair don’t care. The soft, dark brown of his eyes can tell that he couldn’t hurt a fly. Bet he takes the ladies out on good dates too.

10. Michael del Zotto

“Michael Del Zotto does wedding photoshoot, does not actually get married”

“New Vancouver Canucks defenceman Michael Del Zotto was named one of our nation's 25 Most Eligible Bachelors”

“Just showed up, plugged in his iPod without anybody asking, just plugged it in”

Michael del Zotto, more commonly known as DJ MDZ has Italian heritage as you might realize in his name. He’s got curls curls curls. Simple, overall goof who often thinks too highly of himself. Further he’s the absolute kind and friendly standard Canadian. 

11. Erik Gudbranson

YOU CANT TELL ME HE DOES NOT LOOK LIKE HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE ON THE GQ COVER!!! Certified male model Erik Gudbranson. God definitely was in a very good mood when he gave him his face. His nose is straight and thin, it just makes you want to tap on it. His smile is very comforting and so is his look. His eyebrows are a statement. This guy knows for sure what a hairstyle is. His sense of fashion is straight out of a fashion magazine. The scrub is just the whipped cream on top, his face is artwork. 

12. Markus Granlund

Looks quiet and serious but has a great sense of humor and arguably some of the best Instagram posts. He’s from Finland so if you want a Finnish player we have all ages. He’s got pretty green eyes.

13. Alex Biega

Alex Biega is a cute family man. Great with kids, nice, cute smile, rosy cheeks, nice nose. Con: he has no hair, but you don’t see that when he’s wearing a helmet.

Next up: our young guns! They are all handsome af and just overall lovable. They’re fast and speedy and some of them are thicc af. Save the best for last, our personal favorites.

14. Ben Hutton

1. If you’re ever feeling down, watch a hutton video, he’s happy 24/7 and knows how to have fun. 2. He’s always smiling and his smile can brighten a room. 3. Those dance moves tho. Who knew a “Barbie girl” lip sync could be so hot. 

15. Darren Archibald

He is a wall, he is badass and that makes him so ass. His skin looks very soft and his beard does actually look good, not like Guddys. HIS BEARD IS PERFECT. His eyebrows are straight up goals and look at the dark, kind brown of his eyes. Beautiful.

16. Bo Horvat

Bo’s face is chiseled like a god. He carries his dog because he doesn’t want to make him walk. He love to go to the beach with his dog but he doesn’t let him swim because he’s “more of a sinker”. His nose is very cute and his body is damn well trained you can just look at him forever. Bo has very soft short hair and he is often amused by Brock’s non-existant smile. 

17. Brendan Gaunce

Baby face Brendan Gaunce has the hairstyle of a guy from elementary school. His lips are so red at all times it’s inhuman. He looks very innocent but it feels like he’s not. He’s just kind of there, no one really knows how or why. Kind of looks like a little baby deer. 

18. Tyler Motte

Fact: There are no good pics of him in the inter webs. Tyler “Applesauce” Motte kinda looks like a college kid from a frat. He’s a very fast skater and his penalty killing is absolutely sexie. 

19. Nic Dowd

Dowdy is just overall an incredibly handsome guy. That hair line and the wavy fluff, can you see it? Beautiful. The cheek bones? Beautiful. He could work as a male model if he wanted but fortunately he plays hockey to bless us with his beautiful face. 

20. Troy Stecher

Stechy has straight up the most adorable dog on this planet. Let’s be real if anyone says Phoebe isn’t their favorite Canuck they’re lying. Kind of an underrated defence man so not a lot of people fully appreciate him. He’s like that rough and tough hockey player that’s also very adorable. His voice is simply great. 

21. Brendan Leipsic

Where do we start here? First of all he calls his dog his son and it’s very adorable. Also his curls. CURLS. They match his face so well and they are absolutely adorable. His lips have a perfect shape and look so soft. Generally his face looks just super soft and kind. Also, have you ever noticed his fashion sense? Definitely one of the best dressed guys on the team. He’s also very aggressive on the ice and he hustles and works very well with our favorite d-man Derrick Pouliot. His nickname is delicious country gravy because he works so well with the chicken strip.

22. Brock Boeser

Here we go, it’s time for Prince Charming! The hockey community on here already knows how great he is and look I even found a rare footage of his shiny smile. Whenever he smiles he helps the global warming because his smile melts icebergs. Awesome. He always chews on his mouthguard rather than use it and his mom doesn’t like that. Oh, he also went to prom with a girl who has down syndrome and that’s really the type of guy he is. His flow is legendary and often his hair look like actual gold. He leaked his hair routine and apparently he just uses Head and Shoulders shampoo. 

23. Nikolay Goldobin

Goldy is the most adorable Russian puppy you can find anywhere in the NHL. His hair are super fluffy and he doesn’t know how to wear a hat but that only makes him look even more adorable. His nose is so small and round it’s absolute gold! Don’t even get me started on his eyebrows because they are flawless! He got the most innocent and sweet smile out there, he always seems happy. You want to squeeze his cheeks and generally just hug him. It seems like he gives nice hugs. 

24. Sven Bärtschi

@baercheese is here to confess her love: “My cute little Swiss boy ♥ my forever favourite & definitely underrated in the looks department & as a hockey player. His nose might not be straight but it’s still cute (I will fight you if you disagree) and his hair is always slicked back to perfection👌🏻 If you haven’t heard him talk you need to because he has a sight accent and it’s my favourite thing in the entire world 😍 He’s also a known dog lover & has a dog named Bear (named after himself basically), what’s not to love?”

25. Derrick Pouliot

Derrick Pouliot, also commonly known as Poulet, chicken strip and super strip is our cutest chubby teddy defenseman and we all know it. He grew up in the middle of nowhere in Saskatchewan and not a lot of people got to appreciate his beauty so far. His hair are the pure fluff and make you just want to run your hands through it. His face looks so soft, his eyes are warm and you just want to squeeze his cheeks ngl. Listen to his voice once and you never want to listen to something else ever again. He is not really tall and his hockey gear looks kind of too big for him, the others love to pat his head. Sometimes his hair get a little curly and it’s just the cutest thing ever. Just by looking at him you can tell that he gives the best and softest hugs ever and he makes you feel comfortable at all times. He is really silent and not outgoing, he needs a lot of time to feel comfortable with new people but that’s totally okay. He’s super cute with kids and just overall totally lovely and kind. A real Canadian.

26. Jake Virtanen

Jake Virtanen is the ultimate snack. He’s half Canadian, half Finnish and 100% babe. The man can skate. Fast. Right into my heart. To quote the great philosopher of our time, Taylor Swift, he’s so gorgeous, it actually hurts. He has the cutest dance moves and the most precious smile. When he does that little slanted smile, I swoon, you swoon, we swoon. Bonus: When he works hard his face turns red and it’s adorable lmao.

[lvnalovegreat]

some luna headcanons

In Icelandic lore, magic is primarily a woman’s art. Witches were called vísendakona - wise women, knowing women, women of science. Accounts by muggles call them by many names, as for much of history the existence of magic was not disputed or despised to the degree it was in Great Britain. Eventually persecution did send her mother’s ancestors into hiding, but that could not stop strong women from continuing  to breathe light and reason into their world. They simply learned to dole it out in more subtle doses. Luna learned from a young age that a soup can be another word for a potion, a walking cane can be a staff in disguise, a garden can protect a house from evil - that magic will flourish wherever a clever, tender caster may hide it. 

