#both about love itself and about other topics. his art is very politically charged

[metanarrates]

speaking of the concept of universal themes/emotions: there are emotions that a lot of the population will inevitably experience. things like loss, or joy, or loneliness ARE a really common component of being a person! and it can be comforting to know that your experiences are broadly shared. you are not alone, most likely, in both certain types of suffering and certain types of joy. it's nice to experience that connection to other human beings.

but the second you start calling things universal, you start to veer towards prescriptivism. statements such as "all art is about x" and "all humans experience x" frequently has the unspoken sentiment that "I will not contemplate the absence of x." there are people who do not experience love. there is art that is not made, in a general sense, to explore "the human condition," but rather to explore some other idea. and I suppose you could insist that no, it IS in fact about the human condition, or about love, or whatever, but to do so misses out on both what people have to say and what art has to say. you close yourself off from really vital, interesting perspectives of the world by doing that.

people have interesting things to say outside of your current worldview! and of course art does as well. don't do others the disservice of refusing to engage with it! you won't grow at all that way.

[wainwrightjakobshammerlock]

finally. i decided to do this. anyways hello there, i am jake and today i want to talk about something; you see, if you are in the tf2 fandom, you probably know about heavymedic. Wherther you are a hardcore gamer who resents f2p’s or a person that never played the game but has trillions of notes on their art- you know heavymedic exists and most of all you probably ship it.

And I find that weird. In the few fandoms in my life I have been in I had never seen a single ship be so widely if not shipped, then accepted. Sure, maybe everyone in the GF fandom knows what Billdip is - for better or for worse. Sure, maybe the HS fandom is 70% shipping.

But I have never ever seen such a phenomenon in a prominent multiplayer game fandom. A fandom, sadly, oftentimes filled with toxicity. Overwatch is very similar here - yet ships are either a hot topic of discussion or straight up ignored. But TF2? In here for whatever reason we ship these two mercenaries. And in this essay I will try and find a reason or two why is that.

Apologies for any mistakes or incoherency. English is not my first language, I need to ramble, and my vocabulary is all over the place.

Content warning: mentions of homophobia, blood, death, mentions of WLW fetishization, nsfw mention. Also MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE TF2 COMICS.

Part 1: Canonical Evidence and Interactions

Let’s be honest: I could ramble about this one for days on end. But I’ll try and keep it short.

First and foremost we have the official videos. And of course the first thing that comes to mind is Meet the Medic.

At the very start of the part where Medic himself appears, we see him telling a joke about a particularly gruesome situation to Heavy.

He laughs along with him, visibly enjoying his company. He even smiles as he waits for another joke. Heavy only shows genuine fear a lot later.

And of course this damn scene always cracks me up. Medic slightly pinches Heavy’s cheek and strokes his lip gently (the other part is almost not noticeable unless you play the video at slow speed).

Of course we all know about the Hand Hold that happens somewhere halfway in the vid. I don’t think I have to explain the gayness in that. The fact their hands stay interlocked even after Medic helps Heavy up. The deep breath Medic takes because even he cannot handle the emotions. That few seconds is unresolved sexual tension manifest.

Overall the short shows a strong feeling of trust between these two. Medic confides in Heavy and reverse. Yeah he puts a baboon heart into his friend’s chest cavity but the fact (as proven at the end of the video) that Heavy was the first one to have an Ubercharge implanted into him shows that Medic at the very least considers him a lab rat.

I treat End of the Line as non-canonical, as do many others, and as such won’t discuss it here. But it will forever crack me up that Valve endorsed such levels of homoerotic subtext.

These two have some short moments in other videos, like for example in Invasion Heavy helps Medic up (CINEMATIC PARALLELS) but it’s nothing major so I guess I’ll skip forward.

Second is their interactions ingame. You might call me a weirdo for trying to find stuff in there but holy shit I have things to say and I’m going to say them.

You thought I was going to fanboy over the “i love this doktor” voiceline huh? Well not really. I wish these two had unique lines if they assist one another.

Heavy is literally listed on the official wiki as the “ideal medic buddy” and multiple pages on that exact wiki say some pretty interesting things.

I have to say something about the Gentleman’s Ushanka and/or Pocket Medic. They are both community cosmetics - but the fact they both got accepted by Valve says a lot. Above is text snipped from the actual wiki.

Last but not least: The Comics. Darned comics. The pair of mercenaries has basically no interaction - unless you count issue 6.

Heavy getting absolutely PISSED when Medic is killed by Ch*avy. Their reunion. Medic referring to Heavy by “my friend” in a totally straight way. Kind of sad Valve wasted an opportunity for them to hug. Maybe they knew their comic artist ships them and wanted to avoid having to answer the Question™.

Part 2: Dynamics

This part’s a bit trickier, mostly due to the reason that I’m new to this whole dynamic analysis thing. Yeah I’m good at spotting canonical evidence but very specific shipping dynamics often escape my gaze.

The most obvious one is Big Guy, Little Guy. Quoting the TVTROPES page:

[…] This trope describes a pair of guys who always fight together, are best friends forever, and quite often have a very obvious hierarchy: The little guy is often in charge […] The little guy is usually listed first, since he’s the leader, and they are always listed together, as if they are one entity. In fact, some episodes may center on the fact that they can’t live without each other. […] If this is a case of Brains and Brawn, the Big Guy is usually the Brawn, and the Little Guy the Brains. It’s almost never the other way around, but in some cases the Big Guy can be rather smart too. […]

A sub-type of this, a common favorite here on Tumblr is known as “small chaotic big calm” and hoo boy if that isn’t these two. I don’t really have much to say here - again I am not an expert.

Part 3: Fandom Impact

So you don’t think Red Oktoberfest (as Heavymedic is sometimes called) is super popular on anywhere else than Tumblr? Wrong.

It’s hard to find TF2 fics on Archive of Our Own not tagged with Heavy/Medic. Of course most of them only contain hints to their relationship but go in the main tf2 tag and I can guarantee you, you’ll gonna see “implied heavy/medic” all the time.

But these two go further than AO3 or Tumblr or Instagram or whatever. They are recognized even within the wider circle of the fanbase. Take this SFM, for example. (I am using the Saxxy Awards version of Secret Lives here mostly due to the fact that the Heavymedic moment is much gayer. In the normal version, the dialogue isn’t changed, but they simply hold hands.)

But it gets deeper. (WARNING: THE GAY MOMENT IN THIS ONE IS NSFW. NOT EXPLICITLY SO BUT JUST A HEADS UP TUMBLR PLEASE DO NOT FLAG ME)

And the best part? The comments are extremely positive. You’d expect hoards upon hoards of homophobes screeching but no, the comments are supportive. Even on places such as Reddit or Youtube, comments like “yeah they’re gay and in love” do not get downvoted/disliked to hell; in fact the opposite.

Part 4: Canon Status

Let’s be real. Most ships are shipped because people want to explore the dynamics in fanfic, fanart or something else. But Heavymedic is shipped because… well, I have no idea.

Actually, I kind of do - but only theories. You see, while the canonical evidence is here, the creators have never said anything about them. No confirmation, no disproval, no hinting, nothing.

But the ship is so prominent! There has to be something causing this!- you say. And to that I present you 2 theories on why Heavy/Medic is so popular.

Theory number 1 states that we simply all choose to interpret their interactions as homoerotic. And this is very easy to disprove - there’s simply no way we just collectively agreed on these matters out of nothing. There has to be something bigger.

And theory 2 states that, well, our interpretation is the desired interpretation. But this is even more ridiculous than theory 1 for a number of reasons. If they are in fact gay, why hasn’t Valve made them canon yet?

A Theoretical Scenario

I am going to ramble big time on this one, so buckle up lads. I’ll discuss a theoretical scenario in which, well, if that was not obvious, Valve confirms Heavymedic as canon. Maybe then we will see why they will probably never do so.

TF2 is considered by typical capital G, alt-right Gamers as a “non-political” game. This means no women (in the game itself, at least, and if even, sexy women only), no queer folk and no minorities (for some reason they accept Demoman but throw a fit if someone draws any other merc as not being pearl white). Team Fortress 2 was around before Gamergate and other things like Gamers Rise Up. It’s a classic and Valve is regarded as the good guy to Epic Game’s bad guy. If Valve did anything to confirm doubts, wherther it be clearing up popular fanon or confirming ships, these people would throw hands. (Although they seemed to ignore when one of the writers confirmed Miss Pauling is a lesbian. Huh.) Even those that don’t play TF2 would come to the aid of their bros.

Let me illustrate with two very similar examples. In both cases these confirmations were the first made by the company as a whole, both are fairly recent and both confirm a character as gay.

First we have the confirmation of Tracer from Overwatch as a lesbian. It was done in one of OVW’s comics. Tracer is the FACE of Overwatch as a whole and while most of the fanbase accepted it (thankfully the Gamers are reluctant to infest ow), some people threw what I can only describe as a hissy fit. At least her girlfriend’s a background character.

Second is Neeko from League of Legends. Unlike Tracer she was added a while before it was confirmed she was gay. LOL is much more toxic and filled with Gamers than OW and holy shit people smeared LOL so much.

Of course these are not accurate to Heavy/Medic. In both of the cases I listed it was girls being wlw and we all know how much cisgender heterosexual gamers LOVE yuri porn. Apparently only girls can be gay because they can jack off to it - if it’s two guys then it’s disgusting. Nevertheless I think these are good approximations - in every case the company gets “shat on” on social media and other sites. With the community that Valve has, I think even if they wanted them to be gay, they would never ever confirm it.

Conclusion

I’m sorry for that ending. I had to theorize a bit. Regardless I’d love if you shared this on other sites, reblogged or whatever - I wasted at least 1 and a half hours of my life on it. Feel free to cite this as a source if someone asks you why you ship the big heavy weapons expert and the feral battle medic.

[goliath-de-senfina-sango]

Things get darker right before they get brighter in the end, something three plucky teens are about to learn. Sometimes you just want that darkness to have never had a reason to come for you in the first place. One has to be careful what they wish for, of course.

Welcome to the end, friends

Danny was on the ground, unmoving.

The ghost left with a cheerful wave, saying, “Tata!”  Like he hadn’t just ruined their lives worse than the first time Tucker had heard Danny’s screams at their loudest.  Like it was simply a wonderful day and they had engaged in the most wonderful of conversations, not a fight that ended with one of them-

Danny was in Tucker’s arms, unmoving and pale.

Tucker was trying everything he could think of, removing most of Tucker’s tops and trying to perform every life-saving action he knew off, pressing against his chest, trying to breathe more breath into his lungs, keeping pressure on the bleeding and burnt wound when he saw it.

Danny was in Tucker’s arms, unmoving, pale, and bleeding.

Tucker knew everything was blurry because tears were clouding his vision.  He knew he was crying. He knew he was shaking with the force of his sobs and for once in his life, he couldn’t bring himself to give half a damn about that because Danny-

Danny was in Tucker’s arms, unmoving, pale, bleeding, and his heart wasn’t beating no matter how long Tucker listened for it.

Sam was doing something, pulling out Danny’s weapons, and Tucker wanted to scream at her that she’d done enough with Fenton weapons already.  He wanted to scream and rage at her for what she had done so far with Fenton Tech. He wanted to go to the Fentons and rip them all a new one for making what they made.

Because Danny was dead in Tucker’s arms, and screaming and crying were the only things he could do about it.

But he didn’t scream at Sam, he just watched as she pulled out one of Danny’s paintbrushes and dipped it in the ectoplasm of the cartridge in one of his guns.  She started drawing on Danny’s face, his arms, his chest, and then pulled out another cartridge of charged ectoplasm in another gun and poured it in Danny’s mouth, tilted his head so that he would swallow.  “Chant with me. Chant with me Tucker, we have to fix this!”

Tucker didn’t know any Hebrew, decided he’d learn both because Sam was his friend and because apparently, she could do things that could save their lives with it.  Tucker didn’t need to know what he was saying to say it, and he did say it, over and over again for the next 10 minutes, until the drawings on Danny’s body lit up like fire and every ray of light rushed toward him and everything went dark.  Tucker could hear the song of the universe dimming in his ears and knew nearly for a fact that Danny was sucking the ectoplasmic energy into him along with every other flavor of power within blocks of him. Tucker would let the sun itself go black just to hear Danny’s laugh again.

The darkness faded, Danny’s body was outlined in light, the markings were gone, and Danny groaned.  His chest rose and dropped, his heart was beating, color was coming back to his skin, he was as warm as he’d been since the accident.  Danny was alive in Tucker’s arms, and Tucker wanted to cry even harder than he already had. Instead, the put Danny’s binder back on him, Sam grabbed his shirt and jacket, and Tucker carried Danny out to their hoverboards.  They flew to Sam’s house, Tucker staying as high and close to the sun as he could to let Danny soak in all the light he needed. When they got to Sam’s house, Tucker didn’t let Danny go until he was being set on a love seat on Sam’s balcony.

There were, of course, jokes to be made about the way Danny curled up in the fleeting October sunlight and how his fluffball curls and height combined with this to make him much like a kitten.  Jokes about him being a cross between Superman and the Martian Manhunter could’ve also been made. Danny was a white-haired anime boy, that could be remarked upon with laughs aplenty. Tucker made no such jokes.

Tucker put to use the information he’d gathered at his last LARPing session at furrycon after a shank attempt by a guy who’d wandered into the park where he’d been LARPing at that took their cosplay a bit too seriously.  That being that leather was wonderful armor, silk blocked stabs fantastically when a blade slid through said leather, and that one should always wear cotton under silk anything because sweating to death after a fight near to death wasn’t fun.  He’d smacked a crazy guy upside the head and gotten a useful lesson out of that. Tucker’s older cousin could supply the leather, Sam could order fine silk jackets and pants for all of them, Danny had cotton shirts already, and Sidney offered to use intangibility to fuse the two together.  Tucker commented that the leather would look fitting on Sam since she was more of a punk anyway. She called him a furry, he called her a weeb, and they both explained the concepts to Sydney.

That was all fine and dandy against most blunt force, stabbing and slashing that even a ghost could probably do, but against ghosts and their intangibility, there were few places to go.  Sam had her magick book but Tucker didn’t want to touch on anything supernatural for a while and unless she could prove that her wards were working, he wouldn’t exactly trust Danny’s life with them.  Convincing Jack Fenton that he needed some easily worn and hidden accessory to prevent possession was almost sadly easy, the only condition being that Tucker had to wear one of those horrible looking hazmat suits.  Tucker let it hang in his closet, as he had no intention of matching Jack Fenton’s fashion sense.

One might feel that Tucerk and his friends were being a bit excessive in their measures to keep Danny padded up against the world, but such an individual hadn’t seen their best friend since age 1 die in front of them by the same person’s hand twice so that particular person could kindly go shove their opinion where the sun don’t shine in Tucker’s very polite opinion.

Danny himself was groggy for most of his recovery time and had clearly caught on that they were being extra protective of him.  While Sam was introducing Sidney to anime and videogames and Tucker was showing him the best comics and music, Danny always had whoever wasn’t with the others within arm’s reach.  He was jumpy when it came to his ghost sense telling him that Sidney was there, had his hood up whenever they were outside, and even though they’d been near forcing Agatha’s cooking down his throat at every meal they could, Danny had yet to Go Ghost.  Sam brought up the idea of taking down the shapeshifter and Danny balked at the topic, bringing up the frogs, the latest anime that she had shown Sidney or really anything else when she did this. Tucker was more than fine with this since no ghost mode meant no seeking out danger which meant that the only fights they were dealing with included Dash, Kwan and Dale making fun of them for being a furry, a weeb and a Fenton.  Seeing Sam put her martial arts to use when Dash tried to stuff Danny in a locker was worth the detention he got for tripping Dale as he rushed in to help. He spent it with Sam anyway so that was fine. If wanting Danny safer than Amity was selfish then Tucker was as far from selfless as possible.

“Hey, Danny,” Tucker said while he worked on finishing up the Spector Deflector that Dr. Fenton had started for him in Danny’s workshop.  “There’s a swap meet coming up in Harrison Park this Saturday. Wanna come with? I’m gonna get a set of dice if I can and see if I can show Sidney DnD.  Maybe we all can play even.” He grinned. “We can get you a new bowling ball so you can destroy Sam in bowling.”

“Bro, you’ll be wrecked with her,’ Danny challenged from where he drew in his art book instead of doing his homework.  Tucker was procrastinating by making ghost hunting tech, he couldn’t blame Danny. “That sounds cool.”

“Awesome.”  Tucker set down his tools and pulled up his safety goggles.  “Can you come over and poke this? Very lightly and just a little in case I’m as done as I think I am.”  Danny obliged and there was a loud SNAP accompanied by a yelp and Tucker patted Danny’s shoulder.  “Looks like I’m done with the internals. Now all I gotta do is adjust it so that it can ignore your ectosignature, and Sidney’s and Agatha’s, and it’ll really be done.”

“Done for your armor idea, right?”  Danny scoffed, slugging Tucker in the shoulder while he looked for the blueprint he’d downloaded of the part that’d track ectosignatures in the Fenton Finder.  “Sidney told me about it while we were watching Star Wars. Or should I call it his guard duty shift? Cause I know what you guys are doing and while I appreciate your concern over my safety, I’m the one with powers here.”

“20 hours straight of unconsciousness and tears say that superpowers don’t mean you don’t need protection against people with the same superpowers.”  Tucker huffed. “If we’d been wearing some armor like we’re making then that fish thing probably wouldn’t have been able to bite through me like it did.  Silk and piercing ya know.” He bumped shoulders with Danny when he went quiet and forced his lips up into a smile. “And besides, your parents have literally no fashion sense.  A leather jacket lined with silk? Leather pants, probably with studs in it since Sam is involved? Dude, that’s cool as fuck looking. You’ll be the best-dressed ghost out there.”  Danny laughed and shook his head. Tucker got to work setting up the design for the Fenton Fabricator™ to make for the Spector Deflector. He also considered asking for a cut of the royalties when the belt inevitably became a Fenton Brand item, since he’d finished it.  “You think putting on clothes in ghost form will invert their colors like your suit?”

“Fuck you, Tuck, now I have to find out.”  Danny huffed and Tucker snickered. For a moment everything was quiet, and then arms were wrapping around his middle.  “Thanks, Tuck. For everything.” Tucker looped an arm around Danny and smushed him against his side.

“That’s what bros are for, man.”  The room was a comfortable quiet after that.  The Fabricator and the generator were humming softly at the edge of Tucker’s once again human limited hearing, the only other sound was their breathing and - Tucker could swear - their heartbeats.  The air was charged with something more than ectoplasm and electricity and Tucker wasn’t sure if Danny knew that as well, but he knew that he could hardly know anything else right then. So naturally, Tucker lowered his hand at Danny’s side and started tickling him.  Danny squeaked, squealed out some giggles, and phased out of his grip when wriggling didn’t work.

“You dick!  Get over here!”

Danny appreciated the effort Sam, Tucker and Sidney were putting in for him, he really honestly did.  Sidney still went to his therapy session with Jazz which Danny could tell were helping him by how bright his aura had gotten, and between him and Jazz at school there were at least a few bright auras to go around, but with how things were going, Danny felt at least a bit suffocated.

