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readyaiminquire · 4 years ago

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The Future as Vapor.

‘The semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own.’

William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. Not wholly sure as to why, perhaps it’s because we’ve just moved from one year to another, and taking stock is only natural; or perhaps because of the peculiar nature of the year that has just ended, with its pandemic, lockdowns, and the many challenges and tragedies borne out of it. Perhaps my research and its focus on time and temporality makes me particularly vulnerable to this sort of introspection; perhaps I am just predisposed to it? Likely, it is a mixture of all of these, but I already digress from the main point I was making, which is, quite simply: I have been thinking a lot about time lately. I’d wager the year that has just been, and which doesn’t feel as if it has fully ended quite yet, has a lot to do with it. My soundtrack for 2020, if there was such a thing, has undoubtedly been vaporwave, dyschronous ‘trapped-in-a-loop’ music for a year where everything stood still: a semi-ironic haunting from the past with empty, tinny beats and retro-synths, just mangled enough to sound new, but not too mangled so as to lose its retro-80s soundscape. It is, as absurd as it sounds, Muzak with teeth. The ironic resurrection of a dead aesthetic, brought back with a vengeance and with a purpose.

Vaporwave gets its name from ‘vaporware’, software that never was. Vaporware is software that has been announced, sometimes even showcased, but which then disappeared into some development maelstrom and seemingly vanished from view. It is neither cancelled, proclaimed dead and left to rest in the pile of ‘what could have been’, but always kept alive – a zombified software – as a potential. Its nonexistence-with-a-side-of-potential is precisely what makes vaporware vaporware. What does vaporwave take from this? The music is a form of Muzak, seemingly generic elevator music perfect for blending into the background but never meant to be listened to. This implies a vaporware existence (existence in nonexistence; or rather nonexistence in existence), vaporwave has more to it than that. It is precisely its purposeful meaningless soundscape that gives vaporwave ability to critique. Often made up of repeating synth riffs, tinny beats, sometimes sounds or jingles reminiscent of 1980s and 1990s TV and radio commercials, it is not an accident that the genre has modelled itself on Muzak. It is an echo of a past that has long disappeared into memory, even into cultural memory; a haunting reminding its listeners of what was, through its twisted soundscape of an otherwise well-trodden cultural form. The genre is best described as music optimised for abandoned malls.

Vaporwave is the audial version of a ruin. Or rather, it is the erection of a folly among ruins, a means to highlight the absurdity of the action itself. Its soundscape exists as a reminder of a past that promised a future that has not appeared; its central thesis – if it were to have one – is that we live surrounded by the ruins of this future-that-never-was. Crucially, and this gets at the heart of the present predicament, we only live and operate among these cultural ruins strictly because we have been unable to reconfigure these cultural building blocks into something new. The ruined landscape of a future that never existed has only come to pass because it has not been replaced by the new. Instead, the orientation has shifted to focusing on the past in the present, not the future ahead of us. The emergence of vaporwave in the present is thus by no means a result of the pandemic, the lockdowns, and the perceived stalling of time as a result, but rather predates it. The pandemic has likely brought such feelings of standstill to the fore, but it by no means created it.

This essay was prompted by a post on Reddit. Paraphrasing, the posted said something to the effect of ‘I don’t want to play the video games from when I was a kid, I want to feel like I did when I played the video games from when I was a kid.’ This, again, gets at the heart of the predicament. That feeling many of us remember from the past is one we have not felt in a long time – myself included. Indeed, video games are a fantastic case study for this development. Using an example from my own experience: I remember when I first played World of Warcraft. I know, your mental image of me as the narrator just shifted substantially, but bear with me. The nature of a fluid massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) wasn’t new by the time WoW was released. Still, it had never been done quite so well: the graphics were fantastic (at the time…), the level of interaction, the fluidity and connectivity of the world, the social aspects and community building… the list goes on, but the software was an adventure, and I (and countless, millions of others) couldn’t get enough of it. It was an unrivalled experience in many ways. Nothing like it had existed before. It was a completely new cultural artefact. It invoked a sense of future-shock.

WoW is, in addition, an interesting example as its original (well almost original) game was re-released in 2019 to thunderous applause, and a community bracing itself for another nerdgasm. The re-release was undoubtedly popular, it was undoubtedly fun, but it wasn’t the same. The feeling that it evoked in the past was no longer there. The future-shock with which it had once been densely packed had melted into air. This disconnect has even been picked up by parts of the community. A debate has raged between players who wish for no changes to be made to the original, for it to be released in its ‘pure’ state (as some changes had been made around specific mechanics, bugs that were never ironed out originally had been, and so forth), and players who call not for a recreation of the original game, but a recreation of the feeling of the original game.

But this is the issue with nostalgia. The original feeling of something unique, the future-shock as it were (or what German historian Reinhard Koselleck called the Überraschung; lit. surprise) cannot by definition be re-created; it must be created anew, with something new. The tragedy faced in the present, then, is that the dominant form among popular cultural media is that of nostalgia: a harkening for past experiences not for the experiences themselves but for that feeling of wonder that came with them: the surprise when playing your first 3d video game, or when first using a smartphone, or at the choice of music on an iPod (not to mention that the songs never skipped if you bumped it!). In many ways, this sense of surprise and wonder has been lost, even if innovation has sped up. Computing is faster than ever. Technology is near-ubiquitous in some parts of the world, yet nothing new seems to come from it. It is the same experiences, but faster, or in higher fidelity – occasionally this even folds back unto itself: vaporwave being a prime example — the mockery of a past cultural form that is only made possible with new technologies and innovations. In short, for all this new potential, nothing new is created.

Much has been written on what has caused this predicament, be it Mark Fisher’s argument that the foundations for innovative cultural forms have all been eroded with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s analysis that the future has disappeared because social imaginaries have been eroded with the rise of global techno-capitalism, or indeed Fredric Jameson’s take that capital is too effective at rehabilitating the radically new. To varying degrees, these thinkers (and others) speak to the problem of nostalgia, specifically how the marketing of nostalgia is but a logical conclusion. In the present neo-liberal configuration, innovating is a risk, especially within the realm of culture and pop-culture. It is much safer, and more in line with the underpinning profit motive, to repackage and re-sell old cultural forms as nostalgia and pastiche: think of the Star Wars universe's resurrection yet again, or indeed the example above with the re-release of WoW.

‘Fine’, you say, ‘you’re right’, you concede, ‘but what’s the problem?’ you finally ask. The issue with nostalgia becoming one of the main pop-cultural articulations is that it reorients the present away from the future and towards a past long gone. A lack of future orientation, in turn, takes out much of the hope surrounding societal and cultural development and innovation. To frame this less abstractly: it is hardly news that scientific research and literature, typically in the form of science fiction, exist in a feedback loop. They both take inspiration from one another. Scientific breakthroughs lead to authors to push the boundaries of the imaginable, which in turn inspire scientists, engineers, and inventors to make science fiction science reality. In the words of William Gibson: ‘There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process.’ Just think of how many present innovation and inventions we have already seen on shows like Star Trek. Lacking this future orientation, in short, invariably leads to a form of social and cultural stagnation. Let me be clear here: this is not a piece lamenting the ‘fall’ of some romanticised Western culture or some such nonsense. Instead, much of our present social, political and cultural order is underpinned by a futural orientation insofar as it is a belief in a future that drives engagement, innovation, and creativity; that creates future-shock. Why bother changing anything if ‘this is it’? It is precisely this process that ‘Bifo’ Berardi described as the slow cancellation of the future, and that the late Mark Fisher referred to when he asked, “Is there no alternative?”

When I say that nostalgia has become the dominant cultural form, this is what I mean. The conventional means of artistic productions have been subsumed under an unmoving profit motive. As a result, real, shocking, surprising innovation cannot take place. But I wish not to end it with such a conclusion, as merely pointing at a problem isn’t necessarily helpful. Instead, new & radically different forms of production must be discovered. Fredric Jameson calls such an exercise cognitive mapping, the process to resituate oneself in the cultural landscape and thus gain a new perspective. To continue a metaphor: to move out of the ruins and into new vistas to regroup, reshape, and ultimately rebuild. The first step is to realise the impasse faced, the second is to do something about it. This process can already be seen in some spaces, especially among grass-roots movements like the markers’ movement, citizen scientists, and other groups – be they tech-focused or artists’ collectives. What ought not be understated, on the other hand, is the importance of ensuring such a shift takes place, lest we end up reading our own collective epitaph:

‘[…]

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818.

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rustbeltjessie · 5 years ago

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Five years ago, I began putting a book together—a collection of my writings themed around punk music/punk subculture. They were all written between ‘99 and 2014, and had previously appeared in my own zines that had since gone out of print, or other zines or online magazines that had gone out of print/gone dark; style-wise, they ran the gamut from CNF to lyric essay to music criticism. I decided to crowdfund and self-publish the book, but at that point I didn’t really know what I was doing in regards to either crowdfunding or publishing full books. The book was almost ready to go but the artist I’d commissioned never finished the cover art, and my crowdfunding campaign hadn’t been entirely successful, and I wound up not having enough money to publish it.

About a year after I realized I couldn’t do it the way I’d initially planned, the book was picked up by a small press. My plan was to buy enough author copies to fulfill the initial crowdfunded preorders, and hopefully sell even more than that. With the help of an editor, I partially rewrote some older pieces and wrote some new ones to flesh it out a bit more. They found someone to do the cover and interior art, and put up a preorder page; I got blurbs from some of my favorite writers. It was all basically ready to go. But shit happened, and the press folded, and the book was once again dead in the water. (I’m not naming the press here, because my intention here is not to call anyone out. The people involved in all that are friends of mine, and as a small press owner myself I understand that shit happens. The saddest part about that whole thing is that I don’t get to use the cover and interior art we had, because it was amazing.)

I’ve recently realized that I need to get the book out in some way, because I need to put it behind me. For one thing, I feel badly that the people who crowdfunded or preordered never received anything. For another, I just need to move on, and I can’t fully move on until I get it out into the world. So I’ve decided to self-release it. For right now, I’m only making a digital version. I know, I know, print is way better, but I don’t have the funds to print it right now, and I’m certainly not going to ask people to pre-pay for it a third time. I’ve redone it somewhat—took out some of the weaker pieces, added in some others I’ve written in the past three years—and I’ve used my own artwork for the interior and done the cover in a zine-y/Xerox art style. I’ve uploaded it to Payhip, for a sliding-scale, pay-what-you-want price. This way, people who already paid for it (or just can’t afford it otherwise) can download it for free, and other people who can/want to throw a few $$ my way can do that. Most importantly: finally, finally, five years later, What We Talk About When We Talk About Punk will be released unto the world. — Here’s what some rad people had to say about WWTAWWTAP in its original incarnation: Love letters to way-too-late whiskey-drunk nights, stolen hearts and stolen kisses, small- town parking lots and bad decisions and even badder girls, WWTAWWTAP is a gritty and gorgeous series of riffs on living and loving punk. Like your very first show all over again, it'll set your blood on fire. —Sarah McCarry, author of the Metamorphoses trilogy and editor/publisher of the Guillotine series What We Talk About When We Talk about Punk distills wild nights of loud music, cheap whisky, and fugitive romance into a pure tonic. Jessie Lynn McMains’s voice is as indelible as a stick-and-poke tattoo and her autobiographical stories vividly capture the highs and lows of punk-rock youth. Pull on your leather jacket, grab a bottle of something, climb up onto the roof, and read this book. —Jeff Miller, author of Ghost Pine: All Stories True Wearing music like a jacket, that’s one of the things Jessie says about herself in these pages. I find that very admirable and inspiring. It gives a wonderful perspective to not only observe oneself in the moment, and in the past, but to feel the effect of that topic of study and passion on you, pressed against your skin. Jessie’s very subjective approach succeeds, and doesn’t fall into, impenetrable in-crowd self absorption, because she is smart enough to allow an adequate amount of objectivity and analysis to let her audience vibrantly see and feel her own experiences as if we are there with her. Music is a good reference point because lyrics, rhythm, and melody hit deep beyond the intellect into the emotions. You can always put on a CD, or vinyl record, or cassette and be transported to other places and times. These personal essays did this very thing to me, like listening to music. She becomes the jacket that we put on as we hear the lyricism of her stories. We are always with Jessie in her writings. The hyper-awareness that she uses to capture her memories to be pondered again and again, as we read on, immersing ourselves in her writing, is crucial. We are reading something that is alive and learning it’s own lessons. We can picture her being transformed by her own documenting of her experiences, becoming a complex being, a well informed member of humankind. She is infused with the playfulness and philosophy found in music and she demonstrates the frightening willingness to view oneself through a microscope. I find this fascinating. Therefore, because of this heart-on-her-sleeve writing style, when we allow ourselves to engage with her words on the page, to be as vulnerable as she has allowed herself to be, we too are transformed. Her words have gone from jacket to skin. We are there feeling her sexually charged reaction to Rock and Roll. We experience the sensual allure of the human body. With her we dive head first into decadence, decay, nostalgia, and hope. Her bouts of loneliness and need for community are palpable. We are bruised by the violence, the drugs, the suffering. We are stifled and also warmed by the dying and the regenerating of a constantly changing musical style. We witness the passing of friends and idols. We share in her understanding of what it means to be an outcast, and more specifically, how it feels to be a female outcast, to be a mother and a rebel. Through the willingness to wear this book like a jacket, like a skin, we not only see who Jessie is but we learn about the daily life behind the music, of people, inspired by their own creativity and the creativity of others, trying to simply be, to live a life worth living. This isn’t just a collection of diary entries, a memoir, it is an opportunity to look at oneself. Why are you a punk? Or perhaps even more importantly, why aren’t you a punk? —John “Jughead” Pierson, podcaster (“Jughead’s Basement”), musician (Even in Blackouts, founding member of Screeching Weasel), author Jessie Lynn McMains weaves the threads of her own life with a typewriter ribbon on a loom fashioned from melted records and empty 40's. The end result is fascinating, an ultrapersonal look at a life shaped by punk, forged by punk, fired by punk. What We Talk About When We Talk About Punk has music at its core and surrounding it on all sides, but its main muscle is the reaction to that, the response. Thoughts thought while listening to a perfect mixtape that takes you far away from the blah street you've found yourself living on (and a secret peek at the science behind that perfect tape), the thrill when a cute girl comes into your crappy job and gets why the 1" button on your jacket is so important. Notes scrawled on diner napkins and on the back of show flyers, now compiled into book form! —Ocean Capewell, author of The Most Beautiful Rot and High On Burning Photographs zine At 16 I cut my hair with a razor and dyed it black, looking at my reflection in the mirror that night I was convinced I was the spit of Richard Hell. When I think back through my own punk history, the bands, the friendships and the crushes; the obsessions that took over my life, led me to zines and the community I was desperately searching for, I can see with perfect clarity how I arrived at this point. As an adult woman these things are intrinsic parts of me. And that’s what Jessie’s writing does, it kicks you in the gut then hands you a cold beer. She knows. Jessie is the real deal; she is the girl Cometbus, one of the great zinesters of our time. If you want me, I’ll be in my room listening to my tapes. —Cherry Styles, writer, editor/publisher of The Chapess — You can download it here. Then listen to the official soundtrack here. (Pretend it’s on a tape, okay?) xoxo, the writer formerly known as Jessica Disobedience