Luna’s journey into the earthy, patient magic of her maternal heritage made great leaps and bounds during her time as her mother’s assistant, and this time started in the garden. Luna learned to hum beautiful, mildly enchanting tunes to  plants every morning until they grew taller than her. She coaxed gnomes away from the dirigible plums and towards the ordinary plums planted as a decoy. Garden work was an idyllic task for a pensive little girl, but a talented witch cannot be crafted from purely idyllic circumstances. A large part of her mother’s work was kept hidden from Luna, and for good reason. It was unrefined and brutal, a terrifying counter to Sigrún’s sophistication and tenderness. As Luna grew older her mother entrusted her with more information and a more significant role as an assistant. It was at this point in Luna’s life that she learned the true power of knowledge. Luna watched her mother’s work consume her in a very literal sense of the word. Luna’s participation in these experiments forced her to wonder if perhaps she could have done something to prevent the day from turning as pear-shaped as it did. For years she chatted quietly about the possibility, among many other things, to Hogwarts’ thestral herd. Luna’s  heart aches for the the creatures. She wonders if, perhaps like her beloved thestrals, her lot in life as an outcast was determined from birth. She misses them dearly and hopes they aren’t suffering under the school’s new administration. 

As much respect that Luna has for her childhood hero Newt Scamander, her father obviously holds a more  tender place in Luna’s heart as a magizoologist and explorer. He met Luna’s mother while traveling around the globe in search of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack, a supposedly breathtaking creature that neither of her parents doubted the existence of. Luna will wistfully tell the romantic story of how her mother and father conceived her in a tent in Northern Sweden beneath the winter sun in all its detail. All its glorious detail.  Xenophilius was (and is) a doting, intelligent father. He listened with great patience to all of little Luna’s eccentric theories about the world around her and she learned to do the same for him in return, and as a result raised an open-minded and respectful woman. He did not insult his daughter with dumbed-down speech or lies about Father Christmas, but instead included her in his work from a very young age. He painted the stars on Luna’s ceiling and showed her which she was born under so she’d know when she was most safe from Nargles. He wore his coat to the threads to buy Luna books to devour and crystals to protect her brain from wrackspurts.    After the death of Luna’s mother, Xenophilius took a break from his profession of growing potions supplies and took Luna to spend time living with his mother’s family in Brazil. Luna did not entirely appreciate being around so many relatives she wasn’t particularly close with, but she could tell it helped her father a great deal. When they arrived back in Ottery St. Catchpole, Luna named her father’s new piece of journalism the Quibbler. 

Luna suspects the Crumple Horned Snorkack doesn’t exist, but nobody else will know that she doesn’t believe strongly in such a key aspect of her father’s life’s work. She doesn’t want to discredit his other discoveries - because nargles do exist, as to a whole host of hidden creatures only her father has been dedicated and intelligent enough to learn of.  Luna’s keen intuition when it comes to those around her has also allowed her to see her father’s desperate search for what it is - a way to keep her mother alive, as Sigrún had been just as excited about the possibility of finding it as he had, and they had used up their honeymoon money looking for the legendary creature. And for that Luna finds the search an admirable cause even if it never bears tangible fruit. 

Luna had never minded being alone, and still she cannot remember a time when she could consider herself anything but an outcast. However, making friends changed her forever. Now that she knows the comfort that comes in caring for such a diverse and wonderful group of people, she also knows that returning to isolation would hurt her immensely. The thought of her friends losing themselves to this war scares her - will it turn Neville hard? Will it take Ginny’s youthful passion away? Will Harry be able to handle the mess he’s being thrust into?  Luna takes pride in keeping the peace. She finds people forget the spiritual aspects of self care, so she does her best to help them keep their souls healthy even when their bodies ache. The last thing she wants is pessimism and anger overtaking the Resistance. She detests the notion that a good fighter is hard and stubborn and cruel. Luna mourns the losses on both sides, and does not seek to do any more harm than is absolutely necessary. Luna has never killed and dreads the prospect.  All the same, her ability to detach from planet earth and plant the thinking part of her brain firmly in the clouds helps her get dirty work done. She’ll protect her friends at almost any cost. 

Luna’s father passed his talent for painting on to her and then some. Luna’s walls have changed dramatically over the years, from the star chart her father painted her to whimsical stories all the way up to her final piece featuring her friends intertwined in a protective golden circle. Luna does not always speak much, but she draws and paints almost daily, and often practices meditative painting. She loves how much emotion can linger in a single color and how easily her world is communicated in pictures.  When Luna hid in the Room of Requirement prior to slipping out of the castle, she used the steady hand her father blessed her with and the ancestral lore her mother taught her to make the bold decision to tattoo runes onto her skin. The tattoos are mostly hidden beneath her shirt and pants, but the two most prominent ones are located on her wrists, right above the hands. She genuinely believes they help her focus her magic and provide protection and, as demonstrated with placebos for Felix Felicis, sometimes belief is all one really needs.  It’s not her body’s appearance that matters. These tattoos help Luna preserve her soul. Like most things, Luna has thought deeply about her ink. She thinks about how she can look at them while she’s being tortured. How they will help identify her mangled corpse. How they will look sliced through with scarring. Luna thinks about all the grisly details with general indifference, but she hopes most of all that her tattoos will help her remain a good friend and protect her soul from decay. Are these things necessarily what the runes she chose were originally meant for?  As always, Luna thinks that’s up for interpretation. 

[johnbazley]

My Favorite Albums of 2018

xxx

Honorable mention: Bruce Springsteen - Springsteen on Broadway

This one is tricky to place on a list; it’s not technically an album, though it’s not technically a film, and since I watched it on Netflix/listened to it on Apple Music, I can’t really call it a show I attended, either. Still, as a long-time Springsteen fan from the suburbs of New Jersey where the Boss cut his teeth, this performance floored me. Essentially a performed, abridged version of his 2017 memoir Born To Run, cut with songs from his fifty-year career, Springsteen on Broadway finds Bruce Springsteen examining the threads of his life, trying to make sense of them, and deconstructing the legendary persona he has spent his career constructing. The result is the reframing of many of his biggest and greatest songs. If you are at all interested in the craft of creative non-fiction or Bruce Springsteen music, Springsteen On Broadway is a must-see.

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30. Pale Waves - My Mind Makes Noises

This album reminds me a lot of The 1975’s first record, which I adore. It’s catchy as hell, and it’s my favorite pure pop record of the year. It’s too long and samey—I skip around a lot when I listen now, and there’s probably a fantastic ten-track album within these fourteen songs—but there are some real hits on here. I spent enough much time on the subway this year trying not to bop my head to “Eighteen” that I’d feel wrong not including it here.