Half the auras at school - both student and teacher - were dim enough that Danny almost couldn’t see them.  Dash and company had been especially vicious as of late, calling them every name under the sun and getting into actual fights with him, Tucker and Sam.  Between the three of them they managed well enough - being dragged to martial arts lessons with Sam and fighting eldritch abominations from the afterlife did things for your confidence in facing up to bullies - but it hadn’t ever been this bad before.  And while Tucker and Sam both were clearly brighter than everyone else emotionally, they were skirting around things in the most unsubtle way imaginable and Danny wondered how they kept anything hidden. Sam tried to get him into ghost form to see how fast he could fly, Tucker changed the topic from anything ghostly to something nerdy and Sidney seemed to stare at him as much as he did the movies they were watching.  Sure, Sidney was keeping his eyes on the screen but Danny knew ghosts could see more than just with their eyes and the feeling of being constantly watched was getting more than unnerving.

Saturday was a breath of fresh air.  Sam was maybe coming down with something and Sidney was off exploring the city on his own, so it was just Danny and Tucker buying the stuff they’d come for and laughing their heads off at their dumb jokes.  It was sunny, the crowd was bright with positivity abound, and he was having fun with his best friend in the world. It was nice.

Of course, a ghost attack ruined it.

Cotton candy erupted and flooded the place, and Danny slid under a table while the crowds stampeded away, yanking Tucker under as well.  He reached inside, past the void of darkness into the soft and splintered light at his center. It exploded out to the surface and in a flash of silver glass, shimmering shadows wove his hazmat suit around him and unraveled gravity’s hold on his body.  He shuddered, glitching out of reality - or what he was so very hopeful and sure was reality anyway - and gave Tucker a smile. “Wish me luck.” He slid down into the ground and forward, rising out of a mound of cotton candy as big as himself. There was a woman with long black hair, dark green skin, and blue scarce clothing floating over the sweets and stretching her arms.  “I understand a sweet tooth and all that, but this is a bit dangerously Much.” Danny held out a hand with a smile when a sneer was turned his way. “I’m Danny Phantom, hopefully nice to meet you.”

“ I am Desiree,” she said in some accented blend of every language that Danny knew.  It was headache-inducing and he definitely didn’t like it. “ This confection explosion was hardly my intention boy, I am cursed to use my power to grant the wishes of all those who make them. ”

“What, like a jinni?  If I find and rub your lamp and say ‘I wish I had a dick’ do you complete my tra-”

“ So you have wished it, so shall it be. ”  Her hands went up, green smoke curled around him, through him, within him, caressed that inner light and warmth that was his human body, and Danny shuddered in the wake of power well beyond his ability to fully process.  Before the smoke even cleared, Danny could hear Desiree speaking through gritted teeth. “ Yes, boy I am a Jinni.  One of your kind cursed me, both to be trapped in that infernal bottle, but also to use my power for all who catch my ear. ”

Danny was reeling when the smoke cleared, giving himself a mental review of what he could feel on himself and gawked when he realized what had happened.  “Um. Wow.” Desiree was clearly unimpressed. “Uh, well, I know a way I can he-” a ball of ectoplasma, charged up with energy, raced into Desiree’s gut and knocked her back and Danny really wished that people would stop interrupting him.

“Stay away from him, damn it!  Can’t we have one nice day?” Tucker readied another shot and Danny waved his arms to tell him not to.  “I wish I had stopped you from going into that stupid fucking portal! Then we wouldn’t be in this mess!”  crud.

“ So you have wished it, so shall it be. ”  FUCK .  Green mist filled Danny’s vision, and everything went dark.

[notbang]

that cat’s something i can’t explain

read on ao3

1.

“Rebecca,” Nathaniel says in surprise when he spots his girlfriend weaving through the Mountaintop lobby, flour-dusted apron and all, making a very determined beeline in his general direction. “What’s going on?”

As soon as he says the words, he expects her haughtiness—an affronted why can’t a humble pretzel maker visit her lawyer lover on the top floor, perhaps, or something equally colourful. The closer she gets, though, he can see she’s vibrating with something other than deliberately cloying indignation.

“What’s going on,” she says emphatically, dropping her phone on the front desk with enough force that its momentum slides it towards him, “is that if I had to be subjected to this monstrosity, then so you do you.”

He stops the phone before it can ricochet off the edge of the counter, eyebrows raised as he unlocks the screen.

“Now that we know a love of the theatrical arts is something which we both share—”

“Wouldn’t say ‘love’,” Nathaniel interjects.

“—we can have these very important cultural discussions together.”

He makes it approximately twenty seconds into the video before he turns it off.

This isn’t the first time he’s found himself completely miffed by one of Rebecca’s outbursts, but even in his bemusement it’d be disingenuous of him to paint it as one of her qualities he considers skewed towards the negative. There’s always been something so captivating in the way her feelings tend to command the entirety of her tiny frame, expressing endlessly outwards, always making her seem so much more than what she is.

Still, he’s at a loss for what to offer her in return for her obvious discontent, and he settles for stating the obvious, well aware she’ll hand him precisely the response she was looking for soon enough.

“Don’t see it?” he offers, tone tentative and polite.

Predictably, she scoffs at him, jabbing two accusing pointer fingers in his direction. “Ha. Don’t see it. I wasn’t planning on it, was I? But then they had to go and make it terrible, which is how they reel you in! And not just plain old terrible, either—it’s, like, the uncanny valley, haunt-your-dreams kind of terrible that cancels out how terrible the source material already is, because that’s how negative integers work, for some reason, and now it’s like this… furry train wreck I can’t look away from,” she finishes, gesticulating wildly and scrunching up her hands into frustrated little cat claws.

“Did Nathaniel finally admit he’s a furry?” Maya whispers with conspiratorial glee, popping up unannounced on Rebecca’s immediate left.

“Ugh, Maya, go away,” she groans.

“You don’t work here anymore—you can’t just boss people around,” Nathaniel says, before straightening his shoulders and adding pointedly, “Maya, go away. Please.”

Rebecca raises her eyebrows as the office assistant pushes her glasses up her nose, pouts and scampers away. She leans across the desk to give him a blatant up-and-down. “Wow, look at you—dolling out pleases like you’re Oprah or something. So cordial, yet commanding. It’s kind of sexy, in a Miss Manners kind of way.”

“Don’t you have a storefront you should be manning?”

“I’d be able to hear the fire alarm from here,” she defends, then pushes up on her tip-toes to plant a kiss on his right cheek. Nathaniel pauses in his photocopying, ears pinking, then reciprocates with a brief press of his open palm to the small of her back.

He clears his throat. “I’ll see you at lunch,” he calls after her, but he’s certain she doesn’t hear him, already having summoned Maya back, strangely intent on correcting her opinions on something involving, if he’s heard correctly, Taylor Swift.

2.

When he makes his way down the hall back to her bedroom, still towelling his hair, there’s a message notification waiting on his phone from Rebecca.

“What is this?” he asks, waving his screen at her.

She doesn’t even glance up from the novel she’s reading, a stray lock of her hair looping around her finger in an absent spiral. He watches the movement for a moment, transfixed, until she disengages the curl to flick the page over and finally responds. “It’s Hermione after she messes up her Polyjuice potion in Chamber of Secrets. Obviously.”

“Okay.” Then, after a beat, “Why am I looking at it?”

“Because Paula doesn’t understand musicals or Harry Potter or memes, so it had to go to you by default.”

“Do you understand memes?”

“Plus,” she says, ignoring him, “you’re, like, romantically obligated to find every message I send you entertaining.”

He plugs his phone into charge before joining her on the bed, shuffling as high up on the pillows as he can manage to keep his toes from skimming the end of the mattress when he stretches out. It’s not entirely successful, but if he bends at the knees a little and curls on his side, he knows from past experience he can make it work.

“Am I, just. Even the ones composed entirely of emojis?”

She grins. “Especially the ones composed entirely of emojis.”

Rebecca ditches her paperback in favour of wriggling into his warmth, murmuring her contentment when he slips an arm around her waist to draw her close and drop a chaste kiss onto the crown of her head. Her hair’s still damp and smells vaguely floral, like her shampoo, and he lets his lips linger there, breathing her in.

His phone vibrates twice on the nightstand.

When pulls back to peer down his nose at her, she’s not-so-subtle in her attempt to conceal what she’s cradling innocently between their chests. He sighs, feigning exasperation. “You just sent me a cat emoji, didn’t you?”

“I absolutely did not,” she says solemnly, then, dissolving into laughter under his scrutiny, confesses, “It was more like five. And I think maybe a llama by mistake?”

3.

“It’s like they didn’t even try,” Rebecca announces loudly in the vicinity of Nathaniel’s ear, rudely jerking him back from the precipice of sleep.

“Oh good,” he sighs, blinking his eyebrows higher up his forehead in the darkness. “This again.”

He grunts out his disapproval as the bedside lamp clicks back on, casting half the apartment in dramatic shadow as it burns his retinas with its unexpected blinding light.

“And I’m just saying,” Rebecca continues, oblivious or in the very least unconcerned with his state of obvious discomfort, apparently immune to any such adjustment period of her own, “did anyone consult TS Eliot before reinventing his heartfelt poetry as a vaginal yeast infection in musical form?”

Nathaniel’s nose wrinkles to match the pre-existing scrunch of his face. “What?”

“Never mind, it was a whole a thing. My point is, no film is an island unto itself. People signed off on this. Multiple people looked at those designs and said, you know what’s gonna add a layer of appeal to a musical that already has no plot? Stripping it of its one redeeming feature—AKA the crazy 80s hair—and replacing it with horrifying, humanoid heads that somehow manage to look furry and bald at the same time.”

Even if Nathaniel felt remotely qualified to comment on the topic—which, for the record, oddly flattered though he is at Rebecca’s pervasive belief that he might be, he decidedly is not—it’s late, it’s a weeknight, and he really just wants to sleep.

“If you hate it so much, rewrite it,” he says before pointedly rolling away from her with a yawn and yanking the covers up over his shoulders.

She follows him, flicking him hard in the back of the neck where his nape’s still exposed above the blanket. “Not cute, dude. You don’t get points for that one anymore. And you can’t ‘rewrite’ CGI. Even if you could, a thousand rewrites isn’t gonna change the eyesore that I—nay, humankind—have been subjected to.”

Nathaniel buries his face in the pillow and groans something that resembles her name before it gets jumbled in its muffled pass through the cotton.

“Rebecca,” he says once he’s resurfaced, trying again, tone still undeniably clipped as he scrubs a palm across his face. “I have a deposition first thing tomorrow. Do we really need to have this conversation now?”

She wilts visibly, chagrined, eyes flicking to the clock at his bedside that may as well have ABSURDLY LATE splashed across its interface in red LEDs. “Sorry,” she says meekly, officially rebuked, sinking back into the sheets and switching off the lamp.

The room is blissfully silent save for the collective electronic hum of his appliances, but despite the stillness, Nathaniel finds himself unable to drift back off. Without opening his eyes he pats around beside him until his fingers connect with the phone he’d known with every fibre of his being she was still holding, confiscating and discarding on his nightstand, out of reach.

“Go to sleep,” he admonishes.

“I was just—”

“Sleep,” he repeats, voice gruff with exhaustion, enfolding her firmly in his arms as a preventative measure, practically able to hear her calculating the device’s retrieval in the dark.

4.

“What are we dealing with, here? Minor song lyric alteration? Beloved song exclusion? Reinforced misogyny? Racially insensitive miscast?”

Nathaniel startles at the sound of the door opening, Paula spilling into Rebecca’s house like she lives there and depositing her bags in the entryway with a dramatic thud.

Rebecca, by comparison, is unperturbed by the intrusion, swivelling on a breakfast stool to look at her friend and shake her head. “We’re not talking misdemeanours here, Paula. We’re talking big league. Like, DEFCON-5.”

“Oh,” Paula says. She clucks in feigned sympathy and shoots a knowing glance in Nathaniel’s direction. “This is about the singing cats, huh.”

Even focused as he is on rinsing out her blender, he doesn’t miss the way Rebecca shrinks guiltily away from him in his periphery.

“Did you call an early morning emergency meeting of your girl mob to discuss a movie trailer you didn’t like?” he asks, careful to keep his tone light.

“It’s gurl group, but you know that, and no—Valencia is in town for her sister’s birthday and Heather’s working at this Home Base today and Paula’s new job means she has to like, actually do work now, so breakfast is the only time all of us were free.”

As if on cue, Heather and Valencia sidle through the open doorway.

“Oh, he’s here?” Heather drawls with an exaggerated grimace when she spots Nathaniel. “Looks like you’ve already found someone to rant about your dumb movie to, so I’m gonna just—”

Her attempt to pivot on the spot and leave is thwarted by the arm Valencia loops through her own, catching her before she can re-cross the threshold.

Nathaniel wastes no time in whipping his head around to aim an aha look in Rebecca’s direction, and she’s just as quick to defend, “Yeah, okay, so it’s on the agenda. Amongst other things.”

“Is that so. Like what?”

“Like… topics I don’t know about yet because nobody ever responds to my requests to send me their items for the agenda.”

“God, no more agendas,” Paula grouches, reaching for a mug from the overhead cabinet. “Or meetings. My entire life is meetings and agendas and scheduling conflicts. Can’t we just have a good old fashioned rendezvous? I feel like nobody ever rendezvouses anymore.”

“Ooh, or how about a tryst,” Rebecca suggests, waggling her eyebrows.

“Girl, you know I love you,” Valencia says, “but I’m not trysting with you. I have a fiancée.”

Heather hums, drumming her fingers against the countertop as she hoists herself up onto a stool. “So full disclosure, Hector and I saw the Cats revival with his mom last year, and I liked it. I think the lack of plot worked in Hector’s favour.”

“There’s no accounting for taste,” Rebecca says, wistful.

“You liked The Lion King,” Nathaniel feels obligated to point out. “That’s technically about digitally rendered singing cats.”

“I tolerated The Lion King because of my deep fondness of the original and because I knew I could bully you into seeing it with me because of its zoological themes,” she corrects. “Anyway, that remake’s issue was that it had no soul. This remake’s issue is that it’s, like, demonically possessed, or something. Which, to be fair, cats, as a species, generally are.”

“Rebecca,” Valencia begins, voice all saccharine and scathing, “need I remind you of one of the many occasions you broke up with this one—” She jabs a thumb in Nathaniel’s face, making him frown. “—with the intention of adopting an entire shelter’s worth of felines?”

“That was a different time,” Rebecca dismisses. “I was punishing a version of myself I wasn’t proud of by resigning her to the fate I believed she deserved.”

Nathaniel tilts his head, bemused. “Huh?”

“Oh, she wanted to be a crazy cat lady,” Heather translates, enunciating loudly, “because she couldn’t bone you in the stationery closet without feeling bummed about it anymore. Just, like. While we’re on the subject of trysts.”

“Heath-er,” Rebecca hisses, kicking her ex-housemate in the shin.

Parsing their less than stellar communal romantic track record with a group of women all too happy to gang up on him afforded the slightest opportunity isn’t high on Nathaniel’s to-do list for the morning, and a flick of his wrist to check his smart watch is all the excuse he needs to make a timely escape.

“On that note,” Nathaniel says, snatching his car keys off the counter, “I’m going to leave you ladies be.”

The conversation barely dips as he sees himself out.

5.

“So in between your being typecast as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, you didn’t happen to don, say, a unitard and leg warmers, did you?”

“What?”

He knows he should be used to this by now—this tendency towards unexpected tack-changing that he’d liken to a dog with a bone, if the cliche didn’t feel somewhat inapt, considering. It’s not like he’s unaccustomed, after all this this time, to Rebecca’s one track mind. It’s just that up until this point, most of the tracks she’s been fixated on treading have usually, admittedly, served his own interests as easily as her own.

“Just checking, because for the record, it’s kind of a massive deal breaker for me.”

She flops into his side, not entirely-unpleasantly sticky, or in the very least, skin virtually indistinguishable from the slick of his own. Rebecca’s ability to pick up intelligible conversation immediately post-coitus is a talent he does not share, and as the golden fog of afterglow suffuses through his bloodstream he takes his time meandering back towards the realm where articulation is possible, content in the knowledge his bedmate will happily barrel on without him until he catches up.

“Just kidding,” she seems to feel the need to clarify, even in the absence of any protest on his behalf. “The knowledge that you were a theatre kid is such an aphrodisiac to me that it well and truly trumps any potential feline faux pas.”

“Wasn’t a theatre kid,” he corrects, the response so automatic he’s not sure it counts as cognitive function.

“Agree to disagree,” Rebecca says, earning herself an exasperated sigh.

Once the drumbeat of his pulse has slowed in his ears, he cracks an eyelid, suspicious of the lack of movement and sudden cease in chatter from the woman sprawled out across his upper torso. Rebecca’s gazing up at him as if she’s been patiently awaiting his full attention, chin resting on her stacked hands, a lazy, satisfied smile stretched across her features.

“You know, for someone who claims to hate Cats,” Nathaniel tells her with amusement after stretching to peck her on the mouth, “you kind of talk about Cats a lot. Some might even describe you as off-puttingly passionate on the subject. Not me,” he backtracks at her incredulous glare, tucking her hair behind her ear with affection. “I find your aggressive diatribe charming.”

Suitably placated, she drops her head back down against his shoulder. “They do say there’s a fine line between love and hate.”

He skates his hand down the bare expanse of her back, letting it settle in the dip between her hips. She undulates with the caress, thighs parting and sliding to bracket one of his. If she’s gunning for a second round he’s still got his refractory period to contend with, but there’s always other ways to keep her occupied, his loose-limbed lack of focus notwithstanding.

She doesn’t push it any further, though, apparently content for now in her own come-down, and he’s just about to give in to the pull towards sleep when it occurs to him what he’s neglected to ask.

“Did you?”

Rebecca’s even breaths, which up until now have been fanning rhythmically across the damp of his throat, catch and falter enough that he takes note of their telling absence.

“Hmm? Did I what?” she deflects, and his eyes narrow at the way she doubles down on the suggestive patterns she seems intent on tracing across his pectorals.

Determined not to be swayed, he shifts beneath her, laughter rumbling through him and muscle mass quaking like tectonic plates beneath the surface of his skin. “Oh, you so did,” he grins, pleased to have been on the money with his flicker of suspicion, eager to bask, as always, in any correct insight he’s managed to garner into his girlfriend’s endlessly multi-faceted brain. “This whole time there’s been incriminating photos of you somewhere wearing tacky fake-fur and an unseemly wig. There’s no hiding your shameful history, now—the cat is out of the bag.”

Rebecca smacks him on the chest, unimpressed, and he can see every telltale corner of her mouth at which the scowl fails to conceal the twitches of her laughter. “So what if my vendetta is somewhat rooted in past trauma? It doesn’t change basic fact, which is that the mere existence of Cats—animal, musical or movie—is a plague against mankind. And for what it’s worth, I didn’t need the wig—my early adolescent frizz was unseemly enough all on its own.”

Where late-night exhaustion-fuelled irritation existed only a few evenings prior, Nathaniel finds himself suddenly capable of only overwhelming fondness. “I think you would have made a very fearsome cat,” he tells her seriously. “All feisty, and nimble.”

