#also re: self deprecating artists i get it and i have to stop myself from doing it too

[sun-marie]

5, 8, 15, 23 for the artist asks! :]

hehe, thank you for the ask!!

5. Anything you haven’t drawn yet but want to?

While attempts have been made, I've never successfully drawn any Shenko art, or Kaidan Alenko art period. And I'd really like to change that, bc Kaidan's ME3 romance emotionally affected more than maybe any other video game romance (probably tied with Rookanis), and yet you'd never even know I liked him if you took a look in my portfolio. Really, I wanna more Mass Effect art in general, but specifically Shenko is on my to-do list 💪🏻

8. What do you like most about your own work?

Ohh 👉🏻👈🏻 Well, part of why I like drawing facial expressions so much is that I do think I can be good at them. And the more comfortable I get drawing backgrounds, the better those backgrounds are looking I think. Also I can't lie, I do love me some warm color pallets 🍂🍁☀️

15. Biggest artist pet peeve?

OOOHH okay this is a big one, but it's when artist put down their own work in their art post. "Here are my dumb scribbles", "The anatomy's all wrong on this but here it is anyway", "I know no one cares about my art but here it is" stop it!!! why shoot yourself in the foot like that before the viewer can even form their own opinion? if you hadn't mentioned the mistakes I probably wouldn't have even noticed them, and I certainly wouldn't have cared about them! in a world where machines can just steal a person's artwork and create endless soulless schlock from it, I think having some basic confidence and pride in yourself as an artist is essential. You're a human who made Art with their own hands!! whether you like it or not doesn't negate it's value and you shouldn't either.

Also, it bugs me when new/amateur artists do it, but it really bothers me when objectively skilled/talented artists do it. New artists don't have that confidence yet because they're just starting out in a new hobby, and when they see experienced artists also self-deprecate about their art it's demoralizing! if your [experienced/skilled/talented artist] years and years of experience still only create something you actively call slop out loud, then why should new people even start?

...anyway, i'll hop off my soapbox now. love is love and art is art, and self love and self confidence is important to keep in mind regarding your art.

23. Do you listen to music or watch shows while you work? If so, what’s your favorite?

I do listen to music :3 Usually I just throw on whatever YouTube mixes up for me (and currently it's quite a lot of the pmd ost <3), but according to YouTube's recap thing for 2024, I apparently listened to Echoes of the Eye from the Outer Wilds (a game i...have not played...) for a total of 1,364 minutes, and I can guarantee a solid 1,200 of those minutes were while I was drawing <3

Artist Ask Game!

[onlydylanobrien]

Dylan O'Brien - NME Magazine Interview

Dylan O’Brien: “I was in this transitional phase – close to a quarter-life crisis”

From YA heartthrob to legitimate leading man – how the 'Maze Runner' star hit his stride after a whirlwind decade

Definitely!” hoots Dylan O’Brien when NME asks if he still has to audition. “I’m not Tom fucking Hanks, bro.” He’s clearly amused by our question, but forgive us for thinking the 29-year-old actor gets cast on reputation alone. A decade into his career, and he’s making an impressive transition from teen TV star and YA franchise hero to charismatic leading man.

New York-born O’Brien cut his teeth on MTV’s hit Teen Wolf series, before landing the lead in the Maze Runner film trilogy based on James Dashner’s hugely popular novels. Leading a band of bright young things that included ex-Skins tearaway Kaya Scodelario, Game Of Thrones’ Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Will Poulter, he honed his craft while racking up nearly a billion dollars at the box office. “My career is a constant acting class,” says O’Brien. “To be able to do the Maze Runner movies simultaneously with Teen Wolf was amazing in terms of getting in reps and working my [acting] muscle.”

Now for the sometimes tricky bit. Many actors struggle with the post-breakout period, but O’Brien is making it look easy so far. This year’s Netflix hit Love and Monsters proved he can carry an old-school family adventure, and new film Flashback (out next week) reveals an appetite for weirder, more cerebral work. He stars as Fred Fitzell, a young man reluctant to buckle down to life as a nine-to-fiver with a boring corporate job and a long-term girlfriend (Mindhunter‘s Hannah Gross). When he runs into a freaky-looking acquaintance from his teenage years, Fred becomes obsessed with finding an old high-school friend he used to drop a mind-bending experimental drug called Mercury with. It’s difficult to say any more without entering spoiler territory, but Flashback is a wild ride underpinned by the idea that we can exist in several realities at once. Even if you follow every plot twist, you might not fully understand the end. “Oh, it’s definitely a headfuck,” O’Brien agrees. “There’s not totally an answer to figure out. There’s a lot of different things that people can take from it.”

Speaking over Zoom from his LA home, O’Brien is bright, thoughtful and really good fun to talk to, especially when he relaxes into the interview, but he clearly knows where his line between public and private lies. When he first read the Flashback script, written by the film’s director Christopher MacBride, his “mind was blown” by just how much he related to Fred. “I felt like I was in this transitional phase of my life that was, you know, sort of close to a quarter-life crisis type thing,” he says. “For whatever reason, it was like me and this script were meant to be. I remember reading it and thinking: ‘I am this guy right now.'”

“There were a lot of things in my personal life that were neglected for a while”

When we ask why O’Brien felt as though he had reached a “transitional phase”, he gives an answer that’s vague but not exactly evasive. For understandable reasons, he doesn’t mention the incredibly traumatic motorcycle accident he sustained while shooting the final Maze Runner film in March 2016. O’Brien suffered severe trauma to the brain and said in 2017 that he underwent extensive facial reconstructive surgery after the accident “broke most of the right side of my face”. Tellingly, he’s never really revealed what happened on set or how it affected him.

Today, O’Brien dances around the details of the accident and other issues he was dealing with at the time, but doesn’t shy away from discussing his inner conflict. “You know, it was a lot of personal things combined with at-a-point-in-my-career things,” he says after a brief pause. He says he’d have been going through some of this stuff anyway, simply because of his age, but it sounds as though success intensified it all. “It was like this whole fucking storm of shit,” he continues. “I was simultaneously so fulfilled and happy about these, like, otherworldly and surreal things that I had experienced in terms of where my career had brought me. I had all this confidence and fulfilment and beautiful people [in my life] – such amazing things to experience at a young age. But at the same time, there were a lot of things in my personal life that were unchecked and sort of neglected for a while.”

O’Brien says that in time, he realised he had to “stop for a second” and “re-explore how I wanted my life to look going forward”. In fairness, you can see why he needed a breather: his career took off while he was still a teenager. After his family moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles County when he was 12, O’Brien contemplated a career as a sports broadcaster – his Twitter bio still bills him as a “no longer suffering Mets fan” – then began posting YouTube videos as moviekidd826. A funny, slickly edited skit titled ‘How to Prepare for the SAT in 45 seconds’, shared when he was just 17, shows he was a born performer and storyteller. YouTube success led to him getting a manager, but his breakthrough role in Teen Wolf still came out of the blue. At the time, he was treading water at a local community college and taking auditions on the side.

Still, he has since taken a rather fatalistic view of this career-making moment. “It’s totally weird because, when I think about it now, I don’t see how it could have happened any other way. I can’t picture myself doing anything else now,” he told Collider in 2011. “It was really sudden and a little random, and not provoked by anything. It was just out of nowhere. It wasn’t my intentional doing.” Today, O’Brien summarises his skyscraper career trajectory succinctly. “I guess I just graduated high school and started acting,” he says. “And then I felt like I was just flying by the seat of my pants and never got a chance to stop.” Thankfully, straight-out-the-blocks Hollywood success hasn’t taken away his sense of perspective. When I say how easy social media makes it to compare yourself unfavourably to others, O’Brien jumps in: “Yeah, that’s very true. I was watching the Billie Eilish doc the other day, and I was like, I’ve done nothing. I’m not an artist at all!”

“No one thought ‘Love and Monsters’ was going to be good!”

O’Brien is also self-deprecating when he talks about being cast in Flashback, suggesting it happened because he had such an intense connection with Fred. “I was honestly like, ‘Who is watching me right now?’ That is the best way I can describe how I was feeling when I came across this script,” he says. “Chris [MacBride, director] and I had this conversation that went so well in terms of [my] understanding this script that I think he’d sent around a lot and [that] very commonly wasn’t understood. I think Chris has even said that the night before shooting, he suddenly had this thought, like, ‘Wait, do I even think he’s a good actor?'”

Though O’Brien has firmly ring-fenced elements of his private life, he’s actually pretty frank about his acting vehicles. He readily admits he was expecting a snobbish response to Love and Monsters, a CGI-heavy hybrid of post-apocalyptic action and romcom that dropped on Netflix in April and topped the streamer’s daily most-watched list. “It means so much that Love and Monsters has gotten the response that it’s gotten,” O’Brien says. “No one thought this movie was going to be good.” His blunt honesty makes me laugh out loud. “No one did though!” he says in response. “And so, fuck that. You know, most of the people who say something to me about the movie, they’re like: ‘I watched Love and Monsters, and it was… good?’ And honestly, that just cracks me up.” For obvious reasons, we hastily decide not to share our response to the film – namely, that it was a whole lot better than expected.

In Love and Monsters, O’Brien plays Joel, a survivor of a so-called “monsterpocalypse” that has bumped humans to the bottom of the food chain. Though he’s known in his colony as a bit of a coward, Joel sets off on a treacherous 80-mile journey to find his high school sweetheart Aimee (Iron Fist‘s Jessica Henwick), which means evading the hungry clutches of various supersize grizzlies including a giant monster-frog hiding in a suburban pond. It’s a simple but pretty out-there premise that wouldn’t work if O’Brien’s performance was even slightly condescending. Instead, his unselfconscious sincerity really sells a film that has as much in common with the family-oriented Robin Williams movie Night at the Museum as darker fare like The Walking Dead.

His obvious affection for the project really comes across during our interview today. “When I read the script, I just thought it was so sweet and funny and smart and unique, but at the same time reminiscent of all these movies that don’t really get made any more,” he says. That’s a fair point: Love and Monsters is neither a fail-safe superhero movie nor a slice of classy Oscar bait. “And when they were talking about how to market this movie, it was so funny hearing all these conversations like, ‘How do we actually get people to watch it?'” he adds. “But that’s a big part of the reason I wanted to do this movie: because it felt like something I missed seeing.”

“I’m lucky to be surrounded by people who want to make something out of love”

So in a way, Love and Monsters was a risk for an actor seeking to establish himself outside of a bankable movie franchise and a hit TV show. O’Brien has only made four films since his final Maze Runner outing in 2018, and insists he hasn’t been tactical with his choices. “I don’t have anyone saying, ‘We need to get you in an Oscar vehicle’, or any of that kind of shit,” he says. “I’m really lucky to be surrounded by people who think like me: that you should do what you’re drawn to, and make something out of love.”

He’s recently finished shooting a mysterious crime thriller called The Outfit in London with Mark Rylance. Directed and co-written by Graham Moore, who won an Oscar for his screenplay to Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, O’Brien calls it “quite possibly one of the most special pieces of writing I’ve ever experienced”. He first read the script on a plane and says he “actually stood up and clapped” when he got to the end. Considering O’Brien probably wasn’t flying Ryanair, this reaction presumably attracted a few baffled glances.