29. J. Cole - KOD

I haven’t loved the past few J Cole albums, but I have fond memories of listening to Sideline Story as I rode around Monmouth County, New Jersey in the passenger seat of my friend Kevin’s car the summer after got his driver’s license. I think of those summer nights whenever J. Cole announces a new album, so I always listen to them, no matter how much I disliked the previous one. KOD surprised me because for the first time since Sideline Story, I felt like I had something to chew on and unpack when I read the record’s lyrics. There’s a statement made here about the consumption of black art by while people, and while it is certainly up for debate how effectively that statement is made—I can’t help but feel like substance users are thrown under the bus at times—I do think Cole has finally released a record with a thesis statement. Hopefully his next one has features!

28. Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs

Admittedly, this album might be much higher if it had released earlier in the year. There is a strong case to be made that Earl Sweatshirt is the greatest rapper alive, and that Some Rap Songs is his best album—I just didn’t spend a whole lot of time with it this year.

Despite that: I love the mixing on this record, how everything sounds obscured, like a recording of a recording. Earl, much like his old Odd Future cohorts Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean, has gotten much better at what he does since the collective dissolved a few years ago, and his lyricism is better than ever. There’s a trend toward immediacy in hip-hop at the moment as streaming numbers increasingly play a larger role in the business end of things. Some Rap Songs feels like the only album in the genre released this year that was designed with long-term consumption in mind. I can’t imagine this album will leave my rotation any time soon.

27. Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

I’ve always been kind of a fair-weather Deafheaven fan. I listen to the new albums when they drop and appreciate them for what they are, but I’m not enough of a metal fan to spend much time with them after that honeymoon period ends. I come back to Sunbather fairly regularly, but mostly because it reminds me of the summer when it gets cold out. 

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is the first Deafheaven album I’ve fallen for. It’s the first Deafheaven album I recommended to my friends in the group chat who don’t care for metal music at all. Sunbather, and to a lesser extent, New Bermuda showed that there’s plenty of room for experimentation within the black metal genre, but Ordinary Corrupt Human Love blows the whole thing up. I love a subversive record, and while I didn’t spend as much time with this album as I did with other records on this list, I spent a lot of time thinking about it.

26. mewithoutYou - [untitled] LP

All I can say for this record is that it scratched an itch. It’s been a while since I’ve been truly invested in the Will Yip-produced Run For Cover emo scene, but this record reminded me of those heydays with the Citizens and the Balance & Composures and the whathaveyous. I don’t think it’s Yip’s best produced album, and I don’t think it’s mewithoutYou’s best album, but “Julia” worked its way into my head quite often this fall, like an old friend I hadn’t heard from in a few years, coming home to visit.

25. Noname - Room 25

Noname is just so good at this shit. After Acid Rap, I hoped she’d release a mixtape. She did, and Telefone was one of the best albums of that summer--a pivotal summer of my life, the summer we got Blonde, Coloring Book, Puberty 2, and Atrocity Exhibition, no less. Room 25 is even better, and proves that Noname is here to stay.  

I put “Ace” on a playlist called “better by fall” in October. That playlist was full of mellow songs that calmed me down, that also had BPMs high enough to put a spring in my step and get me my out of my apartment when I didn’t feel like leaving my bed. It was my happy place when all of the shit started hitting every fan a few weeks into the fall semester. I think I’ll remember this fall much in the way that I remember the summer Telefone dropped--a lot of darkness, a lot of growth, but mostly a lot of good songs.

24. Basement - Beside Myself

I feel like so few rock bands today are concerned with structure and songwriting like Basement are on Beside Myself. This record reminds me a lot of early 2000s Jimmy Eat World output, which is mostly because of how the guitars sound, but I think that comparison really comes together in the strength of the choruses and the way the songs build and release. Each song is built like a brick house. I’ve always kind of doubted that this band would ever be able to top 2012’s Colourmeinkindness, and while I still prefer that record to this one, this one is a nice addition to a discography that gets better with each new release.

23. Vince Staples - FM!

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year is home. I moved from New York City back to New Jersey in large part because I felt like I needed it--2018 was the year that I accepted that this place made me the person I am, and that I should embrace it. I wrote a lot about this state and my community here.

FM! resonated with me because it felt like Vince Staples doing the same. I liked Big Fish Theory, but I didn’t return to it much after release, largely because it found Vince abandoning much of the Long Beach, California-centric lyrical content that made me love Summertime ‘06 so much. I think there’s a potency to an artist writing about the good and bad of their hometown, and I love FM! because Vince does it well, in a stylish wrapping that feels more like a meaningful concept record than Big Fish ever did, despite what critics said about that album.

22. Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer

I remember walking around Grand Central trying to catch a train the day after Dirty Computer dropped this spring, listening through the album in full for the first time as I raced through corridors and took my seat, and thinking as “Americans” came to a close, “oh, yes, this is the best album of the year.” It just seemed like a fact at that point that no one could possibly top the beauty of Dirty Computer, which consists entirely of very catchy songs that construct a larger statement piece about queerness, blackness, and womanhood. And while it may be true that Dirty Computer is the best album of the year, I have not listened to it in full since, mostly because I got very distracted with schoolwork and other music in the weeks following its release. However, that listening experience was my most memorable of the year, and this is the only record on this list that I’ve only listened to once. I think that counts for a lot.

21. Alkaline Trio - Is This Thing Cursed?

Earlier this year, I drove 20 hours round-trip to Maine and back to visit a friend in Bangor. I spent most of those twenty hours listening to old Alkaline Trio records, as I’ll do from time to time when I feel nostalgic for my middle school years. I think spending so many hours with Good Mourning and From Here To Infirmary this summer prepped me to love Is This Thing Cursed?, which feels like it could have been released right before Crimson. 

If you haven't already been in on Alkaline Trio, Is This Thing Cursed? probably won’t change your mind (though you might like the last record, My Shame Is True, which is more “““mature””” and less spooky, but I digress), but it’s a solid addition to a great discography from a band I’ve loved since Tony Hawk’s Underground came out.

20. Saba - Care For Me

Care For Me is the best rap album that no one talked about this year. The first time I heard “PROM / KING,” I figured Saba would blow up in 2018 the way that Kendrick Lamar did after good kid, mAAd city. That didn’t happen, but I still think Saba is bound for stardom.

19. Hop Along - Bark Your Head Off, Dog

I didn’t stick with this album as much as I thought I would when I first heard “How Simple”--I think a lot of my adoration for this album actually zeroes in on that song, actually--but we had a nice summer fling.

18. The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

This album is probably my biggest disappointment of 2018. So much of it doesn’t work for me. I wish I could cut out every terrible, self-indulgent lyric like “Kids don’t want rifles, / kids want Supreme” and “I found a gray hair in one of my zoots, / like context in a modern debate, I just took it out.” “The Man Who Married A Robot” had to have been written by a man who thinks he has something profound to say about how humans are affected by technology, but has also never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. Matty Healy apologized for his ridiculous and offensive comments in The Fader about misogyny in rock music and hip-hop, but I can’t return to “Love It If We Made It” after Matty essentially said “hey actually I don’t know what I’m talking about, sorry y’all” with regard to its lyrical content. I think Healy is essentially rewriting Drake’s career, coming so close to genuine profundity at every turn and constantly falling victim to his own inflated ego.

Still, I adore the minute-to-minute songwriting on this record so much that I can ignore its many failed attempts at crafting a larger statement. “I Like America and America Likes Me” is so good that I don’t mind skipping “The Man Who Married Robot” when it’s over. “It’s Not Living If It’s Not With You” is exactly the type of song that seems effortless to The 1975, but no one else has quite cracked yet.