He takes two locks of her hair, twisting them up into faux-ears on the top of her head until she bats his hands away, failing miserably at stifling her giggles.

“Stop that. You’re one adjective away from me adding myself back into the Mountaintop text chain just so I can make Maya’s week.”

“Uh-huh. Because I’m the one between us whose levels of preoccupation are concerning.”

He rolls her beneath him, nuzzling his nose against hers in an exaggerated way he can tell irritates her to no end given the context, but muscle memory wins out and she melts into it, the frown lines easing from her forehead as she moulds her mouth against his.

It’s only a matter of time before she’s pressing insistently against him, appetite predictably reawakened, and every sordid pun he could torture her with right now tingles at the ready on the tip of his tongue. But then she sighs into him with a kind of giddiness that sends his mind shattering into static, and as he nips and noses his way down past her belly every teasing thought disintegrates into the ether as he touches her until she’s arching, unraveling, drawing out his name in what can only be described as a delighted purr.

[survivingart]

STORY IS EVERYTHING

Be it online or in person, there’s a lot of competition in the arts. And the fact that the art world is much smaller compared to the world of business, law or medicine, only makes it harder for any one artist to succeed. While everybody online is telling us to “niche down”, and explaining why it’s so important, usually no specific tactics are disclosed, and the how is left for us to figure out for ourselves.

 This blunder is intended for anyone who wishes to find their focus and stand out in today’s oversaturated creative market by understanding the immense power of storytelling — especially when positioning ones creative skill and aspirations in the market.

Regardless if you paint, sculpt, make experimental video installations or are a political performance artist, the main goal for all of us is to express ourselves. 

We do so not because it’s the quickest or easiest way of making a living, but because it’s who we 

are. Most of us love our craft in some form or another and follow some internal aspirations that guide our interest and consequently the kind of art we make. 

But while creativity is a general term, it could not be describing a more colourful and rich abundance of personal motifs and ambitions of why we do what we do. 

For example, I could be selling skilfully crafted portraits because of my passion for creating narratives about beauty, intimacy and connection. But it could also be that I just really enjoy painting figures and fabric and am good enough at it to charge for my work. 

Both are great reasons to make a portrait and market ones skill, but even if the end product looks similar in both cases, their target audience couldn’t be more different.

So, let’s put the “art” in artwork.

I’d like to open this conversation with one of the hardest, but probably the simplest of all questions to answer, because we need to get it out of our way to really get the point of why story matters so much. But to find the answer we will have to go all in and drop the proverbial A-bomb. 

We’ll have to ask the big question. The one you can read about in 50€+ books, written by prominent and knowledgeable art historians and theoreticians, whose answers are mostly written so thoroughly, so extensively, that one needs a dictionary to find their point.

Ready?

What is Art?

Boom.

Unlike most other questions like: “What is carpentry?”, “What is music?”, even “What is philosophy?”, we artists and other creative souls appear to have an enormous problem — none of us really seem to know what the heck we are doing in our lives. Not because we are confused, undisciplined or too spontaneous, but because no-one actually seems to know what art is.

If you ask most academic professors, they will usually give you an academic answer. If they’re more on the liberal side, it will surely have to do with the freedom of expression and the lyrical power of images in the fight against social injustice.

Ask a person in the street — anyone you want really — and they might tell you it’s something pretty, something that looks good. And probably also something that is quite expensive. For a wealthy collector it might be freedom; a way of expressing themselves without the need to actually learn how to paint or draw or sculpt. 

A tattoo artist will tell you it’s tattoos. A barber will tell you it’s an exquisite haircut. An IT technician might even tell you it’s a perfectly sorted and laid out collection of ethernet and electrical cables in the server room. 

Just don’t ask an aesthetician — the branch of philosophy that researches art — and they might tell you a lot. Truth be told, they might tell you too much while saying very little. A wonderful example is Tiziana Andina’s prominently titled book: “The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories”. Read at your own peril.

Art seems to be everything. And we all know that something that is everything is consequently nothing at all.

We have to take a closer look into the production of art; the making of paintings, sculptures, videos and maybe even haircuts and tackle the question by investigating the process of making something an art piece. 

So, let’s see if we can’t fix this mess of tattoos, pretty pictures and ethernet cables into a more workable definition by asking a better question: What makes something art?

In the 1960s the art world had a small crisis, caused by none other than the famous pop artist Andy Warhol. The root of the crisis was his artwork, titled simply: Brillo Box.

It looked exactly the same as a normal Brillo soap pad box, albeit being made out of wood. The question: What made Andy’s Brillo boxes art, but at the same time dismissed the original boxes made by James Harvey (the creator of the design) as mere industrial design?

Surely it wasn’t looks, and it couldn’t have been materials — the prestige of using silkscreen on wood instead of printing on cardboard was not the deciding factor after all. The only real difference that one could discern was the name associated with either product. 

You had Andy Warhol superstar and the other guy.

Apart from being a marvellous posh object to own, Andy’s Brillo box shines light onto an immensely important topic in art, namely that when push comes to shove, the classification of an artistic piece does not have anything to do with its physical composition — be it medium, motif, size, you name it…

This is immensely important, because if we distill the factors that make up art, we can get a pretty rough, yet quite precise equation, that looks a bit like this:

ART = Viewer + Art Piece + Artist

But why does it now seem like the art piece, the central point of the equation isn’t really important? Well, there’s another surprise coming up.

The artist has been regarded as a genius ever since the invention of the cave painting about 40.000 years ago. The master painter, listening to the whispers of his or her muses and transcribing the messages of the gods into reality, for all of humanity to experience the righteous powers of the divine.

As humans, we couldn’t have been more proud of the lineage of artistic mastery that our planet had created over the years, and we had every reason for it. From the Ancient Greeks to Giotto and Titian, then Caravaggio, Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso … all geniuses in the craft, that shaped how we perceive reality itself. 

But then came the trickster. The black sheep, the snake, the devil himself. Then, came Duchamp.

In 1917 as part of The Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition at the The Grand Central Palace, he unveiled his biggest joke of all — a urinal. And even though the organisation of the exhibition had promised that each and every art piece that was entered in the application stage would be shown, they decided to remove The Fountain (as Duchamp named his vertical toilet) from the exhibition. 

It was serious.

But the problem that Duchamp’s art piece created was minuscule compared to the big issue that was yet to come. His simple question : “Is this art?” didn’t just create a revolt inside The Society of Independent Artists, it started a revolution.

Thus, conceptualism was born.

The point he was trying to make was simple: Art is an internal human experience, not an invisible aura imbued into an object by some artistic genius.

The art world though, instead of getting his point, concluded that Nietzsche was indeed correct; the gods of art, beauty and aesthetics truly did perish. The murderer’s weapon was finally found — fully drenched in nothing but bloody ideology, the Fountain stood as proof.

Now, more than 100 years later, this narrative is still the bedrock of many institutions, both commercial and educational. And I feel it is about time we change this. 

Not only could more people start to appreciate art — instead of thinking of it as a pretentious playground for the rich, filled with expensive junk and weird intellectuals — but by removing some of the misconceptions that either artist or artwork are the origin of the artistic experience, we could actually improve the status of us artists in society.

How?

By educating the viewer. By making our artistic process visible to all via social media and other means. By not trying to overcomplicate our work descriptions and artist statements and ending the need to feel like we have to defend our right to paint, sculpt, dance or make videos, with big words and complex explanations.

By connecting with our audience and being strong, sincere and genuine people. And with social media exploding in a constantly connected world, the timing just couldn’t be better.

Art is a multitude of stories, each different from another and all created by every one of our viewers. 

And like good spelling and a decent vocabulary are the bedrock for any novel, we visual artists have a bunch of tools that we can use to build our narratives too.CREATING YOUR STORY (CONTEXT AND CONTENT)

In 1976, artist and critic Brian O’Doherty published his essay Inside the White Cube, that not only created lots of buzz in the art world, but gave this popular mode of displaying art in museums and commercial galleries a catchy new name.

While his wonderful critique of the White Cube is better to read in the original form, I would like to focus on one psychological factor that made his essay become so well known.

People experience things instantly and as a whole, rather than a collection of individual parts. When looking at a red triangle, we can’t just decide to see it as a triangle or just as something red — we always see both of its features at the same time.

Similarly with music; we can’t decide to hear just the tone of a note, while zoning out the colour of the sound (for example hearing the same note being played on a drum compared to a double bass or saxophone).

We as beings need context for just about everything in our lives — even our ability for differentiating object sizes and various temperatures is done by creating context from the surrounding environment.

Ok, but what does this have to do with art? Truth be told — everything.

As art is subjective, we can never really take full control over how a viewer of our show or a customer who bought one of our pieces will understand the work’s narrative. 

A description of the work might help, but some actually prefer to make up their own mind about what a particular art piece means to them on a strictly personal level, rather than listening to the artist describe what it should mean. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that in my opinion. 

But, while we aren’t able to control everything our viewer will experience, there are many aspects of our work that we absolutely can and should be thinking about. Because understanding them makes our job of finding potential buyers or getting a place in an exhibition incredibly easier.  

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Choose materials carefully, not just as a means to an end but as building blocks of your work’s narrative. 

A marble sculpture and a wood carving of the same motif tell different stories. Both may be a portrait of someone, but marble will always communicate prestige, longevity and may form subconscious connections to Ancient Greek and Roman statues of prominent individuals, making the portrayed look even more respectable and important. Wood on the other hand is softer and warmer in appearance and more suitable for creating intimate portraits emphasising emotion rather than status.

Evoke emotions, then seal the deal with a well prepared concept.

Nothing is worse than a conceptual piece that doesn’t also work on an emotional level. The appearance of your work will make or break its ability to convey your message, so regardless of how brilliant your idea may be, if your work doesn’t first captivate your viewer and make them curious enough to step closer, all is lost.

Presentation is really important when exhibiting your work. 

Adjust lighting, surrounding objects like tables, chairs, plants … to compliment your work, or at least not to distract your viewers attention.

Impressionists used a lot of green leafy plants to compliment the vibe of their paintings, modernists decided to completely remove everything (including the frame of a painting or plinth of a sculpture) to maximise emphasis on their work — hence the White Cube principle.

When showing work online, it is imperative to get it right.

Show your work not just as a clean, shadowless and speckless photograph with good colour correction (because the images should look identical to the real thing), but incorporate it into an environment — even a generic architectural shot of a living room will be better than nothing.

Give your online images enough context and help your visitors understand the colours, size, textures and other features of your work by providing enough visual information; a few detail shots, a side view and maybe even the back of the work (if it’s 2D). For spatial works, maybe make a 360° GIF by stitching together multiple angles — nobody wants to buy a sculpture only to find that they don’t like the rear end of it.

The venue is a big part of your exhibition. 

If you paint a picture of an apple being picked by a woman somewhere in a forest and hang it in an office of a juice company, people will probably see a nice lady picking apples. But hang it in a church community centre and people might see the highly complex concept of Ancestral Sin. 

Same painting, same communication, immensely different results — just by changing the context.

So whenever you have the chance — for example if you are invited to create a show in a certain gallery from scratch — work with the space in mind, or change it if you can to make it a better fit for your work.

Regardless of what kind of art you create, if you make a thorough examination of the materials you use, the message you are trying to tell and the environment you are telling it in, you can use all of this information to reverse-engineer your work to find your target audience. 

It should never be the other way around.

from Surviving Art https://ift.tt/2mSC2Mu via IFTTT

[insideanairport]

A New Film-school for Moving People

❍❍❍

The Interview with "Academy of Moving People and Images" artistic-director Erol Mintaş and curator Elham Rahmati took place in an unplanned café somewhere in Helsinki. The new school is free of charge and open to all “mobile people”. The next deadline for application is on the 28th of February.  By Hami Bahadori 31.01.2019 ---

Hami Bahadori: Before we start, how do you feel about the opening of the Academy at the Museum of Impossible Forms? I was a bit surprised to see that many people came on a random Friday to Kontula, while the metro was shut down?

Erol Mintaş: It was great, even though the metro was closed. [laugh]

Elham Rahmati: I think a lot of people are excited about the project and we already received a lot of support.

Hami: Great, let’s start. I am in love with the name of the academy, do you want to tell me where the name has come from?

Erol: There is, of course, a story behind it. When we were doing our test-workshop for the film academy, the name was “Mobile Film School”. And the word mobile referred to our life situation of being mobile. Then we found out there was a school with the same exact name somewhere in the U.S.

Elham: Conceptually, that school was completely different. They were going from city to city. So, the school itself was mobile and had nothing to do with mobile people.

Hami: [laughs]

Erol: We already knew what we want. The school is for film and moving image, and it is for all the people who have been experiencing movement in their lives. So, the name naturally came together. You know, the name is a very difficult issue. As a filmmaker, I know, because when I make films, finding the titles is very difficult. It was the same with the finding the right name for the film academy

Hami: I love that the word “people” is before the word “images”. Was it also important that the idea of movement also applies to the school?

Elham: Yeah, that’s basically the main point. It serves people who in one way or another have experience mobility. Mobility, not in a sense of traveling a lot, but the experience of relocating home. It can be for many reasons such as study, work, migration, seeking asylum, etc.

Erol: Also, we don’t want to again frame people with the same mainstream words that carry a certain weight with them, whether positive or negative. We have to reinvent the vocabulary and also question the existing vocabulary that is used.

Elham: Yes, and that’s the reason we stress on using the term “mobile people” is that it conveys what we want to get across. For example, words such as refugee and asylum-seeker have been used and misused in so many problematic ways that are stigmatizing people. Once we say “mobile people” it puts everyone together.

Hami: Can anyone come and participate, or do people have to have some relationship with mobility.

Elham: Anyone who comes from a mobile background is welcome to apply. Be they migrants, asylum seekers, student, etc. If someone is a Finnish citizen but their parents come from a mobile background they’re still eligible to apply.

Erol: There are also these words that try to push people in a corner, frame them and keep them there. I don’t believe in having any kind of border between people. We don’t want to be in a position of power although we realize sometimes it is inevitable, our academy can only admit a few people and that selection process already puts us in that position. The whole idea of the Academy is that we provide a common ground, to share knowledge, tools and networks. We are also learning along with everyone else who’ll be participating.

Elham: It is not just about lecturing participants. The lecturers are also there to learn from the participants --we prefer to call it participants rather than students.

Hami: So, the School is going to be based in Finland? And participants have to be physically present.

Elham: In keeping the idea of moving people and images, the academy is also going to be in a moving state within different institutions and platforms in Finland. Another important aim of the academy is to provide different networks. After finishing the 1st year, the participants are going to be familiar with so many institutions, and you will be connected to the arts and cultural scene and a receive a certain degree of visibility and networks which you can take advantage of in your career. It is a beautiful thing that so many institutions and actors within the cultural scene of Finland have come together to support this project. It is very encouraging and tells us a lot about the will that exists for change when it comes to diversity and representation.

Hami: Let’s go way back. To some degree, I am familiar with both of you and your art-works. I think, there is something fascinating there, something between history and geography and also the differences in culture. So, now I want to ask about history. How did the idea of the school come to you in the first place?

Erol: When I lived in Istanbul, my filmmaker friends and I were interested in issues such as “How to make the film industry more diverse?” We started to work on this issue, tried to create films, spaces and also platforms. Simultaneously, I kept making my own films and telling my stories. But as you know, in Istanbul, the situation is very different compared to here [Finland]. When I came here, these stories and issues stayed with me. I met a lot of people who had a mobile background in multiple cities around the world. In Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, LA and other places. People were talking about how difficult it is to get into the film industries, especially when you are new in a place.

Later I was in the jury of the Istanbul Film Festival. I watched a lot of films in one week. And almost all the films were “talking about” immigration. Actually, not just film festivals, but Biennials, galleries, and other places.

Hami: What do you mean “talking about”? “more voices” or the same people representing others and mediating?

Erol: Same people from certain geographies keep telling stories about vulnerable people and mediating them. At that time, I started to feel very weird, I wasn’t able to really explain myself. It’s very personal. It was two years after this experience that I said to myself, why not I share my network and give whatever I have to others, so they can tell their own stories.

Hami: It’s very interesting because these issues also exist in the art world. We see a shift in perspective, on “who is representing who”. Not only in topics related to migration, but also on more universal phenomenon such as climate change. In 2017 Venice Biennale, we saw paintings by the Inuit artist Kananginak Pootoogook which was a surprising move by the curators. Instead of curating an artist from NYC or Berlin to talk about climate change they picked an indigenous artist to talk about his personal experiences on colonialization and its relation to climate change.

Elham: Hmm. But very slowly. There have been so many outrage from our communities on this issue. “stop misrepresenting us, stop speaking for us”. More people are realizing that there is something very problematic. They either speak for us or bring in people from our communities who they can manipulate into telling stories that fit their political agenda. By they, I mean different Western foundations, production companies, etc. who profit from projecting and selling a certain image from a non-western world that is miserable and helpless and needs to be liberated or intervened in.

Our aim is to have everyone tell their stories in the way they like. Of course, we have our own red lines ––As long as your films are not sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic or contain any other form of hate speech or patronizing attitude towards a certain minority.

Erol: This doesn’t mean that they can’t talk about things they like. If people feel they want to talk about some issues, they can do it as long as it’s their choice. But, also, we have to question what are the choices and where are they coming from? We should think about how much of our choices are really our own.

Elham: We encourage everyone to tell their stories in a way that is not affected by the market. There is a big difference between stories that actually come from immigrants and their life experiences versus the stories with certain formulas that for example Hollywood tries to sell, immigrant success stories, grateful refugee stories, etc. We should be able to imagine and dream of a film industry that is open to more honest and less market-driven representations of mobile people.

Erol: We are not expecting our participant to only make immigrant or refugee stories, they can tell us a love story or a science fiction one. They don’t have to share their personal stories if they don’t want to.

Hami: When it comes to film, the other problem here is the role of the education, which most of the times boils down to ethics. In another word, while school is trying to make “successful artists”. It’s telling students what not to do if they decided to go somewhere exotic. Particularly, in documentary and ethnography film-making, which still has a reminiscence of the detached, sovereign and unchallenged gaze of the observer.

Erol: Every media has its entertainment part that deals with capital, selling, celebrity stuff, famousness, etc. It also has another part which enables people to express their ideas and philosophy or to change something by sharing and communicating. This is what we call the “artistic” part of any kind of media which lets you communicate what you deem as valuable to the audience.

Elham: We have to mention something important here about the academy and one of the things that makes it unique among other things. A free film-school with an English working language doesn’t exist in Finland. As far as I know, there is no such a platform in Europe either. Film academies charge students very high amounts of money which very few people can afford. This is one of the reasons that film industries are often elitist and very difficult to enter.

Erol: A free film school is so unusual that some people think that there is a fee for this academy as well, I want to clarify that AMPI is completely free of charge.

Elham: It’s interesting, We are getting messages from people in other countries across Europe asking if they can apply.

Hami: …But they have to be here physically. right?

Elham: Yes, and the priority is for people who are already in Finland. But if you don’t live in Finland but are committed to moving here for the sake of this academy then you can certainly apply and we will take your application into consideration.

Erol: The participants have to be present at least, 80% of the time. And for us, the most important thing is the result, which is the films. We wish our participants to make strong films at the end of the year.