Anyway, it must be pretty intimidating walking onto set with Rylance, a multi-award-winning actor revered by his peers – Al Pacino once said he “speaks Shakespeare as if it was written for him the night before” – but it sounds as though O’Brien took it all in stride. He says he’s confident in his abilities, but admits to having a slight wobble whenever he begins a new project. “I’m always sort of re-questioning everything – like, ‘Can I even act?'” he says. “But I think there’s something very natural about that. I think even Rylance could relate to that feeling. Acting is like starting a new year at school every single time.”

At this point in his career, O’Brien has made peace with the fact that some people will have preconceptions about him based on what he’s known for: Maze Runner and Teen Wolf. “People will put you in a box no matter what,” he says. “There was definitely a time when that would get to me, especially when it felt like somebody had a perspective on me that in my soul, I just felt wasn’t accurate.” Still, there’s no doubt he wants to show us what’s really in his soul with more films like Flashback. “If anything,” he adds bullishly, “it just makes me think: ‘Right, I’m really gonna show them now’.”

‘Flashback’ is out on digital platforms from June 4

[flclarchives]

Amusing Himself to Death, an Akadot.com interview with Kazuya Tsurumaki (director of FLCL and assistant director of Evangelion) from around December 2001. In the article, Tsurumaki explains a few things about Evangelion, his mentality behind FLCL as a whole, and the meaning of the name ‘FLCL’.

Full article text is under the cut, or read the article in its original form [here].

Kazuya Tsurumaki was a relatively little-known animator when Hideki Anno selected him to work as the assistant director on Neon Genesis Evangelion. For the TV series, which became a smash hit in Japan and one of the touchstones of the current surge of interest in anime in the US, Tsuramaki served as the main storyboard artist as well as assistant director, and when Studio Gainax began production on a trio of Evangelion films Tsurumaki got his first directorial assignment.

As he tells the story, Anno came to him after Eva and announced that he was out of ideas and that it was up to Tsurumaki to dream up the next project because, "you are next." Tsurumaki let his imagination run wild, but by the time he had written a script, Anno - despite his declaration that he had no stories left to tell - was already several steps ahead of Tsurumaki and in pre-production for his next series, Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo, leaving Tsurumaki a chance to have complete and unsupervised creative control of his own series FLCL.

FLCL, referred to as "Fooly Cooly" (or "Furikuri" by its American fans), is unlike any anime series to come before it. Wild, maniacally fast-paced physical comedy; exaggerated, exuberant animation alternately pushing towards surrealist- as when mecha exuviate from a bump on young Naota's head - and deconstructionist - as when the animation literally stops and the story is told by a camera bouncing across a page of black and white manga art panels; and obsessively, often irrelevantly, referential to obscure Tokyo-pop bands and anime insider trivia; FLCL was hyperkinetic and disorienting, yet mesmerizing, almost transgressive, and undeniably original. It inspired enthusiastic admiration for Tsurumaki as a creator, even amongst the perhaps 90% of the series' fans who were absolutely baffled by much of it. One is tempted to refer to it as announcing the arrival of full blown post-modernism in animation, or perhaps as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable of the anime industry.

When Tsurumaki visited Baltimore to speak to American fans at the recent Otokon Convention, predictably, many of the questions were along the lines of, "Hi, I really loved FLCL [or Evangelion], but could you please explain this part of it to me?"

Tsurumaki answered all questions genially with a self-deprecating and often mischievous sense of humor. For example:

Why does Haruko hit Naota over the head with her guitar?

Kazuya Tsurumaki: Naota is trying to be a normal adult and she belts him to make him rethink his decision.

Why does Evangelion end violently, and somewhat unhappily?

KT: People are accustomed to sweet, contrived, happy endings. We wanted to broaden the genre, and show people an ugly, unhappy ending.

Why is the character of Shinji portrayed as he is?

KT: Shinji was modeled on director Hideki Anno. Shinji was summoned by his father to ride a robot, Anno was summoned by Gainax to direct an animation. Working on Nadia [Nadia: Secret of the Blue Water, one of Anno and Tsurumaki's earlier projects] he wondered if he still wanted to work like this. He thought that working on Eva could help him to change.

Is there any particular reason why so many Gainax series feature very anxious, unhappy young male protagonists with no parents?

KT: Yes, the directors at Gainax are all basically weak, insecure, bitter, young men. So are many anime fans. Many Japanese families, including my own, have workaholic fathers whose kids never get to see them. That may influence the shows I create.

Could you explain the mecha bursting from Naota's head in FLCL?

KT: I use a giant robot being created from the brain to represent FLCL coming from my brain. The robot ravages the town around him, and the more intensely I worked on FLCL the more I destroyed the peaceful atmosphere of Gainax.

Why doesn't FLCL follow one story?

KT: In the third episode Ninamori was almost a main character, a kid who, like Naota, has to act like an adult.  After episode three her problem was solved so we wrote her out.  She has many fans in Japan and we got plenty of letters about that decision.  For FLCL I wanted to portray the entire history of Gainax, and each episode has symbols of what happened behind the scenes on each of Gainax's shows.   Episode one has many elements of Karekano; episode two, a lot of Evangelion references, etc.

Where does the title FLCL come from?

KT: I got the idea from a CD in a music magazine with the title Fooly-Cooly.  I like the idea of titles that are shortened long English words. Pokémon for "Pocket-Monsters" for instance, and an old J-pop band called Brilliant Green that was known as "Brilly-Grilly."

Is there any reason why the extra scenes added to Eva for the video release were cut in the first place?  Did you think the story would mean something different with them intact?

KT: The scenes that were added to Eva for its video release aren't that important.  We added them as an apology for taking so long to get the video out.  Maybe they'll help people understand things, because the episodes were done under tough deadlines the first time around.

Can you explain the symbolism of the cross in Evangelion?

KT: There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us.   Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious.  None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians.  There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool.  If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice.

After the panel, Mr. Tsurumaki sat down to speak with Akadot.

Do you enjoy confusing people?

KT: I have a twisted sense of humor.  I'm an Omanu Jacku, a contrarian.  [Writer's note- Omanu Jacku is a folk character a bit like Puck, a mischief maker]

What do you see differently now that you're working as a director rather than only as a visual artist?

KT: As an animator I have only the art; as a director story is really big.  I still feel as an animator and I often have trouble putting the needs of the story first.

Did you intend from the start for FLCL to be as bizarre as it wound up?

KT: From the very start I wanted a different flavor.  To achieve this I had to re-train the animators to be as stylized as I wanted them to be because I wasn't drawing it.  I knew that not everyone would get it.  I deliberately selected very obscure J-pop culture and anime sub-culture jokes and references.  Because Eva was so somber I always intended to make FLCL outrageous and wacky.

Why the choice to break out of conventional animation and use manga pages? Was it at all a response to how many anime are using computers to achieve smoother and more realistic visuals?  Were you trying to go the opposite direction?

KT: I like manga, not only to read, but the visuals.  The pen drawings, the frame breakdowns and layouts . . . This is the first time I have used digital animation, and those bouncing manga shots wouldn't have been possible with cel animation.   Personally I'm not interested at all in using computers for realistic animation.  I'm impressed by it sometimes, but I'm interested in using computers to do what was once impossible, not to do smoother versions of what has already been done.  I want to be less realistic.

Has using digital animation techniques changed the way you work, or the way you feel about your work when you see it?  Does it still feel like it's yours if a computer did much of it?

KT: Before I got into digital animation I saw other shows that were using it and I felt that there was no feeling, it was empty.   As an animator, there's a sense of release when you draw a cel.  There's something there.  Working on FLCL, though, I learned that computers can do more, and, most of all, that they allow room for trial and error and revising, more freedom to experiment.  That is why I now feel that cel art cannot win against computers.  For actual animation everything is still drawn on paper.  That work hasn't changed.  It's the other stuff, the touchups, and coloring.  If we didn't use paper, maybe the feeling would change.

Earlier today you said that you were trying to broaden the genre by giving Eva a sad ending.  Does the sameness of much of today's anime bore you?

KT: First of all we didn't use a sad ending to annoy fans.  When they're upset, that really bothers us.  Personally, I think a happy ending is fine, but not if it is achieved too easily.  That's no good.

For all the fans that are confused at all, if you had to define in one sentence what FLCL is about, what would you say?

KT: FLCL is the story of boy meets girl.  For me it is also about how it's ok to feel stupid.  With Evangelion there was this feeling that you had better be smart to understand it, or even just to work on it. With FLCL I want to say that it's okay to feel stupid.

Even though it may be strange to us, do you have in your head a logic behind it?  Are you trying to portray a story that follows the logic of dreams, or is it supposed to make sense symbolically?

KT: I'd like you to think of FLCL as imagination being made physical and tangible, just as it is for me when I take whatever is in my head and draw it.

So what are you working on next?

KT: Right now Gainax has told me that they'll support anything I choose to create, but I'm having trouble coming up with any ideas.

Why is that?

KT: Releasing titles for market, I know I have to make something to please fans, but I'm not a mature enough person to accept that fact.  If I'm not amusing myself I can't do it.  I feel bad that fans have to put up with such behavior from me.  I apologize. 

[adultswim2021]

Ephemera Week (2002)

It’s still ephemera week, and we’re still talking about John K. I said most of my piece on him in the last post, so don’t expect there to go full bore on this one, except I forgot to say he’s animation’s Jerry Lewis. His current stuff is basically Hardly Working. I will not elaborate, because I’m being mean to you0.

MARCH SPECIALS!

In March, Adult Swim advertised a run of one-off specials. A couple of them were already covered because they fell under the parameters of “Adult Swim original production”. They were Welcome to Eltingville (March 3rd) and Saddle Rash (March 24th).

Day in the Life of Ranger Smith | March 10th 2002 - 11:00 PM (Originally aired on Cartoon Network in 1999)

This was one of two specials commissioned by Cartoon Network re-imagining Yogi Bear. The artist what took this assignment was John K, who I REEEAALLY skewered in last night’s post, didn’t I?

This is about Ranger Smith harassing animals and writing them up for violating park rules, basically. It’s short! I remember liking it at the time! Okay, maybe I’m going crazy here, but I distinctly remembered a part at the end where Ranger Smith is in bed and he solemnly confides in the viewer that the noises of wilderness give him nightmares and then it just ends. Did I imagine this? It does end with him in bed, but this doesn’t happen in the version on YouTube (which is from the Adult Swim airing). Huh.

Boo Boo Runs Wild | March 10th 2002 - 11:15PM (Originally aired on Cartoon Network in 1999)

Boo Boo Runs Wild was another one of these stand-alone Yogi Bear John K specials. This one was 30 minutes long. The Ranger Smith short was a brief 7 minutes; I’m guessing they aired a couple Capt. Lingers or something to fill time.

This one is about Boo Boo reverting to his feral nature and causing BIIIIG problems! This special would later go on to be kind of a weird trolling thing Adult Swim would do where they aired it every Sunday for a few months, even promoting regularly. This was like 2006, I think? They’d also air it as part of April Fools. Is that Adult Swim admitting this special sorta sucks? Does it sorta suck? Again, I liked these at the time and REFUSED to actively rewatch these for this write-up. Sorry.