17. Mitski - Be The Cowboy

Be The Cowboy is probably my least favorite of Mitski’s records. This one didn’t blow my mind the way that Puberty 2 did, and I don’t think it’s as timeless as Bury Me At Makeout Creek, but it’s still a god damn good Mitski album. “Old Friend” makes my heart skips beats.

16. Foxing - Nearer My God

I don’t really remember this album coming out. The only thing I remember about the first time I listened to it was that I was falling asleep on the subway, constantly restarting it from track one and dozing off again before that song ended.  

15. Courtney Barnett - Tell Me How You Really Feel

I’ve always felt like I should like Courtney Barnett more, and it all clicked into place for me on this record. I love the vocal melodies and how they play with Courtney’s guitar work. It’s also a very enjoyable listen from start to finish, and when it first released, it was my go-to walk-around-my-neighborhood-and-think-about-life album.

14. boygenius - boygenius

This release is such a dream come true that it almost feels wrong—how could two of the best active songwriters today start a band together? And how does that band live up to every expectation? How did Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers come through with their best songs ever for their supergroup? This is the EP that shouldn’t exist because we don’t deserve nice things.

13. The HIRS Collective - Friends. Lovers. Favorites.

This is the album you’re all sleeping on. The best hardcore album of 2018 and among the best of the past five years. For fans of scary, heavy music with lyrics about trans and queer liberation. Read this and listen.

12. Brian Fallon - Sleepwalkers

Sleepwalkers is exactly where I wanted Brian Fallon to go after Painkillers. I know so many Gaslight Anthem fans who want Fallon to write the same song over and over--and I love that song, to be fair--but Fallon’s songwriting is most interesting to me when he’s branching out and experimenting with new songs. I think that’s why I’ve always loved Get Hurt, and it’s certainly why I love Sleepwalkers. The British invasion sound that Fallon plays with here fits like a glove, and the slowed-down Manilow-esque “Etta James” is the best song he’s written in at least four years. I feel like Fallon’s next album will be a bit more typical, as the cycle of Fallon records tends to go, but Sleepwalkers stands out and I hope Brian Fallon never stops writing songs.

11. Jeff Rosenstock - POST-

I think there’s a fantastic seven-track album within POST-. I don’t care much for the long songs here, because I don’t think longer song structures are well-suited to Jeff Rosenstock’s frenetic style, so when I listened to POST- this year, I most often started with “Yr Throat” and turned it off once “9/10″ was over. I’ve included it so high on my list because I think that seven-track album is perfect. It’s frustrating how good those songs are. The thing about Jeff Rosenstock is that he writes so many songs (this is the first of two appearances he’ll make in my top eleven of 2018) that I can forgive the clunkers, especially when they’re so nicely bookended at the beginning and end of an album. 

The fact that the larger “rock” audience hasn’t caught on to the fact that Rosenstock is one of the best songwriters alive and releases multiple records each year is confounding. WORRY. remains one of the best rock albums of the decade, and POST- is a perfectly good follow-up.

10. Now, Now - Saved

Now, Now’s turn with Saved reminds me so much of the recent Paramore trajectory. It seemed for a while that the previous album would be the last. When the island-pop follow-up with a new lineup was announced, I feared that everything I’d previously loved about the band was gone. Then the album came out, and I fell head over heels for it.

I listened to Saved a lot on my roof this summer as I stole time and watched the sun set between my two jobs. I often had a few free hours here or there, and I spent so many of those hours listening to “Window” or “AZ” as I sipped a beer and watched the planes land in Queens. 

I don’t remember much of this year--so much of it blends together in a way that, honestly, concerns me. But the nights I spent with “Saved” blend together as well, and if I look back at my summer in 2018 and only remember getting drunk as the sky turned pink in Brooklyn with “SGL” in my headphones, I’m cool with it.

9. Ruston Kelly - Dying Star

I’m not usually in the business of recommending country albums, so you know this one must be good. 

Dying Star does so much by the books. “Mockingbird” could be a radio hit. “Cover My Tracks” features a main melody that I swear I’ve heard in a Ryan Adams song before. It all works, mind--it works so well that the subversive moments all land even harder. 

Maybe I’m just out of touch with the genre, but I have never heard a song like “Son Of A Highway Daughter” before. I didn’t know country artists were allowed to pull a “Hide and Seek” and hide the instruments behind several minutes of vocoder vocals. If this has been going on longer than Ruston Kelly’s tenure in writing songs, please send those albums to me. 

I love interesting music, and Dying Star is the most interesting country album I’ve heard since Taylor Swift’s Red (will not be answering messages debating Red’s existence as a country album, thank you). 

8. Pusha T - DAYTONA

I spent most of the early parts of 2018 angry at Kanye West. As the “Santeria” beat unfolded from the speakers of my 2003 Ford Escape, stuck in stand-still traffic in Staten Island, mere weeks before its transition would fail and leave me stranded in an AMC Theaters parking lot, I had a single, fleeting moment of shit, what am I going to do if this Kanye album is good?

Luckily, that feeling faded before I crossed the bridge into Jersey. But there are elements to Pusha T’s greatest record, DAYTONA, that prove that Kanye hadn’t lost quite all of his marbles when he conducted these beats and dreamed up the concept of the all-killer-no-filler, seven-track hip-hop album. Every second of this album is good. Because it has so few keystone moments, every moment is memorable. In that sense, listening to DAYTONA reminds me a lot of listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run. Springsteen conducted that album so each side of the LP would start and end with one of the record’s best songs. Therefore, each moment of picking up the record and flipping it results in some thought of “damn, that was good and I am truly enjoying this LP.” I feel like DAYTONA is structured similarly, albeit with the lens for the streaming generation. Pusha gets in and out of verses effortlessly here, and each track opens and closes in a memorable way. Before you have time to get bored, the record is over and repeating and you're ready to hear it again.

It will likely be another several years before another Pusha T record, so it will be interesting to see how this one’s short length holds up as the thirst grows. But for the time being, part of me wishes every album was so dedicated to trimming the fat and delivering the goods only.

7. Travis Scott - Astroworld

I’ve never been wrong about a rapper like I was wrong about Travis Scott in 2014. I wrote Travis off when “Mamacita” dropped because he came across to me as a Yeezus impressionist who wanted desperately to be Young Thug. In 2018, Young Thug hasn’t had the hit I’ve always assumed was around the corner, and Kanye is a hack. 

I can only imagine hearing a song like “Sicko Mode” in high school. The way that song, and so much of Astroworld, effortlessly hops between movements, weaving in and out of movements and codas as if that’s ever been allowed in pop music--Travis Scott really did something here. It’s like he traded all of the corniness for genuine insight into the mechanics of hip-hop music, and in the process released of the genre’s standout albums in a post-DS2 world. Sometimes, it’s good to be wrong.

6. Staten - I don’t want to be alone anymore

I always laugh when Justin puts out a new song because he’s so god damn good at this. Unsigned artists shouldn’t be able to make pop music that sounds this solid, this well-produced. Find me another local musician who’s making pop music on the level of “Saturn” or “Loy’s Son.”