Elham: We also hope that AMPI can create a strong community, generating collaborations between artists and lecturers, or lecturers among each other.

Erol: We have a lot of the key players in the Finnish film industry and the art-scene working with us, whether as collaborators or in the board of advisors. Organizations such as YLE, The Finnish Film Foundation (SES), Aalto University (ViCCA, Critical Cinema Lab), Goethe Institut Finnland, G.A.P, HIAP, Design Museum Helsinki, Museum of Impossible Forms, Third Space, Taidekoulu MAA, Caisa and Publics.

Elham: About the participants, we encourage everyone from different levels of professional backgrounds to apply, even though a lot of people might say for example that I already have a BA or another sort of training in film. You can always get to learn more from our team of lecturers and also participants.

Hami: When is the deadline to apply?

Elham: 28th of February 2019 and the classes start in April 2019.

Hami: Thank you very much

Image source: http://academyofmovingpeopleandimages.com/

[aion-rsa]

Cyberpunk 2077 Review Roundup

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Cyberpunk 2077 is arguably the most highly-anticipated game of 2020, and after several delays and other controversies, it’s finally here. Fans will be able to get their hands on CD Projekt Red’s new RPG on Dec. 10 (unless you pre-ordered from Best Buy). Ahead of the global launch, here’s what critics are saying about the game so far:

Andrew Reiner, Game Informer:

“Cyberpunk 2077 is a work of awe-inspiring ambition, dazzling with its massive scale and creative vision. The world of Night City is a metropolis of futuristic art, stealing your eye with stunning neon-lit architecture and streets filled with citizens made of flesh and metal. Night City is an open world that immediately pulls you in and keeps you engaged with its dark narrative, meaningful player choice, and overwhelming amount of side content.”

Score: 9/10

Kallie Plagge, Gamespot:

“It also bears a mention: Cyberpunk 2077 is phenomenally buggy. I played a pre-release build that was updated during the review period, and there’s a day-one patch planned as well, but the scale of technical issues is too large to reasonably expect immediate fixes. I encountered some kind of bug on every mission I went on, from more common, funnier ones like characters randomly T-posing to several complete crashes. I didn’t notice much of an improvement after the update, either. In a very late-game, very important fight, the game froze on me–twice. I ended up taking a break out of frustration before attempting, and finally succeeding, the third time.

These bugs, more than any game I’ve played in years, took me out of the experience often. Non-interactable items like cardboard boxes will explode when you interact with something next to them; UI elements will stay on-screen long after they’re meant to, which is only solved by reloading a save; characters will interrupt themselves during proper dialogue sequences by repeating a throwaway line they’d say in the overworld, seriously disrupting key moments; I died once and, upon reloading my last save, found my hacking ability no longer worked, forcing me to roll back to an autosave 10 minutes prior. The list is extensive.

Score: 7/10

James Davenport, PC Gamer:

“I found it moving and life-affirming in the final moments, even in the face of near certain death and a relentless onslaught of bugs. I suppose it’s an appropriate thematic throughline though: Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about V coming apart at the seams, in a city coming apart at the seams, in a game coming apart at the seams. Play it in a few months.”

Score: 78/100

Tom Marks, IGN:

“Cyberpunk 2077 kicks you into its beautiful and dazzlingly dense cityscape with few restrictions. It offers a staggering amount of choice in how to build your character, approach quests, and confront enemies, and your decisions can have a tangible and natural-feeling impact on both the world around you and the stories of the people who inhabit it. Those stories can be emotional, funny, dark, exciting, and sometimes all of those things at once. The main quest may be shorter than expected when taken on its own and it’s not always clear what you need to do to make meaningful changes to its finale, but the multitude of side quests available almost from the start can have a surprisingly powerful effect on the options you have when you get there. It’s a shame that frustratingly frequent bugs can occasionally kill an otherwise well-set mood, but Cyberpunk 2077’s impressively flexible design makes it a truly remarkable RPG.”

Score: 9/10

James Billcliffe, VG24/7:

“In the midst of such intense anticipation and scrutiny, it’s easy to get carried away with what Cyberpunk 2077 could have been. The final experience might be more familiar than many predicted, with plenty of elements that aren’t perfect, but it’s dripping with detail and engaging stories. With so much to see and do, Cyberpunk 2077 is the kind of RPG where you blink and hours go by, which is just what we need to finish off 2020.”

Score: 5/5

Carolyn Petit, Polygon:

“One of my fears about Cyberpunk 2077 was that it was going to be so cynical and nihilistic that playing it would be like wallowing in grim hopelessness, that the cheapness of human life in the game’s world would be mirrored by the game itself. But that’s not the case. It’s easy to lose the human thread in the overwhelming glut of stuff Cyberpunk 2077 puts on your plate, with your map plastered with crimes you can violently “neutralize” for a reward from the police, and fixers constantly sending you text messages about underdeveloped one-off jobs you can take on to earn a bit of extra cash. But the humanity is there, if you look for it.

“And that humanity is the saving grace of this alluring yet uneven and deeply flawed game. I can’t deny that Night City wowed me with its scale, its verticality, and its sense of history. But I wish I could see people like me on its streets as something more than objects. I wish that the game’s politics were more radical. Yes, I know I shouldn’t look to a colossal game that was itself produced under exploitative labor conditions to lead the charge of anticapitalist liberation, but I wish the sparks of Johnny Silverhand’s ideological rage got to burn brighter, that Cyberpunk 2077 felt more interested in envisioning new futures than in reminiscing over bygone glories. Neither its gameplay nor its narrative can imagine the bold possibilities that I find so central to the best of cyberpunk. But what it does offer is visions of people trying to make do and get by in a world that’s trying to eat them alive, and sometimes those people get by with a little help from their friends. It’s not the revolution I hoped for, but it’s something.”

Riley MacLeod, Kotaku:

“I haven’t fallen in love with playing Cyberpunk 2077, but I haven’t loathed it either. Some moments have been exciting or moving, while others have just felt like stuff to do. I’m middle-of-the-road on it so far—having fun in spots, left wanting the game to be more like what made The Witcher 3 great in others. The game itself wants so badly for you to think it’s cool, that it’s the cutting edge of graphics and game design, that it talks about edgy topics like body modification, corporate power, and the internet. It tries too hard, stuffing itself with a tangle of complicated roleplaying game systems; with so many cyberpunk tropes, plots, and slang; with neon and holograms and so many in-game ads, most of them for sex; with car chases and hacking and corporate espionage and double-crossing powerful people; with a world where the human body is made obsolete with money and technology, while also chewed up and spat out for the sake of capital. There’s an admirable diversity of races, sexualities, genders, and body types, but they feel like a veneer. It’s not a politically progressive game: these identities are all in service of the game’s vision of the cyberpunk future, one that can feel implausible and alienating but also has hints of the world we live in today.

Chris Tapsell, Eurogamer:

“It’s still early on for me, I should say – after 30 hours I was still, no doubt to the horror of many with vanishing spare time, just finding my feet – but much of that focus is placed on Cyberpunk‘s central story, which has so far been a welcome surprise. Beneath the noise – and Cyberpunk is truly cacophonous – there is a lingering thread of tenderness to it. I’ve opted to play V as a woman, with a ‘Corpo’ background, and she’s been voiced impeccably by Cherami Leigh and written with some skill. There’s real tenderness here, real vulnerability – a lot of “this city’ll chew you up and spit you out” stuff, sure, but there’s a waver to the tough talk, and from more than just V. Cyberpunk‘s story so far is one of fear, the surface of it plated in chrome and angst and body horror gore, but still built on a core of humanity. It’s more than I expected, and more than we’ve been taught to expect, frankly, by the brashness of the marketing, the pitching of Night City as this great, submissive, ultra-hedonist playground. Night City is a vile swamp, in actual fact, and Cyberpunk‘s characters are drowning in it. It is, so far, more than just a synthwave skin on another puerile open world.”

Rob Zacny, VICE:

“Cyberpunk 2077 is a game of the past and its forgotten futures. Its setting is a pastiche that was overtaken by history and technology. It is a piece of software that is a throwback to PC gaming of the 1990s and early 2000s in every possible way, and its aesthetic and narrative sensibilities of a teenage boy’s bedroom in the 1980s. Yet its lavish and utterly sincere devotion to its influences recalls what has made these dated visions so alluring and enduring. Cyberpunk is too tacky and graceless to be cool, but it’s very big, and very loud, and sometimes that’s all it takes to be awesome.”

Brad Chacos, PCWorld:

“Even if the main narrative somehow stumbles at the finish line, it wouldn’t take away from that sublime core gameplay experience. After a dozen hours, I haven’t come close to exhausting the available activities in just the first of Night City’s six districts and surrounding Badlands. No matter what happens with V, I can’t wait to discover all of Night City’s secrets. I’m in love.”

Richard Scott Jones, PCGamesN:

“Retroactive trigger warning about ‘politics in games’ for whoever cares about such things, by the way, but if that’s you, then you’d best steer clear of Cyberpunk 2077 if you stand by your claimed convictions. This is one of the most explicitly politically charged games ever made – Mike Pondsmith designed the tabletop game upon which it’s based as a “cautionary tale,” and after the killing of George Floyd back in June, reiterated that his universe is “a warning, not an aspiration“. Anyone who insists it’s pure, meaningless escapism is hopelessly deluded.

“Even if such sentiments are uttered in sincere good faith, I think it’s a tragic diminishment of our medium to insist that it shouldn’t tackle politics. Cyberpunk 2077 might not push quite as many boundaries in game design as a landmark release could, but if it can convince more people that games can and should take a position on issues of substance rather than peddle mindless thrills, that’ll be a worthy legacy.”

Stay tuned for Den of Geek’s review of Cyberpunk 2077 next week!

The post Cyberpunk 2077 Review Roundup appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[joel-furniss-blog]

Shitposting and Dada

I discussed briefly in my project statement how I sense a certain lack of ambition and that I enjoy and produce work that is often of low-effort and low-quality, and in the previous semester I intended to sort of trick the examiners into giving me a better mark by overloading them with a quantity of work, trying to sort of test the ‘quality ≠ quantity’ saying. This method of producing work is quite like another of my favourite pastimes, the online behaviour of shitposting.

As vast as its internet domain, shitposting can take up a myriad of different forms on different forums, but a generally agreed definition is ‘posting large amounts of content "aggressively, ironically, and of trollishly poor quality” to an online forum or social network,’. Usually this is in order to derail otherwise orderly online discussions or alternately to bastardize a site to its regular visitors. Its usage dates to the early 00’s under the influence of niche online forums and imageboards, in which comment threads were often derailed from discussion by anonymous users either adding unconstructive posts out of ignorance or malicious intent. The resulting environment of chaotic misuse it results in is commonly referred to as ‘cancer’ (highlighting just how seriously an issue it is thought to be).

From its initial days as a minor annoyance on obscure online sump, shitposting has since changed into a much more mainstream culturally practice, especially in the intersection between internet trolling and politics. With its ability to aggravate, avert information, and overload systems, shitposting has fit well into the maddening expanse of contemporary politics and its sensationalist coverage, its first prominence being in the 2016 United States presidential race among examples of other radicalised internet phenomena—such as the appropriated mascot Pepe the Frog who has his own shitposted legacy—where the internet-savvy right-wing circles used memes as a new age propaganda machine to entertain its recruits and alienate its enemies through a stream of coded slang and images pumped out at a perpetual speed.

A most extreme and unfortunate example of the extent of the radicalization shitposting can cause is the 2019 Christchurch shooting in which an ethno-nationalist terrorist livestreamed his attack on Facebook and released a 74-page manifesto publicly on Twitter and imageboard 8chan as well as being sent directly to more than 30 recipients including multiple media companies and the New Zealand prime ministers office. The manifesto was allegedly littered with multiple memes including references to video game Fortnite, YouTube personality and alt-right running dog PewDiePie, and the classic Navy Seal copypasta, as well as alt-right associated meme and Serbian anti-Muslim turbo-folk song commonly referred to as Remove Kebab, paired with the method of distribution the manifesto could be seen as a most radical version of shitposting, intended to throw out morsels of the shooters philosophy to confuse outsiders and tempt those who might sympathise.

But shitpostings use is not exclusive to the political-right, as left-identifying groups have also used it for their own advancement, such as Facebook group New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens with over 175,000 members who produce and exchange memes and general discourse related to environmentally friendly and socially accommodating urban design schemes and transport reform, whose impact has seen 2020 United States presidential candidate Bernie Sanders become a member and supporter. Shitposting and trolling has even cropped up in the UK political scene, with current Liberal Democrat party leader Jo Swinson having to explicitly state that she does not murder squirrels after a fake screenshot of a news article saying so began circling Twitter.

With its relation to the fake news phenomenon and the post-truth environment, shitposting has found a comfortable place in the current political climate, but for my own sake I have to ask; how does it relate to art. Surprisingly, shitposting—while not in its current form—was very crucial to art history. The conceptual elements of shitposting, its ideas of producing an output of notably low effort, with enough capability to rise reactions from those lacking in acumen, and then continue to overwhelm the viewers by reproducing the same min-effort/max-impact work are comparable to the pursuits of the Dada movement. With its lack of principles, no cohesive aesthetic, and overt anti-normality take on making art, Dada holds many similarities with shitposting. Even contextually they are somewhat parallel, with the birth of Dada spewed from the loins of a WWI-era Europe in which class divisions widened between the uppers who were protected and profiteered from the war and the working class who suffered financially and psychological from its first-hand effects, paired with a spike in nationalism and a deduction in perceived human rights it was the turmoil and the bastardizations of the modern human society that spurred the reflective works of Dada, in essence producing shit art for a shit period. Whilst lacking in the same kind of industrialised killings of a World War, today’s society can be seen as comparable to the same conditions Dada was born under, a sharp rise in nationalism broaching into outright fascism in many places; a correlating increase in alienated peoples changing the other side of the political pendulum; governments which actively undermine their own people for financial gain (as if that’s anything new); consequences from governments decades past haunting marginalised communities and countries; a revolt every other day in every other country; an alphabet or damaging ‘-isms’ and ‘-phobias’; and a general feeling of slow and sinking madness infecting society, it’s easy to see why such absurdist practices as shitposting were born.

It’s easy to see certain similarities, even in famous—or infamous—examples such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) which was sent to a gallery exhibition as an absurdist remark on arts dichotomy between the aesthetic and the conceptual, the ceramic shitpost (or rather pisspost) of an overturned urinal embodied the same attitude as a modern shitposts, irritating to any traditionalist constant, and amusing to those who either don’t understand it or do. Shitposting is an effective way to overturn expectations and subvert opinions. Even the way it spread so suddenly, with a rise and fall caught in six years in over ten countries across the globe mimics the viral sensationalism of internet trends, rising to a global impact to suddenly deconstruct itself through saturation.

Both subjects were also entwined with the political game, with Dada practically challenging any traditionalist view it could, condemning the rising nationalist tendencies and capitalist fervour of societal ‘progress’, found especially amongst the Berlin group. Under the depression of the Weimar republic and the following rise in oppression by the Nazi party, German Dadaists continued their absurd political communication and activities through art, with their efforts corralled in with other morally objectionable art labelled as ‘degenerate’—a word that has also found relevance amongst certain shitposters—they rebelled nonetheless, with artist John Heartfield even sending postcards of his work directly to Nazi leaders, a literal shitpost.

However, just as concept and context can be applied, so can criticism to both subjects. Some art historians have noted Dadas perverse relationship with race, with a streak of using racially charged language an imagery with little to know relation or appreciation for other races, especially that of Africans with prominent member George Grosz often performing a minstrel show at the movements epicentre the Cabaret Voltaire and the Incoherents Paul Bilhaud painting an all-black work titled Combat de Nègres dans un Tunnel (Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel by Night, 1882). Paired with a fetishization of racial others as ‘primitive’ Dada had problematic effects, much like shitposting which, as previously discussed, has become lumped in with the narrative of deplorability within right-wing margins, and later majorities. However, from personal experience I have seen just as much shitposting from left-wing sources as right-wing, because it lacks any concrete coding and has evolved from mindless pastime to activist tool, but there are obvious questions on whether politics should be taken in such a Dada direction, whether it’s anti-sense sensibilities will reduce politics to further churlishness that it already is, whether elections will do away with voting systems for a game of ‘how many memes can either side send’.

I’m not here to concern myself with the politics of shitposting, I’m studying this topic from a sincerity past politics and into a wider philosophical scope. I love shitposting, the anonymous nature of the internet lets me crawl into someone else’s life, sew whatever discourse or confusion I can and then promptly leave, like a stray rat running across a kitchen floor only to never be seen again, moved on to another person’s virtual kitchen. However just as a rat searches for food, I search for shitposting grounds that are comfortable to me, things that I care about or have some sort of personal opinion on, things like euthanasia, suicide, societal expectations, abortions, issues on morality, art, and other various philosophical conundrums that I am slowly devolving. In some cases, I think it’s the most earnest thing one can do, to laugh into the void as it were and generate absurdist rebellion to normality that’ll upset its balance. I even think it has practical applications, take into consideration the increase in targeted advertising algorithms, in which websites and apps hijack personal information you send or even speak privately to sell you products. But by streaming false or flagrantly inflated information instead it is possible to confuse and disrupt the targeting algorithms, a small rebellion against corporate injustice. Some may call it sadistic, or sociopathic, or just plain sad to deliberately seek and produce such effortless and meaningless content, but I see it to hone my ideological axe, to build my ideas into more concrete forms. Paired with the previously mentioned anti-normality connotations with the Dada movement, and the current cultural relevance of it, I think the philosophical implications behind shitposting are essential to my current work and I will continue to take inspiration from it.

 “How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul; dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap

Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.”

[machetelanding]

For more than a decade, despite the increase in domestic population, the number of movie admissions sold has stalled. For some time that fact was papered over. Premium pricing through gimmicks such as 3D and IMAX were at least able to increase annual box office revenues (a bit). Nevertheless, the movie business is no longer a growth business, and 2017 is beginning to look like the year when the industry will have to finally come to terms with that.

Globalism was supposed to save Hollywood. The exact opposite ended up being the case. The worldwide audience became the tiger held by the tail; for the global village is one that demands shockingly expensive spectacle, which means huge investments, all-in gambles, that cannot begin to see a profit until $600 to $700 million in tickets are sold.

Worse still, leftwing filmmakers were counting on these oh-so sophisticated internationales to make political diatribes profitable, to appreciate their cinematic calls for multiculturalism, moral equivalence, anti-Americanism, and statism. Whoops! Turns out the rest of the world is even more addicted to mindless escapism than us rubes.

And so, over the last ten years Hollywood slowly painted itself into a corner, where at the expense of everything else, only $250 million franchises, low-budget horror, animated films, and raunchy R-rated comedies can make any money. But today about half those franchises are flaming out and R-rated comedies are in a coma.

Oh, there will always be movies. But let's face it, other than the pretentious, wankfest indies America's foo foo critics pretend to like and the thrilling exceptions that used to be the rule — Dunkirk, Baby Driver — going to the movies anymore is like going to Six Flags; an expensive ride on the latest CGI rollercoaster, something that is no longer about affirming the soul or a relaxing good time. Instead of coming together to explore our shared human condition, we buckle in to overload the senses.