The Jetsons: Father and Son Day/The Best Son | March 10th, 2002 11:45PM (Originally aired on CartoonNetwork.com in 2001) Our John K rock block ends with a pair of Jetsons shorts, Father and Son Day and The Best Son respectively. This is kinda the same deal as his Yogi Bear shorts, but these were exclusive for Cartoon Network’s website. I remember watching them on there. They are as bad as you’d expect late-period John K internet shorts to be, though the second short is a superior version of Spielberg’s A.I. (in that it’s shorter).

Night of the Living Doo | March 17th, 2002 - 11:00PM (originally aired on Cartoon Network, 2001)

Night of the Living Doo originally aired as wraparound segments during a Halloween Scooby Doo marathon on Cartoon Network. It’s kinda like an episode of the Scooby Doo Movies, which shoehorned in a guest star each episode. Suddenly my man Dick Van Dyke be running a carnival and shit. That’s the Scooby Doo Movies. At the end of the night they played all the wraparound segments in one uninterrupted sitting, so the viewer could appreciate it as an actual full-on Scooby Doo episode. Night of the Living Doo functioned both as an extension of that series as well as a parody. The guests were Gary Coleman, David Cross, and the very cool band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. It was all very self-deprecating and had jokes about the absurdity of Scooby Doo tropes. Well trod territory by this point, sure. But this is better than most irreverent Scooby Doo things. It didn’t hurt that I was a HUGE David Cross fan when this aired. Is this where I tell the stupid-ass story about getting mad at a message board guy for not liking David Cross? Sure. Okay, yeah. When this aired on Adult Swim a guy on Kon’s (hi Kon) message board posted something about not finding David Cross funny, shrugging that he didn’t get the hype. He cited this and his appearances in the Men in Black movies, and nothing else as proof for his lackluster comedy skills. It’s kinda like deeming Eddie Murphy as a bad comedian after watching Dr. Doolittle.

The point of this special is that David Cross is a little wooden and stilted, like in the old Scooby Doo Movies episodes. This poster revealed that he never heard David Cross’s stand-up or seen Mr. Show, explaining “I don’t watch puppet shows” A response that still baffles me to this day. Why Mr. Show isn’t a-- WHAT IS HE TALKING ABOUT? I’m not even sure if there was EVER a puppet on Mr. Show*. David wasn’t even a guest on Crank Yankers at this point! SO WHAT THE FUCK? To this day whenever mutual pals from that board get together and watch a movie or show and a puppet appears we make a joke about this guy. Good story? No? Fuck you.

Other stuff about this show: When it originally aired on Cartoon Network it was a little bit longer than the Adult Swim version. There’s a missing scene. I think it’s David trying to play an improv game with a mummy or something. At one point I had it on tape, but I’m not sure I kept it. Sorry.

*sorry to be coy here, but I do know of at least one puppet on Mr. Show, episode 204 there is brief footage of Grass Valley Greg putting on a puppet show for his staff. This CAN’T be the source of the confusion, can it? It’s literally like, 5 seconds.

MAIL BAG

This’ll teach me to skip a day cuz this really piled up. Thanks, guys. I love all the attention. It is my favorite thing.

I never really saw oblongs as something for the hot topic set. They had Invader Zim and Squee for that kind of shit. Oblongs feel like it was always directly targeting me: the shut-in comedy nerd who would appreciate will ferrell and the sklars being in a thing. Since they ended up doing the exact same show with Janeane Garofalo and David Cross a few years later it seems like that was the goal.

Yeah, I guess that also makes sense. There were a few elements that were kinda gothy but this show was mostly just Angus Oblong ahem, clowning around (puckering mouth to stifle laughter like Chris Elliott in Cabin Boy)

What are your thoughts on the other adult animation blocks of the past couple decades? Spike's notriously failed attempt. Animation Domination. Apparently Syfy has had their own going?

Spike was irredeemably bad. People think this shit is easy. Animation Domination is sorta legit, but it’s anchored by mostly crap. That ADHD thing was kinda good and underrated. Is that still going on? I wish I were more diligent about watching/recording that. Some of them bumpers were good. Also, we mustn’t forget MTV’s oddities. They were kinda the first cable network to court Adult Animation as their thing. They deserve some kind of credit for that. I’m sure they’re doing fine.

I'm having a nice big thing of spaghetti for dinner with some chicken parm? Jealous?

I’ve never had those are they good

What does Ephemera mean? Why is this happenening? Why aren't you talking about 10 Home Movies episodes in a row like a good boy.

In dude time, my friend. In dude time

What would be your Adult Swim dream come true?

Having a complete archive of Adult Swim blocks on a harddrive like Don Giller has with his Letterman archive. Even the commercials and shit. I know of a guy who was a regular taper of the entire block from night 1 but I’m not sure he kept up with it when they went nightly. I should ask him if he still has his tapes, huh?

That or they bring back the BUILD YOUR OWN DVD thing but with blu-rays and you can make your own bumps, which was a different thing they had. THEY SHOULD COMBINE THEM. And you can master it in SD if you wanna put 10 hours of stuff on a disk.

All this is archival bullshit dork shit. Real answer: Clay Croker comes back from the dead and every block is hosted by Space Ghost. That’d be it, right?

If anyone has genuine/better answers please write in with them I wanna keep this conversation going. ‘kay?

McDonalds reintroduces limited edition Adult Swim Toys. You can get them all (plus an extra to keep wrapped for collectors purposes) but you have to spend 20 dollars at McDonalds to grab them all. This is the last day of the promotion. You have to personally eat everything you buy but you can take it home. You can only buy one of each food item. What are you getting? I know the longer the mailbag message is the quicker you are inclined to give some glib remark but indulge this one for once.

Oh wow. I’m literally going to take this seriously. I’d roll in as breakfast was ending. Get myself a McChicken Biscuit and a Bacon Egg & Cheese McGriddle, hashbrowns and a Coffee. Gobble that knob on down. Wipe my mouth with a napkin. It’s lunchtime, bitch. Big Mac, Large Fries, BIG ass soda. You feel me, dude? Lemme tally up. Okay, probably need more. 20 piece nugget. Take that home cuz I’m probably gonna have to save some for dinner. That’s probably 20 bucks right there, especially if you go to the McDonalds on Burnside where all the menu items are more expensive because of the amount of security they have to hire (did you know that different McDonalds have different prices even in the same city? I didn’t until very recently). If this somehow doesn’t satisfy my price point I get a Vanilla shake and eat it anally DURING my BIG D squirt sesh, so it’ll spend as little time in my body as possible. Wait, do I get something for this? I might do this tomorrow just cuz. It sounds like a funky thing to do

Do you think you'll open an Adult Swim mueseum at some point? You seem to be the only steward of its history.

Unless I’m hired to by a large corporation, probably not. Also I don’t think I actually have much in the way of merch other than DVDs. I stopped being a DVD completist at some point around Freaknick The Musical. Oh, I never EVER bought a Robot Chicken DVD, EVER. I literally had a nightmare once that one appeared in my collection.

Hey! Please keep us abreast any time you put more of your garbage on eBay. Maybe you can put your wedding dress on there, you big girl.

Fucking sexist/trasphobic behavior.

Check out my eBay auctions I got season 18 of NCIS up there and some other things :)

The Ripping Friends blow chunks. I don't care if a rapist or the opposite of a rapist (a virgin who volunteers, lol) made it. It sucks a high hard one like when Ozzy banged the Cheiftan's Wife in that Black Sabbath TV Funhouse cartoon. Tell me more.

Tell you more?

Name one rap song you tolerate lol. You can't say anything by weird al or marky mark.

I guess I like the song the pest sings from the motion picture The Pest

Are there any good podcasts on adult swim?

The official one hosted by Matt Harrigan is good, but I’ve only bounced around on it. I don’t know if there’s any formal recap ones. I simply don’t know!

HE'S GIVING HIGH HARD ONE TO CHEIFTAN'S WIFE? UH OH!

Buddy, you are BANNED for LIFE from my MAIL BAG! You drive me CRAZY!

[schrijverr]

Behind the Scenes

This is a story that developed from a small peek into my brain whenever I write the stories you read into a thinkpiece about writing and posting fanfiction. 

On AO3.

Ships: none (unless you wanna ship me with my keyboard lol)