There are a ridiculous amount of good Staten albums, and I don’t want to be alone anymore is one of my favorites. Do yourself a favor and spend some time on Justin’s bandcamp page.

5. Antarctigo Vespucci - Love In The Time Of E-Mail

Love In The Time Of E-Mail is my favorite Chris Farren full-length. I love the grit that Jeff Rosenstock brings to Farren’s otherwise glossy songwriting style, and I love how Chris’ lyrics straddle the line because funny and heartfelt, often in the same song. I think my single favorite moment from a song this year is the bridge of “Breathless on DVD,” where Farren sings: “Am I unhappy because I’m not free, / or not free because I’m unhappy? / I wanted to see you / to see if I still wanted to see you.” “Breathless On DVD” is the kind of song that makes you wonder how some emo band didn’t already write this whole album a decade ago. It instantly meshes with the canon of albums I’ve spent my life with, and fits like a glove. I hope I never wear this one out.

4. The Wonder Years - Sister Cities

I wrote a bit about this album in a personal essay for Substream earlier this year, but to elaborate a bit: The Wonder Years have a habit of releasing life-affecting albums right when I feel like I need one. The Upsides and Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing came into my life a few months after I ended my first real relationship and started to wonder why I had spent so much of my life up to that point consumed by my own inexplicable sadness. The Greatest Generation came out a month shy of my high school graduation and I spent a lot of time that summer delivering pizza, dreading the day I’d have to leave my friends to move into a dorm room and meet new ones, listening to The Wonder Years and wondering if this is what it feels like with my wings clipped, I’m awkward and nervous, I’m awkward and nervous.

Sister Cities is an album about boundaries and the bodies of water that separate us and how traveling the planet makes us feel more distant and more connected to the people who pass through our lives for however long. I split my time between New York and New Jersey this summer, working a handful of jobs across both states, trying to pay my rent without the help of student loans and putting a little bit of scratch aside in case I needed to get out in the next few months for whatever reason. Around this time, I also began to process how upset I was about the death of my Aunt Mary, who passed away during my first week of graduate school, whose funeral was the first of a handful I had to miss due to geographical limitations and work obligations. I slept on New Jersey Transit a lot those weekends, and I listened to this album on repeat as I dozed off, as my train passed over bridges and into tunnels, until I woke up and walked off into a different home from where I started.

I think there’s a shift here—Dan Campbell is no longer belting out war cries like “I’m not sad anymore, I’m just tired of this place” or “I’m gonna shoulder the weight till my back breaks, / I want to run till my lungs give up.” It’s a quieter, more personal record that wrangles with quieter, more personal subject matter than previous Wonder Years releases. That resonated with me this year, and while I’m not sure how much I’ll return to Sister Cities compared to The Greatest Generation or even The Upsides in the future, I will not forget the time we spent together in 2018.

3. Spanish Love Songs - Schmaltz

Schmatlz was my most played album of 2018—I think that counts for something. Like if The Menzingers incorporated Bomb The Music Industry’s synthesizer lines, Spanish Love Songs make the most fun denim-clad Americana punk I’ve ever heard. I love every song on this album. I wore it out this year, and then I played it some more. I hear so often from my friends in the punk scene that there aren’t enough new bands making good punk music—this band is doing exactly that, friends.

I think Schmaltz, more than any other album on this list, will be the one that will forever remind me of my time living in Brooklyn. I spent countless nights last year walking home from my local neighborhood bar, Aunt Ginny’s, drunk, anxious, spinning as I avoided traffic and worried about homework I hadn’t done yet and mouthing the words to “Beer & NyQuil” and “Buffalo Buffalo” with Schmaltz in my headphones. It’s a cathartic record that made me feel considerably less alone in a year where my loneliness was more pervasive than ever. It’s a time and a place, but that time and that place weren’t so bad.

2. Jake Newcomb - Yosemite

When I was in my last year of high school, Jake Newcomb was in a pop-punk/emo band called Cross Town Train. Cross Town Train had a song called “Red Floral Dress,” and I can still remember the first time I heard it, in a friend’s house where we all hung out after school. “Red Floral Dress” was Cross Town Train’s best song, I think, the one that the crowd always went crazy for. I heard it hundreds of times that year, most of which I spent at local shows with friends and drunk in basements. I still consider it my favorite song of all time.

I loved and continue to love “Red Floral Dress” because it was the first time I can remember one of my friends creating a piece of art that felt not only impressive from a craft perspective, but truly important. It was cathartic. I was very confused about feelings of love toward everyone that year—my friends, my romantic interests, my hometown, my family—and that moment at the end of the bridge: “I’d been anticipating this for weeks,/because I don’t know how I feel about you—/and then I saw you, and then I saw you, and then I saw you,” sounded so obvious to me. Of course there is an answer here. There is an answer, an answer that Jake Newcomb has figured out, and it will come for you in time.

I have been thinking about “Red Floral Dress” a lot lately because Jake Newcomb released a new album this year. Yosemite is a nine-track album, the first full-length album that Jake wrote and released on his own. I love the vocal melodies and I love how beautiful the acoustic arrangement sounds, but the reason I resonated so quickly with the record is because of how obvious it all seems. Lyrically, the record follows the story of a relationship from beginning to end. Each of its tracks address peripheral factors that put stress on a new relationship. “Sparky” was inspired by the death of Jake’s childhood dog, which coincided with the relationship. “Warped Tour” and “Cross Town Train” consider shared experience and lack thereof between the singer and his partner. Several tracks, like the standout “Little Things,” explore lowercase-p-political themes, like how poverty, the perceived inability to provide for a significant other, and the ever-present fear of climate change damage the ability to see a potential relationship as something that could possibly last in the long-term. In the closing title track, Newcomb croons without judgment about the passage of time: “It’s been a long time / since I loved you / like I used to.”

Yosemite sounds so clear to me—much in the way that “Red Floral Dress” sounded like an obvious answer to my teenage anxiety, Yosemite sounds wise and experienced, vulnerable, and relatable. The album artwork reflects my feelings best—a landscape full of trees, cliffs, fog, dirt, a layered image of a valley that goes on for miles that simultaneously seems so clear, beautiful, and obvious.

1. The Story So Far - Proper Dose

There is so much that I love about this record. I love the production, how it paints frontman Parker Cannon’s voice in a manner that show off his technical chops while retaining so much of the timbre of scorn that gave The Story So Far rise in the punk scene in the first place. I love the committed dive into acoustic tones and slowed down BPMs, both songwriting elements that TSSF have been flirting with since “Placeholder,” but entirely nail with “Upside Down.” I love how surprising these songs are—how the the “save my soul” refrain emerges from the ashes of a 90-second punk banger at the end of “Need To Know;” how the slurred, auto-tuned vocal line in “Growing On You” worms its way out of the bassy “Line” interlude, giving both tracks a sense of linked significance. 