#what we talk about when we talk about punk #jessie lynn mcmains #ebooks #punk #indie lit #writers on tumblr

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artificiary-fr · 5 years ago

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ok so arti’s unnecessary opinion time

Just wanna give a disclaimer that these are just my sort of thoughts in general, and are in no way an attempt to demean, attack, or cause drama about any artist or staff member, or community member. Just kind of what I’ve observed and come to the questions/conclusions of. I got a little opinionated at the end but I tried not to single anyone out save for I think, one unnamed example?

I’ll put everything under the cut here, because I know I have a tendency to get wordy (and spoiler: It did. This is a super long post, I’m sorry). So, here we go...

TL;DR: I like the gene, I’ll wait for the revamp before giving a concrete opinion, there were definitely some issues, I appreciate that staff took note/action, more communication like this or the dev streams is good (though communication between staff/community is a Thing unto itself of which I probably have a Disliked Take on and that was the really long part that isn’t necessary to read)

Okay before anything: the familiars. They’re super pretty! I like the recolors, and now I’m gonna have to grind the Kelp Beds for those boss fams. Dang. I love the kitty golem recolor.

With that out of the way, here we are - the subject of today’s discussions... Glowtail.

So, my first opinion: It’s not a bad gene! I can see some curious use for it, certainly. But there are some problems with it (and yes; I am aware staff has addressed this and pulled it to fix those problems! That’ll be more relevant later on here c: )

Note One: I think I do understand why it is a gem gene. Yes, design/thematically it does appear to fit the bill of a Baldwin Gene more. But I’d like to posit it’s the completion of a gem-gene set - Wasp/Bee/Glowtail. So in that regard, it makes sense!

Note Two: My personal opinion with the gene is that I like it, but it feels... hm. Plain isn’t correct. Like it’s missing something, I guess? I wish the segmenting was a little more prominent, and that the glow or gradient had a little more glitz/glamor, maybe some glitteries around the hips, to really sell it as a gem gene. I do like the glow we have on the other bits of dragon like light reflection, though, because it adds a little bit of dimension! All in all however even so, I do like it, and I won’t cement my opinion until we see what their updated version looks like in the future.

Note Three (The Problems): The art errors. What... what happened here?

As we’ve noticed, male snappers and male tundras are the two big offenders, with large chunks of color erroneously sitting outside the lineart quite noticeably. There is also part of the ‘glow’ (the aforementioned light reflection) that doesn’t make sense - being on parts of the dragon where it shouldn’t be, like on the front of wings where the tail is not in front of said limb, but behind.

But like... how did this not get caught before it got posted? Was it a time crunch, or it just... didn’t get quality checked before this happened? It’s really unfortunate. :c

Something I do with my art - and this is just my own process/thoughts - is when I’ve put down the base color, before I do any shading/highlights/big details, I pop a layer underneath the entire drawing and fill it with a high contrast color to the palette. That way any bits where I missed coloring in - or didn’t clean up outside the lines - becomes super noticeable, and I can fix it then instead of being a problem later. Maybe doing something like this before throwing the gene through the color automation process would’ve helped?

Last Note:

I feel like part of why these errors went unnoticed is because of how often, and sometimes how rushed, some of these updates have been - and this has been more noticeable in this year than otherwise. Is it because of community dissent with wanting more updates creating more crunch? Due to low-attention reticence creating a need for pushing more ad revenue / more “come to the site there’s new”?

I’m unsure, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless. I think staff, and FR as a whole, would benefit from like... hm. How to word this...

Maybe taking more time on updates / a more extended schedule so things aren’t as crunch (of course this being said, I don’t know what the workload is like so I can’t even say if crunch is applicable), and more open communication? Like how the dev streams were going - that was pretty well liked and everyone I know got pretty excited to see em and how the art was doing. It also opened up the avenue for more open communication / more nuanced opinions or thoughts.

---

But herein lies the huge issue, I think, with communication. This is the part where I’d like to reiterate, this is just my observations, and is not intended as an attack, a vaguepost, or deliberate callout at anybody. There’s no malicious intent here. This bit could also be construed as drama I suppose, and I apologize for that because again - not the intent. Just my take.

I’ve noticed posts going ‘no drama please’ or being tired when new updates come out of like, ‘oh boy here comes the negativity’ so I don’t think it’s just me who’s seen it, but have you guys noticed when anything new comes out, there’s an immediate rush of extreme salt and negativity?

And I don’t mean posts where its like “it’s not for me” or “I don’t like it but here’s [detailed/explained reason why]” - those are the nuanced opinions I mean. Those are fine. I mean the ones where people in forums, or on the more prolific drama blogs, are just.... mean/empty? Like “FUCK staff I hate how lazy they are with this it’s shitty looking” - that really vocal generally super salty in general minority of the community. Just hate without explanation, or just kind of aimless generalized attack/complaint.

I think that’s where communication with Staff fell off the bandwagon. The really loud, really vocal minority of folks who throw super salt or yell “This Sucks You Suck” completely overshadow the people who are well intentioned with sharing their opinions or problems/criticisms. The toxic bits and really vitriolic words are what gets seen and noticed. I think this is the majority of what gets heard, which is why communication got so closed off / shut down unless positive, in recent times. Do I agree with that? No, I don’t either - but I’m just looking at this from the outside. Idk how staff feels or thinks.

And this goes for both people who don’t like the content, and people that do.

Remember that the Keel thread got locked because someone who was white-knighting started getting real nasty with people in the thread, and going to extremes insulting artists who did mock-ups to help visualize their thoughts/opinions and was just being a real douche?

What I really wish was that we could have more open communication. Some of the things I really liked to see were like: Dev Streams, Community Updates/Q&A, Opinion Polls, That Update Progress on Breed/Gene Progress from a while back. All of that was excellent. And I like to see the community responding in well thought out ways! I like to see staff more hands on too! We’re only human and love this site and our dragons and want to see it at it’s best - but they’re also only human, and make mistakes, and we don’t know what’s goin on in there, just out here.

Trello is a really good way to kind of show that communication, and is transparent, but isn’t free-to-use for businesses, so... of course I also don’t know how Stormlight Workshop runs their business/hours so I’m just blowing hot smoke. But anyway, I think everyone would benefit from slowing down and opening up. If things are going slow, that’s okay - if Staff opens up to the community and says “This is taking longer than expected, but here’s upcoming releases / current in-progresses” I think we’d be like oh okay things are happening and it’ll be nice! As compared to everyone gets super antsy, nothing’s happening, no-one is talking... and then we get hit with a bunch of updates, some of which, like today’s, have... issues.

Of course then I worry that with more open talking or “we’re experiencing delays” the more vitriolic will get even angrier/saltier which doesn’t... help... but I mean... yeah.

ANYWAY so I’ve written a full dissertation essay here without really intending to (see? I warned y’all! I ramble/don’t shut up ahahaha) so I’m gonna just stop myself here before I start going in circles. This last chunk I don’t really know what the meat of what I was trying to say was, now, I think. Sorry about that. It was just “here’s my stream of consciousness” apparently ^^;;;;

Have a good evening y’all! Thanks for listenin’ to my (rant?) if y’all made it this far. You’re appreciated and thank you for letting me bend your ears! Stay safe in this crazy world, hang in there, and have a good one!

#so i wrote a literal novel under the cut most of which can probably be ignored #but i do wanna say im not attacking the community in defense of staff #staff has made missteps and mistakes and doesn't handle some things the way they should #im just noting some things ive noticed that i feel like correlate #am i gonna make people really mad at me? oh probably #i hope not but idk #arti parties #update opinion #long post

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smokeybrand · 4 years ago

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Future Imperfect

Marvel Comics is taking over publishing duties for the Alien and Predator comics, confiscated from Dark Horse, starting next year. Most cats I've spoken to see this as a win but i am hesitant. Marvel is owned by Disney and those two properties are, decidedly not, Disney approved. More than that, i am wildly concerned about the lateral integration Marvel has been shilling in their books for the better part of two decades. My biggest nightmare is having a Xenomorph/Spider-Man crossover but that seems to be exactly what they are planning to do. There have been two teaser covers released that have me incredibly apprehensive to this move; One has the Big Chap front and center with little Star-Lord-esque Walkman in the foreground and a Youtja in the familiar pose made famous by the City Hunter, spear in one hand and Iron Man’s helmet in the other. Gross.

More than that, Disney is about destroying continuity and creating their own, to terrible results. They mangle Star Wars for a decade, only now finally righting that ship. Dark Horse has built thirty years of continuity. All of that is out the window now in favor of more accessible, more palatable, more bankable fair. Feige is in charge of all things Marvel and i have faith in him as a fan, but i don’t know how you fit the visceral, violent, world of Aliens and Predator into the Marvel universe. What does that look like? What that do to established characters, favorites among the fandom? Amanda Ripley and Zula Henderson had a story unto themselves that was ramping up pretty solidly but my dear Machiko Noguchi, what the f*ck is going to happen with her?

I’ve written at length about her awesome. You can search Little Knife and pull up my love letter to the character. Everything i said in that essay still applies to the character but, now that Disney has the rights, will she go the way of Luke Skywalker? Will she be erased from continuity like Mara Jade? This sh*t hurts my heart, man. To relegate such a wonderful character to oblivion would be a massive mistake. Machiko in the greater Marvel Universe would be dope as sh*t. She could fit in perfectly with the Guardians or Starjammers. Maybe a team up with Gamora or Moondragon Or Dani Moonstar. Maybe just relegate them all to their own little universe and build from there. I don’t mind a PG-13 Xeno or Preddy movie but to ignore the dopeness of the homegrown Dark Horse continuity is bogus and i am wildly concerned. Machiko could work within the framework of Celestial Marvel. The Yautja can work with a little tweaking. Marvel might have a problem with the Xenos because they already have the Brood, a direct response to the popularity of those first two films. This could work but i am definitely, cautiously, optimistic about it.