Anyway, let's look at all the suicidal mistakes made by the film industry…

1. The Death of the Movie Star

The men who made Hollywood — the Selznicks, Warners, Mayers, Cohns, Goldwyns, Thalbergs, Zanucks, Schencks, Zukors, Laskys and Laemmles — quickly figured out that the movie star was the key to the world. Not just to box office success, but the key to shaping our culture, fashion, politics, Americanism, and even our humanity.

And so it was until the 1990s. Believe it or not, we used to go and see Eddie Murphy movies, Sylvester Stallone movies, and Goldie Hawn movies. We liked Harrison Ford and trusted his choices. We loved Chevy Chase and trusted his choices. This reality was good for everyone because you didn’t need $250 million in computer effects to put butts in seats. All you needed was Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal or Sigourney Weaver. All you needed was John Candy trying to get it right or Kathleen Turner merely showing up.

Fearing their $20 million salaries and growing power, Hollywood killed the movie star. But without the face on the poster selling tickets, all that's left to sell is the narcotic of CONCEPT, which must get bigger and bigger and more expensive in order to feed the fix.

2. Partisan Politics

Movies have always been political, have always had something to say. But it used to be that for every leftwing High Noon you had a response in the form of Rio Bravo. And look at what this healthy competition created — two masterpieces, both of which are political as opposed to partisan or divisive.

Today, movies and actors go out of their way to create ill-will through insulting and divisive commentary that attacks more than half the country. Sure, in their time, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, Katherine Hepburn and many others were leftwingers who advocated for their respective causes. But they had class. They never insulted or demeaned those who disagreed with them. Creative giants, leftists such as John Huston, Orson Welles and Elia Kazan, managed to have their say without throwing poop.

And that is all the difference in the world.

Insulting your own customers is not only bad business, it cannot begin to make up for a deficit of talent.

3. The Death of Censorship

Just because I believe that certain things should be legal — porn, getting drunk, loveless sex, homosexuality — that does not mean I believe those things are healthy for our society. Quite the contrary. I side with freedom because the messy and oftentimes tragic results of freedom are almost always preferable to the result of government control (see: Obamacare).

The same goes for censorship. I'm not for any form of movie censorship, but that doesn't mean I'm unaware of how lifting censorship, removing all barriers, has greatly diminished the art form of the motion picture.

There are exceptions (DePalma, Scorsese) where excess can be in and of itself art, but for the most part the depth, creative energy and artistic breakthroughs required to find another way through subtext are almost always preferable to text.

Had Alfred Hitchcock been allowed to get his full freak on, does anyone believe Psycho, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Strangers On a Train, Notorious, Rebecca, or Rope — all violent films stewing in sexual, and sometimes homosexual subtext, would be anywhere near the classics they are today?

Almost always, limits benefit art. There are no limits today and creative laziness is the result. For this reason, movies are not even sexy anymore.

4. The Leftwing Sycophants Who Cover the Movie Business

Whether it is Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter or Variety, whether it is pretty much every critic you read at Rotten Tomatoes, the people whose job it is to cover the movie business are almost all leftwing Social Justice Warriors, all sycophants who refuse to challenge the status quo or speak truth to power.

Yes, there are people on the political right like myself who sometimes cover these things, but we are all on the outside looking in. The publications within the bubble, however, are all bubbled themselves, and all about protecting the bubble. The only time they raise a fuss is when Hollywood is not leftwing enough — We need more homosexual movies! We need more trans movies! We need more women and minorities! We need more Stephen Colberts! Trump is icky!

A perfect example was published over the weekend when two new movies released on more than 3,000 screens tanked. The franchise wannabe Dark Tower failed to clear $20 million; the oh-so topical and critically-lauded Detroit lit itself on fire with $7 million.

But how did Deadline spin these dual duds…

For the second weekend in a row, Sony figured out a way to work around the Rotten Tomatoes system to get a lackluster title to open. Last weekend, it was the Emoji Movie, which posted an OK $24.5M in second. This weekend, it’s their Media Rights Capital co-production The Dark Tower, which is taking No. 1 with a modest take estimated at $19.5M. …

Call it what you will, but it’s distribution’s job to open a movie. In the case of Sony, they held back reviews as late as they could for Dark Tower and Emoji Movie and got them started so they could last the rest of the month. Again, not a wondrous result with Dark Tower, but here it sits in first place.

It gets worse…

Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit from Annapurna, despite having the best reviews and audiences scores out of this weekend’s wide entries – respectively with an 88% certified fresh and A- CinemaScore – didn’t find that love spill over into its opening weekend, which looks to settle at $7.25M. Not a fantastic start for a movie which cost between $35M-$40M. …

Once moviegoers leave Detroit, they’re amazed. The trick for Annapurna is to keep word-of-mouth alive[.] … We hear the original 20 runs of Detroit held quite well.

For the sake of context, let's look at this very same Deadline writer's analysis of a movie that opened in January of 2016. Both Detroit and 13 Hours are topical, controversial, and political. Both are modestly-budgeted ($40 million for Detroit; $50 million for 13 Hours), but that is where the similarities end.

13 Hours, Michael Bay's Benghazi story, is aimed at conservative Middle America. Detroit is aimed at the Black Lives Matter crowd.

13 Hours opened cold in only 2,389 theaters. After a limited run to boost publicity and word of mouth, Detroit opened in a whopping 3,007 theaters.

Over at Rotten Tomatoes, critics buried 13 Hours with a miserable 50% rating. Critics lauded Detroit with a 88% fresh rating. Nevertheless…

13 Hours opened to much, much better $16.5 million 3-day when compared to Detroit's miserable $7.3 million 3-day opening.

And yet…

This weekend Paramount launched Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, drawing more noise from the CIA, Republicans and Democrats than moviegoers with a middling 4-day opening of $19M.

But despite audiences embracing the Michael Bay film with an A CinemaScore, bureaucrats have had a heyday kicking 13 Hours around like a political football. And it’s never good when partisan factions get their hands around a movie. Such squabbling is one of the chief factors seen in 13 Hours coming in under its $20M-$23M four-day projection.

This sort of partisan spin and wishcasting from those who should be telling cold truths is part of what's destroying a cowardly and out of touch film business desperate for any kind of affirmation that encourages them to never change.

5. The Death of the Women's Movie

After the studio system gasped its last in the mid-60s, the leftists of New Hollywood took over, and while they had an incredibly creative 10-year run, these oh-so progressive leftists also killed the women's picture.

In the hands of leftist Hollywood, in the hands of a Hollywood where more women and feminists are in charge than ever before, how freakin' pathetic is it that a Wonder Woman is a revelation, a cultural epoch, a record scratch in Hollywood history.

Sorry, but no it's not.

When patriotic right-wingers ran Hollywood, when those stodgy, old and backwards "sexist" conservatives were in charge, up on that big screen, women enjoyed real equality. They were goddesses — tough and beautiful, independent and accessible, whip-smart and classy, in charge and selfless, sexy and decent.

The list is endless… Garbo, Davis, Crawford, Grable, Stanwyck, Simmons, Kerr, Hayworth, Lamar, Hepburn, Rogers, Colbert, Bergman, Bacall, de Havilland, Fontaine, Hayward, Taylor, Dietrich, Loren, Lombard, Garland, Loy, O'Hara, Pickford, Harlow, Day, Monroe, Kelly, Gardner, Leigh, Swanson, Holliday, Grahame, Reynolds, Neal, Saint, Caron, Wyman, Wood, Tierney, Darnell, Goddard, Grier and Arthur.

What do we have today? An aging and increasingly unappealing Meryl Streep and a whole host of cookie cutter babes (many of whom look like 14-year-old boys) all-too eager to degrade themselves, to act like sexist men. Hollywood uses these girls for nothing less than chum, and every year wonders why they can't find even five decent choices to fill the Best Actress category.

Oh, yeah, you've really come a long way, baby.

6. A Bubble That Has Lost Touch With the Audience and Now Makes Crap

The movie industry has lost complete touch with its audience. Gone are the talent scouts looking to build a farm club by spreading out across the country in search of The Next Big Thing. Instead it is an incestuous bubble that only reproduces within the family, within the rarified zip codes of Manhattan and Los Angeles.

7. The Death of Comedy

What in the world happened to the family comedy? The romantic comedy? The high school comedy? The ethnic comedy? The guy comedy? The snobs vs. slobs comedy? The stick-it-to-the-man comedy?

I'm no prude. I love The Hangover and American Pie. But every comedy today is man-boys and their body fluids, gross-out and heartless.

I don’t want to walk out of a theater feeling like I need a shower. And judging by the endless string of R-rated flops, we are all tired of this soul-killing garbage.

8. The New Production Code Is Much More Stifling Than The Old One

The old Production Code that guided the movie business throughout much of the golden era was more about how content like sex, violence and human sexuality was presented. In other words, these topics were not placed off limits. Hitchcock was allowed to make clear that Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint did it, he just couldn’t show them doing it; Hitchcock could make clear Martin Landau and James Mason were homosexual lovers, he just couldn’t show it.

Today's Production Code is an unspoken one. Nevertheless, it is much more fascist and creatively stifling than its predecessor because you cannot work around political correctness, you cannot turn text into subtext when certain subjects are placed completely off limits. For instance, unless you are black, you are no longer allowed to tell certain stories. A movie that told the truth about transsexuals being mentally ill could not be made today. Certain special interest groups cannot be satirized today. Conservatism cannot be portrayed as having any good ideas today. Every Western must apologize to the Indians. The list is endless and grows by the day. Just look at this stupid controversy surrounding HBO's Confederacy.

You can argue that anyone can make any movie they want. Sure. And that was true back in the studio era. But within the system, within the mainstream, you risk the same thing you did in 1955 — being blacklisted, shunned, and personally destroyed.

9. An Expensive Bad Time

With insanely high ticket and concession prices, movies are no longer accessible to millions of Americans. Like major league baseball, the theater experience is not only expensive but becoming more and more elitist, with high-priced luxury theaters becoming their own form of skyboxes.

For those of us who do gamble a hard-earned $80 for family night, we are forced to deal with the stress of theaters that do not police the talkers and texters; we are forced to gamble all that cash on an industry with a 15% success rate when it comes to producing a satisfying product.

Pathetic.

[jonjost]

Hot on the heels of making All The Vermeers in New York and Sure Fire, in what appears in hindsight to be a somewhat feverish creative rush, I went again to shoot another feature, somewhat full of myself, thinking and telling friends, I was out to make a masterpiece.  Brian DePalma was saying the same thing then, referring to his in-production film Bonfire of the Vanities.  Oh well….  I researched in Newport, Oregon, a film to be set in Toledo, a nearby paper and lumber-mill town.   Beginning with a somewhat inchoate idea, vaguely rooted in the at-the-time mania about “recovered memory” in relation to childhood abuse, the result was The Bed You Sleep In.

The Bed You Sleep In

1993 | 35mm Panavision | Color | Sound | 117 minutes

Writer, director, editor and cinematographer: Jon Jost

Music: Erling Wold

With: Tom Blair, Ellen McLaughlin, Kate Sannella, Marshall Gaddis, Thomas Morris, Brad Shelton

Official selection: Berlin, San Francisco, and Sundance Film Festivals

  Set in a small lumber mill town in Oregon, The Bed You Sleep In is an examination of a family facing a crisis – an accusation of deep and profound impact against one of its members. Along the way a portrait is rendered of the town, discreetly revealing its qualities, for better and worse. While doing so in a very oblique and indirect manner, the town and the family are surrogates for the larger community of America and its family of citizens. Moving slowly and stealthily, The Bed You Sleep In lays out its pieces, inviting the viewer to think for themselves. When the accusation arrives, a tragedy ensues, sweeping the family to the abyss.

    “It would be wrong to claim that Jon Jost’s extraordinary The Bed You Sleep In is an underrated film within the Australian film scene – it would be truer to say that, so far, it’s unrated, virtually unknown beyond a small circle of Cinémathèque members.

Jost is a true maverick of American independent filmmaking, but sadly for Australians he’s an unfashionable maverick whose films are beyond the pale of almost all art-house distributors and exhibitors in this country (and elsewhere, I suspect). And it seems that, especially in the case of this film, the condition of cultural ignorance and neglect may be virtually global.

The Bed You Sleep In is the final installment in what some call the Tom Blair Trilogy, named after the remarkable (and little known) actor who has incarnated several faces of American male psychosis in two previous Jost films, Last Chants for a Slow Dance and Sure Fire. Taken together, these three films form one of the greatest, most important and powerful bodies of work in all cinema.

The Bed You Sleep In also marked Jost’s departure from the US. As a farewell letter, it is surely one of the darkest, most profoundly despairing documents that American culture has ever produced. Not for nothing did Jonathan Rosenbaum title a catalogue note on the film, “The Tunnel at the End of the Light”.

The story traces an allegation of sexual abuse within a family that is living in an economically declining, Oregon lumber mill town. The film charts a double, auto-destructive tragedy: a family that tears itself apart, mirrored by the signs of a slow but terrible ecological disaster.

Jost tackles what I think is probably the single most difficult topic to dramatize on screen – child abuse, and especially the repressed memory of that abuse. This is an area that can be construed in so many wildly different ways – in terms of whom in the scenario one chooses to believe (the child who comes forth with the charge or the parent who protests innocence), the sorts of motives one imputes to the players (is the child on a petulant revenge kick? Is the patriarch at last showing his true, rotten colours?), and in the kinds of moral and social lessons that one decides to draw from it (is the family unit inherently corrupt or inherently civilized? Is feminism warping minds or honing them? Is righteous, ideological paranoia destroying everything that is good or opening our eyes at last to the truth?).

I don’t think Jost, finally, is in control of all the implications of narrating a plot (in however open a form) out of these awful, almost unfathomable issues; his film is unsettling in part because of that lack of control. He deliberately leaves everything unresolved and ambiguous, as Otto Preminger might have done in less psycho-gothic times than ours. Where Jost ends up is with the stasis of absolutely wrenching, wretched despair, complete hopelessness and helplessness, especially where the masculine condition is concerned: few images in cinema have shook me more than the climatic shot of Blair the ‘monster’ reaching a hand down into a pool of water and bringing it up to splash his face, as if to wash his soul clean, at the end of so much sadness and devastation …

But Jost also reaches beyond the turbulence of the dramatic or diegetic illusion to perturb the film form itself. Going far beyond the frozen, burning frame that concluded Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Jost gives us an entire scopic and aural regime that is slowly bending, cracking and coming apart under immense psychic strain. His use of depopulated landscape shots, in particular, generates a true, deep dread that surpasses any of the horrific grace-notes in the oeuvre of David Lynch (whose Twin Peaks film and TV series offer many points of close comparison with Jost’s tale).

The Bed You Sleep In is in every respect a brilliant, corrosive work – one of the most remarkable films of the 1990s.”

Adrian Martin, November 1995

  “The final film in an informal trilogy starring the phenomenal Tom Blair (the other two films in the series are Last Chants for a Slow Dance and Sure Fire), The Bed You Sleep In illustrates the deep frustration about America that drove director Jon Jost to relocate to Europe shortly after it was made. As in the first two films, this one tries to get at the roots of America’s social and political ills through the portrayal of one man’s life. On the surface, Blair’s character, Ray Weiss, is much more sympathetic than the ones he played in the previous two films, but his job as the manager of a lumber mill (albeit a nature-loving one) being driven out of business by foreign competition and clear-cutting places him in a can’t-win situation. He either has to destroy the nature he loves or lose his livelihood. His dual nature is reflected in the visual scheme of the film, which includes many landscape shots composed as diptychs. This is one of Jost’s most powerful portraits of the slow pace and underlying sadness of small town life, both of which are beautifully depicted in a remarkable scene in the town’s diner, made of a single, languid tracking shot encompassing the diner’s interior while life simply goes on both within and beyond the camera’s view. When the letter from his daughter arrives accusing Ray of incest, it hints at an even more violent split within his nature, one that, in Jost’s view, is symbolic of the violent divisions threatening to undermine America’s nobler ideals.

Tom Vick, All Movie Guide

  “This really is a most extraordinary film. I found it in the university film library back when I was studying English Literature in 2009: this little gem was nestled in what looked like a knock-off dvd case – the cover looked like it had been designed using clip art. I had no idea quite how obscure it was until I made this list: research has yielded very few reviews and very little information.

Set in a sleepy American town, this film dissects the American dream through its candid study of an American family and the town in which they live. One day, a shocking accusation arrives, sending the family spiraling into despair and tragedy. But who is telling the truth? Camerawork seems telling here, but it is ultimately left to the viewer’s discretion. There is no soundtrack to this film, and conversations are delivered in a realist style, reminiscent of Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. Far from stark, however, this film uses colour and exquisite cinematography to imbue its portrait of tragedy with a kind of stillness. The film is quiet in tone, and highly textured in its delivery. Directed by Jon Jost, it can be bought directly from his website and from Amazon.”

Writer and source unknown

“This 1993 feature certainly has its flaws–including a wholly unnecessary literary quotation that appears on-screen at the worst possible moment–but it’s still one of maverick independent Jon Jost’s most forceful efforts to date, in part because it stars the most talented actor he’s ever worked with, the resourceful Tom Blair. Mainly known as a stage actor and director, Blair also starred in two of Jost’s best earlier features–as a wandering, jobless malcontent in Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977) and as a misguided, bullying real estate speculator in Sure Fire (1990). Here he rounds out a loose trilogy of Jost’s corrosive, speculative self-portraits by playing a more sympathetic and ostensibly less alienated character, the owner of a lumber mill employing 60 workers, though the consequences of his situation prove to be even bleaker–and this time they can’t be so confidently traced back to his own character. A tragic, beautiful, and mysterious film that alternates between all-American landscapes (many of them composed as diptychs) and an unraveling nuclear family, this is as evocative and apocalyptic as Jost’s cinema gets–a film full of unanswered questions that will nag at you for days even as it makes fully understandable the sort of feelings about this country that drove Jost into European exile not long after it was completed. It’s part of the aching horror and lucidity of Jost’s vision that he can’t regard himself and the U.S. as wholly separate entities. With Ellen McLaughlin and Kate Sannella.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

  The Bed You Sleep In is very much the work of the same individual but, as mentioned above, is very different in tone.  The narrative revolves around the character of Ray (played by the truly remarkable Tom Blair, whose only prior features to the best of my knowledge are Jost’s Last Chants for a Slow Dance and Sure Fire), owner of a financially distressed lumber mill.  In a scene of astonishing power, Ray’s wife Ellen (played superbly, particularly in this scene, by Ellen McLaughlin) reads out a letter from his daughter who is painfully and emotionally accusing him of sexual molestation.  (The manner in which the letter is read and the way in which the characters’ emotions play out are so vastly different from the ways a similar scene in a Hollywood film would do them that I can’t even begin to describe their effectiveness.)  This event occurs just about halfway through the film, and the narrative threads leading up to and trailing from this scene are slowly, meditatively interwoven with masterful visuals of the landscape in and around the town and lumber mill.  The cumulative power of the film is devastating.