All that aside, Proper Dose is my favorite album of 2018 because of its urgency and importance. Its structure and content remind me of Tyler, The Creator’s Flower Boy, which was my favorite album of 2017. On that record, Tyler tells a story while wrangling with questions he doesn’t yet have answers to. Once he has confronted the central knot on “Garden Shed,” rapping as quickly as he can to put his admission of confusion out into the world before he has the ability to stop himself—“that was real love I was in / ain’t no reason to pretend”—the narrative begins to accelerate, rushing in as many disparate directions as possible in rapid succession. The rambling “Boredom” jams up against the erratic “I Ain’t Got Time!” before the split “911/Mr. Lonely” directly confronts that the narrator is lonely and depressed, but will keep on dancing to throw ‘em off. The b-side’s lack of cohesion is its cohesion, as a meta-narrative emerges—Tyler is racing to the end of a record, hoping to find the answers to his questions there, as if all endings inherently offer serendipitous and logical conclusions. 

I think Proper Dose is structured similarly, albeit with significant differences. The lyrics to Proper Dose are primarily concerned with Cannon’s struggle with addiction to xanax and prescription cough syrup, and the arc finds the narrator reaching for answers. It’s here where the whole record comes together for me. Yes, “Need To Know” culminates in a surprising refrain, but that refrain is as inevitable is it could possibly be—when Cannon’s frustration and desperate admissions of internal struggle reach their ends, the only logical move is a shift and a direct address: Save my soul. That slurred vocal effect in “Growing On You” works so well because he sounds depleted, and by track ten, Cannon has already effectively shown the extent to which his addiction has left him exhausted. “Not as simple as I wanted it to be,” he sings slowly, as if the words are being pulled out of him, as if doing so is the only way to reach some type of conclusion. “Now I gotta say all of the things that are bothering me.”

All of this is to say that I have written a lot this year, and I still have more trouble than I’d like to admit writing about the knots that tie me up inside. An advisor of mine once told me that writing toward hardship and trauma is like holding a beach ball underwater: it gets harder the deeper one goes. If you let go, the ball returns to the surface, and you must start the work over of returning to previous depths. 

I think Proper Dose would be The Story So Far’s best album even with its lyrics—urgency and importance—removed entirely. The vocal melodies here have improved dramatically over 2015’s self-titled effort, and for the first time, the songwriting sounds as though the band prioritized the listening experience over the crowd-going experience for their live shows. But it’s that leap of faith, that urgency and importance, that excavation of one’s own hardship, that makes it resonate so deeply with me.

[readymade-journal-en]

Adonian Chan / Designer Type is the New Fashion

“Type is the clothing a word wears”, said the legendary Swiss Typeface designer Adrian Frutiger.   

In Hong Kong, while people crave fashion and spend a fortune on the clothing they put on, type, the outfits of words, remains unnoticed and is one of the last things people’ d be willing to pay for. If appearances can say things about us, then we could perhaps find out something about the designer and founder of design studio Trilingua, Adonian Chan, from his vintage pencil moustache. His ardour for the past is not just shown by his taste of tash, but also by his occasional mentioning of Chinese history, and above all, his persistent efforts to research Beiwei type design. But what distinguishes Adonian from a dinosaur is that he does not trace the past out of pure nostalgia— he wants people to learn to admire our own culture, picking the cultural essence both critically and meticulously. To Adonian, type itself is the vector of our past and present cultures. Only when people realise the treasures in typeface could they truly love type design as much as they love fashion.

How are Hong Kong’s cultural features manifested in typography and calligraphy? 

Right from the start Hong Kong hands down an enduring tradition of writing culture that diffuses into daily applications of different society strata. Maybe the Chinese culture has a fancy for characters, which explains their ubiquitous appearances in everyday life, from a-building-tall shop sign to smaller things like food containers, chopsticks, tissue paper and so on.

A type design style can reflect the national psychology or aesthetics of a period, for example, the fierce, masculine Beiwei style demonstrates Xianbei nomads’ boldness, and its razor-edged strokes remind us of the ferocious warfare around the Northern Wei period.

Shaped by Hong Kong’s culture, the evolved Beiwei style is round, genuine and forceful. Perhaps doing business in a crammed city needs reliability and standing out?

On the contrary, Japan’s type design style tends to be graceful and reserved, which reveals their meticulous trait.

What is the biggest hurdle to make people understand the value of typography?  

Typography is significant, but it is not as overriding as other design fields such as architecture. Because the most dreadful type design only results in an incorrect pronunciation or looking terribly unpleasant, yet an appalling building can threaten people’s lives. Therefore, the importance of typography is more implicit.

There are three aspects of value in typography.

Firstly, the practical value. Writing is invented to transform conceptual thoughts in our mind into comprehensible forms. (In reverse we hinge on languages to organise our ideas.) Words are the visual expressions of this type of communication, so that we can convey messages more accurately. So, legibility and readability are the standards to assess this area.

Secondly, the aesthetic value. Words’ visual quality comprises a more indirect, or the second level of a communication form, in addition to its function as a message-transmitting tool. This form can articulate abstract feelings.

Thirdly, the cultural value. Writing constitutes the core of a culture, for the entire culture is based on this form as a major mode of communication. Its extensive use gradually produces various commonalities in type aesthetics, breeding a kind of aesthetic notions. The most gripping part of typography is that its design spirit is very similar to a relay race, and both are never-ending. The “runner” is handed down the fruits of his predecessors, adding some thoughts of himself and a new work is created. Typography does not only reflect the present culture, but also it expresses the past cultures.    

Have you come across a thing which completely subverted your perceptions when you were conducting your type design research project?

I used to participate in social movements fervently, spending a fair amount of time in reading political news or articles every day. But it was also this absorption which made me feel rather gloomy, because every time I heard some vexing information (basically there isn’t a day without bad news). Yet from the time when I started to delve into Hong Kong’s Beiwei style, bit by bit I saw a more holistic vision— although politics could in fact impact all aspects of our life, it was always the cultural influence which continued to shape life for a few decades, or even for centuries. Wei Bei (a model calligraphy inscripted in Northern Dynasty’s monuments) has existed in a thousand and five hundred years ago, and its artistic legacy is still altering today’s Hong Kong city landscapes. In contrast, last week’s political incidents might have been forgotten now. It makes me focus on type research and design, and less on politics. The thought is not far from political apathy, but I am quite determined as the decision is taken, stemming from the understanding of my career and the social needs. I put my mind to it when the “battlefield” is clearly chosen.   

Independent Film — Pseudo Secular《風景》Poster Design

You are a designer, one-half of the design studio Trilingua, as well as the member of the band tfvsjs and cafe SYUT. Do you view yourself a slash? (or a career juggler, who pursues a life with multiple jobs and identities)

Life has a great deal of dimensions, and if these dimensions thrive they would become careers. Quite a lot of  ancient people have in fact got on well with their many jobs, just like Northern Song Dynasty’s Su Shi, who  was a minister/ poet/ painter/ calligrapher/ gourmet. This phenomenon has never disappeared really.    

In the farewell statement of your cafe SYUT you’ve mentioned being a hazy, “grey” person, someone who cannot be defined. So, as a “grey” person, what do you face in Hong Kong? And how do you manage your time and work?    

Hong Kong is a uniform society. Starting from secondary education, people are taught following either an arts stream or a science stream. But people are born with different interests and identities, and roles in essence are ambiguous. We relish having these vague identities. Time is certainly scanty, and that’s why we have to allocate our work efficiently, and discipline ourselves for a balanced development.