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i-am-very-very-tired · 3 years ago

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Somewhere between Britney and Billie Eilish, liberated by social media and their direct relationship with fans, millennial and Gen Z women claimed the right to be complicated pop auteursRead all of the essays in the decade retrospective

📷 Laura Snapes Mon 25 Nov 2019 13.12 GMT 174

While Billie Eilish has reinvented pop with her hushed SoundCloud rap menace, creepy ASMR intimacy and chipper show tune melodies, there’s also something reassuringly comforting about her: as a teenage pop star, she has fulfilled her proper duty by confusing the hell out of adults. It’s largely down to her aesthetic: a funhouse Fred Durst; a one-woman model for the combined wares of Camden Market. Critics have tried to make sense of it, but when editorials praised Eilish’s “total lack of sexualisation”, she denounced them for “slut-shaming” her peers. “I don’t like that there’s this weird new world of supporting me by shaming people that may not want to dress like me.”To Gen Z’s Eilish, not yet 18, it is a weird new world. She and her millennial peers have grown up in a decade in which pop’s good girl/bad girl binary has collapsed into the moral void that once upheld it, resulting in a generation of young female stars savvy to how the expectation to be “respectable” and conform to adult ideas of how a role model for young fans should act – by an industry not known for its moral backbone – is a con. “It’s a lot harder to treat women the way they were treated in the 90s now, because you can get called out so easily on social media,” Fiona Apple – who knows about the simultaneous sexualisation and dismissal of young female musicians – said recently. “If somebody does something shitty nowadays, a 17-year-old singer can get on their social media and say, ‘Look what this fucker did! It’s fucked up.’”📷 Lunatics conquering the asylum ... the Spice Girls. Photograph: Tim Roney/Getty ImagesFemale musicians have been subject to conflicting moral standards for longer than Eilish has been alive. Madonna, Janet Jackson and TLC knew them well – but the concept of the pop “role model”, expected to set an example to kids, solidified when the Spice Girls became the first female act to be marketed at children. In the 70s and 80s, idols such as David Cassidy primed girls for a monogamous future. By comparison, the Spice Girls were lunatics conquering the asylum. But, given their fans’ youth – and the sponsors that used the band to reach them – they also had a duty of responsibility. Their real lives – the all-nighters and eating disorders – were hidden so effectively that Eilish, born in 2001, thought the band was made up, actors playing the roles of the group in Spiceworld: The Movie.In the late 90s, kid-pop became an industry unto itself: Smash Hits and Top of the Pops magazine pitched younger; CD:UK and America’s TRL aimed at Saturday-morning and after-school audiences; Simons Fuller and Cowell built empires. The scrappy Spice Girls preceded the cyborgian Britney, who was a far sleeker enterprise – until she wasn’t. She was pitched as a virgin: cruel branding that invited media prurience and set a time bomb counting down towards her inevitable downfall. Britney’s 2007 breakdown revealed the cost of living as a virtuous cypher and being expected to repress her womanhood to sell to American prudes. Her shaved head and aborted stints in rehab prompted industry handwringing, and so an illusion of the music business offering greater freedom and care for pop’s girls emerged in her wake. Advertisement Major labels abandoned the traditional two-albums-in bad-girl turn (a la Christina Aguilera’s Stripped). Social media-born artists such as Lily Allen and Kate Nash were swept into the system and framed as the gobby antithesis to their manicured pop peers – until their resistance to exactly the same kind of manipulation saw them cast aside. And if Kesha, Lady Gaga or Amy Winehouse burned out, their visible excesses would distract from any behind-the-scenes exploitation, inviting spectators to imagine that they brought it on themselves.📷 Reclaiming the hard-partying values of rock’s men ... Kesha. Photograph: PictureGroup / Rex FeaturesAt the dawn of the 2010s, social media surpassed its teen origins to become an adult concern, and an earnest fourth wave of activists brought feminism back to the mainstream. Like a rescued hatchling, it was in a

pathetic state to begin with – dominated by white voices that tediously wondered whether anything a woman did was automatically feminist. Is brushing your teeth with Jack Daniel’s feminist? Are meat dresses feminist? Is drunkenly stumbling through Camden feminist? Are butt implants feminist?Pop culture became the natural test site for these ideas – especially music, where a new wave of artists challenged this nascent, often misguided idealism. Kesha reclaimed the hard-partying values of rock’s men to embody a generation’s despair at seeing their futures obliterated by the recession. Lady Gaga questioned gender itself, as one writer in this paper put it, “re-queering a mainstream that had fallen back into heteronormative mundanity”. In a career-making verse on Kanye West’s Monster, Nicki Minaj annihilated her male peers and gloried in her sexualisation. MIA, infuriated by America’s hypocritical propriety, flipped off the Super Bowl and proved her point by incurring a $16.5m fine.📷 Infuriated by hypocritical propriety ... MIA gives America the middle finger during her Super Bowl performance in 2012. Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty Images Advertisement As a former Disney star, Miley Cyrus stepped the furthest out of bounds. In 2008, aged 15, she had posed in a sheet for Vanity Fair. “MILEY’S SHAME,” screamed the New York Post. She apologised to her fans, “who I care so deeply about”. But in 2013, she torched her child-star image by writhing in her knickers on a wrecking ball, twerking against Robin Thicke, being flagrant about her drug use, appropriating African American culture while perpetuating racist stereotypes.Cyrus’s 2013 transformation bore the hallmarks of a breakdown – especially witnessed two years after the death of Amy Winehouse, who was then perceived as a victim of her own self-destruction. But Cyrus was largely intentional about her work (if, then, ignorant of her racism). She had waited until she was no longer employed by Disney to express herself. Earlier in her career, she said, she struggled to watch her peers. “I was so jealous of what everyone else got to do, because I didn’t get to truly be myself yet.” Despite apparently smoking massive amounts of weed herself, she didn’t want to tell kids to copy her. But she knew the power she offered her peers such as Ariana Grande, who that year left Nickelodeon to release her debut album. “I’m like, ‘Walk out with me right now and get this picture, and this will be the best thing that happens to you, because just you associating with me makes you a little less sweet.’”Pop did get a little less sweet. Sia and Tove Lo sang brazenly about using drugs to mask pain. Icona Pop’s I Love It reigned (“I crashed my car into a bridge / I watched and let it burn”) thanks to its inclusion on the soundtrack of Lena Dunham’s Girls. With its aimless characters and their ugly behaviour, the show mirrored pop’s retreat from aspirational sheen, and the culture’s growing obsession with “messy” women and “strong female characters”: flawed attempts to create new archetypes that rejected the expectation of girls behaving nicely.📷 An explicit rejection of role-model status ... Beyoncé performs at the Super Bowl in 2013. Photograph: Ezra Shaw/Getty ImagesA new cohort of young female and non-binary critics shifted the discussion around music: in 2015, when the documentary Amy was released, they questioned how Winehouse was perceived in death compared to Kurt Cobain. They also pushed aside the virgin/whore rivalries of old. In an earlier era, Beyoncé and Lana Del Rey might have been fashioned into nemeses, one sexualised and powerful, the other gothic and demure. Instead, their respective mid-decade self-mythologising showed that female musicians could be pop’s auteurs, not just the men in the wings. Advertisement Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album was an explicit rejection of her role-model status. She was 15 when Destiny’s Child released their debut album. “But now I’m in my 30s and those children that grew up listening to me have grown up,” she said in a behind-the-scenes video.

The responsibility she felt to them “stifled” her. “I felt like ... I could not express everything … I feel like I’ve earned the right to be me and express any and every side of myself.”It was the first of her albums to reveal the breadth of her inner life – the coexisting kinks, triumphs and insecurities, showing the complexity of black womanhood. The critic Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote: “Mixed in with songs about insecurity, grief, protest and the love she has for her child, Beyoncé manages to present her sexuality as a normal part of her life that deserves celebration.” “It doesn’t make you a bad mother. It doesn’t make black people look bad, and it doesn’t make you a bad feminist, either.” When Beyoncé emblazoned “FEMINIST” on stage at the 2014 MTV VMAs, she helped reclaim the word from middle-class white discourse.Like Beyoncé, Del Rey countered the idea that female pop stars were major-label puppets. She had struggled to make it as an indie artist but found a home at Polydor – a detail that caused detractors to question her authenticity. Her shaky debut SNL performance revealed the flaw in their thinking: if she was manufactured, wouldn’t she have been better drilled? Her project was potent, but startlingly unrefined. More intriguingly, she opposed fast-calcifying ideas about how feminist art should look: Del Rey’s lyrics revelled in submission and violence, in thrall to bad guys and glamour. It wasn’t feminist to want these things; but nor was it feminist to insist on the suppression of desire in the name of shiny empowerment.📷 Exposing industry machinations ... Azealia Banks at the Reading festival in 2013. Photograph: Simone Joyner/Getty Images Advertisement Del Rey’s lusts and designs were her own – pure female gaze – a hallmark of the defiant female pop stars to come. Rihanna said she was “completely not” a role model, a point driven home by the viscerally violent video for Bitch Better Have My Money. Lauren Mayberry of Scottish trio Chvrches refused to be singled out from her male bandmates and wrote searingly about the misogyny she faced online. Janelle Monáe and Solange rubbished the idea that R&B was the only lane open to young black women.They started revealing their business conflicts. In 2013, 21-year-old Sky Ferreira finally released her debut, six years after signing a $1m record deal. She was transparent about her paradoxical treatment: “They worked me to death, but when I wanted to input anything, it was like, ‘You’re a child, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’” When Capitol pulled funding for the album, she financed its completion: it was widely named an album of the year. Facing similar frustrations, rapper Angel Haze leaked her 2013 album, Dirty Gold, and Azealia Banks wasted no opportunity to expose industry machinations.The rise of Tumblr and SoundCloud put young artists in control of their own artistic identities, forging authentic fan relationships that labels couldn’t afford to mess with. Lorde was signed age 12, but her manager knew he had to follow her lead because she knew her audience better than he did. Halsey was already Tumblr-famous for her covers, hair colours and candour about her bisexuality and bipolar diagnosis when she posted her first original song in 2014. It received so much attention that the 19-year-old – who described herself as an “inconvenient woman” for everything she represented – signed to major label Astralwerks the following evening.A new type of fan arrived with them. The illusion of intimacy led to greater emotional investment – and with it, an expectation of accountability. Social media was being used to arbitrate social justice issues, giving long overdue platforms to marginalised voices, and establishing far more complex moral standards for pop stars than the executives who shilled Britney’s virginity could ever have imagined. In 2013, Your Fav Is Problematic began to highlight stars’ missteps: among Halsey’s 11 infractions were “sexualising Japanese culture” and allegedly falsifying her story about being “homeless”.Musicians, particularly of an

older guard, were unprepared. Lily Allen’s comeback single Hard Out Here, released in late 2013, satirised the impossible aesthetic standards expected of female musicians – a bold message undermined by the racist stereotypes she invoked to make her point: “Don’t need to shake my arse for you ’cause I’ve got a brain,” she sang, while black and Asian leotard-clad dancers twerked around her in the video. The backlash was swift. There was the sense of a balance tipping.📷 Refused to let terrorists suppress girls’ joy ... Ariana Grande at One Love Manchester, 4 June 2017. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/One Love Manchester/Getty Images Advertisement Over the decade, female pop stars steadily self-determined beyond the old limited archetypes. But the most dramatic identity shifts were still a product of adversity, women battling for control.In 2015, Ariana Grande provoked mild outcry when she got caught licking a doughnut she hadn’t paid for and declaring: “I hate America.” Two years later, a suicide bomber attacked her concert at Manchester Arena, leaving 22 dead. She went home to Florida in the aftermath, then returned to stage benefit concert One Love Manchester. A victim’s mother asked Grande to perform her raunchiest hits after the Daily Mail implied that the bomber had targeted the concert because of her sexualised aesthetic. So she did. By prioritising her mental health and refusing to let terrorists suppress girls’ joy and sexuality, she set a powerful example for fans that ran counter to the moralising of commentators such as Piers Morgan.Grande appeared to emerge from this tragedy – and the death of ex-boyfriend Mac Miller – with a renewed sense of what was important, and what really was not. Her next album, Sweetener, defiantly reclaimed happiness from trauma; she swiftly released another, Thank U, Next, abandoning traditional pop release patterns to work with a rapper’s spontaneity. “I just want to fucking talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do,” she said.Kesha had helped instigate this decade of greater freedom for female musicians – or so it seemed until October 2014, when she sued producer Dr Luke, making allegations including sexual assault. (In spring 2016, a judge dismissed the case; Luke denies all allegations and is suing Kesha for defamation.) She claimed she was told she had to be “fun”, an image that Luke’s label intended to capitalise on, revealing how revelry could be just as confining as its prim counterpart. In 2017, she released Rainbow, her first album in five years. Addressing her trauma, it got the best reviews of her career – a response that also seemed to reveal something about the most digestible way for a female artist to exist. But her forthcoming album, High Road, pointedly returns to the recklessness of her first two records. “I don’t feel as if I’m beholden to be a tragedy just because I’ve gone through something that was tragic,” she said.Taylor Swift’s refusal to endorse a candidate in the 2016 election, and the fallout from a spat with Kanye West, saw her shred her image of nice-girl relatability with her 2017 heel-turn, Reputation. But she rebelled more meaningfully when she leveraged her profile to expose the music industry, alerting the public to otherwise opaque matters of ownership and compensation. She joined independent labels in the fight to make Apple Music pay artists for the free trial period it offered consumers. Earlier this year, she despaired at her former label, Big Machine, being bought – and the master recordings to her first six albums with it – by nemesis Scooter Braun, an option she claimed she was denied. Now signed to Universal, and the owner of her masters going forward, she hoped young musicians might learn from her “about how to better protect themselves in a negotiation”, she wrote. “You deserve to own the art you make.” Advertisement Swift’s formative politesse came from country music, an industry that emphasises deference to power and traditional gender roles. In 2015, consultant Keith Hill – using a bizarre metaphor about