Warnings: none, I suppose, but it does get a little down in the end, I was having a rough day when I wrote this, sorry.

~~~~~~~~~~

I sit on my chair before my laptop. I’m curled into myself as my fingers glide over the keyboard and my thoughts flow out of my fingertips onto the screen.

It isn’t all that late, just past midnight, but it’s already dark outside and in order to see the keys properly I have to turn on the lamp I have on my desk. With the light it’s kind of cozy here in my little nook of the world.

I look to the screen and try to make sense of my own words. I don’t have a fully fledged idea yet, but a vague idea that floated through my brain at some point during the day has inspired me enough to open a new document and start typing.

I now know how this story begins and I see where I am going and how it will end, but the question of how I get there sits heavily on my mind.

I stop typing for a moment and think. If I introduce this character now, it might set some other things in motion and that’ll be good for the plot, but I don’t know how to write that character at all and I’m afraid that if I do it wrong, people won’t like me or my story.

I sigh and realize I’ve started almost every new paragraph with the same word. I hate it when I do that. The story starts to feel repetitive and as a non native English speaker I want to prove that I have a bigger vocabulary than that.

How to proceed?

A synonym, maybe? But I’ll have to look that up and I don’t think there is a good synonym for I. Sighing again I scan the page and think. Maybe I could start with a verb to shake things up a bit or a question. No, not a question that would feel out of place here.

Now I’ve written a few paragraphs again, so I could use the word I used before, but since I used it so many times already I want a bit more space between now and the next time I use it. So a synonym it is, I guess, I think as I open my browser to look one up.

…

There is no synonym for I.

Goddammit, I think. Well, it’s no use now anyway. I’ve decided to write this story in the first person, despite knowing I’m horrible at it, and now I have to deal with the fact that I don’t have another word for I.

I start my next paragr- no that’s not right. Backspace, backspace. Moving on to the next- No, not that either. Backspace, backspace. I look at what I’ve written last and wonder why I’ve written something upon which I can’t, hmm, what’s a good word there?

I know I have a good word in Dutch ‘voortborduren’, but when I translate it, it gives me elaborate, which doesn’t fit in the sentence at all. Mentally groaning I recline in my chair as I try to think.

Maybe it’s the sentence itself? Lets see what did I write again? Oh yeah: I look at what I’ve written last and wonder why I’ve written something upon which I can’t- and then I need to find a word. Hm, funny, I don’t know how to go on by the sentence about not knowing how to go on.

‘I look at what I’ve written last and wonder why I’ve written something upon which I can’t’, I whisper it to myself in the hope the right word comes to mind.

First there is nothing, but then! Expand! Not perfect, but it fits, which is good enough for now, maybe when I proof read it a better word will come to me and I can use that.

So, expand. I wonder why I wrote something I can’t expand upon.

Fuck, I’ve spend so much time finding the right word that I have forgotten what I was talking, well writing, about in the first place. Softly swearing under my breath I scroll up and read what came before the sentence with the stupidly hard word to think off.

Ah yeah, it was about the other stupid thing, namely that I am writing this in the first person, which I still cannot do, no that skill has not come to me in the time it took to look up a word. What a pity.

But I have started the last few paragraphs with something other than I from time to time. That at least is something. Wait, should I add punctuation there? That, at least, is something. Looks better, but maybe that is just my love for commas talking. I mean, why write a boring sentence with a dot in the middle, which makes it short and doesn’t give you enough space to play with it, when you can also add unnecessary punctuation, so that you can play with the cadence of how something is read out loud or in someones mind?

Whoops, now that whole paragraph is long, if I want to make this story easy to read I’ll have to make this one shorter. Hmm, is this good? Yeah, probably. Enter.

Now, I’m suddenly wondering, if paragraph is even the right word. In Dutch the word is ‘alinea’ and the word ‘paragraaf’ also means chapter, but not really, only in a school book. It doesn’t really make sense, because you also have a chapter in a schoolbook and that’s divided in paragraphs and each paragraph has ‘alinea’s’

Aaand I’ve distracted myself by thinking about the differences between each language instead of looking up if paragraph is actually the right word and it means what I think it means.

I look it up on Google translate, not the most trustworthy source for sentences, but for lone words it’s alright.

It is the right word, along with indention, but I’m not really familiar with that word, although I can see where it comes from with the paragraphs creating indentions in the text. Still, I decide to stick with paragraphs, cause “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and I live by that.

Looking back to the clock in the corner of my screen I realize that I’ve now been writing this for 40 minutes. It isn’t all that long, but I don’t know where I’m going with this anymore. I had a point when I began and now I’ve forgotten it.

I stretch my arms, by pushing away my chair, leaning forward until my shoulders are at the same height of my desk is. My right shoulder cracks, it has always done that, but the sound snaps me out of my musings and makes me pay more attention to my surroundings.

It is raining outside and I hear people screaming. They sound happy, probably celebrating something and drinking, but I still wondered what they’re doing up so late (ignoring the fact that I am still awake too.)

Right, my word document. I was trying to remember what my point was. No wait, not remember, recall sounds better. I double click remember and replace it with recall: I was trying to recall what my point was.

Although I have found a nice sentences with the best word to describe the action, I still don’t know what comes next. I suddenly begin to doubt myself. Maybe this was a dumb idea. Maybe I’ve read this somewhere before and I am unconsciously copying someone. Maybe I should just delete this and move on to something else.

I mean, come on, who wants to read this? No one. I’m just going to post it, knowing that no one cares and no one will read it. People don’t go to AO3 for original works, you don’t, so why would anyone care about it? It’s going to get five hits tops, with maybe two kudos, three if you’re lucky.

And now I have accidentally switched to a second person perspective, can’t even stay consistent. Maybe if I play it off as an introspection or and internal dialogue no one will notice or think it’s an artistic choice.

Pff, artistic choice. You can hardly call what I’m doing artistic. It’s just fanfiction, a hobby. Yeah, I know that is still good and can be great, even amazing and artfully written, but this isn’t. I have a too direct writing style for that. I’ve only been getting English education for six years and it’ll take so much more practice until I ever reach that level.

I’ve gotten off track completely now. I faintly remember that this started out as a mock internal dialogue of what happens when I write a fanfic, but now it turned into a self deprecating shit parade.

I blink long and hard, trying to get my head back on track and write something better, or at least more consistent.

Realizing that in order to do that I should probably scroll up and read (lets be honest scan) how I started. I don’t have the energy for it, but I force myself to do it with a sigh.

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Ah, yeah, I began with where I was and then that discussion about language and looking things up. Oh, but I’ve also reflected on what I’ve written before, well, before. Then it was about re-finding what I was doing after I had to look up a word and now it is desperately trying to remember what the actual fuck I was doing in an attempt to make something cohesive, but still. I decide to not do that again.

I still don’t know what my point was when I started this, but I’m making a new one up right now. I think I’m going to call the work ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘the thoughts of a writer’, since I have now decided that this is a way to get readers a peek behind the curtains.

As a reader, I can respect people so much for all the work they put into a story. And of course I’m not saying you can’t do that if you don’t write, no, that would be pretentious, but I do have more respect for them than before I started writing all those years ago.

It is really easy to forget that something you read in a few minutes has taken hours to write. This is not even 2k words long right now. I know I can read that in a few minutes, not even blinking and mostly forgetting, before moving on to the next story, but I have been writing almost nonstop for over an hour now.

I am lucky that I can usually keep the words flowing long enough to make some bullshit up that I can reason into a coherent story in the end, but that has taken practice. A lot of practice.

In order to become a good in writing a story you have to do it so many times and you won’t even notice you’ve gotten better until much later. I know this, because I recently went through all my works and made them better. Got all the typos out there, I fixed vague sentences and I made the lay out better. I also cringed a lot.

Well, I think I have to go with a ‘behind the scenes’ now, because I don’t think I can claim this is my internal monologue when I’m writing. Instead this has turned into a think piece about writing and appreciating it or something.

I don’t even know anymore.

I recall I had a point when I started this, probably thought it out and then my brain decided to throw it away and throw up this garbage instead. It is interesting, I suppose, but not at all what I was going for in the beginning.

Oh well, maybe I can fix it when I proof read it, because I am tired and I think I’m going to bed. I have half the mind to just fuck it and throw it on AO3 without glancing over my own words even once. It’s very tempting to leave others to deal with these honest words and pretend they aren’t mine, but I don’t.

However, I don’t think I will edit this that much, because it was nice to get some frustrations on, well not paper, but on screen. Just order my thoughts, you know?

It is hard to stay motivated when it seems that everyone around you is doing so much better than you. It is disheartening and it makes you want to stop.

I don’t.

I can’t.

Writing is what I do, it helps, it’s nice. I love writing and I don’t think I will stop loving it. But one of the reasons I love writing is because it can get the constant thoughts and ideas to stop swirling around in my head.

Today I needed it to stop, so that I could just go to sleep properly and I feel like this helped. It was honest and I feel better now. Tomorrow can come at me and I will face it like I did today. Maybe my last few fics weren’t to everyones taste and that’s okay, they were my taste and I love them and I am proud of them. For me that’s enough.

I would apologize for ranting, I usually do, but since you could stop at any time and leave, I don’t think I’m going to do that, what I am going to do, is thank you.

Thank you for reading this, despite the fact that it is not a fanfic. Thank you for allowing me to just dump all these thoughts on you. And thank you for being here and clicking it, your support, even if it is only an extra number by “hits”, means so incredibly much to me and I cannot put in to words how grateful I am that you are here.

Since it is now 01:18 and if I recall correctly it was 00:02 when I started, I think I am really going to stop now. Goodnight, or good-whatever time a day you’re reading this!

Goodbye :)

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone, by Joe Dunthorne

Is it fiction, is it poetry, is it truth — what are the rules here? Kirsty Dunlop tackles the difficult, yet illustrious art of the poet bio in this review of Joe Dunthorne’s All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone (Rough Trade Editions, 2018).

Whenever I read a poetry anthology - I hope I’m not the only one - I go to the bios at the back before I read the poems…it’s also a really strange thing when you publish a poem…you brag about yourself in a text that is supposed to sound distant and academic but is actually you carefully calculating how you’ll present yourself.

> It’s the middle of a night in 2019 and I’m listening to a podcast recording from Rough Trade Editions’ first birthday party at the London Review Bookshop, and this is Dunthorne’s intro to the reading from his pamphlet All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone (2018). As I lie there in that strange limbo space of my own insomnia, Dunthorne’s side-note to his work feels comfortingly intimate because it rings so true (the kind of thing you might admit to a friend over a drink after a poetry reading rather than in the performative space of the reading itself). Like Joe, and yes surely many others, I am also fascinated by bios - particularly because I find them so awkward to write/it makes me cringe writing my own/this is definitely the kind of thing you overthink late at night. Bios also function as this alternative narrative on the margins of the central creative work and they do tell a story: take any bio out of context and it can be read as a piece of flash fiction. When we are asked to write bios, there is this unspoken expectation that we follow certain rules in our use of language, tone and content. Side note: how weird would it be if we actually spoke about ourselves in this pompous third person perspective irl?! Bios themselves are limbo spaces (another kind of side note!) where there is much left unsaid and often the unsaid and the little that is said reveals a lot. Of course, some bios are also very, very long. Dunthorne’s pamphlet plays with this limbo space as a site of narrative and poetic potential: prior to All The Poems, I had never read a short story actually written through the framework of a list of poet bios. The result is an incredibly funny, honest and playful piece of meta poetic prose that teases out all the subtle aspects of the poet bio-sphere and ever since that first listen, I can’t stop myself re-reading.