From a Top Ten listing in Chicago, listed as #4 after Frameup as #3, author not known

  NOTE:  The available copy of this film has French subtitles burned in and is somewhat banged up.  Sorry about that but it is 100% the erstwhile “producer” who is responsible for this reality.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/123248

Fouled Beds Hot on the heels of making All The Vermeers in New York and Sure Fire, in what appears in hindsight to be a somewhat feverish creative rush, I went again to shoot another feature, somewhat full of myself, thinking and telling friends, I was out to make a masterpiece. 

[caveartfair]

The Best Public Art of 2018

For the third year running, the art-and-design studio and foundry UAP has compiled a list of the most compelling public artworks and initiatives around the globe. (UAP has itself helped make possible many impactful projects recently, from Ai Weiwei’s “Arch: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” to a Zaha Hadid–designed hotel in China.) With the help of international curators, UAP has highlighted 12 public works that captured the world’s imagination in 2018. We present their selections here, with exclusive commentary on each project from the curators who nominated the projects in question.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2018 The Infinite Dimensions of Smallness, Singapore

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2018 The Infinite Dimensions of Smallness, 2018, Singapore. Image courtesy of the National Gallery Singapore.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2018 The Infinite Dimensions of Smallness, 2018, Singapore. Image courtesy of the National Gallery Singapore.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2018 The Infinite Dimensions of Smallness, 2018, Singapore. Image courtesy of the National Gallery Singapore.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2018 The Infinite Dimensions of Smallness, 2018, Singapore. Image courtesy of the National Gallery Singapore

“This site-specific installation commissioned for the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden at the National Gallery of Singapore references both the city’s regional-specificity and status as an international hub,” says Alexie Glass-Kantor, executive director of Sydney’s Artspace. “Situated in central Singapore and framing the urban skyline, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s large-scale bamboo structure acts as a porous, labyrinthine border between its public surrounds and the intimate rituals of a Japanese teahouse nestled in its centre. Utilized as a space for both private and collaborative encounters, Tiravanija draws on regional architecture, ritual, and tradition to craft a space that thoughtfully exemplifies the subtle intricacies of globalized, socially engaged art practice today. What the artist describes as ‘the infinite dimensions of smallness’ has a vast poetic and reflective quality that draws the audience into an enigmatic entanglement of space and place elegantly dislodged from the everyday.”

Callum Morton, Monument #32 Helter Shelter, Sydney

Callum Morton, Monument #32 Helter Shelter, 2018, Sydney. Image courtesy of Daniel Bound.

Callum Morton, Monument #32 Helter Shelter, 2018, Sydney. Image courtesy of Daniel Bound.

Callum Morton, Monument #32 Helter Shelter, 2018. Image courtesy of Daniel Bound.

“The proverb and curse ‘may you live in interesting times’ comes to head-on fruition in Callum Morton’s sculpture, commissioned by Sydney Contemporary for the Barangaroo Precinct,” Glass-Kantor says. “In reference to the social, cultural, and political traumas plaguing the Trump era, Morton highlights the ripple effects of the U.S. president’s unnerving presence and constructs a topical, politically charged public art installation. Passersby literally stop in their tracks as they encounter the unmistakably tangerine features of the president rising from the pavement, grafted into a Frankenstein mix of theme-park homage and minor architecture. Morton is a deft hand at dark humour and this work plays with form and dysfunction—the front is a bravura of portraiture, whilst the reverse is a hollowed-out shelter (of sorts), offering very little reprieve from the current maelstrom of global politics. Ultimately what lies within is anyone’s guess.”

Do Ho Suh, Bridging Home, London

Do Ho Suh, Bridging Home, 2018, London. Image courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro Gallery, and Gautier Deblonde.

“Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh’s Bridging Home is a deeply clever artwork,” says curator Alison Kubler. “It so aptly describes the tension between public and private space in the sense that it is at once both: a home on a public thoroughfare. Installed on a pedestrian bridge in London’s heart, Bridging Home—a replica of a traditional Korean home—forms part of Sculpture in the City, and Art Night, an annual initiative that commissions site-specific artworks across the city. It is incongruous and charming and so perfectly illustrates the nuance of what defines ‘home’ as seen from the perspective of an immigrant, which, in light of the larger issues surrounding the worldwide refugee crisis, is even more timely.”

Erwin Wurm, Hotdog Bus, New York City

Erwin Wurm, Hotdog Bus, 2018, New York. Photo by Jason Wyche. Courtesy of the artist, K11 Art Foundation Hong Kong, KÖNIG GALERIE Berlin, and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong.

Erwin Wurm, Hotdog Bus, 2018, New York. Photo by Jason Wyche. Courtesy of the artist, K11 Art Foundation Hong Kong, KÖNIG GALERIE Berlin, and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong.

Erwin Wurm, Hotdog Bus, 2018, New York. Photo by Jason Wyche. Courtesy of the artist, K11 Art Foundation Hong Kong, KÖNIG GALERIE Berlin, and Lehmann Maupin New York and Hong Kong.

“New York Public Art Fund’s brilliant Erwin WurmHot Dog Bus is undoubtedly one of the best artworks of the year,” said Kubler. “An excoriating comment on gluttony and greed, it is at once also a moment of unbridled joy. The work is so uniquely Wurm; I love the idea that the viewer is both a willing and guilty participant in the act of consumption. And yet, too, Hot Dog Bus is a deeply democratic artwork; it is imbued with grave and serious meanings at the same time that it invites one to share a moment with others, and ‘enjoy’ the moment. It perfectly embodies the notion of what public art should and could be: inclusive.”

Dorothy Iannone, I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door, New York City

Dorothy Iannone, I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door, 2018, New York. Image courtesy of Time Schenck and Friends of the High

“I truly love the work of Berlin-based American artist Dorothy Iannone, but it’s rarely shown in New York City,” says Emma Enderby, senior curator of The Shed in New York. “And when it is, it’s never public art. This always seemed odd to me, given that—as Robert Filou stated—‘her aim is no less than human liberation.’ That’s partly what makes Iannone’s mural, commissioned by the High Line, so exciting. It feels undeniably fresh, courageous, responsive. It features three renditions of the Statue of Liberty and the last line of Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem ‘The New Colossus,’ which states: ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’ This ode to the famed statue becomes a simple reminder of the country’s history as a welcoming place for those that needed a new home, and the reality of the state of immigration today.”

Multiple artists, Liverpool Biennial

Installation view of Abbas Akhavan, Variations on Ghost, 2017-18, Liverpool Biennial. Photo courtesy of Rob Battersby.

Installation view of Agnés Varda, 3 moving images. 3 rhythms. 3 sounds, 2018, Liverpool Biennial. Photo courtesy of Thierry Bal.

Installation view of Mohamed Bourouissa, Resilience Garden, 2018, Liverpool Biennial. Photo courtesy of Pete Carr.

Installation view of Mohamed Bourouissa, Resilience Garden, 2018, Liverpool Biennial. Photo courtesy of Pete Carr.

“The 10th rendition of the Liverpool Biennial was one of the best thus far,” says Enderby. “I’ve selected the biennial as it’s a city-wide exhibition, with all artworks free and open to the public. It’s interesting to think about how biennials can be public art, acting as essential ways people can access art for free. In this year’s Liverpool Biennial, scattered throughout public spaces in the city, there were more than 40 artists from 22 countries—many of those countries in political turmoil. The exhibition reflected on contemporary crises, but also imagined a better world. For me, highlights included Abbas Akhavan’s monumental soil work, which referenced ancient sculptures destroyed by ISIS; Agnès Varda, one of the only female filmmakers to emerge from the French New Wave movement; and Mohamed Bourouissa, whose two films in the biennial are wedded to his community-based practice.”

Archie Moore, United Neytions, Sydney

Archie Moore, United Neytions, 2014-18, Sydney. Photo by Jessica Maurer. Courtesy of The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

“United Neytions is a major new commission at Sydney’s International Airport, Terminal 1, comprising 28 imagined First Nations’ flags suspended from a central atrium,” explains curator Natalie King. “Moore, a Kamilaroi Aboriginal artist, reflects the diversity of Aboriginality with over 280 language groups across Australia. Ideally situated at the airport—a place of transit and mobility—his public artwork graphically and joyfully suggests a ‘welcome to country,’ highlighting the immensity of First Nations’ histories as the original custodians of Australia for over 60,000 years.”

David McDiarmid, Rainbow Aphorisms, London

David McDiarmid, Rainbow Aphorisms (1993-95), 2017. Photo by Benedict Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and the Estate of David McDiarmid.

David McDiarmid, Rainbow Aphorisms (1993-95), 2017. Photo by Benedict Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and the Estate of David McDiarmid.

David McDiarmid, Rainbow Aphorisms (1993-95), 2017, London. Photo by Benedict Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and the Estate of David McDiarmid.

David McDiarmid, Rainbow Aphorisms (1993-95), 2017, London. Photo by Benedict Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and the Estate of David McDiarmid.

David McDiarmid, Rainbow Aphorisms (1993-95), 2017, London. Photo by Benedict Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and the Estate of David McDiarmid.

“David McDiarmid’s activist and alluring Rainbow Aphorisms reappear, after the artist’s death of AIDS in 1995, across South London’s metro, infiltrating the streetscape and accosting the passerby,” says King. “His witty and dazzling slogans stridently message queer identity and history, as urgent and politically astute as ever. Pithy phrases such as ‘Don’t forget to remember’ and ‘I’m too sexy for my T-cells’ are emblazoned against rainbow backgrounds, reminding us of both the AIDS crisis and the pertinence of inclusivity in contemporary society.”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The London Mastaba, London

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The London Mastaba, 2018, London. Photo via Flickr.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The London Mastaba, 2018, London. Photo courtesy of Wolfgang Volz/laif.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The London Mastaba, 2018, London. Photo by Matt Buck via Flickr.

“In contrast to the glacial time frame taken to realize many of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s major projects, The London Mastaba happened relatively fast,” says Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of New York’s Public Art Fund. “Its origins, however, go way back. Oil barrels were among the first objects Christo wrapped or stacked as a young émigré artist in Paris in the late 1950s, culminating in his Wall of Oil Barrels – Iron Curtain, Rue Visconti, Paris (1962). It was astonishing to see the same functional, industrial objects so utterly transformed in use: from the politically inflected urban barrier of 1962 to the massive and archetypal mastaba form, made seemingly weightless on water, dazzling in tones of bright candy. The late work of some great artists is dark and brooding; that of others feels like an ode to joy. It was a joy to be at the Serpentine Galleries in Hyde Park this summer.”

The Mile-Long Opera, New York City (co-created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang, with text by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine. Co-produced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line, and THE OFFICE performing arts + film)

The Mile-Long Opera, 2018, New York. Co-created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang, with text by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine. Co-produced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line, and THE OFFICE performing arts + film. Photo by Timothy Schenck.

The Mile-Long Opera, 2018, New York. Co-created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang, with text by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine. Co-produced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line, and THE OFFICE performing arts + film. Photo by Liz Ligon.

The Mile-Long Opera, 2018, New York. Co-created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang, with text by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine. Co-produced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line, and THE OFFICE performing arts + film. Photo by Timothy Schenck.

The Mile-Long Opera, 2018, New York. Co-created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang, with text by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine. Co-produced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line, and THE OFFICE performing arts + film. Photo by Timothy Schenck.

“It is no easy feat to create a work of art that is at once epic and intimate,” Baume says. “By the numbers, The Mile-Long Opera was of monumental scale: unfolding gradually, continuously, and cumulatively along a vast section of the High Line, featuring 1,000 voices singing acapella to an audience of countless New Yorkers that streamed by, like pilgrims on ritual journey by night. Thus the operatic evocation of quotidian urban life became an attenuated, immersive experience, different for everybody, since nobody could have the same experience of each singer, each text, and each location at the same time. The inspired partnership of architect Liz Diller and composer David Lang, both virtuosos in their own disciplines, generated a new model of participatory performance and audience experience that painted a captivating portrait of a remarkably diverse collectivity: New York City.”

Tauba Auerbach, Flow Separation, New York City

Tauba Auerbach, Flow Separation, 2018, London. Photo by Nicholas Knight. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery and Public Art Fund, NY

“Tauba Auerbach’s transformational work combines the dazzle camouflage technique invented by British painter Norman Wilkinson during World War I to confuse enemy submarines, with fluid dynamics and forms found in wake patterns left behind objects as they move through water,” say Natasha Smith and Ineke Dane, both members of UAP’s own curatorial team. “The work is at once optical and delightful, even participatory—inviting viewers to partake in boat trips on the New York harbor on board the artwork’s historic vessel and canvas, the fireboat John J. Harvey. The work intertwines concepts of engagement, interactivity, Op art, technology, and innovation, while acting as an homage to the end of World War I (or the celebration of peace) in an unexpected, memorable and accessible way.”

Olafur Eliasson, Fjordenhus, Vejle Fjord, Denmark

Olafur Eliasson, Den indre himmel, 2018, Vejle Fjord, Denmark . Photo by Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist and Kirk apital.

Olafur Eliasson, Den indre himmel, 2018, Vejle Fjord, Denmark . Photo by Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist and Kirk Kapital.

Olafur Eliasson, Den indre himmel, 2018, Vejle Fjord, Denmark. Photo by Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist and Kirk Kapital.

“Internationally renowned Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has completed his first architectural project, a sculptural headquarters in the Vejle Fjord in Denmark,” say Smith and Dane. “The building was commissioned by Kirk Kapital, the holding and investment company for three brothers who are direct descendants of the founder of Lego. It is the first building entirely designed by Studio Olafur Eliasson.

“The design of the building casts nature as a hero through consideration of natural light, the weather, the seasons, and the Vejle Fjord itself, with the building sited on the water within the renowned geological formation.

“Not only is this work considered, thoughtful, and striking by design, it is a powerful testament to the skill of the creative and evidence of the current breaking-down of perceived barriers and definitions within the creative industries—simply put, the categorisation of mediums and practices continues to blur and produce compelling outcomes.”

from Artsy News

[whatthekpopofficial]

Suicide Prevention Awareness: 12 Korean Celebrities Who Tragically Committed Suicide

*Please be aware that this article is a special topic for September, the National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. While we are making the effort to handle this topic with care, some people may find the topic triggering. Suicide prevention hotlines and resources are listed at the bottom of this article.  While this entire month is dedicated to suicide prevention awareness, September 10th in particular marks World Suicide Prevention Day. Regardless of your position or status in life, depression is something that can affect any of us.  At times, depression, anxiety, and other issues can make life seem truly unbearable, even driving some people to consider suicide. This is something that can affect anyone around the globe, even famous singers or actors. Due to our love of Korean culture, it's easy to focus on the bright and positive aspects of the entertainment industry, forgetting the challenges and pain that can accompany life in the spotlight. When you add this to the normal demands of being a young person these days, it is easy to understand why some people feel so overwhelmed. In fact, suicide is the leading cause of death among Korean people in their teens, twenties, and thirties. While some advancement is finally being made concerning mental health issues in Korea, there is still a long way to go. In order to bring awareness to the rising number of suicides in Korea and around the world, we wanted to talk about some of the most famous celebrities who have chosen this tragic method of coping with their personal issues. We also want to encourage you that you should reach out for help if you're feeling suicidal or know someone who is. If we can assist in any way at WTK, please let us know. Last year, we lost one of our staff members to suicide. As such, suicide prevention is a topic important to our hearts. For further resources, we would also like to refer you to the radio broadcast we held in honor of SHINee's Jonghyun. The broadcast is divided into different segments, when one segment dealing specifically about what to do when you or a loved one is feeling suicidal. Click here to listen to the broadcast. You can find the different topics and their time stamps in the description of the video. In the meanwhile, let's look back at some of the notable cases of suicide in Korea. We remember these lives and mourn their loss after they succumbed to such a horrible thing. Suicide itself is 100% preventable, and we encourage you to reach our for help today! Park Yong Ha (1977-2010)

If you’re a hardcore drama fan, you will have seen this guy somewhere. Park Yong Ha debuted in 1994 and rose to fame in the early 2000s with Winter Sonata, the famous drama co-starring Bae Young Jun and Choi Ji Woo. He became a hit actor and singer in both Korea and Japan. After the successful drama A Man’s Story and his movie The Scam in 2009, the actor was scheduled to star in Comrades in July 2010. Sadly, however, he didn't make it that far. Speculations still surface as to why a successful and well-known actor like Park Yong Ha would make that choice. Some said he was under too much stress after he started managing his own company, others claimed the news of his father’s malignant cancer was the reason, and some simply cried depression. Whether one or more of these reasons contributed to the decision, no one will ever fully know what went on in the mind of the 33-year-old actor. Lee Eun Joo (1980-2005)

Steadily making a name for herself as an actress, Lee Eun Joo killed herself after leaving a note apologizing to her mother for her decision. The actress appeared in many popular films, including Bungee Jumping of Their Own and The Scarlet Letter. She was young and full of potential. So, why? Was it depression? Was it "insomnia after her nude scenes in The Scarlet Letter" as some people claimed? No one will ever truly know. U;Nee (1981-2007)

This beautiful and promising young woman debuted in 2003 as a dance-pop singer. With her debut album, she instantly become well-received by both fans and critics alike. The young artist was also a rapper and went on to make her acting debut as well. A normally shy person, her label soon wanted her to transition into a more sexy genre of music, pushing her to get plastic surgery and changing her looks. Although it wasn't determined that she suffered from depression until after her death, things she had written on her social media page later came to light that indicated she felt overwhelmed and without purpose. After attending a church service in the morning, she decided to take her own life at the age of 25. Ahn Jae Hwan (1972-2008)

Money issues— including a failed business and debtors storming in— was thought to be the reason behind Ahn Jae Hwan’s death. I watched him in Sunflower, and he was one of the few things I liked about the show. The rising star killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in his car, first leaving an apology note to his newlywed wife. What makes this so sad is that the actor wasn't found for several weeks, leading people to wonder what took his loved ones so long to find him. Kim Jonghyun (1990-2017)

On December 18, 2017, beautiful and talented artist Kim Jonghyun of SHINee made the decision to end his life. A person who had been very public with his long-term struggle with depression, he left behind several texts and notes that gave a glimpse into his mental state at the time. Asking his sister to tell him he did well and explaining to a friend that he just wasn't supposed to have been a celebrity, he talked about his "devouring depression" and feelings of hopelessness. A beautiful soul who had touched countless lives with his music, art, writing, and more, Jonghyun's death was one of the most shocking and high-profile suicides among Korean celebrities. Jeong Da Bin (1980-2007)

Most famous for Rooftop Cat, Jeong Da Bin committed suicide in the bathroom of her boyfriend’s apartment. The boyfriend stated that Jeong Da Bin was depressed because of lack of work, imprisonment of her manager, and cyber attacks on her appearance. With only the boyfriend's words to go on, no one will ever truly know what motivated this lovely young lady to take her life that day in his bathroom. Kim Seok Hyun (1979-2009)

After getting a late start in his career, Kim Seok Hyun played minor roles in few productions on TV. You might recognise his face without being able to recall exactly where you know him from. At the age of 30, he took his life in his own home. Again, all that was left after his suicide were speculations on what led him to take this extreme measure. Many said it was due to depression from lack of work, but the public will never know. Jang Ja Yeon (1982-2009)