salad – admitted that radio sidelined female musicians: they were then subject to endless questions about tomatogate, as if they had the power to fix it. But that blatant industry disregard freed female country artists to shuck off obligation and make whatever music they wanted. In recent years, Miranda Lambert, Ashley McBryde, Brandy Clark, Kacey Musgraves, Ashley Monroe, Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile and Margo Price have all creatively outstripped their male peers.📷 ‘Just me existing is revolutionary’ ... Lizzo. Photograph: Owen Sweeney/Invision/APTheir situation resonates beyond country: greater personal freedoms for female musicians haven’t equated to greater commercial success. Just because a wave of female pop acts have refused old industry ideals, that doesn’t mean control is consigned to the past. There will be young women enduring coercive music industry situations right now – whether manipulation or more serious abuse. Some may never meet those impossible standards, and fail to launch. Others may quietly endure years of repression before potentially finding their voice. There are high-profile female pop acts working today who control their work yet are still subject to grinding suggestions that they change to meet market demands, and noisy women from this decade who have been sidelined. The tropes of the self-actualised female pop star are so established that labels know how to reverse engineer “real” pop girls beholden to a script.But the emergence of a more holistic female star will make it harder for labels to shill substitutes. Their emotional openness has destroyed the stigma around mental health that was used to diminish female musicians as “mad” divas. Charli XCX said she would never have betrayed her vulnerabilities when she was starting out in her teens. “If I’m emotionally vulnerable,” she thought, “people won’t take me seriously … Now I just don’t care.” Robyn spent eight years following up her most successful record because she needed time to grieve and unpick the impact of her own teen stardom. Britney – who in 1999 told Rolling Stone, “I have no feelings at all” – this year cancelled her Las Vegas residency to prioritise her mental health. 📷 More to the floor: the decade the dancefloor was decolonised Read more Advertisement They’ve relentlessly countered the male gaze. Chris refused to simplify queerness for the mainstream; Kim Petras stood for “trans joy”; Rihanna challenged the idea of skinny as aspirational by creating inclusive fashion lines and candidly discussing her own shape. “Just me existing is revolutionary”, Lizzo has said, while Cardi B refused to let anyone use her past as a stripper undermine her legitimacy as a powerful political voice.Where unthinking messiness was valorised at the start of the decade, now imperfection only gets a pass as long as nobody else is getting hurt. This summer, Miley, now 26, apologised for the racial insensitivity of her Wrecking Ball era. Soon after, she posted striking tweets in response to rumours of her cheating on her husband. She admitted to having been hedonistic and unprofessional in her youth. But she swore she hadn’t cheated in her marriage. “I’ve grown up in front of you, but the bottom line is, I HAVE GROWN UP,” she wrote. (To a degree – not long after, she found herself called out again when she implied that queerness is a choice.)In their fallibility and resistance to commodification, the women who have defined this decade in pop look a lot more like role models than the corporate innocents sold to girls in the early millennium. They’re still learning, working with what they’ve got rather than submitting to what they’re told. “I don’t know what it feels like not to be a teenager,” Billie Eilish said recently. “But kids know more than adults.” … as you’re joining us today from South Africa, we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s high-impact journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5

million readers, from 180 countries, have recently taken the step to support us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.With no shareholders or billionaire owner, we can set our own agenda and provide trustworthy journalism that’s free from commercial and political influence, offering a counterweight to the spread of misinformation. When it’s never mattered more, we can investigate and challenge without fear or favour.Unlike many others, Guardian journalism is available for everyone to read, regardless of what they can afford to pay. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of global events, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action.We aim to offer readers a comprehensive, international perspective on critical events shaping our world – from the Black Lives Matter movement, to the new American administration, Brexit, and the world's slow emergence from a global pandemic. We are committed to upholding our reputation for urgent, powerful reporting on the climate emergency, and made the decision to reject advertising from fossil fuel companies, divest from the oil and gas industries, and set a course to achieve net zero emissions by 2030.

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shepaintsred · 4 years ago

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One Circle

I gripped my steering wheel, as the slope took me down the winter hill to the river bottom and then up again, more momentum on the icy roads than I wanted. I did not dare to tap the brakes. I pulled into the parking space, that over years, became mine, and felt tension in my neck subside. Pushing against the door, I felt release, and headed down toward the pond. My feet are still cold, here, writing, and I am a part of the complexities of the circle, even as I have left the urban pond, sandwiched between what is now called Stoney Trail and Bishop O’Byrne High School in SW Calgary. (see fig. 1)

A murmuration of black Eastern Starlings created strong contrast against the primarily frozen landscape. The water, the circle that remained open, was of the deepest shade of Phthalo blue, and Buffleheads, both male and female, landed in great numbers as I made my way to the bush at the pond’s edge, its translucent yellow leaves, frozen. Enjoying the visit, I was reminded of how distinctly my perceptions evolved through a period of years, walking a circle at this specific place each day from 22 Sept. 2011 until 26 Jul. 2016. Kathleen Stewart, in her 2013 essay from the series, Studying Unformed Objects, addresses, in very specific ways, these experiences of place.

Fig.1. Southwest Ring Road Construction began 2016. Black dotted line to indicate one circle. Single black dot to indicate bush. Screenshot from the cityonline.calgary.ca/GISMap/MainMap.

The social-material world as a composition is a world made of entities that are not simply present and knowable but prismatic, flickering, and gathered into lines, angles of light or motion, for people who are attuned to them, or identified with them, or hostile to their existence, or tired of them, or excited to see their outline on the horizon, or sharply excluded from them (Stewart 2010).

Digging deep into personal documentation; blog, journals, photographs, and poetry, I will begin my recollections of circling one pond in 2012. By that time, my mother was suffering the end stages of Alzheimer’s disease. I met her every evening, on Skype, at five o’clock, and took one screenshot some time during every conversation. These visits took place every day, without exception, for five years. I purchased my camera the summer of 2011, before my drive to visit my parents in Belleville, Ontario. While there, I took daily photographs of my mother’s hands.

Returned to Calgary, I explored the pond, as unformed object (Stewart), and thought that the act of walking this circle daily began with walking my dog, Max, a ‘prismatic’ (Stewart 2010) relationship and experience unto itself. Now I realize that, along with Max, the act of ritualistic and daily documentation of my mother’s hands over the course of two months, was leading to a transformative investigation. Something about this place provided an exploration of memory, ritual, and an almost obsessive compulsion to document.

The shape of this documentation included, daily, one poem and one photograph (see fig. 2) posted to my blog, sometimes, alongside a piece of music. In Sun Dazzle, written on 30 Jan. 2012 and in third person, initial sensory relationships are made.

Romp! Run! Go! Laughing woman and smiling dog, up to their knees, racing! Crunching through the snow’s skin, wind blown and captured in waves; the weatherman’s story from yesterday.

Muskrat, perching on pond’s edge, dark form instantly sliding into water at the burst of their movement. Energy is joy exploding!

Blue sky stretches canvas on a white sea of ice. Yellow-gold grasses etching a circle around the pond. The dog following, explores hidden places.

Sparkle. Dazzle. Squinting, tears roll down her cheeks, light echoes on everything. She cries for the beauty of it all. [1]

Fig. 2: Moors 30 Jan. 2012, Accessed 22 Oct. 2020

Rituals of walking began with very general observations of my natural surroundings, but from the beginning, I felt that this was somehow magical or just-for-me. I rarely, at this point, noticed anyone else. I noticed birds as a general category. At that time, I did not make distinctions between different species. Later, I saw sparrows, ducks and geese, a progression after months of seeing birds.

Patterns of documentation began to emerge, particularly on themes of light and atmosphere, water reflections and wind. I captured a series of photographs of clouds reflected in pond water and created my first slide show, watching with great enthusiasm, back home, at my desk, while the series scrolled past, again and again.

Years later, I would discover, not only an interest in documentation and recording, but also, the collection and creation of objects in series, series of journals, green glass vases, photo books, porcelain hotel creamers and photograph archives. Just as Kyo Maclear, in her book, Birds Art Life, refers to spark birds (113), I received new revelations (sparks) on a very regular basis while walking one circle.

The habit of writing and posting poetry, images and music was not sustained, but became intermittent. This practice saw me transition from wide-eyed observer to steward. By February of 2012, I knew the difference between a Ruddy Duck and a Red Necked Grebe. My language around bird and plant species was becoming more specific. I poured over new birding books in the evenings. Instead of capturing vistas, I was zooming in and trying to focus and make-clear the subjects of my photographs. I was capturing strings of video and I was noticing my evolving knowledge around the camera. It became a treasured object, not merely functional.

Fig. 3 Moors, Findings: 20 Tim Horton’s drink cups, with plastic lids, 14 plastic bags of various sizes, 15 pieces of industrial insulation of the foam variety (likely blown from the construction area, an extension of the sports center), a large sized plastic bucket from the same site, burned book pages, fast-food containers and hamburger wraps, two bags of dog poop and a large purple plastic hoop. 28 Feb. 2020, Accessed 22 Oct. 2020.

What became evident through the camera lens was the fact that this was not a pristine environment. I took a photograph of a red-eyed, Black-Crowned Night Heron and arrived home to find, visible on my computer screen, the wondrous bird standing on rounded stones and a Tim Horton’s cup. I became hostile (Stewart 2010) when I noticed the human impact on my self-constructed and utopic experience. Like my growing knowledge about birds, I was noticing this negative relationship. (see fig. 3) It seemed insurmountable and a feeling of helplessness came with one circle. I decided to fill a large bag with litter while walking daily, to write about it, and archive possible shifts in the aesthetic of the place. I had conversations with people, those teaching classes in outdoor education, City of Calgary Parks Management teams, politicians, seniors participating in outdoor exercise, homeless people and business owners in big-box and fast-food outlets. I became more a citizen than a tourist. Interactions through phone calls, electronic mail and even business meetings, stretched the unformed object (Stewart), one circle, and it became both political and social, as well as spiritual in its being.

While human connection and communications were sometimes disappointing, many were incredibly positive. I met a man who was sleeping under the stars through warm weather. Frank had plans to move to Vancouver for winter. He overlooked the flats, daily, and drank six beer while watching me pick. At the end of each circle, we exchanged pleasantries and then he passed me, each day, his six cans knotted up in a plastic bag. He always expressed his gratitude. Over time and together, we named the location, Frank’s Flats and soon, people in public positions began to refer to this location as Frank’s Flats. I was interested in how access to human connection contributed to an act of naming.

One other noteworthy human connection involved the manifestation of a constructed relationship. This construction surfaced out of the next series of investigations while circling the pond.

On 8 Oct. 2015, I began to capture an Instagram photograph of one bush, the same bush, every day. It is situated at the edge of the pond. (see figs. 1 and 4) Weather, time of day and atmosphere were impacting the appearance of the bush and so, I logged these conditions as a brief caption on my posts. Published to Instagram and then, Facebook, the bush became a familiar character until the final day, July 26, 2016. Friends ‘liked’ the bush/image and wrote comments over almost 300 days. An artist-friend in one of these forums, after some months, named the bush, Bianca. Toward the end of 2015, I noticed a young man slept on cardboard and under an evergreen tree and two sleeping bags. A shopping cart contained his possessions. We never spoke, but he was aware of me and I, him. Moving into December, I decorated the bush, adding ribbon first, then ornaments and finally, solar-powered Christmas lights. The young man would be able to see the bush from above the flats. I filled his cart with gifts, warm socks, hoodie, scarf and thick work mitts, chocolate, and candy canes. That Christmas I felt connected in a new way to this place, through sentiment. The ornaments remained, lighting up the landscape until Epiphany that year.

Fig. 4 Moors, Merry Christmas beautiful light the hawk is perched in the evergreen tree. Instagram Bush, 25 Dec. 2015 Accessed from Desktop Photo Archive 25 Oct. 2020.

My last Instagram photograph was snapped the day before my mother’s birthday and minutes before I headed for the Trans Canada highway. My mother died in May of 2013. I did not want to circle the pond on July 27, 2016 nor did I wish to archive the bush. I wanted to be in the van and driving toward my father.