Trilingua Design Facebook Page 

tfvsjs Facebook Page 

Video Interview by Sabrina Li

Text by Sabrina Li

[tristanvswriting-blog]

Research essay Draft #2

Shoes, essentially everyone has and for the most part people where them every day. For some they are just the thing you put on before you walk out of the door, for others its everything. Sneaker Culture is something that has fascinated me for a long time, I am a self-proclaimed sneakerhead and likely will be until the day I die. That all said I wanted to get down to the brass tacks of, what is sneaker culture? Well the term sneaker dates back to the early 1900s, sneakers where first introduced by yard workers who need a durable shoe with more comfort, traction, and durability than the typical leather shoe of the time. Design was primitive to say the least, worker would just dip the soles of their leather shoes into melted rubber. Thus, the birth of the sneaker (Duc Nhat Huy 6 and Chrisman-Campbell). This quietly caught fire and began sprawling into all facets of life. This first took traction in the tennis industry, but quickly broke out afterpeopl began to realize how versatile that sneakers are. Things really began to heat up with the birth of the Convers All-Star, coming out in 1917 the Chuck Taylor was the first signature sneaker. Breaking ground for athletes for the legendary shoe namesakes we know to today: Jordan, Kobe, etc.. Soon to follow came the break of musicians in the shoe industry. Some staple names to that break through would be RUN DCM, Kanye, and Drake.  Today there is a sneaker for almost anything or anyone you can think of. Some might say you haven’t made it big until you have a shoe deal these days, no matter your industry. Others use the shoes made famous by other to immolate their identities to those around them.

Taking me for an example, I wear basketball shoes 85% of the time, but if you saw my jump shot, you’d likely wonder if I’ve ever even heard of the game. I am not alone, I’ve found that the culture has very strong roots in identity. While, yes, some basketball players will identify themselves by wearing Jordan brand, artist similarly will can identify with a Jordan shoe purely based on design. Rob Dyrdek, professional skate boarder and CO-Owner of DC Shoes was quoted in the documentary Sneakerheadz saying, “There are a handful of things that can define who you are without saying a word; shoes, are one of those things (Friendly and Partridge)”. People cling to shoes for certain things, sometime unbeknownst to them. Like how someone can be drawn to a painting not really understand why, shoes can speak to people. Those who are a part of the culture will fall in love with the design, the back story, the person, the era; and shoes become a direct connection to who they feel they are.  Beyond that its and industry that is growing exponentially, as more people get involved it draws the attention of people who normally might not be exposed to sneaker culture. A great example of this is the collab’. A collab is when two companies work together to create a joint product, any time you see a brand that is mark BrandA x BrandB that is a collab. Collaborations do exactly what I noted above, bring people who might not be exposed to sneaker culture in by expanding sneaker cultures reach. When artists, musicians, fashion groups, companies, and other brands come together it opens the eye of the consumer (Friendly and Partridge). Another interesting thing about collabs, and most sought-after sneakers in general, is the idea of exclusivity. More often than not people in the sneaker industry want what others can’t have (Friendly and Partridge). Meaning if you can be one of a few thousand people in the world with a specific shoe, you are then above those who can’t have that shoe. This also lend to one of the most detrimental things sneaker culture faces today: violence. More often than not, shoes bring people together, but there has been multiple instances where people die over shoes. “The thirst for inherent exclusivity creates an innately competitive culture where the goal is naturally adversarial: if your friend has a dope exclusive shoe, then your search for a more exclusive (and therefore more desirable) shoe is an ongoing challenge” (Rakeshaw). Sadly, it’s the riots; murders; and theft that make it into the mass media, not the stories of growth and strengthening communities. This leaves people with a sour taste in their mouth because people question why we spend so much on shoes or why anyone would care so much as to harm someone over a pair of sneakers. Fortunately, things aren’t all bad. Shoes are becoming a universal language breaking barriers of race, gender, and ideology. Someday maybe sneakers will bring us piece.

Prior to continuing I’d like to elaborate on the means and location of which I acquired the information which this essay is comprised of. There is a mix of information both peer-reviewed and pop-culture reference which was acquired from a number of sources. Beginning with the Peer- reviewed information I tried my best to find sources that would contribute to the idea of sneaker culture, but because its both a abstract and non-academic subject this did prove to be difficult. This lent to out of the box thinking in order to find information that would directly correlate to my topic. My information came from many different places, from business thesis to art reviews. From medical journals to quasi-biographies. It became a matter of finding ways on which sneaker culture connected to the academic world as opposed to trying to find the academic world speaking on sneaker culture.

Then came my pop-culture refences, this was difficult too, but for a very different reason. I find myself so immersed daily in sneaker culture that I felt there might have even been too many source from which I could draw. Another problem with the sources I use everyday is they can be partial toward sneaker enthusiast. So, in order to find relevant and usable modern information, I tried to sample from a bread of sources. Some known for being very tight knit to the culture of shoes and fashion others being known simply for their literature. I found that there was a lot to be said about the industry outside of what I already knew. It was also intrigued to see all the different areas of research and life that sneakers manage to sneak their way into. Both types of sources brought together, I was able to find some strong corollaries that united all of the sources. These themes being Identity, Influence, and Value.

Identity, as I touched on before, is how people use shoes to tell a story of who they are. There is also some strong associations between certain types of shoes and certain types of people. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell explains in her Atlantic article, “Sneakers Have Always Been Political Shoes”, as verity grew shoes took on different meaning, for example Vans and other canvas shoes became the staple shoes of youth rebellion (Chrisman-Campbell). There is also strong associations between race and gender identity within the shoe culture. Nike known for their many campaign that promote identity (equality line, pride line, Día de Los Muertos line), they are also on the forefront of introduction of women into the sneaker industry. With the sneaker industry being known as a boy’s club for such a long time, this is huge. Next comes Influence.

Influence is arguably the basis of sneaker culture as we know it today. Many of the shoes we as consumer like are because of who we see where them. Whether it be celebrities, aspirational groups, or identity groups we wear the shoes that will bring us closer to them. According to a thesis written by Rodney M. Miller, we can attribute the growth of the industry to three key components: physical activity, professional sport, and hip hop culture (Miller VII). From this we find the fame of Lebron shoes, the shell toe adidas in relation to RUN DMC, and the popularity of Nike Air max shoes for everyday use. How we view these influencers can also relate to how we value shoes.

Value of shoes is actually an interesting topic. With cites like StockX that value shoes as stocks where you can view market trends and fluctuation of individual shoes and the entire universe that is the resale market we have been able to see insane value coming out of the shoe industry. The high end sneaker market runs on an ideology contrary to that of typical business. Where a normal business you try and make supply meet demand, in the shoe industry the limit supply. Since there is no drop in demand this leads to astronomical resale prices. The other thing is that we value shoes beyond a monetary value, because of the two other things I discussed shoes mean more than money to us. Where some one might see something you step on, a sneakerhead sees a piece of art you can put on your feet. This about concludes the secondary research, to come is the primary portion of my research.