> This work is an exciting example of how formal constraints in writing can actually create an exhilarating sense of narrative liberation. I see this really playful, fluid Oulipo quality to the writing, where the process of using the bio as constraint is what makes the rollercoaster reading experience so satisfying as well as revealing a theatrical stage for language to have its fun, where the reality of our own calculated self performance can be teased out bio by bio. The re-reading opens up a new level of comedy each time often at the level of wordplay. I’ll maybe reveal some more of that in a wee bit.

> It’s a winding road that Dunthorne takes us on in his narrative journey where the micro and the macro continually fall inside each other. So perhaps this review will also be quite winding. Here is another entry into the text: we begin reading about the protagonist Adam Lorral from the opening sentence, who we realise fairly quickly is struggling to put together a ground-breaking landmark poetry anthology. His bio crops up repeatedly in varying forms:

‘Adam Lorral, born 1985 is a playwright, translator and the editor-publisher of this anthology.’

‘Adam Lorral is a playwright, translator and the man who, morning after morning, stood barefoot on his front doorstep […]’

‘Adam Lorral is a playwright, translator and someone for whom the date Monday, October 14th, 2017 has enormous meaning. Firstly Adam’s son started smiling.’

The driving circularity of this repetition pushes the narrative onwards, whilst the language is never bogged down: it hopscotches along and we can’t help but join in the game. Amidst a growing list of other characters/poets- that Adam may or may not include in this collection he seems to be pouring/ draining his energy into, with just a little help from his wife’s family money- tension begins to build.  

> Although Adam is overtly the protagonist in the story, to my mind it is, in fact, Adam’s four-week-old son who is the real heroic figure. Of course this baby doesn’t have a bio of his own but he does continually creep into Adam’s (he’s another side note!). He comes off as the only genuine character: there is no performance, no judgement, he just is. Adam is continually amazed by his son’s mental and physical development which is far more impressive than the growth of this questionable anthology. The baby is this god-like figure, continually present during Adam’s struggles, with the seemingly small moments of its development taking on monumental significance. Adam might try to immerse himself fully in this creative work but the reality of his family surroundings will constantly interrupt. This self-deprecating, reflective tone led me to think about how Dunthorne expansively explores the idea of the contemporary poet and artist identity through metanarrative. In Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016), he writes ‘There is embarrassment for the poet – couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?’ In a recent online interview with the poet Will Harris[1], when asked about his own development as a writer, he spoke about how the career trajectory of a poet is a confusing phenomenon and I’ve heard many other poets speak of this too: there are perhaps milestones to pass but they are not rigid or obvious and, of course, they are set apart from the milestones of more ‘adult’, professional pursuits. I think Dunthorne’s short story accurately captures this confusion around artistic, personal and intellectual growth and the navigation of the poetry community, through these minute, telling observations and the rejection of a simplistic narrative linearity. The story doesn’t make any hard or fast judgements: like the character of the baby, the observations just are. Sometimes, it feels like this project could be one of the most important aspects of Adam’s life (it might even make or break it) and we are there with him and at other moments it seems quite irrelevant to the bigger picture, particularly as the bios get more ridiculous. Here, I just have to highlight one of the bios which perfectly evokes this heightened sense of a poet’s importance:

Peter Daniels’ seventh collection The Animatronic Tyrannosaurus of Guadalajara, is forthcoming with Welt Press. He will not let anyone forget that he edited Unpersoned, a prize-winning book of creative transcriptions of immigration interviews obtained by the Freedom of Information Act, even though it was published nearly two decades ago. His poetry has been overlooked for all previous generational anthologies and it is only thanks to the fine-tuned sensibilities of this book’s editor that has he finally become one of the chosen. You would expect him to be grateful.

> Okay…so I said above that there weren’t hard or fast judgements; maybe I should retract that slightly. The text definitely doesn’t feel like a cruel critique of poets generally (its comedy is too clever for that) but, yes, there are a fair few judgements from Adam creeping into those bios. I am so impressed with the way in which Dunthorne is able to expertly navigate Adam’s perspective through all these fragments to create this growing humour, as the character can’t help inserting his own opinions into other poets’ bios. Of course, we are also able to make our own judgements about Adam and his endearing naivety: shout out here to my fave character in the story, Joy Goold (‘exhilaratingly Scottish’) who has submitted the poem, Fake Lake, to the anthology. Hopefully if you’re Scottish, you can appreciate the comedy of this title. Adam Googles her and cannot find any trace of her, which feels perfect…almost too good to be true.

> Dunthorne plays with cliché overtly throughout the text. You could say all the poets in this story are exaggerated clichés but that certainly doesn’t make them boring: it just adds to the knowing intimacy that, yes, feels slightly gossipy (which I can’t help but enjoy). For example, there is the poet who has:

[…] won every major UK poetry prize and long ago dispensed with modesty […] Though he does not need the money he teaches on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His latest collection is Internal Flight (Faber/FSG). He divides his time between London and New York because they are both lovely.

I am leaving out a fair bit of this bio because I don’t want to take away some of the joy of simply reading this text in its entirety but it is one of many tongue-in-cheek observations that feels very accurate and over-the-top at the same time (I feel like everyone in the poetry community knows this person). It is also even more knowing when you consider that Dunthorne actually has published a collection with Faber, O Positive (2019), a totally immersive read that also doesn’t shy away from poking fun at its speaker throughout. I always like seeing the ideas that repeatedly crop up in a writer’s work and explorations of calculation and cliché are at the forefront of this collection. I keep thinking of this line from the poem ‘Workshop Dream’:

We stepped onto the beach. The water made the sound: cliché, cliché, cliché.

Interestingly, there is this hypnotising dream-like quality to O Positive - with shape shifting figures, balloonists, owls-in-law – in contrast to the hyper realism I experienced in the Rough Trade pamphlet. However, like All the Poems, in O Positive, we’re always one step inside the writing, one step outside, watching the poem/short story being written. It’s this continual sensation of being very close to failure and embarrassment/cringe. (I can also draw parallels here between Dunthorne’s exploration of this theme and the poet Colin Herd who speaks so brilliantly about the relation between poetry and embarrassment- see our SPAM interview.) Failure is just inevitable in this narrative set up. It makes the turning point of the narrative- when it arrives- all the funnier:

As Adam typed, he hummed the chorus to the Avril Lavigne song–why d’you have to go and make things so complicated?–and smiled to himself because he was keeping things simple. Avril Lavigne. Adam Lorral. Their names were a bit similar. He was looking for a sign and here one was.

> If it isn’t clear already, this is a story that I could continually quote from but to truly appreciate the work, you should read it in its beautiful slim pamphlet format created by Rough Trade Editions. For me, the presentation of this work is as important as the form: this story would have a different effect and tone if it was nestled inside a short story collection. I think a lot of the most exciting creative writing right now is being published by the innovative small indie presses springing up around the UK. Recently I listened to a great podcast by Influx Press, featuring the writer Isabel Waidner: they spoke about both the value of small presses taking risks with writers and the importance of recognising prose as an experimental field, rightly recognising that experimental work often seems to begin with, or be connected to, the poetry community. Waidner’s observation felt like something I had been waiting to hear…and a change that I had noticed in writing being published in the last few years in the UK. I could mention so many examples alongside the work of Rough Trade Books: Waidners’s We are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019), published by Manchester-based Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Eley William’s brilliant Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017), the many exciting hybrid works put out by Prototype Publishing, to name just a few. There is also a growing interest in multimedia work, for example Visual Editions, who publish texts designed to be read on your phone through their series Editions at Play (Joe Dunthorne did a brilliant digital-born collaborative text with Sam Riviere in 2016, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, I would highly recommend!). But this concept of combining the short story with a pamphlet format, created by Rough Trade Books as part of their Rough Trade Editions’ twelve pamphlet series, feels particularly exciting to me and is a reminder of why I love the expansive possibilities of shorter prose pieces. Through its physical format, we are reminded that this is a prose work you can read like a series of poems without losing the narrative tension that is so central to fiction. The expansiveness of the reading possibilities of Dunthorne’s short story also reminds me of Lydia Davis’s short-short stories. Here’s one I love taken from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Penguin Books, 2009):

They take turns using a word they like

“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman. “It is extraordinary,” says the other.

You could read this as a sound bite, an extract from an article, a writing exercise or a short story, the possibilities go on; there is a space created for the reader and consequently it encourages the unravelling of re-reading (which feels like a very poetic mode to me). Like Davis, Dunthorne’s work also highlights how seemingly simple language can be very powerful and take on many subtle faces and tones. I think short forms are so difficult to get right but when you encounter all the elements of language, tone, pacing, style, space, tension brought together effectively (or calculatingly as Dunthorne might say), it can create this immersive, highly intimate back-and-forth play with the reader.

> All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything to Everyone. The title tells us there is a collection of poems here that are hidden: the central work has disappeared leaving behind the shadowy remains of the editor’s frustration and the marginalia of the bios. We feel the presence of the poems despite not actually reading them. The pamphlet’s blurb states that this: ‘is the story of the epiphanies that come with extreme tiredness; that maybe, just maybe the greatest poetry book of all is one that contains no poems.’ The narrative, as well as making fun of itself, also recognises that poetry exists beyond the containment of the poems themselves: it can be found in the readings, the performances, the politics, the drafts, the difficulties, the funding, the collaboration, the collectivity, the bios.

> A friend of mine recently asked me: Where are all the prose parties?…And what might a prose party look like? We were chatting about how a poetry party sounds much cooler (that’s maybe why there’s more of them). I think prose is often aligned with more conventional literary forms, maybe closed off in a way that poetry is seen to be able to liberate, but I think Dunthorne breaks down these preconceptions and binaries around form and modes of reading in All The Poems. I want to be at whatever prose party he’s throwing.

[1] University of Glasgow’s Creative Conversations, Sophie Collins interviewing Will Harris, Monday 4th May 2020 (via Zoom)

~

Text: Kirsty Dunlop Published: 10/7/20

[strangledeggs]

The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

Who’s comparing this to OK Computer? Who’s calling it “political”? If you want politics, Parquet Courts released a whole concept album about being “woke” earlier this year. No, this album is about one subject over all: Matt Healy. Everything else, all the quoted tweets, the internet “critique”, the so-called “politics” - it’s all just a backdrop, a stage on which Matt Healy can dramatically perform at his Healy-est for us, the audience/internet.

Needless to say, if the title didn’t give it away, there’s a lot of conceptual fuckery going on here. Or is there? Are we to believe that all the open-heartedness of the grandiose production is inviting us to believe that we’re getting some kind of confessional affair here, getting to hear the “real Matt Healy”?

The answer is obviously “no”, or he wouldn’t need all the conceptual smoke-and-mirrors. So that means this album is primarily a formal exercise, one in which Healy performs some version of what he thinks we want to think of him and hopes that we’ll focus on the performance rather than the man behind the curtain. The play’s the thing. It’s actually a bit reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished posthumous novel, “The Pale King,” which I happen to have been in the midst of reading when I decided to take a break to give this album a first listen; both writers employ similar techniques of “decoy” autobiographical details, “false selves” displayed to psych the audience out by luring them into a false sense of familiarity with what they believe to be the artist. Very “meta”.

Except unlike Wallace, Healy has chosen to stage his play in a medium that people actually expect to be enjoyable - pop music, rather than a novel. So the question that’s on all our minds isn’t so much “How clever is it?” as it is “How does it sound?” And the answer to that question is no more easily determinate than the answer to the former.

For one thing, it’s a general truth that a strong singer is often what marks the dividing lines between the territories of “upstart punks” and full-on “pop music” for a band with the 1975’s ambition. But Healy’s not exactly a “strong” singer - he’s got two modes: breathy to the point of intangible, and belting it out in his best Bono impression (which, I’ll add, isn’t nearly as dynamic). He seems to catch on to this himself and piles on the vocal production, auto-tune, choral backups and everything to disguise his weakness.