Returned to Calgary, that autumn I hired a videographer to archive Max and I through the seasons. While filming, I struggled with the destruction of surrounding ecosystems and the impact of the Southwest Calgary Ring Road development and so, the following spring, I left this circle for another on the edge of the Bow River. I used references from the pond to create paintings in my studio and these art works continue to this day, recently taking a new direction, in the world of pandemic.

In series, I am layering reverse transfers of the Instagram bush images onto panels, in chronological order, beginning with the practice on 8 Oct., five years after the first Instagram photo was taken. These images are placed one on top of another and create a container for memory. An Instagram account has been opened (see fig. 5) to record this progress.

Fig. 5 Moors. Instabush_bianca. 25 Oct. 2020

The pond, Frank’s Flats, the bush, all remain forms, but they have also become vivid constructs, numerous material objects that push up against my imagination and likely, always will. Christopher Witmore, in his essay, Archaeology of the New Materialisms (221), quotes Rosemary Joyce in What Eludes Speech.

Then describe and describe some more—all this descriptive detail one can unpack later, if there is time, in a space where hesitation is possible. Dozens of hours of ambient video walks along routes of transhumance, along paths, streets, walls, or through museums; video diaries of those confounding moments of contact with weird stuff will pay off later. Still, anything we do in documentation is always a translation. We can only manifest something of the style of things; much will always remain beyond reach. There is always a trade-off. There are always gains and losses. And there is always more to be said and done (Joyce 2011).

Works Cited

Joyce, R. 2011. “‘What Eludes Speech’: A Dialogue with Webb Keane.” Journal of Social Archaeology 11(2): 158–170. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469605311403836

Maclear, Kyo. Birds, Art, Life. Toronto, Doubleday Books, 2017.

shepaintsred.com. Accessed 22 Oct. 2020.

Instabush_bianca. Accessed 22 Oct. 2020.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2010. “Afterword: Worlding Refrains”. In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 339–53. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2013. “Studying Unformed Objects: The Provocation of a Compositional Mode”. Member Voices, Fieldsights, June 30. culanth.org/fieldsights/studying-unformed-objects-the-provocation-of-a-compositional-mode

Witmore, Christopher. 2014. Archaeology and the New Materialisms. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. 1. 203-246. 10.1558/jca.v1i2.16661. DOI: 10.1558/jca.v1i2.16661

[1] See shepaintsred.com, 30 Jan. 2012 et al.

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k-chapman · 4 years ago

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Chapter 6 - The Soap tastes

Lenny Belardo washes himself with the soap. The city and God watch Lenny do it.

Analysis descends to the cloud, to chaos, to the limit, to whiteness. [1] And the death that ravishes the light from my eyes returns all its purity to the day it was soiling. [2]

The white ash, from an offering. Weight to lightness.

The meaty tallow, the slowly grown innocence. Many to one.

The salty broth, from a man in pleasure. Solid to fluid.

These three rarities combined in the hollows under the pit, the chamber of soap, containers created from windowpanes of house that stood here before. They congeal through time to a matter in between all three components. A binding agent. An active matter, a pureness capable of cleansing, infused in cream, to curds coagulates the liquid stream, sudden the fluids fix the parts combined; such, and so soon, the ethereal texture join'd. [3]

I make my way to the tower. The congealed essences in hand. Upon my pure white robes, the filth of the night’s dealings, the contrast is stark. The vapour of the embers, the blood of the slaughter, the sins of man, his sweat from the pale, the cow shit on my feet but it is no spot but a universal stain which soils me. [4]

To cleanse and purify; to appoint a thing unto holy uses, and to separate from unclean and unholy uses. [5] As for cleaning out, —that function was entrusted to the pouring rains. […] [6] which gather now in the sky, angry as God must be at my midnight exploitations. Stripping my soiled garments to the wind. They float to the city as I ascend the tower.

I reach the top of the double helix tower open to the heavens, a small platform for a single man, the only thing visible of the bubble from the outside. No railing, no security on this platform. Men may be taught by fables; children require the naked truth. [7] The most loyal and tender, or intense, love assigns subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement that constantly switch places, wrapped in the sweetness of being [ ] naked. [8]

The downpour begins and if it's raining that can only mean [we’ve] been bad children. Why? Because raindrops are the tears of Christ. And if Jesus is crying, that can only mean [we’ve] made him angry. [9] And how that makes me happy, wasn’t it the Bible that prescribed an eye for an eye. The lather, I scrub on my body froths and bubbles off myself onto my tower and down one side of the helix and seeps into the edifice below, into the pit to calm the heat.

I feel the city and skies watch me as I clean. I feel the filth slowly dissolve leaving fresh skin beneath, the cold wind pulls my skin tight. I feel my spirit rise with the inhaled essences. The cool tears splash around me as I dance my rain dance. Precious rain: Because the issue of this seed was the birth of Perseus, but also because it symbolizes a first cause for poetry. [10] The first time I washed myself I did it concealed. Afterwards I washed as part of a routine. Well now, I bask in God’s tears. By scrubbing my skin with earthly gifts, I took for myself. I am without God, and the filth of the world can run entirely through me without a holy barrier to stop it. I welcome the filth now, for I have a solution, a solvent, a catalyst for release, a consuming substance to rid me of the filth of the world.

[1] Serres, Rome

[2] Serres, Statues

[3] Pliny, Natural History Volume 3

[4] de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

[5] Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises

[6] Hugo, Les Miserables

[7] Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[8] Deleuze Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

[9] The Young Pope

[10] Petrarch, The Canzoniere

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crstapor · 4 years ago

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Why I am so Cynical

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” - Zarathustra

Part 3

Let me stop shouting - sometimes I get carried away. Because it needs be clearly stated that my perspective on the matter at hand is not based solely on 'personal' experience (of course one can never deny the importance such datum possess!) but also 'phenomenological' experience, which is, clearly, a different animal altogether. That this menagerie has informed my thought will surprise no-one who's ever tried it; thinking, I mean. How else, if one is being as honest as possible, can one arrive at any conclusions whatsoever? While the first part of this essay waxed rather subjectively poetic, allow me to offer this third as a sort of empirical respite. Facts, good reader, let me proffer facts to further found my cynicism most severe.

But let me first define the scope these facts will express. The working title for this missive to minds who want to think was 'A Polemic against American Modernity'. Allowing that my interests, here, lie not north to Canada or south of Texas, the parameters of this diatribe should be well understood by all with even meager cartographic skill.

Superficial perhaps I've structured these facts into three distinct phenomena; the surface, the self, and the symbol. I do so not to make any sweeping ontologic distinctions or assertions, rather, to help me think through them. System-building is not my purpose here - system-analysis is. The facets of modern America culture were well in place before I came along, and, unless I'm completely mistaken, I've done little to add to or enhance any of them. Apart from the clear truth of my having lived with and through them the vast majority of my mortal years. This 'truth', my citizenship and biography, allow me credence to present what follows as 'fact'; though of course it's still just one man's opinion!

Knowledge!

The Surface

Politics. Democracy. American Exceptionalism. Yeah right. So, help me out here, we have a great democracy because we vote for other people to get to vote on who actually becomes leader? Unless of course nine robes get that special privilege - based off of their admitted political preferences naturally! - like back in 2000. How the legislature is just a club for the privileged, connected, and the rich (which is almost redundant). How once 'money' became speech only those with 'money' had speech. The Founders are grave-rolling and Mussolini's having a laugh - fascism much? Let's remember Benito's definition of the term; which is when State and corporate interests converge (more or less). And we find that just about everywhere we look up in DC these days. Apparently we have the 'political will' to help banks, big oil, agribusiness, gun manufacturers, and all the other consolidated purveyors of terror, hate or control (sure, tobacco had to be sacrificed - occasionally you must throw the peasants a bone to keep the lie alive) but can't find the time to help out 'we the people': see continuing cuts to social programs; see the limp-dick governmental response to the housing/mortgage crisis of 2008 - ?; see the student loan pyramid scheme; see a 'minimum' wage that consistently fails to keep up with inflation; see a 'healthcare' plan that mandates private citizens purchase a product from non-governmental, for-profit companies - and taxes them if they don't; see how prohibition (here considered against natural, earth-born narcotics) continues to fuel a for-profit prison system and further erodes race relations; see how the gravest existential threat to the species (climate change, for realz) is perpetually laughed off and ignored; see how we lecture others on human rights while keeping Gitmo open and denying homosexuals equal protection under the law; see how NASA's (quite possibly, from a historical perspective, the greatest achievement of our modern society) budget keeps getting gutted while their priorities are schizophrenically re-ordered with each administration; see how children keep slaughtering children with weapons of war and no one can even attempt to do anything about it; see how voter ID laws are passed like Jim Crow; see how the innate sovereignty of the nation has been torn asunder now that private corporations can be 'to big to fail'; see an ever increasingly militarized police force; see the constitutional absurdity of 'free speech zones'; see democratic campaigns where one guy runs but once elected that guy's nowhere to be found and in his place is a carbon copy of the last guy who held the office ... See how our 'political parties' are two sides of the same coin ... But let's stop here and consider that last point in greater depth, as it is so vital to any understanding of 'democracy' in America ... Republicans, Democrats; Jefferson has been famously remembered, quoted, as saying once our (more properly his) democracy devolved into a two party system it would be a democracy no more. And I've certainly been a witness to that in my life. Sure, America isn't a dictatorship, but it sure as hell isn't the country Jefferson helped forge. And the main reason for that, to my eyes, seems to be the consolidation of power in the hands of politicians with more in common with each other than their constituents. R or D you can bet they're there for Wall Street or the military-information-industrial complex. Anyone else? Good luck with that citizen ... And while they're both complicit in gutting the middle class, let's take a moment to reflect, ethically, on that matter ... You can't blame the snake for its venom, but you can sure as hell blame the snake-oil salesman for shilling his bullshit wares. In case that metaphor wasn't clear enough allow me to decode it for you:

R = snake. D = snake-oil salesman.

Switching gears - though not by much! - let's shift to the state of modern American entertainment. To the uninitiated possibly a trite transition, any who've watched politics lately will surely see the connection. And just as our politics smell rotten, the main complaint with what passes as entertainment these days is how bad it tastes. Yes, it's a question of taste, as it seems most Americans have none. From 'reality TV' (which is surely anything but - though let's not forget Barnum's maxim!), to a pop-music ecosystem that's cannibalized itself to the point of parody, a movie industry that can seemingly fill ten months of releases with one script, the apotheosis of sport, the devolution of literature into a hobby for diarists, the way the performing arts are continually hoarded into smaller and smaller urban green zones, well, it's just hard to swallow most of that without gagging. Or throwing up. Yet a more concerted analysis along these lines is not called for here - we have much too much ground yet to cover.

Speaking of ground and covering it why not mention war? That old playground of glory now some video game where you might win many things; though honor's not among them. The full transition here is yet to occur, but we're definitely in the middle of it. Drones, air strikes, GPS targeting and bombs dropped from orbit (sure, not yet - wait for it!). The complete impersonalization of the other; that total objectification of the enemy (you better believe the pornographers have drone-envy). Let's not equivocate; it's one thing to look someone in the eye and take their life - quite another to push a button sixteen time-zones away and watch an image of indiscriminate carnage. How long will it be before we don't even let a homo sapien sapien push that button? How long before the machines are killing us on their own .?. Nothing to be cynical about here!

And if killing our 'enemies' has/is becoming so much more impersonal healing our 'own' has a fortiori. I'm not even going to start bandying about statistics but it's well known that of the 'first-world', 'post-industrialized' countries we're the only one that still considers healthcare a cash-grab instead of a human-right. And to what wonderful affect! Go ahead and try to ignore all the horror stories of your fellow Americans who lost it all because they couldn't pay their medical bills, or because they did. Pay no attention to record profit margins at insurance companies while the poor forgo all but emergency treatment and the wealth of the middle class is bled out and transferred to HMO executives. Sure, Uncle Tom tried to change all that - by passing a Republican plan even though the Ds had two branches of the federal government! - but when I tried to sign up for 'Obamacare' I still couldn't afford it even though I had $200 in the bank, no assets, and had been unemployed for over two years. If I lived in any other country where English is the primary language I'd be covered without paying a dime. My solution? To use the actual Republican plan - don't get sick!