As far as primary research goes, mine was three-fold. Comprised of an Online survey, Video Interview, and a in person observation. The online survey was held through Google forms, comprised of twelve question and distributed by link to my respondents. All responses were acquired online and done so anonymously. The one hundred respondents ages varied, done so because sneaker culture is not limited to a single  demographic, and I was curious to see how response varied across demographics like region, race, and age. The interview is to be held was held Via Skype with a close friend and fellow sneakerhead, the interview is comprised of 6 questions and further discussion. Lastly, the in-person observation was held inside of the Anderson Academic commons on the University of Denver’s campus on the afternoon of October 24th, 2019. Shoes worn by people entering the library was documented on a purely observational basis, there was no interaction with the population. Data was then combed in search of trends, such as opinions of sneaker culture, and attempt to define sneaker culture, and anything lending to the themes provided by the secondary research.

Beginning with my observation, I sat across from the entrance to the Anderson Academic Commons on the University of Denver’s campus with a piece of paper marking the shoes of everyone who entered in a twenty-minute period in one of two categories. One category was the brands Nike, Adidas, and Vans; the other simply was other. Its important to know that I also put well know companies that fall under the Nike and Adidas (Jordan, Converse, Yeezy, and Pharrell) in the Nike, Adidas, and Vans category. Over the course of the twenty minutes I observed one-hundred twelve people entering or exiting the library. Of those 68% of those observed fell under the Nike, Adidas, and Vans category. I found this surprising, the number seemed low to me. One thing that needs severe consideration is the fact that the city of Denver did receive snowfall that day. This may lend those viewed to wear shoes with either better traction or those that people would have less worry of damaging. That said I still think nearly 70% is a significant number to observe wearing those brands I associate with sneakers. Another thing to note is there other brands that can and would be consider sneakers that I did not place under the category. For example, Puma and New Balance are notorious for being sneaker companies but would not fall under the category Nike, Adidas, and Vans. In conclusion id derive from my observation that a majority of people entering the library wear sneakers, and in turn have some semblance of a affiliation to sneaker culture. What I would not do is use this observation to draw any hard statistic to the size of sneaker culture of what brands are to be considered sneakers.

Next we’ll discussed what I observed from surveying. The survey began with demographic question Age, Race, Gender, and location of origin. This information only helped me with identifying who I sampled, unfortunately the results aren’t put into a format that didn’t lends its self to identify specific trends based on certain demographic variables. This would have been more fruitful in terms of seeing trends in identity and how background affects opinion, but what can be said is the sample was was predominantly between the ages of 18 and 25. The sample was slightly more Male than Female, the majority of those identifing as White or Caucasian. Then lastly majority of our sample claimed to be from the western United States, this is likely due to the fat that the majority of respondents were located in Colorado. As stated one can understand our sample as a whole, just not specific correlations based on demographic response.

The questions that followed demographic, these could still almost be considered demographic question, but demographic question specific to shoes. From this I was found that my sample strongly favored Nike over any other brand of shoe.

The second question was pertaining to how many shoes they personally own, but the responses were about evenly distributed, 38.7%said they owned between 5 and 10 pair.

The next group of questions were seeking information about Identity. Both were free response questions, but majority of people said roughly, Sneaker Culture is a collection of people with a shared interest in shoes, and that a persons shoes tell mostly what their style is and what their personality is like.

I concluded by asking questions regarding value. There was an interesting change between what people have spent and what they would be willing to spend on shoes.

While the majority of people have spent between $100 and $200 on shoes, a lot more would rather pay less as well as some would be willing to spend more. It would be interesting to know what outside factors contributed to the change in between question, perhaps outside influence such as an outside party purchasing the shoes is responsible for the change.

Interview

The interview process was conduct with Michael Sullivan. Michael is an Omaha, Nebraska native who found their passion for shoes during high school. He has not only an extensive collection, but a valuable one. He went on to say, “I begged my dad for my first pair of Jordan’s when I got to high school and saw the praise that other people got for having them… it seemed like people wearing [nice shoes] weren’t even walking on the same ground as us”. Now a days Michaels passion is less about clout and more about how the shoes make him feel. While when his passion started, he favored brands like Nike and Jordan, today Michael wears exclusively Adidas. Michael can identify with creators/designer/influencer Kanye and Pharrell, because “They seem to have shoes with purpose.” He went on to talk about what goes into deciding the shoes he buys and further on how he feels about sneaker culture. In this continued conversation he brought up two points absent from the rest of the body of research. Those being the industry of counterfeit shoes and shoes across cultures. Beginning with the counterfeits Michael talked about how anyone can get them, and sometime people get them when they think they are buying authentic. For this reason, Michael buys his shoes exclusively through sites which have a shoe verification process (i.e. StockX and GOAT).  He said having authentic shoes are so important to him because he, “buys [his] shoes for [him]self”, then going on to elaborate that people who buy fakes do so because they want others to see that they have a particular shoe. Then moving on the culture, this came up when Michael was asked what is one of your best memories related to shoes. Michael tells an anecdote about a time when he was working as a roofing consultant. In this firm many of the workers were immigrants (mostly Latino and Sudanese) who couldn’t speak very much English, but when ever he wore nice shoes to work, they would notice and make it a point to compliment them and try their best to hold conversation. Michael said, “It was crazy to see interested they were, most days the wouldn’t make any effort to talk to me, nor I to them, but for whatever reason shoe bridged that gap.”

           The shoe industry is one rife with history and cult followings, that biggest and most diverse of those following probably being that which has been being defined: Sneaker Culture. The special thing I’ve noticed is that in this community anyone can be a player. Whether you have 3 pairs or 3000, been collecting a life time or a week, and whether you buy Jordan or Adidas; the community will welcome you with open arms. One could venture to say it’s because sneakerheads comprehend that it’s the uniqueness of their beliefs that make not only them unique, but their style. Throughout the both the body of research and secondary research, a very common them has been what your shoes say about you, how shoes reflect your identity.

           Shoes are designed with a story or purpose in mind, those who are passionate about them with infer those stories or sometimes identify things that never crossed the designers mind. Those who really care can see themselves in the design of a shoe. Whether it be the passion the feel towards the beliefs of a brand, the back story of the designer, or someone that they’ve seen wearing the shoe, these all contribute to the story behind why people buy sneakers. For some they want to be seen as stylish or wealthy, others fascinate over the design elements. The important thing to take away though is that no matter what they see they identify in the shoe, it resonates in how they identify themselves, thus giving sneakers a deeper meaning than just what you wear to walk outside. That deeper meaning is also part of the reason people value their shoes.

As previously noted value can come from a number of places, but one of the most common ways its facilitated is by limiting quantity. Previously noted is an article the referenced that this competitiveness to have a shoe only few can get makes consumers resort back to a primal state, but what hasn’t been discussed is how this contributes to diversity of collection. Because not everyone can get every sneaker that releases, people obviously ended up not having the same shoes. This opens doors for people to not only appreciate other people’s collections, but why they ended up with the shoes that they did buy. This opportunity for conversation is one of the things that makes the sneaker community so tight knit, there is an opportunity for dialogue and variable opinion. Thus, facilitating a community rife with diversity. Another thing not limited on its diversity are those who influence the sneaker community.

           Previously noted are those who contribute to creating influence for particular shoes like athletes, Celebrities, etc.; but the thing that has become apparent through out the body of research is that influence is not bound by status. Anyone can influence any one for any number of reasons. Some people just hold higher importance in some people’s eyes. Whether that be family members, friends, or in fact the person whose name is on the box.