Remember the three bullies in Boys Over Flowers? Jang Ja Yeon was one of them. She landed a CF and few other offers because of the popular drama. She was described as a rising star— beautiful and talented. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she committed suicide in her family's home. It seemed to be a result of depression, but this time, a sponsor scandal was also involved. In other words, it was said she was being sexually abused by the rich investors and executives of her company due to her "slave" contract. The actress left a long letter before her death, naming the culprits and mentioning that they had physically and sexually abused her under the permission of her agent. The reason behind her suicide definitely sounds plausible, but we may never know for sure as the truth never fully came to light. In the end, only the life of a poor young girl was snatched away. Meanwhile, the agent is still alive and prospering. Woo Seung Yeon (1983-2009)

Failed auditions, anxiety, and depression are what led to the tragic suicide of this young star. In fact, she was already receiving treatment for depression. The ironic part is before her suicide, she sent her sister a message that said, "I’m sorry." She uploaded the word "goodbye" to her personal page and changed the background music to a song called ''Sorry." Her family knew she was getting worse and said so. Sadly, it seems that Woo Seung Yeon knew she needed help, but when that help didn’t arrive, she simply gave up. Roh Moo-hyun (1946-2009)

This low-income farmer was inspired to become a human rights laywer who would eventually even serve jail time as he faced against the powerful to fight for the average men. As such, it should come as no surprise that this man would eventually turn his eyes to politics in an attempt to change his world. He eventually was elected and served as the South Korean president between 2003 to 2008 and gained great popularity among the younger generation in particular. Politics aside, it wasn't until he had retired and was living a quiet life that someone brought up some suspicion that he had accepted a bribe in the past. The charge ignited an investigation and brought him into media's scrutiny in what his own party denounced as unfair and politically-motivated. Suffering from poor health already, the former politician decided to take his own life, leaving behind a note saying that he couldn't face the future and asking people to not blame anyone else for his death. Choi Jin Shil (1968-2008)

Choi Jin Shil will always be named as an iconic actress. "There was no other talent like hers," many people have stated. She starred in many films and drama and was called "The Nation’s Actress." However, her personal life was not easy. Her road manager died. She got married, but her husband turned out to be abusive. She filed for divorce and went through a public custody war, losing sponsors as a result. Her friend Ahn Jae Hwan (included earlier on this list) then committed suicide, and she was even accused of being involved in that. Things got really dirty and it was hard to cope with all of this in the public eye, so she opted out of the situation by choosing suicide, leaving behind her two young children. Tragically, her high-profile suicide resulted in a temporary rise in suicides in Korea for the month after her death. Approximately 700 more people killed themselves in that month than in previous times. The entire tragic situation led the South Korean government to take a stronger stance against malicious and libelous comments from netizens since it was found to have been such a factor in Ms. Choi's suicide. Choi Jin Young (1970-2010)

Choi Jin Shil’s younger brother gained interest from producers because of the fame of his sister. He landed a small role or two, but people eventually lost interest in him as an actor. As a result, he fell into severe depression. He unsuccessfully attempted suicide a few times, but less than two years after the death of his sister, he managed to succeed. He did not blame his sister or his family, but constantly being compared to a highly successful sibling is definitely not the easiest way to live. My humble psychological analysis is that Choi Jin Young had lived completely under the dome of his sister. So when she committed suicide, he couldn’t go on and did the same. He even chose the same suicide method as his sister when he ended his own life.

Some readers might be wondering, "What can we do about it? Why are you telling us this?" Simply put, we can all do something. When we have opinions that aren't so nice, we can keep them to ourselves. We can report the malicious comments by other internet users. We can help clean up the negative comments and prevent whatever terrible effect it has on celebrities. After all, they’re people just like us and each one struggles with their own issues that are often compounded by hateful, mean comments. More than anything, just take a stand when you see malicious comments online since those comments can be such an emotional and mental strain on celebrities. While these beloved celebrities succumbed to suicide, many more have been able to beat it! Celebrities like Brian Joo, Lee Sang Min, SHINee's Key, and many more have all admitted to self-harm or suicidal thoughts. In addition, several of our own staff members at WTK are also attempted suicide survivors. If we can make it, so can you! Please know you are not alone. We should understand that depression can affect us all, but suicide is never the answer. No matter how terrible your own situation is, ending your life is not the best way to deal with your problems. If you or a loved one struggles with suicidal thoughts, please get help immediately by calling 1-800-273-8255 or chatting online with a counselor from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. For international suicide prevention, please view the list of crisis centers and suicide hotlines in your own country by clicking HERE. If you suspect one of your family members or friends is suicidal, click here to see a list of common signs of suicidal thoughts. You are not alone! Get help today. Let's all work together to stop suicide.

*This article was originally written by author Park Chohwa. Additions have been made by lee1086. Media: As Credited Read the full article

[titheguerrero]

Burnout Returns to Center Stage

A recent Mayo Clinic Proceedings guest editorial, by Yale University physician Kristine Olson, asks the question--to some of us it's far from a rhetorical one--whether burnout among her fellow physicians is in fact "A Leading Indicator of Health System Performance?" Seems to me that her gist is: yes, it surely must be just such an indicator. If she's right, then our system's performance is in a heap of trouble. What is burnout? Our fearless editor, Dr. Poses, has addressed it repeatedly, including a few months ago here in these pages. But burnout is actually hard to delineate and hard to quantify. People quitting? People getting a lot less efficient once they see they're on the hamster-wheel? Getting lousy performance ratings because they're forced to hang in? (Wishing they had another option?) Leaving front line medicine to go to industry? Leaving to clip coupons and bicycle in Provence? Well, to quote Justice Potter Steward in his inimitable pronouncement for his short concurrence in the 1964 SCOTUS obscenity proceedings, "I know it when I see it." I know burnout when I see it. So do you. You want a physician who loves her job enough to get good at it, because lives depend on that. How's that going for you? I've watched my best and brightest colleagues--or those who could find another job or afford to do so--leave in droves. Now the waves of new investigations of burnout are coming at us thick and fast. What's striking about the latest spate of writings on burnout is what it doesn't try to say. Which is to say: back at the turn of the century, or just before that, or just after that, the preponderance of published sentiment was on reinforcing providers' resilience. Essentially, pep talks disguised as exegeses on "professionalism." "Stiff upper lip, remember your values and for heaven's sake, keep your professional wits about you. That's now changed. The surfeit of real, serious challenges--external threats--from HIT FAN (Health IT FAke News) to the opioid crisis to maldistributed resources, are now finally being examined. We'll come back to whether it's too late for any of this. So here are some recent chances for readers to get, usually without a paywall, a look-see.

The redoubtable New England Journal has several recent entries in its 25 January 2018 number dealing forthrightly with the "crisis level" of the problem, beginning with a perspectives piece from National Academy of Medicine authors Victor Dzau et al., including colleagues from most of the major national organizations involved in training and accrediting physicians and their organizations. I hope they read this blog.

The article cited above embeds an excellent and downloadable audio interview with Tait Shanafelt, MD, of Stanford University, also on burnout. He helpfully points out how front line doctors--those in primary care fields like internal medicine, family medicine and pediatrics--bear the brunt of the burden. That is, they bear the burden reflected in the alarming rate of especially experienced practitioners peeling off rather than continuing to put up with the (now my words) losses of autonomy and coherence. More later on autonomy and coherence. (At Stanford, Shanafelt holds the title of "Chief Wellness Officer." That tells us something right there. At a website tied to fitness, the CWO is defined as somehow hired  to "create work culture for employees to not only show up and perform, but thrive." Hey, any port in a storm. If removing noxious threats such as those above can be compared to wellness threats on exercise machines, like coach-driven anabolic steroids, then we're all for it. Let's get rid of the bullying managers along with the bullying coaches. Can CWO's effect such a change?)

In the same number of the Journal, one finds another superb piece by the now long established team of physician-journalists Alexi Wright and Ingrid Katz. Gott sei dank for the impact of young persons and women on health policy around medical worklife. Wright and Katz title their piece "Beyond Burnout -- Redesigning Care," not the shopworn twentieth century "Be More Professional" meme. They go on at length on the cost of losing experienced doctors, and describe one means of addressing the crisis created at the University of Colorado. In the so-called Colorado APEX project, which started (as many innovations do) in Family Medicine at UC, then spread to other departments and institutions, they show how certain burnout measured were cut dramatically. They conclude, though, with an admonition: "how [can] physicians can reclaim joy in the practice of medicine?" They're not sure, nor am I, whether managerial redesign of care, by itself, can "restore meaning and sanity" to the lives of providers. And this is not just about--in the main this is not about--making doctors' lives better. Not the real point. Doctors flake off, patients have longer wait times then have access to less and less experienced ones when they finally get to see them. Doctors lose that passion for the art when they're overwhelmed with prescriptive guidelines around the "science." Unclear which is more dangerous: doctors who burn out and leave, or those who burn out and stay behind.

Wright and Katz and a number of other observers cite what's turning out to be a seminal study published last fall in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Authored by a team led by prominent internist Christine Sinsky, the piece provides all the evidence anyone will ever need to understand the magnitude of the crisis as well as some of its causes. Chief among those causes, a topic repeatedly and eloquently underscored (most recently here) in these blog pages by our own InformaticsMD, is the Electronic Health Record, or EHR. The blog post just quoted actually harks back, through a report in Medical Economics, to the same Sinsky piece mentioned at the start of this bullet.

There's been a lot of inkshed lately about the EHR as a cause of burnout. But what seems most likely is a murkier picture that means we have to look both across the causal spectrum and across the political spectrum.

Does having your practice swamped by addiction-crisis patients contribute as well to burnout? In an earlier blog we pointed to the phenomenon of physicians across the country "learning" about opiates, first becoming "convinced" of the non-addictive properties of drugs like OxyContin. In a word, later, realizing they'd been snookered--a real blow to the joy and coherence of medical practice. Not to mention the end-effect of whole practices being consumed by drug- and doctor-shopping by patients totally convinced that they "needed" continued use of these drugs to avoid pain relapse.

But wait. Burnout is multicausal. Physicians trained to practice public health and physiologically-based internal medicine are stymied by loss of control of their practice, as the managers insist on crowding their schedules with all comers. No choice. Firing a patient is well nigh impossible.

They're also stymied by the bizarre contradictions--see above and all the new articles--of the technology imposed by managerialism. Why is it imposed? The physicians know why, and there's nothing they can do about it.

It allows managers to "watch"--using all the wrong metrics--their performance.

It gives managers the illusion of control by means of counting--which in fact EHR does very badly--adherence by clinicians to clinical guidelines, even when the latter are ill conceived.

It allows managers to draw in more dollars through "compliance" with government-imposed standards, out of the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Care IT, including the now justifiably much-maligned Meaningful Use standards. Some standards we came to know well, allowing managers to capture more dollars, include things such as the following.

pushing out end-of-encounter "Clinical Summaries" that contain nothing but erroneous lists of medications, and no plan, then leaving these near-worthless paper documents on printers when they were destined for patients

striving perversely to push out "eScripts"--electronic prescriptions--for a certain percentage of patients during encounters, requiring first the e-prescription followed by a web-page button indicating "I wrote this prescription electronically," followed by billing for an eScript: except that most patients already got their meds renewed outside of in-office encounters

the push to "upcode" from lower- to high-reimbursement level billing codes for greater charge capture, requiring nothing more than gross importation of macros and text blocks

this list goes on and on; this write knows inside out the perversities of the EHR

So the opiate crisis and the technology crisis have converged with still other forces that now  becoming rampant. Chief among these is the much slower-simmering crisis of hyperspecialism. Students who would become great generalists cannot afford to do so because of crushing debt burdens. Their institutions impose drastic inflated costs on medical students while pushing, through both cultural and institutional pressures, these students to hyper-specialize in procedure-driven specialties whereupon they, too, can become part of the problem.

This last problem has been discussed on occasion over the years in HCRenewal by its editor, Dr. Poses, in his discussions of the secretive AMA-designated panel known as the RUC, the Resource Utilization Committee. RUC exposés are rampant--see here and here--and nothing new. But the result is that the AMA's efforts on behalf of its own heavily specialty-weighted membership have created within medicine an auto-cannibalistic food chain within which the profession, including academic medicine, essentially penalize their own most vulnerable. The most vulnerable who are in fact societally the most valuable. But since the AMA appoints the RUC, it is complicit in this autocannibalism, and therefore in the demise of physician worklife coherence. In his interview, Stanford CWO Shanahan states as much when we speaks of the particularly burdensome consequences of burnout among primary care physicians. (That Sinsky now spends some significant part of her time at the AMA is a good portent, we have to admit.)

So what are we left with? Earlier we said this is a multi-political problem. Look at the sources of the three causes of burnout discussed above.

The opiate crisis clearly stems from industry. Big Pharma, with one company, Purdue, allegedly leading the charge over several decades, gets the nod here. Not, as Wisconsin Sen Ron Johnson seems to think, the availability of Medicaid funds for addicted patients. Score one for private sector iniquity.

The EHR crisis clearly stems from Big Government. And probably, equally, industry, although when it started out the folks who brought you all the deficient EHRs were small entrepreneurs, nothing like Big Pharma. Score one for public sector iniquity. But Big Government brought them into the Bigs. Using by and large the wrong metrics. Medical managerialism then kicked in, bought the package, and went for the gold in them thar IT hills. That's the story of HITECH and even ACA as they sought out tech panaceas--the classic American technological imperative that brought us everything from the Interstate Highway System to the Moon Shot to the War on Cancer. And now this.

The relationship between public clinical needs and physician organizational resource mismatches is internal to the medical profession. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Score one for autocannibalism in a classic profession unable to regulate itself now, if it ever could before, in the face of all these new external forces.

Put all this on a SWOT analysis chart and you have a recipe for disaster. The one thing that both Big Medicine and Little Medicine had going for them in years past was autonomy and coherence. The autonomy couldn't survive in the 21st century, but the coherence--the joy of applying science to the individual patient--could have and should have. It is a flame still not extinguished. But faced with the forces we've discussed here, it is a flame flickering, just barely.

And the solution, like the problem, comes from every part of society, It therefore brooks no easy or solitary solution from either the left or the right extremes of political philosophy.

Article source:Health Care Renewal

[iamrabbani]

Cairo, Egypt. The most challenging trip I’ve ever done, yet the most rewarding. Every crazy taxi ride through mosques and tiny alleys, every breathtaking and polluted sunset, every good and bad deal made with local merchants, every step into the desert with the Pyramids behind you. Cairo’s beauty resides in this unlikeness/divergence, as if the shades made the lights brighter.

What brings you here, to read about this city? Cairo is not for all, I should tell you that. Recent political and social changes have made the Egyptian capital a place where many Western Countries’ Ministers of Foreign Affairs strongly advise their citizens not to go, although I believe this is a little farfetched. “Tourists don’t know where they are, but know where they’re going. Voyagers know exactly where they are, but have no idea where they’re headed to.” Who are you exactly?

Cairo. Its official name is al-Qāhirah, “the Conqueror”, but is also known with other nicknames, like Kahire, which in Coptic means “place of the sun”, Umm al-Dunya (arabic for “the Mother of the World”), and often even Maṣr, which in Egyptian Arabic is the name for Egypt itself. With a population of 20 million people (some say even 30 million though), the current capital city used to host Pharaohs, Ottomans, British, French, and witnessed both bloody coups and golden periods.

Anyway, you might be here to actually read what to do in Cairo, so let’s stop beating around the bush and let’s get to the point.

Pyramids of Giza

Let’s start from the pyramids, which is probably the most famous attraction in the city. And there’s a reason or that: because they are wonderful.

To get there, take a Uber or Careem (I’ll talk about this topic at the very end – check it out to save a lot of money and hassle) direction Giza. From the city center, the trip lasts around 40 minutes, and because of its buildings and views, it is also part of the entire adventure. Beware of the people that at the entrance will try to convince that a guide tour on a horse or camel is fundamental for you. You can decide to listen to them, and you probably won’t be disappointed either (just make sure to set the price before you start the ride), or you can decide not to listen to them and enjoy your time with your travel buddies or by yourself in one of the most impressing places on Earth (if you haven’t noticed it yet, we recommend the second option). The area ticket is 40 LE (around 2€) and you have access to the area of the pyramids and the Sphinx, but to get really into the pyramids you have to buy further tickets (200 LE / 10€ for the Great Pyramid of Giza or Pyramid of Khufu, 40LE for the Pyramid of Menkaure, the one in the middle is not accessible). Is it worth it? Yes, for three reasons: 1- you’re entering the freaking pyramids that nobody knows exactly how were built and that are enormous and awesome; 2- it’s cheap, for the entrance and the two tickets you end up paying around 14€ (price for a lousy museum in Europe probably); 3- being there without getting in is a little funny isn’t it?

It’s also amazing to see the perfection of the tunnels, if we think that were built 4500 years ago and nowadays engineers and architects have all but a common theory about their construction.

Besides entering them, what else is there to do? You will be approached by different people with camels and horses, as it happened at the entrance, that will offer you a ride around and towards the Sahara, where you will get a fantastic view over the Pyramids and the desert itself. It’s a great experience, but look for someone who has a good relationship with their animals (even though you can never know): a lot of them are not treated very well.

Another thing to beware: the heat. If you go during summer, it’s going to be hot. Very hot. So take plenty of water with you (but you can find there water too for the price of 10 LE).

Coptic Cairo

Coptic Cairo is a relatively small part of Old Cairo that contains Christian churches and monuments. For example, the Hanging Church, built in the 3rd century AD on a Roman fortress. After visiting it, go to the patio and you’ll find a wooden door. Open it up and climb the stairs that bring you on top of a small tower, where you can have a nice view over the patio and beyond.

Since you’re there, visit the Church of St. George and the nearby cemetery.

Mosques

But most importantly, visit the mosque Amr Ibn El Aas, which is very close to the Hanging Church. Its original structure was the first ever built in Africa! Albeit its complete renovation through time, the atmosphere inside is impressive. Don’t forget to take off your shoes every time you get into a mosque, and to tip the guardian once you leave (10 LE is more than fine).

Because of the number of mosques present in the city, Cairo is also named “the city of a thousand minarets”, the tall and slender towers of mosques, with a small balcony on top where the Mu’adhin calls the prayers. Besides Amr Ibn El Aas, go to Ibn Tulun, the oldest mosque in Cairo surviving in its authentic form and structure. Make sure you get in from the left, and once you surpass the external gate turn right and keep walking. You’ll see a door on the wall in front of you. Climb the stairs, and you’ll be on top of a minaret, the oldest in town probably, looking over Islamic Cairo. It really is the city of a thousand minarets.

Tip: make sure you visit a mosque (or even better, a minaret) at the Afternoon Prayer call, which is around 15.30: being on top of a mosque whereas the whole city’s mosques call prayers is an experience can’t forget.

Other mosques you can’t miss: Al-Azhar Mosque, or the “shining one”, The Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali, which is situated in the Citadel of Cairo (a medieval Islamic fortification with different museums as well), Mosque-Madrassa of Sultan Hassan, Mosque of Sultan al-Muiayyad (if you give the Mu’adhin 30-40 LE he’s going to take you to the rooftop, the view from there is breathtaking).

But be ready to discover more and more as you walk around in Islamic Cairo (and don’t forget to share your discoveries with us).