But that should be easy since we all know of the three pillars of good health (diet, exercise, genetics) eating right is the easiest of all ... Hell. No, sorry, I was about to go all sarcastic and make it seem America knows nothing about sugar overload, HFCS, preservatives, the increasingly and horrifying inability of urbanites to access fresh foods (specifically the poor ones!), pesticides, pink slime, corn or corn or more corn or when will there ever be enough corn already, price gouging on foods that were produced the way they've been produced for centuries (read: organic, grass-fed, free-range), trans-fats, GMO proliferation in our breadbasket without an honest debate on the merits or looking at the science past what some corporation's panel has assured us is true, sodas, the food-gap, throwing away enough food daily to feed the world's hungry cuz it wouldn't make a dime, slaughterhouses like Auschwitz or Dachau ... That Quite Barbarism ... But that would be foolish - America knows all about that ... Why shouldn't it? America invented most of it …

And we invented the largest consumer-driven transportation system the world has ever seen to move all that food around. Sure, China will catch up with us eventually (if not already), but for the better part of three generations the US led the world in road-building and car-buying. Quite apart from the environmental effects this produced there was a profound psychological positive feed-back loop involved as well: one justifying the pre-dominate narrative of our consumer culture. Choice is sacred; you are special and unique and can reflect that through choice; so choose this product or this other one and express your uniqueness through possessing any one of these infinitely similar products; the choice is yours. Perhaps nowhere else in the market was this ‘story’ sold as diligently and aggressively than in the automobile industry. While it is true the US is, spatially speaking, a very large country, it is not true that every adult American needed or needs their own set of wheels to connect it. There are other options, other technologies that could’ve been employed to bring the masses together with more energy efficiency and communal cohesion. I admit it’s no Copernican Revolution, but the thought that Americans are so stubbornly self-interested and quick to discriminate opposed many of their European or native counterparts can not be divorced from the fact we all love to be in the driver’s seat. That commodified ‘freedom’ we are told awaits us on an open road with our very own internal combustion engine humming along in front of our feet; a freedom trains, buses, or carpooling can never provide. Again, notwithstanding the ecological impact of all this, the psychological dimension is impossible to ignore: even if we all owned Tesla’s that were powered by clean fusion charging stations it would still be me, me, me … which is quite naturally a completely uncynical disposition from which to hold a society together …

American’s fascination with their own value and freedom has of course been a dominate theme in the grand narrative of the country for some time; and while cars and roads were the major technological expression of that for much of the twentieth century, we have turned the corner here, in this regard, finding ourselves lost amid tiny little shiny screens that put the whole world inches from our eyes. With the advent of mobile computing the freedom so many seek isn’t conceived any longer by MPG rather MPBS. The new speed of information, and the promise of perpetual access, have enchanted the newer generations in much the same way vehicles did their antecedents. The technology is different while the story remains the same. It is still a self-centered freedom underlying the need, desire, to own the newest, quickest, coolest gadget. A freedom of information surely, yet one closely connected with the freedom cars brought their older relatives; it is as much economic as it is self-satisfying. The internet changed the game, naturally - and hail and well met etc. etc.! - but a claustrophobic observation remains … for a technology that has brought so many people together - and it has - it sure as hell does an awful good job sundering them as well … for you can’t find a public space anymore where a near-majority of your fellow citizens aren’t more interested in their precious little screens than those flesh and blood humans nearby. Perhaps this is just the necessary evolution of the social fabric - perhaps resistance is futile - though a social contract that has more to do with Facebook’s TOS opposed a Bill of Rights just (and forgive me for being so cynical) doesn’t seem like much of a society worth bothering with to this writer. Certainly not one worth the name.

Speaking of the modern technology we all now can’t live without, it seems to me a funny thing happened on the way to Google’s homepage … we now have access to all the information we can consume, on any topic, just a keystroke away, and look what we’re doing with it … I’m not just talking about social media or pornography, I mean the fundamental epistemological conundrum of an allegedly intelligent species that now has post-scarcity style access to information yet we’ve made of the web one colossal echo-chamber where the tribes huddle together in aggrieved resentment or ignorant bliss of the ‘others’ … look at it like this: in a day and age when the work of science (you know, that thing that made all this ((by which I mean ‘Modernity’ and all its toys)) possible) is more evenly, widely, and objectively disseminated than at any other time in history the public’s grasp and understanding of science and its work is at an all-time low. Basic data are disputed; empirical findings are called into question by anyone with a laptop, forget about a degree in the subject: what used to be considered non-issues, resolved subjects, are now argued over as if the Earth might actually be flat … all of which might just be good for a laugh if there weren’t actual existential threats to the species that only science can solve; yet we can’t even begin that discussion because some car salesman googled Glenn Beck and now we have legislatures that don’t think climate change is real; or they say the data doesn’t support an anthropogenic cause even though they never took a serious science course in their life; or that can’t be right because it doesn’t fit into our time-warp economy and a dollar today is obviously more important than our children’s future; or anyway shut-up idiot scientists just because you actually studied something other than law or business doesn’t mean you know any more than me because I have a high speed internet connection and I bookmarked the Drudge Report … how is it, philosophically speaking, tenable that the more information you have the stupider you become? I don’t know, but if you want a good example of the principle in action take a look at America today. Or just Google it …

Of course there is one thread that ties all these elements of ‘the surface’ together and that thread is consumerism as expressed by our current form of capitalism. The ascendancy of the dollar over all else (sorry God!). The desire to possess, acquire, consume. We are material creatures, we humans, and thus must consume to survive; fine: but do we have to do so in the manner we seem set on here and now? No, not at all, even suggesting that our’s is the only system, the only way to satiate the human hunger is absurd on its face as well as betraying an amnesiac’s conception of history. No, there are other paths, yet we have chosen this one, this ‘capitalism’ that mimics the terrors and rigors of the jungle at every turn. In the act of deifying money (more on that later) we have dehumanized ourselves. For the most part we are simple cogs in a vast machine that cares little or nothing for us; and so we care only for ourselves. The inherent egoism of the modern American psyche is spectacular to behold, certainly, in its primal vanity; at the same time giving the lie to any ethical system we still tenuously cling to as reminder of simpler days (sorry Christianity!). So we are, as a culture, no better than spoiled children grasping for another slice of pie. And while that’s certainly comical, it is also tragic, since such a system is not sustainable whatsoever (there is never enough pie). Neither history or science can provide any examples of such a system expanding into perpetuity (literature has given us a few but they are either satire or utopias ((same thing really))), and yet a sincere, concerted discussion on this issue has yet to percolate through the public sphere, or if so, only in the usual places and thus not given the sort of urgency it requires. But to have this conversation we all have to be ready to listen; it is not enough for the cynics and naysayers to keep shouting into the wild or the web: there has to be an audience, a receptive ear. Which brings us to our next section.

The Self

The problems elucidated in ‘The Surface’ are, to a great extent, symptoms of our sense of self, or, as is more often (if paradoxically) the case, our lack of one. While I am specifically referring to the modern American ‘self’, I’m going to be doing so with large brushstrokes; forming great swathes of colored splotches closer in kind to a rorscharch test than a pointilistic canvass. You may not see a reflection here so much as a sense of remembrance, or deja vu. That’s fine. I can’t be alone in thinking our lifespeeds have altered, and it’s just that alteration I want to discuss.

Lifespeed. Right. Let’s define that quickly so we can move on. By lifespeed I mean that facile quality of Being that tethers us to the ‘now’. Perceptually, our lives happen at a specific point in time, and I’ve conceived the word lifespeed to represent this point, as well as our conscious reaction to it. It’s just a word. Other than this meager definition it means nothing; has no other value. Right.

We were talking about choice earlier and there’s a clear connection between the act of choosing and the extant phenomena adjoining it. Just the relationship that lifespeed is meant to express. On its face, choice is neutral. Neither positive or negative, good or bad. The ‘designed’ choice of our consumer-driven society I find abhorrent, though not from some reactionary impulse, but a genuine longing for what it’s replaced. By making choices we define ourselves and I fear many of us are accepting a story that tells us we can only make this or that choice opposed to this that or the other. That we are told certain stories so many times we think we have no choice how they end; or wether to listen to them at all. In this way our lifespeeds have been damaged; like a bonsai pruned too severely.

Perhaps many are content defining themselves through ‘designed’ choice, or who ‘designed’ it anyway? Yes … there will always be sheep and lemmings in human form, and if that’s your angle you have my pity but nothing else. On the other hand, if you genuinely desire a leveling-up on the self-awareness front but have found this difficult to achieve thus far, you must realize two hard truths; the first that it is your business alone, none others - and the second, that it will be incredibly difficult to achieve because our society was not constructed to assist in this goal - quite the contrary! - it was designed to prevent it, at almost every turn. Here we return to the ‘designed’ component of American choice. Since the beginning the tiny tribes watching the throne have conspired to affect a marked class distinction in the land of the ‘free’. From the original agricultural workers of the new world, to the industrial workers who built a modern nation, to the current service sector workers slipping into poverty those with the firmest grip on the levers of power have continually strived to erect massive obstacles between those that labor for a living and those that live off that labor. Nor are these obstacles simply economic or aspirational in nature, no, due their pervasiveness through the generations they have percolated down into the most subterranean reaches of the mass conscious; into the very stories we use to define ourselves. Egads! a polite-hyper-modern-liberal-minded-triangulator might reply, don’t you know everyone has a TV! A refrigerator! Cheapest food ever! Why yes of course, there is an exception to every rule. While, for about thirty years in the middle of the last century, it seemed America was finally delivering on its promise, just look how long it took for us to devolve into another gilded age (the apparent default position of American society). It is foolish to define a thing based off aberrations, opposed its consistencies. In this way we clearly see the US for what it is … the second most successful marketing scheme in human history (naturally one must award Christianity top honors on that mark) … in the same way tobacco used to be good for you, that sodas were harmless, or how fast food is every bit nutritious as home-made, America cries ‘freedom’ when in so many ways the reverse is clearly the case. From ‘power’s’ perspective it’s nihilistically brilliant sure - give the people a semblance of freedom (in our case economic choice) and they’ll extrapolate that into a veritable cosmos of self-authorized-self-actualization - and you bet the monarchists, dictators, or petty politburos are jealous as hell at the level of control the political classes of America have been able to sustain generation after generation. A state of affairs that continues for no other reason than that an over-whelming majority of Americans keep believing the lies. We are forced to ask: why do they?

Let’s speculate wildly! Is it possible there exists some globe-spanning underground tributary of Lethe that constantly replenishes all the aquifers in the land? Or perhaps when we, on average a truly vain people, look into a mirror our historical consciousness is reset to zero? Or maybe we’ve all become so addicted to the stories we repeat about American Exceptionalism even the most destitute are content to sacrifice any chance they might have of another, better life, so as the stories can keep being told .?. the gyre is constricting at every turn, just like water flowing down the drain we’re becoming closer and closer to ourselves and ours; we’re losing a visceral sense of community and common cause through the ‘designed’ choices of a consumerist economy and specifically the newer technologies of self-absorption. So many of us don’t seem able to see past our own reflections, our problems, that even beginning to consider the larger problems facing our country seems as pointless as sending a manned mission to Mars.

The latent greed of the species is given free reign in America and this greed is destroying us. Making us sick. Stunted, withered, cloying little souls blighted with giga-myopia and eterno-amnesia. Greed. Most cultures have oft thought it a base emotion, one needing constant oversight - not the good ’ole US of A! We saw right through that ethical clap-trap - we saw that by harnessing the simmering greed of a people and putting them to work fulfilling that greed great things could happen … just absolutely amazing things … and we have accomplished quite a bit worth being proud over, and we sure have shown all those historical moralists just how wrong they were about the most solipsistic emotion … but this is a strange greed, our American one, one many may not even be aware of, so deep do its roots dive; a conniving greed that wraps in upon itself like a fresh burrito from Chipotle or those roller coasters you remember from Disneyland or Six-Flags … a greed that we have to learn to turn off, ignore, or quit seeing as so basic and benign in all our lives that there’s nothing you can do about it anyway - because it isn’t benign, it reacts to us and the environment as surely as we do it, and lately it’s been acting badly … yes, there are historical elements to this greed, there is also the question of personal responsibility, mutual complicity, systems of control and power as well - so many factors … I guess I’m nostalgic for another type of human being, one not fueled by avarice or beholden to the choices of others … qualities most seem to have lost somewhere on the way to Walmart … a human being that might never have existed except in a dream …

The Symbol

Human beings have long used symbols to represent value. Symbols are convenient, easy, and incredibly mutable. They can be transferred or translated almost infinitely. With a symbol ideas that might take an incredible amount of energy to explain or describe can be conveyed almost instantaneously. Logic and mathematics could likely not exist without them, nor, indeed, any language. And like any good thing, as is so often the case with any wonderfully useful thing, we humans have become dependent on them. Created for ourselves a world where we can not live without them. We are, in many ways, addicted to their utility. On its face there is nothing ethically challenging about this. Language and math are boons to humanity, practically describing our modern conception of ourselves. Symbols are naturally value neutral, like any high-level epistemological building block. And yet, we modern Americans have found ourselves in a tricky spot. We have crafted a society where one symbol is supreme. Where one symbol, and one symbol alone, holds all the power. A symbol that, if you find yourself without it, without access to it, without a stock-pile of it hiding somewhere, essentially makes you a non-entity. No longer part of the culture, the game. For it is certainly true that the only game in modern America is money. That collecting dollars has superseded all other activities; has supplanted any other endeavor as the only one with value. This state of affairs is the genesis of our cultural decline; of the death of the ideals that the Founders (who themselves were already playing the only game) attempted to instill in the New World: will in the end be understood by future historians as the single greatest crime of our time.