Or is this part of the “meta-performance”, another “false self” by way of obscured vocals? This kind of thing was annoying enough in “The Pale King”, and it’s not necessarily alleviated by Healy’s tastes in production, which are...intriguing, to put it politely. For one thing, it sounds like he picked up the band from Chance The Rapper’s Donnie Trumpet sessions, particularly on the trumpet-heavy “Sincerity Is Scary”. Everything’s drenched in a sort of “lite”-sounding production, drawing from soft rock, the more bombastic end of new wave and ‘’’the 80s’’’ (as filtered through the 2010s’ increasingly warped understanding of what that means). This could bore quickly, slipping into “easy listening” or “muzak”, except for the fact that Healy’s written some really killer hooks in here; I wish Prince were alive to cover “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)”, which has a Purple Rain-worthy riff, and “Love It If We Made It” makes a convincing bid for song-of-the-year with an excellent chorus interpretable from at least three different angles. “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME” (yeah, I know) manages to make an impression over its artless dancehall-lite groove on its sheer playfulness.

But Healy doesn’t know where to stop, and the album is at least four songs longer than it needs to be. Paradoxically, as the production is stripped away on some of the (ugh) “ballads” and we hear more of the “real” Healy (“Healy Unplugged”), the hooks disappear and the music becomes forgettable; “Be My Mistake”, “Surrounded By Heads And Bodies” and “Mine” are all total wastes. On the other hand, the album’s weirdest experiment, a two-part electronic Burial/Radiohead-impersonation called “How To Draw / Petrichor”, is mostly memorable for its weirdness rather than for any substantial songcraft or sonic flourishes; it was probably Healy’s idea of something to “challenge” listeners, but it ends up more like a chance for them to space out.

Even if we forgive these mis-steps, not everything that works is as successful as the aforementioned earworms. The dramatic closer “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)” (again - I know) veers a little too close to Coldplay for my comfort. Opener “Give Yourself A Try” has some obnoxiously inconsistent phrasing and a riff stolen note-for-note from Joy Division’s “Disorder”, which is again one of those things that’s almost clever, but more annoying the more you think about it. Not to mention cloying lyrics that cast Healy as a “man who’s been there and knows what’s up” in the most self-deprecating postmodern way he’ll later mock in the opening lines of “Sincerity Is Scary”.

About those lyrics: there are spots where they really shine. “Love It If We Made It”’s headline-pastiche is one obvious spot, even if it also comprises a vague nod toward “We Didn’t Start The Fire”. But “I Like America & America Likes Me” also has some of the most genuine-sounding lines on the album in its chorus, begging listeners to “please listen” and “believe in saying something”, even when it doesn’t know what exactly to say itself. Likewise, “It’s Not Living” is an honest account of addiction that manages to tie Healy’s romantic drama into it as well. “I Always Wanna Die Sometimes” has one of my favourite lines on the whole album: “Am I me through geography?”

But it also has the lines “You win you lose, you sing the blues”, and this reminds me of the fact that lines like the ones I was so impressed by comprise maybe only 30% of the album. The other 70% is partly smoke-and-mirrors, but largely worse: it’s just plain filler and cliche. So the real best line on the album goes to “I Couldn’t Be More In Love”, the best ballad on the whole thing, in which Healy temporarily transcends his vocal limitations to deliver an emotionally charged chorus: “What about THESE FEEEEEEEEELINGS I’ve got?” No, that’s not the best line; the best line is in the second verse, when Healy sings “I could’ve been a great line, I could’ve been a sign, / Overstayed my time, say what’s on your mind”, because I’ll be damned if that isn’t the whole album in a nutshell. Until he learns to edit down some of his pretentious impulses and filler-y dreck, I can’t see myself re-visiting this album in full anytime soon.

That being said, it’s the streaming age, albums have never meant less, and I’m not above distilling this unwieldy thing down to a fully-listenable playlist. So skip the intro, skip the ambient electronica, skip the ballads, and maybe leave in that joke-y Her/Radiohead parody in the middle if you still find it funny after a few plays and Give This Tracklist A Try:

1. Give Yourself A Try

2. TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME

3. Love It If We Made It

4. Sincerity Is Scary

5. I Like America & America Likes Me

6. The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme

7. Inside Your Mind

8. It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)

9. I Couldn’t Be More In Love

10. I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5hp63LWKr3Kfkdwvq9pCrw

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Linda Ronstadt on Live Album, Retirement and Modern Country Music – Rolling Stone

“I feel if I were to organize it correctly I would try to sing like a Mexican and think like a German. You know what I mean? I get it mixed up,” Linda Ronstadt joked to Rolling Stone in 1978. The quip was a comical reference to her Mexican-German heritage but also, in retrospect, a reflection of Ronstadt’s many musical influences and interests, along with the self-deprecating humor she has employed throughout more than five decades of music stardom. Born in July 1946 in Tucson, Arizona, where her father, Gilbert, the son of a German-born rancher who served in the Mexican army, ran a hardware store, Ronstadt would join her brother Peter and sister Suzy in a folk trio called the New Union Ramblers in 1963. While she was a senior in high school, Ronstadt signed a recording contract with her siblings, but by 1966, she had taken off for Los Angeles, singing with the Stone Poneys, a trio that also included Tucsonan Bob Kimmel and guitarist Kenny Edwards, who would serve as her longtime guitarist when she embarked on a solo career. With the Stone Poneys, Ronstadt notched her first Top 20 pop hit, “Different Drum,” written by the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith.

In 1979, after a string of Rolling Stone cover stories, sold-out tours, multi-platinum-selling albums and massive crossover hits including the pop Number One “You’re No Good” and country chart-topper “When Will Be Loved,” Ronstadt took a bold step with Mad Love, with half the tracks coming from English rocker Elvis Costello and Mark Goldenberg, guitarist of American power-pop band the Cretones. With its assault of heavy synth and electric guitar on several tracks, the album represented departure-by-design for Ronstadt and in many ways freed her creatively to explore the Nelson Riddle-orchestrated pop standards of What’s New, the traditional Mexican fare from Canciones de Mi Padre and her onstage appearances in The Pirates of Penzance and La Bohème.

Ronstadt, who played her last show in 2009 after experiencing issues with her voice, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2013. Unable to sing at all now, the hopes for anything new from the once-powerful vocalist have been forever dashed. But with the recent discovery of audiotapes from a concert filmed for HBO in April 1980, Rhino Entertainment has released Live in Hollywood. The album documents, for the first time, Ronstadt’s thrilling live show, as she tears through full-throttle versions of Mad Love cuts as well as classic hits like “It’s So Easy,” “Back in the U.S.A.” and a blistering “You’re No Good,” backed by a band that includes ace guitarists Edwards (who died in 2010) and Danny Kortchmar.

In a thoughtful and humor-laced conversation with Rolling Stone, Linda Ronstadt provides a snapshot of her life at home in San Francisco, explains why Mad Love proved a pivotal moment in her professional life, and recalls a particular album that turned out to be a rarity — a record of hers she actually wanted to listen to.

This is your first-ever live album. Why did it take so long? It didn’t take so long; it just never occurred to me to put one out. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to put this one out either, because it was recorded for television, so the sound got mushed a little bit. But, you know, record companies have their own ideas about that. [Laughs]

What do you remember about filming in the TV studio for the concert that this album documents? I just remember it was really, really hot. It was too hot for humans. It was probably 110 degrees on stage. I grew up in the desert, so I know heat. We were suffering from that. We had to keep stopping to cool off. And there was a great audience. The audience didn’t have as much heat, because they didn’t have the lights on them. But they were pretty warm, too. But they were very good-natured. You know, you make the best of it.

You had quite a band on this record. What were some of the memorable things these particular players contributed to your records and live shows? Danny Kortchmar’s solo on “Hurts So Bad” is my favorite electric guitar solo on any of my records ever. Not that I ever listen to that record, but I just remember it being particularly good. He’s a really fine guitar player. Especially when he has some structure to play around. And I had Billy Payne from Little Feat on keyboards, Dan Dugmore, Wendy Waldman. Wendy’s such a good singer. I go on YouTube all the time and just listen to her stuff. She was a true prodigy. When she was 17, she was writing songs like “Waiting for the Rain” and “Mad, Mad Me.” I just thought she was tremendous. She continues to write good songs and hits, too.

“You’re No Good” gets an extended treatment on this record, showcasing the band really well. What do you remember about recording that song? Kenny came up with that bass riff. He’d been playing it some onstage, but it was an amorphous arrangement, so when we went in the studio with Peter [Asher, Ronstadt’s producer and manager at the time], Ed Black, who was the steel player at the time and also played six-string guitar, reinforced the bass riff with the guitar. Then Andrew and Peter got together and put a lot of guitar parts on. I was a part of the beginning, and I was a part of the end but I wasn’t part of the middle. I went out to dinner with my boyfriend. When I came back, they had this amazing guitar solo on it. They spent hours doing it and I was blown away by it. The engineer [Val Garay] accidentally pushed the wrong button and erased it all. [Laughs] We had to go back and re-do it! It took them all night. But they did a great job.

The Heart Like a Wheel album is now considered a classic in the realm of country-rock, but at the time did you see it that way? No! I was just trying to scrape enough songs together to make an album. Artists now make a record every two years. I made a record every nine months, and there was incredible pressure to do that. I mean, I always chose good songs, I think, but the songs didn’t always like me as much. There were a lot of swings and misses in those days, I thought.

What was your mindset during the making of the Mad Love album and then after making it? Did it feel like a turning point? It sort of caused me to turn away. [Laughs] I liked that record… I think. I don’t know, I have not heard that record since I did it. I really was longing to do something different. I wanted to do something where I could use my high voice. I wanted to expand my musical horizons in the worst way. I didn’t want to do album, tour, album, tour… After that record I went to Broadway and sang operetta, I did American standards, Mexican music. It was a long time before I came back to pop music. Before going to those others, I didn’t feel like I really started to sing until 1980. And after 1980, after I did Pirates of Penzance and the standards and the Mexican songs, especially, I could come back to pop music with a lot of confidence, and that’s when I did the record with Aaron Neville.

In making the Trio albums with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, what did you learn from both of them? The thing I’ve always thought about music is that it’s not competitive, it’s cooperative. I thought that was a really good example. We chose the songs because all three of us loved them so much we were afraid we’d get sick if we didn’t record them. Then we’d choose the arrangement by who was going to sing lead, by who sounded best. We’d try it in different configurations — like me on the top sometimes, Emmylou on the bottom sometimes, sometimes I’d sing lead, sometimes not. I liked it best when Emmy sang lead and I sang underneath her, and Dolly came in on top. But we could sing in duets or trios and sound good. That was a really unusual thing for me, to be able to make a record that I actually wanted to listen to [Laughs].

“What they call country music now is what I call Midwest mall-crawler music.”

Did you listen to this live record before it was released? I tried [Laughs]. I don’t like to listen to myself! I think of it as something frozen in time. It was the best we could do at the time. It’s like looking at old pictures of your old life. You know you’re related to it, but you’re a different person now. There’s been so much music since then. But it speaks for itself. I can’t really speak for it because it’s so long ago and I’m a different person now.

Your influence on singers in rock, pop, country and other genres is substantial. What do you think they’re hearing in you and responding to that has influenced them? I have no idea. I would hope that it’s a sense of urgency and a sense of an earnest attempt. But that’s all that I can think of. I don’t listen to modern country music. I don’t care for it particularly. I like old country music, when it still came out of the country. What they call country music now is what I call Midwest mall-crawler music. You go into big-box stores and come out with huge pushcarts of things. It’s not an agrarian form anymore. When it comes out of the country, it’s not farmers or woodsmen, or whatever. It doesn’t make much sense. It’s just suburban music.

What do you do with your days now that you’re retired? I’m mostly horizontal. I don’t like getting vertical very much. My vertical time is marked in seconds. [Laughs] Fortunately, I’m lazy, I love to read, so it suits me. I thought I was going to be doing more sewing and knitting and gardening, but that’s off the menu. But I can see the [Golden Gate] Bridge and the neck of the Bay on the top floor. It’s not a really wide, sweeping beautiful view, but I can see the water, which I like. I like to be able to look out and see if anybody’s sneaking up on me.