Khan al-Khalili

This is likely to be the most famous souq, or marketplace, in Cairo. Here you can find scented and colorful spices, exotic silk, and much more. The market was built in the 14th Century by Al-Khalili after the Black Death. Constructed on the the site of the Za’afran Tomb, the burial place of the Fatimid rulers, it aimed at symbolizing a new start of the city and its life after the plague. It’s literally an immersion in the Egyptian folklore, and you’ll be amazed by the small shops and the activity in the area.

I highly recommend Khedr, the oldest house of herbs and spices in Egypt. This is the heaven for spices aficionados.

Zamalek

It’s the district located in the upper part of Gezira, the island in the middle of the Nile. This area is populated by expats, and you can find nice restaurants, bars and cafes. Have a Koshari, the typical Egyptian dish, at Zöoba, a shisha and some black tea with mint at Rooftop Zamalek, or a great view at the restaurant Sequoia.

Extras

Depending on how long you’re staying, you might consider visiting other things as well.

The Pyramid of Saqqara is located a little far from the city, and it may take you almost 2 hours to get there. But if you decide to hit the road, you’ll also have to check out Djoser and the Red Pyramid.

Al-Azhar Park, near the homonym mosque, was a gift by Aga Khan to the citizens of Cairo, and it’s place where to get away from the buzz of the city and admire the skyline from a different point of view.

There’s something magical in the suburbs of Cairo, ideated and designed by eL Seed, a French/Tunisian artist. “Perception”, that’s how he named it. In the neighborhood of Manshiyat Nasr, well known for the city trash collection, the French artist painted over 50 buldings an anamorphic piece of art that evokes the words of a Coptic bishop lived in the 3rd century: “anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first”. However, it’s highly advised to go with someone who knows their way around, since one can get easily lost.

  Tips

Taxi – Make yourself a favor, download that app everybody is talking about and use it. Uber is hands down the best way to move around the city. It’s extremely cheap (so is Careem) and, to be honest, it’s also part of the experience. Besides driving through the crazy streets of Cairo (and thinking about their refined driving skills) you’ll see the city from within.

However, if you want to take taxis, or you don’t have any other choice, make sure you set the price before you leave, as most of them don’t have a taximeter and you risk to be charged way more than usual.

Also, don’t take phots of governmental stuff – Cairo is extremely photogenic, but don’t take photos of governmental buildings and people, since this is not very well seen from soldiers and police.

As regards hotels/hostels/flats: check out Airbnb or booking.com to save some money, you’ll definitely find something cool in the city center at a good price. Otherwise, we suggest staying at Kempinski or Semiramis, luxory hotels located along the Nile – you will love them!

Wrap up

Citis are to me like people, they have personalities. You build a relationship with a city, a give-and-take relationship – like friendship, for example. There could be mutual love, hate, sympathy, depending on how we are.

For tourists, Cairo can be a very nice city. A city where to spend a nice week, immersed in history and legends. But just a city to insert in the bucket list.

For voyagers, Cairo can be something else. It can be the city of adventures, of discoveries, of awe and wonder. It can be one of those cities that you know, once your flight takes off and, from your tiny seat you look down through the window, that someday you’ll come back to.

So, are you tourist or a voyager?

  The city you’ll fell in love with – Cairo, Egypt Cairo, Egypt. The most challenging trip I’ve ever done, yet the most rewarding. Every crazy taxi ride through mosques and tiny alleys, every breathtaking and polluted sunset, every good and bad deal made with local merchants, every step into the desert with the Pyramids behind you.

[auggiedelrey]

Going to a Gay Bar…But I’m Straight, Right?

It’s Saturday afternoon and I found myself deep in thought. I have been seeing so much success in my life and have been breaking new ground by exploring areas I never had (spiritually & mentally). But for the past 2 days, my humanity was peaking and wave after wave of negative thoughts were crashing against my shore. Working non stop all day on music (networking, emails, social media, design, apparel, songwriting, etc.) and in the same place, I was beginning to get cabin fever! I needed a break and I needed it fast!

Let me set up this scene because I find it necessary to do so in order for you to understand why I was in the state that I was. I had allowed all of these emotions to come in because I lowered the gate down of my heart. But why?! I was doing something that I use to do all the time, which was feeling sorry for myself and allowing sadness to overcome me because of the lack of support of the majority of my family. That is a topic of discussion that I will later address, since I need more than a paragraph to explain. This constant beating I was allowing internally was what prompted me to want to go out. 

My new hair stylist and amazing friend had invited me to a club in West Hollywood and I was all in. The club is actually very popular and known throughout the country…The Abbey. For those who don’t know, this is a gay club…so why the fuck was I going if I was not gay? I know what you’re thinking so let me back up…

I grew up in Texas in a very religious and strict home. Homosexuality or even sexuality itself was frowned upon and was a major sin! It was your first class ticket to hell. Despite this upbringing, I never allowed that hate to plant itself in my heart. It didn’t mean I was completely comfortable with the topic nor did I understand it at all! I also don’t know that I would have been open to this sort of thing when I first moved to Los Angeles 2 and a half years ago either. How closed minded was I?

Fast forward to present day and many things in my life have changed. Including me dropping the “Christian” title off of my life and being completely open to the universe. The fact that I am sitting here openly writing about this proves that I truly don’t give a fuck what people say or think about me! This is my beautiful life and I had the opportunity to experience an amazing night!

Was I nervous? Was I scared? Was I embarrassed? Fuck no! I was ready to have a good time and jump right in! I invited a good friend of mine to tag along for the experience since I knew he was open minded about going to have a good time and since I didn’t know what was going to happen that night. 

I showered, dressed up,  and my friend and I headed out to West Hollywood approximately at 10:45 p.m. We arrived to a scene that was extremely vibrant and the energy was insane! I wasn’t seeing gay, straight, or any type of classification. It was people celebrating life.

I called my hair stylist because a table had been reserved, which by the way is a big deal in Hollywood. Otherwise, your ass is going to wait in line for who knows how long! She told me to come in and once we found the girl in charge of VIP, we gave her the information and we were passed straight in.

The bass was literally shaking the floors, the walls, and your fuckin’ soul! It was extremely packed and amazing bodies (both men and women) who work there were everywhere (Damn, I need to go diet just thinking of it). Here’s the thing you may not know about me. I’ve always craved exploring the arts, fashion, sculpting a perfect body, and pushing my boundaries. Since moving to LA, I have found the tools necessary for me to do that!

Ok, let’s go back to the club. There were several dancers all over doing some crazy dance moves who were intoxicated by the music! Jesus fuckin’ Christ, let me have the drugs they’re having! We are escorted by the VIP hostess to the table where I saw nothing but strangers, except my hair stylist. She greeted me with a warm smile and a huge hug and told me that her and her boyfriend had to step out to smoke. Shit, I got there and she leaves me alone with complete strangers. I hadn’t even caught a buzz yet to deal with this!

Not even 5 minutes there and one of the girls there was waiving 100 dollar bills in the air and looking at me. “Darling, I don’t work here” is what was going through my mind. I can’t make out what she was saying because of the loud music so I lean in as she screams in my ear, “you and your friend have to pay $100 each to be here”. Sounds crazy, right? But it really isn’t and this is why. People party hard around here and it’s normal to drop hundreds and thousands in a single night. 

Lady, I am working on getting those millions to drop that measly hundred you asked for!

Today (Sunday) I reexamined that moment and figured out exactly why I attracted that moment.  I immediately corrected it within my mind, thoughts, and vision. Again, this is a topic for another discussion, but it’s very important for you to know that NOTHING happens to you by accident…NOTHING!

After going back and forth with this girl and me proceeding to tell her to fuck herself, I turned to my friend and told him that as soon as my hair stylist returned, we were going to politely dismiss ourselves and leave. This bitch had pissed me off and tried to humble me. Fuck that and fuck her!

I waited awkwardly for what seemed hours (which was only about 10 minutes) when my hair stylist finally returned. As I began to explain why we were leaving, she interrupted me and said, “don’t worry about it. There was confusion and I took care of it. Stay!” I came all this way, I was here now, so I stayed.

The environment was completely high energy the entire night. The crowd was a mix of gays, straight, and every walk of life. This may feel uncomfortable for some of you reading this because you might be asking, “Auggie, why would you go to a place like that if you are not gay?” And I know others are already judging me. But that’s the point…why are you uncomfortable? Why are you judging?

Drink after drink, shot after shot, and sipping some strange liquid that god only knows what it was, lol, I felt like I was in a weird crazy fucked up state of nirvana. Why? Because I was alive, I was free! At one moment, I started dancing by myself, closed my eyes, and wondered why I never gave myself permission to live life before! Oh, and I also love getting fucked up!

As the night goes on, the dancers switch off and I see a familiar face…and he sees me too. Was I embarrassed? No way! I immediately went up to him, gave him a hug, and a huge smile. I know he was probably surprised to see me there, but my spirit gave off the vibe that I was there to have a good time. Plus, he had gone to see me perform a week prior at a Hollywood club and now here I was in his line of work…respect!

People were coming up to these dancers and tipping them money. When I say tip, I mean literally taking ones, tens, and twenties and stuffing it in their tights or underwear (both men and women alike). I noticed a gay man earlier in the night admiring one of the girl dancers and as he kept tipping her, he would occasionally slap her ass as if saying, “damn girl, work it.” and what can I say? These dancers were fuckin amazing!

My friend gets close to my ear and says, “man, your boy is getting it!” And my dancer friend was! He was dancing amazingly and I can admit that. My friend sitting next to me, who is not gay, had to admit that too. He wanted to tip him and felt embarrassed to give him the money. I can understand so I grabbed the money and said, fuck it…I’ll do it!

I get my dancer friend’s attention and he sees the money in my hand and knows my intentions exactly. He starts to laugh and I knew what he was saying, “Ok, I see you. You are having a great time. You don’t judge. You are open to life.” Yes, I am to the point in my life where I am open to live, be bold, have adventures, and have fun! Does that mean I am not gay? No. Does it mean I like dudes? No. What it means is that I know who I am and no longer care about what others say in regards to me living this beautiful life.

Will I go back? Of course! Do I feel awkward? Absolutely not! I feel like I am in a new era in my life where I am evolving. I am literally in the midst of that moment because I can feel it and it’s so damn exciting!

I challenge you to stop being so judgmental and to stop being a bitch! Live life because you are going to wake up one day regretting being so uptight about gender, sexuality, religion, politics, and life!

[willmeiertext]

Dmitri Obergfell: Death of the Cool

via One Good Eye (Denver)

INTRO:

This is the first of a series of experimental writings about, and in collaboration with, select Denver artists. Having no specific agenda other than an interest in these artists’ work, the plan is to have a conversation with them in their studio about whatever happens to come up. There’s no Q&A, no topics to necessarily cover, and honestly, if there’s one thing I want from these experiments, it’s for them to feel different than your typical artist interview. A conversation that is true to the work and the personalities of the artists and myself.

I hope to document the personality of the conversation itself. So keeping the process organic beyond their studio and back into my own, the writing produced will inherit the thematic trajectory of the dialogue directly, with my role as writer being to subsume both peoples’ viewpoints, conclusions, questions, answers, misdirections, etc., into a single, weirdly tangential perspective.

DMITRI OBERGFELL: THE DEATH OF THE COOL

Dmitri Obergfell’s process fills the entire main space of Leisure Gallery, his current studio, in preparation for his show, Man is a Bubble and Time Is a Place, opening at Gildar Gallery March 23. Rap music from Macbook speakers echoes around our conversation. The entire time I was in there, he never paused from making molds. I started in at the natural place: What’s this show about?

Basically, it’s a meditation on “Deep Time” — an idea sampled from 2001: A Space Odyssey (the book), in which one of the most defining moments was the first time a proto-human got bored. Thus began the search for meaning, leading to the creation of symbols, the original “victory over time” that allowed information to be passed to future generations. But this sounds romantic, which isn’t the point. Dmitri is mainly just curious about what might possibly in the future be considered an artifact representative of our current era of massive overproduction.

Really, though, think about what this might be in our current, pop culture-obsessed world. The commodity of what we might call Cool? It’s certainly what’s being produced in rap and pop music, and just about every other corner of cultural industry other than art (as artists would love you to think — but really, their Cool is a commodity too, just more codified).

This has always resonated in Obergfell’s art for me, even at surface value, reflected in the chameleon paint signature to his style. The “flip paint,” as it’s sometimes known, which changes color under varying light conditions, embodies the theme of change and originally came from his fascination with car modification culture, where people have this eerily invested relationship with objects. Weirdly similar to Egyptian funerary art — some of the most extraordinary artworks ever produced, with express intent to be immediately put in the ground. I’ve personally felt for most of my life that the purpose of capital-A-Art is easiest to grasp in a sarcophagus. And I know it isn’t just Obergfell and myself who are on this wavelength: it was one of the most beautiful themes in Matthew Barney’s largely grueling film-opera, River of Fundament, screened in town as an arrival present from DAM curator Becky Hart not too long ago.

But really, for the majority of history, most art arguably had to do with some spiritual notion of death, all the way up until it made a departure from Christianity and began a slow descent into a sort of crisis as it began to become increasingly about only itself. Some might even say that modernism was a result of art becoming aware of its own mortality, with abstraction and minimalism and postmodern schools of self-referentiality becoming obsessively anxious about their encroaching deaths.

That’s a bit pessimistic, though, which is a sort of inapplicable frame for pieces like Dmitri’s recent installation featured in DAM’s Mi Tierra, which reads as not only profoundly Cool, in its chrome-plated, flip-painted, nails-did, speaker-boxed, narco-saint-swearing, tequila-shot-taking visual vocabulary, but also heartfelt, detail-oriented, and really very fresh and futuristic. Obergfell brings up Robert Smithson saying something like, “installation isn’t about filling up a room, it’s about taking things out.” This aside, though, perhaps one of the greatest strengths of this piece is that it isn’t art-about-art. It feels like it’s made for non-artists to enjoy — a product of the MTV / internet age, not just in its references, but in its attenuation to short attention spans with dozens of layered, individual moments for viewers to explore with reward at their leisure. To thumb through like the window shoppers we all are, until the museum revokes the public’s entry privileges because we can’t stop ourselves from doing so (true story).

The fact that Dmitri’s works can be understood and appreciated by both artists and those who know nothing about art cannot be emphasized enough. His artworks’ brand of Cool is that of common symbology, things cool to regular people, in some ways analogous to really exceptionally-produced radio-rap. There’s a persistent legibility, even if you don’t know the prerequisite slang (artSpeak) to understand everything being said. And this is really important to him, mainly because art is in a really dangerous place in our current political climate. Much of the public may come to (if they don’t already) view being an artist as some sort of con, and regardless of any individual cases of subjective truth to that effect, it’s a fact that art is at least threatened by more forms of recreation and entertainment than ever before, constantly competing for increasingly shorter attention spans.

It’s true, sadly. The magic that often lived in art — in Stonehenge, in representational painting, in philosophical minimalism — where is it now? Because mystery, wonder, and “how the hell?” often feel like they now belong to software. And while art has always progressed in tandem with technology, is it a given that, as just one of many incarnations of information, it’s exempt from an expiration date?

This all leads me to the place where I don’t think what might be an “average” perspective on art misses the point at all. If art has this anxiety about its own death, which it compensates for by incessantly semantically proving it’s existential value in this core way, perpetuated by an industry where accumulating generations of post-Duchampian, self-proclaimed Artists successively come-of-age wanting to believe that the fortune they spent on their art-school education was worthwhile — okay, it’s a big ‘if’, but if that’s true — it kinda makes sense that artists wouldn’t want to just make “some shit that’s cool”. But whether tastes are fabricated by capitalism or not, whether that matters or not, “some cool shit” is what anyone who isn’t plagued by these anxieties wants art to be. And even just within the context of a museum visit, focusing on anything in the 21st century is like speed-dating.

Art shouldn’t be superficial. It honestly probably isn’t even art if it doesn’t get deeper and better the longer you spend with it. But it should be gratifying and appreciative of its viewership now more than ever. In a political time when it could be said that people are increasingly scared of being challenged, in all areas of their lives, whether thanks to Facebook algorithms or just some greater zeitgeist, what I’m getting at is a dangerous line of thought, for sure. But I think taking seriously people’s willingness to engage information will only benefit the future of art’s wider efficacy, and maybe ensure it even has that future in the first place. It’s important to connect to the culture you’re a part of, not just simply detach from or criticize it. Then influence is possible. Enjoyment will always be capitalized upon. That doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted.

Returning to 2001 (the movie) — which anecdotally is my personal favorite work of art — no one understood this better than Stanley Kubrick. His movies are immaculately shot. Basically perfect. But if you really think about it, what he did was almost like what people now call “edutainment,” a sort of high-art sacrilege. And yet, there’s no doubt that the way he works with the “material” of film, using something shiny to draw people into his world of ideas, is tactically smart, to say the least. I personally don’t mind admitting that I love to be edutained.

I wanted to talk about Obergfell’s sculpture at BMOCA, Go Home Bacchus, which seemed much farther down the continuum toward “critical” art, and learned that I kinda missed the mark in my interpretation. It’s not institutional critique, it’s again, a meditation. On monuments. They’re everywhere — huge, politically charged objects made by bureaucracies to celebrate victory, a kind of weird idea in the post-9/11 world, you might think, but apparently these sorts of idealistic, fascist colossuses are still a major export of North Korea for dictators worldwide. When New Orleans takes down their confederate monuments, as in current news, then how best to do that? Will they literally topple them? What an indulgent symbol…

And yet, for all this power these things are supposed to hold in the public spaces they reign over, its almost like the only way for people to react is to take a selfie in front of them, or else commit petty vandalism. It’s almost like instinctual in our culture, like it’s funny to vandalize a giant statue whether you care about the politics behind it or not.

Obergfell’s main piece of research for this project was the scene in Tim Burton’s Batman when Jack Nicholson’s Joker brings his gang in to supervillianize the art museum. “A really fucking cool scene,” representative of popular culture. But then also around that time ISIS began making headlines for destroying vast amounts of historical artifacts — horrifically seeming to say “we’re erasing your history in its most prized form, it’s gone, we own you.” So it turns out there is power in the act…

But Bacchus is about graffiti, not aesthetic genocide. But maybe not even graffiti, because that word is loaded and this has nothing to do with geometric, gradient murals. So a more slippery concept — slippery to the extent that Obergfell *might* not even be upset if someone was to tag the piece. Something racist: no-go. Some self-important graffiti writer trying to claim the piece and “get up” — get out. Junior WestSideMafia alternative school student? Go for it. The person who keeps writing “Kill Trump” on electrical boxes around Denver, please. Do your thing (endorsement is mine, not necessarily the artist’s).

Not to get redundant, but there’s something really charmingly normal about the shit-headed vibe of these sentiments, likened by Dmitri to a teenager stealing fire extinguishers to blow at cars in the parking lot for fun. And while that’s so juvenile and condemnable by the ultra-ethical art world, I know – is it not also kind of the most raw manifestation of The Artist’s Instinct, if such a thing exists? To just say “fuck it I’m gonna do this thing and see what happens”.

Why? “I just thought it’d be cool.”