I say crime and I mean it. Don’t use the word for shock or awe. Nor do I want to dwell on this particular subject (not being the place for an extended analysis of this issue I will allow such a discussion its own essay, its own space, a place where it can be a bit more academic and dry, not so emotive or cynical) though we do have to mention a few more things before moving on. Crime. Yes. What was this crime? In short order here we go … it used to be the case that money was a symbol that referred to labor, actual work performed by one human that held value for another. So far as that is all money is, there is nothing ethically suspect about it. Then, at some point in the past, a few cunning paradigm-shifters saw an opportunity and changed the rules regarding what money was; they removed the labor as referent of value, replacing it with rare objects (typically gold) that few among any populace would ever see in their lives. Well, since the promise of alchemy was a lie, and the philosopher’s stone was never discovered, at least this money still referred to something real, something that couldn’t just be made up on the spot. Ah ha! the sons of the sneaky paradigm-shifters thought, that would just be the icing on the cake! Let’s remove the rare objects as value referent as well - let’s go all in on a communal mass delusion and see if anyone believes it … let’s just have money valued at whatever we say it’s valued at. Let’s create a massive shell game that only a very few will ever truly know the rules to, though the outcome, the results, will effect everyone … yes … let’s create the only game worth playing, and let’s give every live birth a turn … which leaves us with a system that, no matter how hard you work, no matter how industrious you are, if you don’t know the rules of the game (in modern America we can think of the Federal Reserve, Wall Street bankers, old money, select members of the Treasury Department etc. as the holders of the rule book) you will not win at it. You will play and play and play and keep losing and losing and losing all the while the rule keepers keep winning and winning and winning because for most players in this game the tokens of victory they collect (dollars) are bought at the hard price of actual labor, as if they never heard about how money grew up - no, they slave and slave for pennies without any chance of leveling up in this game and getting to that haughty echelon where money is no longer about work but having money make money off of someone else’s work … this little narrative I just outlined is a crime because there are clear stealers and victims (of course there are exceptions to every rule, but for every Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, there are a hundred and fifty million working at Walmart for a slave-wage). You see, the architects of the monetary symbol’s paradigm shift knew that by removing any referent to an actual act (labor) or object (gold) they were essentially hollowing out the natural relationship between the symbol and the symbolized, and in that empty space they would find their own El Dorado; their own little universe where they called the shots and none other. They essentially re-wrote the rules of symbolism, and clearly in their favor. And while symbols shift meaning all the time, especially in religious or political environments, these shifts are fundamentally harmless as neither religion or political discourse ever directly affects the physical well being of a human being as does their ability to acquire food, or energy, or health care, or shelter (I understand that by including ‘politics’ in this sense I might seem to be advocating a ‘post-history’ perspective; one where capitalistic-liberalism has won over all other political narratives, and while I hope that isn’t so, at the moment, and especially as an American author, one would be hard pressed to argue the point otherwise). To be clear, I’m not suggesting there was some shadowy cabal that gathered and planned out this great hollowing out of the monetary symbol; as is often the case it happened by fits and starts, here and there, as history would have it, propelled by the innate greed of the least amongst us. And yet they have scored a grand victory, these acolytes of avarice. Have pulled the proverbial wool over so many eyes - and in the process redefined a country that promised freedom into a vassal state completely enthralled to an ugly little strip of green denim that truly means nothing at all …

Of course this transformation did not just occur on American soil. But we sure as hell took the ball and ran it home. More than any other modern nation we are more readily defined by the empty symbology of the dollar than any others. This is not just an American problem; but we must be the first to address it …

America’s enslavement to the dollar is the singular cause of all the problems I put forth in ‘The Surface’, and, in many ways, ‘The Self’. We are a nation of suckers, rats, blind idealists, idiot sensualists, blatant thieves and the occasional dreamer … and knowing that, seeing my country in this way does nothing to alleviate my pathological cynicism … but allow me a query - do you still ask me why I am so cynical .?.

#Essay #Philosophy #c. r. stapor #cynicism #nietszche #modernity #philosophers on tumblr #writers on tumblr

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smokeybrandreviews · 4 years ago

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A Tale of Mages and Servants Eternally Retold

I’m on record as being a massive TYPE-MOON fan. I’ve been one for years, since the initial release of Fate/Stay Night way back in 04. The original ero-game was my first flirtation with the company and i fell in love with it almost instantly. The story told, behind all of the boobs and sex scenes, was incredible. It was awash with unique ideas and creative force. The more I played, the more I was endeared to the characters and the world and, ultimately, the entire universe Nasu crafted. Over the years, as i delved deeper into the lore, i realized there was a real backbone behind that initial conflict between mages. There were Vampires, Outer Gods, True Magic, Magecraft, Reality Marbles, Noble Phantasms, True Ancestors, Grand heroes, Type-planets, Beasts; This web of stories was vast, intricate, and full of passion. Tsukihime, Lord El-Melloi II Case Files, DDD, Kara No Kyokai, Melty Blood, NOTES; All of them connected, adding to the over mythos and mystique of the Nasuverse. I’m a sucker for narrative and what Nasu birthed is one of the best. But Fate, specifically, holds a special place in my heart.

I absolutely adore Fate/Stay Night. When I heard it was going to be adapted into an anime, I was all over it. I remember watching the show when it originally dropped back in 06. While i enjoyed the hell out of it, i always found my interests falling more toward the other two routes; Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel. UBW eventually got it’s own, gorgeous adaption. Two actually. The series is far superior but a lot has to be said about the original film. I don't think, without that initial movie, we'd be sitting here with such a resurgence in the property. As much as I enjoyed the UBW animations, Heaven’s Feel definitely captured my heart. I’m a sucker for a good tragedy and Feel is one of the most tragic stories in the entire Nasuverse. It eventually got a film trilogy and, my oh my, is it a gorgeous watch. Of all things Fate, Feel is the most beautiful by far. Also, i mean, i adore Sakura Matou and Medusa Gorgon. They are my favorite heroine and servant, respectively. Well, servant can be disputed. Medusa was the first i really enjoyed, then came Alter, followed by Nero, Semiramis, and Mordred, but none of that would be possible without the very first Fate/Stay Night. The fact that it was so well received, bore a plethora of spin-offs and alternate tales, all of which are incredible in their own right, is testament to the powerful storytelling therein.

Watching the Fate franchise explode in popularity has been a real joy for me. Seeing all of the individual tales get their own fleshed out narrative is absolutely amazing. Fate/Zero was an outstanding prequel and Fate/Apocrypha turned out to be a pretty spectacular experience. Apocrypha actually carries two of my favorite characters in the entire franchise, Mordred and Semiramis, even if the overall narrative is a little wonky. It’s kind of a muddled mess story-wise, but it’s still a great watch with interesting ideas. Those are two of my favorite tales under the Fate umbrella but i have to say, Fate/EXTRA is, as an entire franchise unto itself, my favorite after the original. EXTELLA, CCC, Link, and Fox Tail all have their charm. Even if they’re all derivatives of the EXTRA tale, they are given their own, unique, twist on the formula.

The EXTRAs are so diverse with how they tell their stories, you can’t help but love them. Plus, Nero. I mean, all of the introduced Servants are dope in their own way, I actually really enjoy Gawain, Elizabeth, Attila, and Charlemagne, but it's definitely Nero. Look, I'm a sucker for a good Saber and Nero is one of the best. She's haughty, gorgeous, hilarious, and an absolute cinnamon roll. Fate/EXTRA Last Encore, the anime adaption of the first EXTRA narrative, goes a long way to endearing our darling Red Saber to the audience, even if it is the most SHAFT animation ever. Fate/Prototype, Fate/Type Redline, Carnival Phantasm, Fate/Requiem, Prisma Illya, Fate/Strange Fake, and Lord El-Meloi II Case Files all take place in the Fate universe. They all deserve their own essay to gush about each of their respective merits. They all enrich the Nasuverse as a whole. They're all incredible stories in their own right. Each has a universe, lavish and diverse, but contribute to the greater narrative, none of which would be possible with out the very first Fate route. The original Fate/Stay Night series will always be my favorite, even if it’s not the gem of the entire franchise anymore. No, that honor definitely belongs to Fate/Grand Order.

Grand Order’s genesis as a gacha game is problematic but, having played it for a few years, you kind of get over that. I hate mobile games and it’s one of the only two i actually play so that’s testament to it’s strength of world building. Indeed, Grand Order is almost all fan service if you know Fate lore. It pulls from every aspect of the Nasuverse and creates it's own, intricate, web of stories. Some are better than others but the few that stand out, do so with extreme prejudice. I can’t speak on the Lostbelts as i haven’t got a chance to play those but the original Singularities all have charm to them. I was partial to the Babylon and Camelot arcs but there is something for everyone in all of the tales. I can't say any of them give Heaven’s Feel a run for it’s money but they are still some of the best stories told in the franchise. More than that, i love the expansive background the Servants get and the seemingly limitless amount you can summon. A lot of the more intimate detail is lost for the all age demographic, but there are little conversations and interactions you can unlock, growing a relationship with the player. It's dope to see and, if you're like me, mad addicting. Hands down, Ritsuka Fujimaru, the player's avatar, is probably the second best protagonist in the entire franchise after f*cking Deadface. Watching a few of these stories getting anime adaptions is pretty cool, too, even if they seem a little convoluted in motion. The way Babylon turned out on TV is a little embarrassing but i have high hopes for Camelot and even Fuyuki was dope to see. I heard rumblings of a Solomon animation and, if true, I can't wait.

I love the Fate franchise. I love how even throw away ideas like Prototype and Apocrypha, can be fleshed out, giving those stories a proper chance to garner a fanbase. I love the intricacies of the world and the laws set to guide them. I love how Fate/Type Redline and Fate/Strange Fake take what we already know, and remix it into something brand new. I love how Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya is basically a Magical Girl anime a la Card Captor Sakura but it still plugs into the Fate universe perfectly. I love how El-Melloi II and Today's MENU for EMIYA family all take place in the aftermath of the Holy Grail War, each looking at completely different aspect of the fallout. I love how all of the principal characters get completely fleshed out, given life and pathos, but allowed to be flawed. I love this entire universe. As a creator myself, i envy the depth of storytelling, the expansive lore being demonstrated, and i use it as a blueprint to create my own worlds. It’s rare a universe can be filled with such complete characters and narratives and I respect what Nasu was able to create. TYPE-MOON has come a long way from it's humble Comiket beginnings and I hope it continues to grow. I hope Fate continues to grow. Also, Mordred is best girl.

#Fate #Fate/Stay Night #Unlimited Blade Works #Heaven's Feel #Fate/Grand Order #Fate/EXTRA #Fate/Zero #Lord El-Melloi II Case Files #Type-MOON #Saber

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more--than--music · 5 years ago

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Albums Of The Decade

Once again, I’m limiting myself to just one sentence about each of these. I have picked 25 albums that I feel were the best of the past decade; I have limited myself to one per artist, and I haven’t ranked them. They appear here in alphabetical order by artist name.

The 1975 – A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

An album for the times if there ever were one, the 1975 here plumb the depths of the millennial consciousness, with awe-inspiring ambition; one can’t help but feel that the 2020s will see them ascend to the stratosphere.

Against All Logic – 2012-2017

What could easily be dismissed as a side-project from Nicholas Jaar, electronic wunderkind and avant-garde darling, 2012-2017 is a gorgeous exploration of house as a genre, replete with flickering samples and breakbeats; you only need listen once, and these tracks will capture you immediately.

Alt-J – This Is All Yours

Each of the 3 albums released by Alt-J this decade could have been here, but I’ve chosen their understated sophomore effort which, despite its ostensible subtleties compared with the rest of their catalogue, is unparalled for moments of sheer beauty; listen to ‘Pusher’ for a perfect example of this kind of subtle beauty.

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

Although perhaps best known for the emotive rock grandeur of Funeral, for me The Suburbs is Win Butler & co. at their narrative height; essentially a concept album, it ties together so many themes of coming of age, Americana, and what it is to be teenage, that it transcends genre; put simply, it makes me nostalgic for a past I never had.

Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Arctic Monkeys had many directions facing them after the worldbeating rock of 2013’s AM; they chose the path less travelled, in the form of sumptuous lounge rock, and found themselves in possession of the most interesting effort in an already distinguished career, and in Alex Turner, a frontman of prodigial talent.