In 1978, you told Rolling Stone, “Probably the greatest thing you can aspire to, the highest state of being, is domestic bliss and tranquility…” I still think that!

Considering the challenges you’ve faced, what do you think the secret is to achieving that state? Well, you’ve got to work at it all the time. I think being Martha Stewart would help. I like my house that I live in. It’s small. I’ve really downsized. I like the city that I live in. I like the view. And I like my kids. They come over for Sunday brunch and I look forward to that every Sunday.

This content was originally published here.

[miggy-figgy]

Rossy De Palma Rossy de Palma, born in Palma de Mallorca, was originally a singer and dancer before being discovered by filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar in 1986. He cast her in roles based on her unique appearance which are best described as a Picasso come-to-life. In 1988, Rossy de Palma broke the rules of beauty when she starred in Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and became a model and muse for designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler. Her status as an iconic fashion face was further cemented with her role in Robert Altman’s 1994 satirical fashion film Prêt-à-Porter. Today, she is a theater actress, charity spokesperson for the Ghanian Charity, OrphanAid Africa, and the face of luxury fashion ad campaigns. Some of the roles you’ve played in Almodóvar films include talk show host, drug dealer, a daughter trapped in a small town living with a hysterical mother, a snobby woman from Madrid, and now, in Julieta you play a malicious housekeeper who doesn’t know much of the world outside her own. You’ve been one of the most consistent Chica Almodóvar in the director’s filmography. Why do you think he always comes back to you? Well, not always. Out of 20 movies, I’ve only been in seven. It’s a pleasure to work with him. I mold myself well, and he knows that with me, he can do whatever he wants. I’m devoted to him and that has its advantages because he knows that I’m effective. I’ll give him whatever he wants. Do you remember the first time you met Pedro Almodóvar? Of course. Legend has it that we met in a bar. But, we met during the years of the Movida Madrileña. I had just arrived to the capital from Mallorca with my music group, Peor Imposible and he used to come to our shows. By that time he was already an underground legend. He had just wrapped What Have I Done to Deserve This? and was beginning to work on Matador. He was casting for that film, but I couldn’t make it because I had a concert in Alicante that same day. He was starting to nag me and I decided to play hard to get. I was going to seduce him from afar. He used to come to a bar I was working at, the King Creole and offered me a small role in Law of Desire. He asked me “Would you like to?” and I responded “Yes, yes; I couldn’t make it to the Matador casting” and he replied, “Ok, well, let’s go.”He was very happy with me. He wanted to portray who I was in Law of Desire. I did my own hair and makeup; I didn’t allow wardrobe to touch my look. I wanted to immortalize who I was aesthetically at that time. I played a TV journalist; but since I was dressed as myself, I didn’t feel like an actress. But, then, when he wrote me the part of Antonio Banderas’ snobby girlfriend in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown it was much more fun because that was the first time I worked as an actual actress. Did you work in any other movies between Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown? No. In the beginning of my career I only worked with Pedro because I was also focused on my music project. Later on, I started working in more films, but in Italy. I haven’t really worked much in Spain until recently. In Spain I only worked with Pedro. Did you want to be an actress when you were a young girl? I’ve been an actress from an early age because I acted differently around each person. I noticed that you had to become a different person. I was conscious that you needed to have a different psychology for each person in order to unite each of your complexities. I was also aware of the simulacra of things. I’ve always felt more of an artist than an actress. I like to keep various creative channels open. I would say that poetry was my first love. The Dadaist poets opened up this whole new dimension of thinking that made me aware that there was another world out there waiting for me. I recently worked in a performance called Residencia de Amor that deals with that: how art helps you survive and how therapeutic it is. Think of it as being the ugly ducking and suddenly you leave, and in this new world you are a Disney character. Tapping into that place of my consciousness without knowing that there was another world waiting for me really cheered me up. Then, also, you need to have music, art and all sorts of things that lift you in order to live another kind of reality because real life is tough. Have you always been connected to your voice within? Yes. I’ve always been connected to that spirit that we all have inside. In fact, I’m very rational; but everything I do creatively I do it from my unconsciousness. I like to surprise myself and see things as if they were the first time I saw them. When I have to interpret a character, I don’t like to prepare and study for it. I like to come from stillness. I welcome and work with accidents and errors. It enriches your life. You can’t think that you can control everything. You can’t control anything. No, you can’t. I don’t believe in that vanity that some artists who think they are creators. No. I believe that everything comes from a collective unconsciousness and when we allow ourselves to be receptive we become vehicles for it but we are not the protagonists. We can’t think, “Oh, I’m going to sit down and write a song.” No. That song came to you from the thousands of influences you have. You are a vehicle for art. I don’t believe in painters who are so self-deprecating. I prefer the humility behind being receptors and we are vehicles for creativity. We’re all artists. Julieta is a great film. His female characters continue to be his strongest suit. Yes. Isn’t this music very 90s? (Forever Young plays in the background) My partner says that time does not exist. My daughter tells me, “Mom, you’re so lucky to have lived in the 80s!” Yes, she’s right. No one can take those memories from me; but especially to have survived that decade, because so many didn’t make it. If it wasn’t drugs, it was AIDS and also the road. In those days the roads in Spain were awful; many fellow musicians like Tino Casal died in tragic car accidents. OD’s, AIDS and the road. Madre mía. All pathways. (Both laugh) And how did you make it? I was very mature in the 80s. I was in my 20s. My adolescence was in my 30s. I was serious in my 20s. All of my friends were getting high and I was everyone’s mother. I protected my friends. I was “homeless” but I had a daily planner. Pedro was always mesmerized by this; “look at her, she’s so organized!” Maybe it’s because you’re a Virgo. Yes, I am. Perhaps it’s that. But I had also moved from Mallorca to Madrid. I left behind my teenage brother and he needed me. My mother was hustling through the market in order to save enough money to send me 3000 pesetas [about $20] in a money order each month. It was so little and it was all she could. With that in mind, I knew I wasn’t there to waste time. I had to pave my road and if not, I went back home. I couldn’t distract myself. I was very clear with my intention. I also didn’t like drugs. Only weed. I don’t like drugs that affect my mindset and take me to other realities because the reality that we live in is already rough enough and psychedelic itself to take me somewhere else. I mean, back in the day we tried everything but weed, the relaxing kind. Sativa’s great but I’m more of an Indica girl. I didn’t get hooked to anything because I wanted to work and build. Let’s be realistic there is no money when you are starting out in music; so even when I worked at bars, I was a bad cocktail waitress because I wanted my patrons to stop drinking. They drank, and drank, and drank. I would tell them, “listen buddy, you just had one…” and the bar owners would come and tell me “This is not Alcoholic Anonymous, you’re here to sell drinks. Be cool. Don’t be such a…”  Don’t be so conscious… “Don’t be such a good girl…” I love playing evil characters but in life I’m such a good person. I’m a softy and I’m very sentimental. You know what I mean? That’s my personality. In theatre I like to play the bad girl because I compensate for being so good in real life. How do you channel it? Your character in Julieta is so malicious. You can’t judge a character because if not, you wouldn’t be able to interpret them. In an interview with Almodóvar, they ask him how can he create such evil characters and he says that he humanizes them. He starts living with the characters; what they eat? What kind of music they like? Yes. Yes. You have to humanize. I already told you that I like playing with the subconscious. I am so at ease to work with Pedro. First of all, he re-enacts exactly what he wants. You have to be careful not to copy him nor imitate him too much because if not, then you look like you’re imitating Pedro. You have to take it to your turf. But, he will do what he wants you to do. Down to a T. He’s very precise. He knows what he wants. And then you’re at ease because he’s moving you around and if you slip he will say, “No, no I don’t want you standing there.” He’s also obsessed with the tone of voice. “This word is too low. Higher…; This one went too high, I want it lower…,”  “This one went too low, I want it higher.” Or “You’re dropping your voice.” Obsessed. He has an ear that works for him and it’s impressive what he can do with it. I let go. I surrender to him. Anyone would. You’d be surprised… Some can’t do it because they don’t have the consciousness to process that Almodóvar is directing them. The important thing is to flow. Absolutely flow. You have to be at ease. Almodóvar is directing you. He will be precise. Really, you just got to play… We played a lot with this character because the newcomers, Adriana Ugarte (who plays the younger version of Julieta) and Daniel Grao (who plays Xoan, Julieta’s partner) had never worked with him. Before each take, he’d tell me, “Now, don’t tell them anything but when I scream ACTION! You come in expelling and shouting random things like “You don’t have a bathing suit? Well, I have a pair of old bragas that you could use.” They didn’t know what to do. Dumbfounded, they’d ask, “Is this going in?” They didn’t know what was going on! We had so much fun. Even though there was a seriousness in the character, when we were filming we had a lot of fun.”

What’s the thing you like the most about New York? It’s that thing I was telling you. That the distance between you and yourself is the shortest one. It’s great to know yourself here. No one looks at you. Everybody minds his or her business. There is a connection between you and your inner self that’s very important to know in order to evolve as a person. To get to know yourself and who you are. I almost moved here before I had my kids, moved to Paris and destiny took me somewhere else. But I almost did it with my friend Dorothy who lives here. We almost bought a townhouse. Back then they were so cheap.

Back to Julieta, it is a movie that touches your core. It leaves an emotional well. It’s hard to swallow. Three or four days after seeing it you’re getting flashbacks. It’s the kind of movie that leaves a scar. Sort of an echo… don’t you think? A few days go by and boom, another flash. I left in a state of shock. I had to drive after seeing it and I was so worried to be on the road; because the film left me a bit loopy. I was distraught.

It makes you think. The silence. The secrets. All that is dragged down due to miscommunication. But, it’s a movie that you have to let it breathe. Like in the beginning when you see that red creature and you don’t know what it is just to find out that it’s her breathing through the red nightgown. Everything goes in… smoothly. There’s no need to time stamp “three years earlier” or “two days later”. Everything flows. Time just comes in by itself.

Through her hairstyles. Well, that towel seen is marvelous. Reading that scene in the script was already a gem. I’d think, “what a beautiful transition”. You were excited by reading it. And the ending, which I can’t talk about you’re like “oh my God” A bit shaken. The way he moves the camera. You need to let it breathe…

Everyone somehow, someway sympathizes with Julieta. We’ve all gone through those moments of silence, assuming situations and changing your life in order to carry on. Or people who never speak again. It’s what Pedro would tell us in order to understand where he was coming from. Try to investigate what makes two people stop loving themselves. They stop communicating. They can’t look at themselves in the same way. They begin to have secrets. A black hole comes between them.

They say that it’s because you didn’t give the other what he or she wanted. Who knows? Each relationship is unique. I think the root (of couples separating) is misunderstandings. It’s a chain of consequences of misunderstandings and people take it personally when some things shouldn’t be a certain way. And then each one starts to victimize themselves and they start a competition of who suffers the most. Right?

And they don’t sit down to think. “Wait a minute. My partner is suffering too.” Yep. And then you can’t get close. I am dealing with things in personal life where I cannot tolerate to have my arm twisted any longer. It’s now not a question of “I don’t want to be dominated because I was once a super softy that always ended up forgiving everyone and now I am at a moment in my life where I can’t have relationships that fail me. Know what I’m saying? Even if they are family and people who I’ve loved for years I cannot give them that power any longer. It’s like “enough is enough”. Not even God can fail me now. Anything that drives you forward, yes. Everything that, as the French would say”, baton dans la rue, clipping your wings… I don’t want that.

Even if I adore you; I can’t give you that power. Sometimes if you don’t get to that point it’s like you can’t ever go back but it’s not about that. You need to seal things. Let the other know that you need your space. It’s more of a male to female dominance, patriarchal thing. I’m in another moment of my life. I finally learned to love myself. Just recently, really. To really love myself.

Me too. And now I can’t lose any of this gained momentum. I don’t want anything that fails nor hurts me. And if you have to re-enforce yourself, you do. You put on an emotional corset, tighten that shell and “nobody gonna come in there. No more, darling.” No more. That’s it. It’s a way of loving yourself without stopping to love other people; of course.

Of course. You have to learn to love yourself. Of course. I think you really have to learn to love yourself before you can really experiment love from others and let yourself be loved. If you don’t love yourself the right way, no one will. I’m sorry. It’s the truth.

And especially in an industry like this one. I’ve always been an outsider in every industry. I’m free and willing; I’m everywhere but I’m not anchored anywhere. I like that thing of not belonging. I’m not compromised to any political party. I’m an individualist and an anarchist. I cut it. I eat it. I don’t know… a little bit of freedom… Just having to answer to one person; yourself.

I’m going through a very similar process. You see yourself through what I’ve been going through. How old are you?

Thirty-three. You’re so young, that’s good! Well, look… it’s better to go through it now than when you’re my age. I’ve taken longer. But the important thing is to make it. I may be 52 but I feel like a young girl.

You need to keep your spirit young. Absolutely! Curiosity is fresh and although we’ve all suffered and everything; my innocence is still very fresh.

It’s in your eyes… …of a child. Yes, yes. I can’t stop being a little girl. When we’re children, that’s when we’re more authentic, when we really get to be our genuine selves. You can’t ever lose that. Ok?

It’s so challenging to live in a world that doesn’t want us to be our true selves. They want us like cattle; all the same. That’s why you always have to rebel.

How did you start? I mean, let’s start with my nose… Would you like some? How about a nose and a half! Although, it did help me hide that part of me that was more complex, no one could really see me and they just focused on my aesthetic.

I meant to ask you about that. Talking about my nose is cliché, but we can talk about it if you like. Beauty is so relative. What is really beautiful is nature; flowers… How can there be evil in the world when we have flowers? A thing as beautiful as flowers.  ‡ Published in the February 2017 issue of Iris Covet Book.  Photography by Sophy Holland | Styling by René Garza | Art Direction by Louis Liu 

[her-culture]

A Gay Icon Grows in Brooklyn: King Princess & The Queer Renaissance in Pop Culture

She’s been hailed as “Lesbian Jesus” and for good reason. Born and raised in her father’s recording studio, Mission Sound, in Brooklyn, NY, King Princess (born Mikaela Straus) grew up surrounded by music, and was afforded the opportunity to “f*ck around with instruments and equipment”, to see how the industry operates, and to grow into the rising (see: shooting) star she is today.

She burst onto the scene in spring of 2018 with her debut single “1950”, an affecting love song which the singer-songwriter has described as being inspired by Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt. “I was reading a lot of gay literature,” she explains “and that really stuck with me because it’s just a beautiful story, and I think what I loved about it was it took place in the ‘50s and the way that queer people were allowed to be public was so censored and it was all about body language and this kind of icy interaction because you had to hide yourself So, I was interested in the parallel between the metaphor of “1950” being how queer love looks in public and how it’s very similar to having a very cold relationship.” Oh, and she also wrote the hit song in the shower of her dorm at USC. She recorded the song in two days, and she hasn’t changed it since. “I kind of just held onto it,” she shares, “reassuring myself that it would come out one day.”

On social media and in interviews, King Princess is laid back and blunt, candid and self-deprecating yet utterly confident, the #coolgirl we all want to be. She describes her child self as “such a f***ing loud, obnoxious kid.” Underneath her frank, funny and irreverent exterior,  however, there is a quiet sensitivity; a poetic attunement to the small graces of life, which is given a voice through her music.

In June, she released her “Make My Bed” EP, which features six equally breathtaking tracks. In “Talia” she grapples with the heartbreak that often follows the swell of euphoria which accompanies romantic love, and which imbues the almost divinely sweet track that is “1950.” In “Upper West Side,” she re-imagines a familiar cultural clash and delves into the nuances and contradictions of romantic infatuation; it is a gay, less campy take on Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl.” It is a story about the strained, and perhaps severed, relationship between a girl who lives downtown (maybe in Brooklyn?) and a girl from the Upper West Side, the kind of girl who, according to King Princess, buys herself a diamond chain and then tells her friends it’s fake. “I can’t stop judging everything you do/but I can’t get enough of you,” she sings, acknowledging how our intellectual dissatisfaction with someone’s behavior is often challenged by the far more capricious and unaccountable allegiances of the heart. There is something haunting, delicate and wistful about her voice, at once raspy and yet also angelic, ethereal. Every word seems to carry a weight that far surpasses its ordinary application, leading us to linger on each syllable with her as we are transported to a lighter, dreamier, more beautiful reality.

Perhaps most radical about her music is the manner in which it describes homosexual relations with the same authority with which straight songwriters have been exploring romantic love for, well, ever. This is a bold gesture in a hetero-normative culturethat demands that non-heterosexual relationships be defined by their difference, be boldly asserted as gay with a capital G, leaving little room for the meaningful reflection and oh-so-human messiness which artistic depictions of straight relationships are afforded.

There is arguably a similar trend taking place in film and even literature, in which art does not necessarily pose queerness or homosexuality as something to be appraised or dissected, or as anomalous in some way, but rather as a kind of certainty, as an element of one’s life that is as innate and undemanding of lengthy discussion as one’s name, job, hometown, etc.

Take Princess Cyd - an underrated movie you can watch right now on Netflix- for example. In the 2017 drama, we get to experience a young, female protagonist who seems interested in both boys and girls. Whether or not this is a newfound discovery is not clear, but it ends up not mattering so much; her sexuality is never discussed. Instead, the viewer has the joy of watching a young girl who accepts her sexuality with openness and grace, and able to her and the other characters involved.

In the literary world, we can turn to Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award). This genre-bending masterpiececonsists of eight stories in which homosexual, specifically lesbian, relationships are explored, and presented without exposition or explication.

The last few years have seen the release of a steady stream of this kind of art in which queerness is implicit. This is not to say that it is necessarily subtle or that it is peripheral to the heart of the work, only that it’s presence is one which does not ask to assert itself, it just does. We are perhaps moving into a cultural moment in which it is ok for not all content about queer individuals to explicitly revolve around their oppression. In many ways, the struggles  faced and the history of oppression of LGBTQ+ folks is so woven into the fabric of their experience and sensibility that the inescapable weight of these experiences does not need to be announced so much as felt and, as the adage goes, “the personal is political.” The song “1950” is a prime example. To the average listener, it may just sound like a straightforward love song about a lesbian relationship. However as King Princess shares, it was deeply influenced by the culture of secrecy and fear surrounding homosexual relationships in the 1950s.

The 20-year-old singer has alsocommented on the need for openly gay artists to represent their communities. She accepts the title of “Lesbian Jesus” and reflects that “I am obviously not the perfect representation of anything and neither is anyone else, but I do feel it’s important that we have people who say they are gay because there are gay people who aren’t bi, who aren’t pan, who aren’t just queer, who feel that they need people who are going to just be with women or men in television or film and music and relate to that.…Everybody needs their people.” It’s an interesting assertion, considering it seems to typically be those who fall somewhere in the middle of the Kinsey scale and who maybe less certain about their sexuality who are most underrepresented in media. But the core message is clear: We all deserve (and all of society benefits from) proper representation. I’m transported back to 2013, when Macklemore released “Same Love” and we were all kind of confused as to whether he himself was gay or not. This is not to say that he didn’t have the right to or should not have made the song, only that, perhaps the impact of the song would have been greater if it had come from a gay individual. While songs like “Same Love” are all fine and good, perhaps even necessary, they should not be the be-all and end-all of queer pop.

In just a few months, King Princess has established herself as the Gay Icon we didn’t know we needed, and fans are anxiously awaited her debut album as they replay the the six tracks included on Make My Bed ad nauseum. Now she is kicking off her “Pussy is God” tourand will return to New York this month with a show at Irving Plaza in Manhattan and another at Warsaw in Brooklyn. She’s also performing at a number of upcoming music festivals, including Governor’s Ball and Firefly. Check out her website for her upcoming tour dates: https://kingprincessmusic.com/.

[inwardism]

Inward Outward, Volume 1

1. Something you thought a lot about as a child was...

Myself. Who I was a person and how that person might fit within the world. My friends. My friends in relation to myself, and what they said about me. School. I enjoyed learning in a structured environment, addressing challenges and stretching my wings to find solutions. Books. The tragedy and triumph to be found there, and how they can make an ugly world beautiful anyway. 

2. One thing I’ve always wished for is...

The brilliant a-ha moment of complete self understanding and total comfort within the world that I’ve been born into. lol. 

3. If you received $10,000 and had to spend it on yourself, you would...

Spend half of it hyggeing up my house some more, and the other half on some pursuit of knowledge or self improvement - classes, workshops, etc. 

4. One thing I know I need to work on is...

Being selfish. Allowing myself to be selfish because I feel the emotional toll of every day is all that’s required of me. Each day is not that hard. You are not an island. Pick and choose the prioritization of those things you allow yourself to not do because you don’t want to. 

5. I am most proud that I...

Am intelligent, logical, quick thinking, and attack challenges head on with thirst to find a solution. This is what most makes me feel like I can conquer the world. 

6. In the next year, I really want to...

Know myself better, and put that knowledge to good use by finding a way to hopefully turn it into joy. I am open to the vagueness this statement presents. 

7. If I could ask any one person one thing it would be (       ), and I would ask...

I would ask my future self, hopefully close to death but still close to wisdom, wizened but sweet, what her regrets are, and work on changing them now. I want to find nirvana - not spiritual or drug induced - just perfect peace with myself. 

8. A silver lining in a not so good situation that happened recently is...

Being let go from my job at the real estate agency provided me the time, self deprecation, and irritation required to begin forward movement in my life. A recent upset with Chris about the level of intimacy in our relationship has brought us closer, made us more attentive to the other as a person. I am no stronger to the idea that painful work often reaps beneficial and necessary rewards. 

9. The skill I’ve always wanted to have is...

Writing. Painting. Something artistic that allows me to process what’s going on inside of me in a useful way, or at all. 

10. A sentence that stopped me in my tracks and changed my outlook was...

I am inspired daily by people’s words, but find it difficult to remain inspired enough to have true personal impact. 

11. The ways I’ve grown over the past five years are...

Hopefully I’ve grown more patient, although I don’t know how much this is true. On the whole I’ve grown more comfortable, even though it doesn’t feel like it. With each passing year I think more and more about how I would never want to return to the constant self questioning and anxiety of identity that overwhelmed my youth, even though I might long for other aspects of it. I have grown less stubborn, was well, I think, in regarding personal relationships and past mistakes. I am not proud of wrongs I have committed but I am also not scared of the fact that they are a part of me. 

12. Something I’d like to achieve one day is...

My interactive wedding barn day trip homestead. 

13. The best bit of advice I could give to younger me is...

Chill. It’s the best bit of advice I could give to me at any time of my life so far. 

14. A book that I always re-read is (      ), because...

Harry Potter. Because I believe in heroes, and magic. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, because it feels like true zen.

15. One thing that I’ll never regret is...

Anything really, because it lead me here. 

16. The quality I admire most in others is...

Kindness. Honesty? Kindness. 

17. If I could be a go-to person for anything, it would be...

Cooking. Advice. More likely cooking though, as I can be a bit judgy. Or finding the answer to any question that google can answer. 

18. If I could go to any point in the past or future, I would...

Not. Unless you could travel back to specific periods of time for fun, like a theme park. Even then I’d probably get anxiety about being permanently stuck there. 

19.  The thing that I’m most afraid to tell people is...

I’m lonely. 

20. The thing that I’m most thankful for is...

Probably the life that I was born into, if we’re talking theoretically. I have mostly succeeded in life with no obstacles simply because I was lucky enough to be born white, middle class, and with good parents. 

If we’re talking more literally, Chris. 

21. When people first meet me, I hope they feel...

A general sense of kind affection for me. 

22. Something that I’d love to do today, that I can easily do, is...

This!