Blood Orange – Negro Swan

Dev Hynes is one of those artists who exists on a different, rarefied creative plane to their contemporaries; Negro Swan demonstrates this with 49 minutes of astoundingly accomplished R&B, interlocked with a narrative addressing race, gender, sexuality and so much more with an admirably light touch.

Drake – Nothing Was The Same

Many may be surprised to see Drake in the company of others on this list, but although I think he has lost his way for several years now, his earlier output is quite masterful in its blend of pop and R&B; I believe Nothing Was The Same is this at its finest, with genuinely masterful production, delivery and direction- ‘Tuscan Leather’ alone is a statement of intent that belied the stratospheric bearing his career was to take.

Father John Misty – Pure Comedy

I’ve been a fan of Father John Misty for a number of years, but Pure Comedy was my introduction to the singer-songwriter, and I was lost for words; the frankly cosmic scale of his ambitions, elevating the inspection of the minutiae of romance he had undergone for 2015’s I Love You Honeybear to examining the entirety of human existence- many other artists would falter, Tillman rises to the task.

Frank Ocean – Blonde

A genuine innovator, an artist of almost no comparison, Frank Ocean released two albums this decade that could beat out most of the competition on this list without breaking a sweat; however, 2016’s Blonde is a truly remarkable feat, an album I could write essays upon essays about, but we don’t have the time, so I will simply say that if you haven’t heard it, what on Earth are you doing, listen!

IDLES – Joy as an Act of Resistance

I can’t quite believe I only discovered IDLES last year, their presence in my life seems like it’s been for decades; a more vital album than Joy you won’t find, bursting with love, loss and beautiful, beautiful rage.

Kanye West – Yeezus

It really wouldn’t be a complete list without at least some Kanye on here; the man revolutionised hip-hop time and again over the course of the decade, and although for many My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is his opus, nothing hits me quite as much as this abrasive LP does, he really rewrote the book here.

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

It feels cruel to limit myself to just one Lamar project, but limit I must; little needs to be said about this album, other than that, for me, it is the absolute peak of hip-hop as a genre thus far, and Kendrick does it better than anyone.

King Krule – The OOZ

Patron saint of cooler-than-thou art kids everywhere, Krule crafts a grimy, grey world here, that nonetheless is populated by brief moments of aching beauty (a notable favourite for me is the slow collapse of Slush Puppy); Archy Marshall does that most captivating thing, creating an album that feels like a world unto itself, quite unlike anything else around.

Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell!

Up until this past summer, a Lana album would’ve made this list, but it would’ve been Ultraviolence, or perhaps Honeymoon; NFR! blew any of her past work clean out of the water with understated ease, a supreme album from a songwriter in her prime.

Leonard Cohen – Thanks For The Dance

It comes as no surprise that Cohen, and this album in particular, should make this list; the man was a master of his craft, and the idea of an album finished after his death by his son, with the help of some of the best musicians working today, was irresistible- and, thank god, it was a beautiful, beautiful record.

Mac DeMarco – This Old Dog

Mac has been a favourite of mine for the best part of the decade, but I can’t help but feel that This Old Dog is him operating at his creative peak- mature, airy songwriting, with real emotional heft.

Metronomy – The English Riviera

Put together a frankly immaculate album of pristine synths and guitar leads, centred on a tranquil concept of the British seaside, all held together by Joe Mount’s Midas touch for pop, and you have on your hands an instant classic.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Skeleton Tree

For many, Ghosteen is the best album of the trio of Nick’s most recent output, but I find Skeleton Tree, in its barren landscape of harsh electronica and shocking grief, the most fascinating project he’s embarked on this decade.

Parquet Courts – Human Performance

An album of some of the most cerebral art-rock around, it reminds me why I fell in love with guitar music to begin with; smart, funny and often moving tracks with real guitar chops and lyrical chutzpah, there’s an overriding feeling that this could be some dusty old 12” found in a record shop, and it’s remarkable to think that it was recorded post-1980 (and that’s a compliment!)

Phoebe Bridgers – Stranger In The Alps

A supremely melancholy record from a singer-songwriter who is spiritual successor to the likes of Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley, Bridgers delivers a set of songs that will make you weep, laugh, and weep again, even without knowledge of the infuriating tale of abuse of power that surrounds this album- an essential listen.

Queens Of The Stone Age – …Like Clockwork

Josh Homme and co. are a band that know their sound, and choose here to refine it and refine it until ‘Desert Rock’ feels like a far too meagre label for the pristine sonics here; the guitars roar when necessary, pianos make an appearance, and Homme remains the platonic ideal of the rock frontman, all too-cool lyrics and Californian drawl, holding the whole affair together with barely a sweat, just masterful.

Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead are getting on a bit, but 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool shows that not only do they still have it (as if anyone was ever in doubt), but they have no issue continuing to explore new depths, seeming to approach their music from yet another angle again; the record is coloured by grief, age and modernity, and yet has moments of flooring beauty (all of Daydreaming, the seemingly underwater piano on Glass Eyes, ridiculously pretty guitar on Present Tense), they’re truly aging well indeed.

Tame Impala – Currents

A slice of psychedelia from one of Australia’s most popular exports, Currents is an album from a man who has already proved himself adept at recreating the sounds of other bands, and now turns his gaze toward creating an entirely new sonic palette- the album feels cohesive, and whole, and a statement of intent from one of the brightest talents in alt-rock working today; but also, in a very real way, it has Let It Happen on it, and so immediately earns its spot on this list.

Thom Yorke – ANIMA

Thom Yorke has already earnt his place in the pantheon of alternative with his work with Radiohead, but it’s been delightful this decade to see him flex his creative muscles a little more with his solo work, exploring avenues slightly less suited to the group, and boy, has he explored, with film soundtracks, collaborations, films; but ultimately, ANIMA feels his most accomplished work, and contains some really workable electronica, and incredibly subtle songwriting too- just listen to Dawn Chorus, it’s beautiful.\

Tyler, The Creator – IGOR

Our last entry, Tyler Okonma has also had quite the decade, going from outsider oddball, through provocateur and now all the way to the vanguard of pop culture, pulling together influences unlike anyone else, and really maturing his sound with his most recent works; IGOR is a prime example of this, with a wholly unique sound, and incredibly introspective and personal songwriting, it tops Tyler’s catalogue for me.

Well, that’s it for the decade then. It’s been a very good one indeed for music, and thank god I didn’t make myself rank these, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Here’s to the 2020s bringing more, as ever, thanks for reading.

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black-poet-boy · 5 years ago

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I always find money.

Money is energy.

At the weekend I found a pound coin in a carpark. I come across copper and silver in my daily living and I make sure to pick them up. In fact, I have a jar in which I deposit them. At the end of the year I discover that I have found more in less.

I learnt many moons ago that finding money is a sign of abundance like a drizzle that becomes a real downpour. Pride doesn't exist in my world. Money is attracted by worthiness, confidence of Self, pure motive and an acceptance that it draws more like itself.

Sometimes, as soon as I release to another, the same or more value is deposited to me immediately or later. This overstanding is a rich one that I hold to always.

I respect the energy of money and better still currency. Value is the mother of all receiving and giving. I always aim to give more value than I get. Gratitude is magnetic. Trust me. It's unfailing in every way.

Every time I find money, I simply say "thank you". It's never too little or too much. It's a sign of abundance.

I welcome money in my life. A lot of it loves me like I love it too. The more I attract money the more floods into my life. This is regardless of appearances.

Fakery never pays.

Truth never fails.

My money vibrates, drawing like unto like.

Yes! Asé.

#blackpoetboy #actsoffaith #ilovemoney #abundance #findingmoney #vibratehigher

#iyanlavanzant #energy #writersofcolour #writerswhoheal #essays

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smokeybrand · 4 years ago

Text

A Tale of Mages and Servants Eternally Retold

I’m on record as being a massive TYPE-MOON fan. I’ve been one for years, since the initial release of Fate/Stay Night way back in 04. The original ero-game was my first flirtation with the company and i fell in love with it almost instantly. The story told, behind all of the boobs and sex scenes, was incredible. It was awash with unique ideas and creative force. The more I played, the more I was endeared to the characters and the world and, ultimately, the entire universe Nasu crafted. Over the years, as i delved deeper into the lore, i realized there was an backbone behind that initial conflict between mages. There were Vampires, Outer Gods, True Magic, Magecraft, Reality Marbles, Noble Phantasms, True Ancestors, Grand heroes, Type-planets, Beasts; This web of stories was vast, intricate, and full of passion. Tsukihime, Lord El-Melloi II Case Files, DDD, Kara No Kyokai, Melty Blood, NOTES; All of them connected, adding to the over mythos and mystique of the Nasuverse. I’m a sucker for narrative and what Nasu birthed force is one of the best but Fate, specifically, holds a special place in my heart.

I absolutely adore Fate/Stay Night. When I heard it was going to be adapted into an anime, I was all over it. I remember watching the show when it originally dropped back in 06. While i enjoyed the hell out of it, i always found my interests falling more toward the other two routes; Unlimited blade works and Heaven’s Feel. UBW eventually got it’s own, gorgeous adaption. Two actually. The series is far superior but a lot has to be said about the original film. I don't think, without that initial movie, we'd be sitting here with such a resurgence in the property. As much as I enjoyed the UBW animations, Heaven’s Feel definitely captured my heart. I’m a sucker for a good tragedy and Feel is one of the most tragic stories in the entire Nasuverse. It eventually got a film trilogy and, my oh my, is it a gorgeous watch. Of all things fate, Feel is the most beautiful by far. Also, i mean, i adore Sakura Matou and Medusa Gorgon. They are my favorite heroine and servant, respectively. Well, servant can be disputed. Medusa was the first i really enjoyed, then came Alter, followed by Nero, Semiramis, and Mordred, but none of that would be possible without the very first Fate/Stay Night. The fact that it was so well received, bore a plethora of spin-offs and alternate tales, all of which are incredible in their own right, is testament to the powerful storytelling therein.

Watching the Fate franchise explode in popularity has been a real joy for me. Seeing all of the individual tales get their own fleshed out narrative is absolutely amazing. Fate/Zero was an amazing prequel and Fate/Apocrypha turned out to be a pretty spectacular experience. Apocrypha actually carries two of my favorite characters in the entire franchise, Mordred and Semiramis, even if the overall narrative is a little wonky. It’s kind of a muddled mess story-wise, but it’s still a great watch with interesting ideas. Those are two of my favorite tales under the Fate umbrella but i have to say, Fate/EXTRA is, as an entire franchise unto itself, my favorite after the original. EXTELLA, CCC, Link, and Fox Tail all have their charm. Even if they are all derivatives of the EXTRA tale, they are given their own, unique, twist on the formula.

They're so diverse with how they tell their story, you can’t help but love it. Plus, Nero. I mean, all of the introduced Servants are dope in their own way, I actually really enjoy Gawain, Elizabeth, Attila, and Charlemagne, but it's definitely Nero. Look, I'm a sucker for a good Saber and Nero is one of the best. She's haughty, gorgeous, hilarious, and an absolute cinnamon roll. Fate/EXTRA Last Encore, the anime adaption of the EXTRA, goes a long way to endearing our darling Red Saber to the audience, even if it is the most SHAFT animation ever. Fate/Prototype, Fate/Type Redline, Carnival Phantasm, Fate/Requiem, Prisma Illya, Fate/Strange Fake, and Lord El-Meloi II Case Files all take place in the Fate universe. They all deserve their own essay, gushing about their merits. They all contribute to the Nasuverse as a whole. They're all incredible stories in their own right. Each has a universe, rich and diverse, but contribute to the greater narrative, none of which would be possible with out the original Fate/Stay night. The original Fate/Stay Night series will always be my favorite, even if it’s not the gem of the entire franchise anymore. No, that honor definitely belongs to Fate/Grand Order.

I love the Fate franchise. I love how even throw away ideas like Prototype and Apocrypha, can be fleshed out, giving those stories a proper chance to garner a fanbase. I love the intricacies of the world and the laws set to guide them. I love how Fate/Type Redline and Fate/Strange Fake take what we already know, and remix it into something brand new. I love how Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya is basically a Magical Girl anime a la Card Captor Sakura but it still plugs into the Fate universe perfectly. I love how El-Melloi II and Today's MENU for EMIYA family all take place in the aftermath of the Holy Grail War, each looking at completely different aspect of the fallout. I love how all of the principal character s are completely fleshed out, given life and pathos, but allowed to be flawed. I love this entire universe. As a creator myself, i envy the depth of storytelling and the expansive lore being demonstrated and use it as a blueprint to create my worlds when i write my stories. It’s rare a universe can be filled with such complete characters and narratives and I respect what Nasu was able to create. TYPE-MOON has come a long way from it's humble Comiket beginnings and I hope it continues to grow. I hope Fate continues to grow.

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