#but he looks like a hipster from the 2010s so like this is simply NOT it

[beannary]

trying to actually put in some thought to tlp donnie's design and specifically his color design because when i first made him i was zero thoughts head empty since i didnt think it would turn into you know this whole comic thing askdfjh

Plus here’s a little bonus Donnie I doodled while at work the other day :)

(psssst you can check out The Little Prince Separated AU over here!)

[southshoretides]

Type of Guy Who Fears The Void

On the object level, I think this DeBoer piece correctly identifies a certain type of person (aging white man who self-consciously and showily hates all aging-white-guy pop culture in favor of trying to stay hip), but as the commenters implicitly/explicitly point out, that type of guy is concentrated among the east-coast-grad-educated-tastemaker-social-media-part-time-writer set, i.e. Freddie's milieu, which he often tricks himself into believing is the only milieu in the world. Go to any bar in the Midwest and poll the natives on BTS-vs-Pearl Jam and you'll get different results. (Freddie is of course interminably contrarian relative to whatever his local milieu is, and if fate had brought him to Kansas instead of Brooklyn, he'd be the most red-tribe-hating, pining-for-Brooklyn's-loving-embrace guy on the internet.)

But the meta level of "People recognize that the world naturally puts them in stereotypical boxes and either fight to escape that or wholeheartedly embrace it" is something I think about a lot. That first paragraph was all about different Types of Guy, and that's all it is these days, isn't it? Type of guy, type of guy, type of guy. A whole generation of internet-raised autists can pinpoint your political beliefs based on how you dress or what kind of car you drive. "Guy who makes youtube videos while driving his SUV and wearing wraparound sunglasses" is a different type of guy than "Guy who insists that Carly Rae Jepsen is the best songwriter of the 2010s" but they are politically and culturally opposite Types of Guy, even though there's no rule that says Democrats can't drive SUVs or Republicans can't like Carly Rae Jepsen. But the trend-lines are strong enough that people notice anyway.

@max1461 occasionally gripes about how quickly and thoughtlessly people transpose is-statements with ought-statements, or in other words, take objective factual data about something and try to force it into a prefab narrative. And it certainly is annoying, but to an extent it's like making fun of cavemen for thinking every rustle of grass is a tiger. That's what their environment is giving them, and it's what their brains adapt for. What our environment is giving us is an endless parade of people who eagerly and effusively promote their political and cultural opinions, and eagerly and effusively identify those opinions with such and such group, so no wonder it's so easy for even an amateur to unearth a Type of Guy. No wonder you can look at someone with a Roman-statue avatar and predict with reasonable accuracy his thoughts on young women who dye their hair. And I think this is something the internet makes worse, not better.

I think any objective accounting of the situation would have to conclude that it's easier to be an eccentric in 2023 than in 1993. The internet has allowed weird people to find each other, talk to each other, understand each other and themselves in a way that simply didn't exist before. At the very least, you don't get that "Am I the only human on earth who's like this?" feeling. And the cheap, Hallmark version of diversity/eccentricity is still a popular cultural value: those wall-hangings and birthday cards your aunt buys say "Be Yourself: Everyone Else is Taken", not "Yourself sucks, Be Someone Else." No one wants to be seen as the stodgy, bitter old fart. Part of it, I'm sure, is a cultural thing--Americans seem to obsess over individuality and being one's truest self more than others.

And yet...there's also this ambient sense that eccentricity-in-itself has been devalued in 2023 relative to 1993, at least in my circles. Everything from eccentric tastes in art ("What are you, some kind of hipster filmbro?"), sex ("Of course I'm sex-positive but weird creepy shit doesn't count!") or politics ("You don't really think that, you're just being edgy.") People who value weirdness and eccentricity for its own sake feel hemmed in by people who either openly see it as a threat to their own culture's local hegemony. A lot of the internet really does seem to live by the 'nail that sticks out gets hammered down' and sees that as a good thing. Seems paradoxical.

(For the record, I'm not laying the blame here at any particular subculture. Conservatives blather on about freedom and liberty and then say anyone who refuses to lick an HOA's balls is a dangerous subversive. Progressives say everyone is valid and beautiful and then plaster their spaces with various 'freaks DNI' equivalents, 'freak' status being determined by vibe-centric whisper campaigns. Liberals will Celebrate Diversity up to and no further than the point where it damages quarterly profits. No "name" group is immune to this, really, but certain subgroups are.)

A theory: the normie-weirdo ratio isn't particularly different than it used to be, but the way they interact is different. In the pre-internet days, the weirdos were well aware they were weird, and in having to navigate normie-land with psychological armor on, at least they might come to understand it somewhat. Now, for those who want it, there's an unending stream of validation and insistence that you're perfect the way you are. Without shading into the "can suffering be a good thing if it leads to change for the better?" argument, I think even people who are all-in on the answer being "no" have met at least one person defined by their self-actualization curdling into selfishness and narcissism, to the point where you can't understand how they function, in a way that is directly attributable to a having a stable of pseudonymous online enablers. That's a real phenomenon the way that "Shut up and repress, you freak" is a real phenomenon. They can both suck. They can even both suck in ways that make the other one worse.

The post-mainstream, pre-social-media 'Golden Age' of the internet was when it was basically a playground for weird people. Now everyone's on it by necessity, the weirdo-in-a-small-town dynamics are back, but now the whole world is the small town with the added "no one can ever really escape for good" dynamics of the internet tracking and recording and monetizing every aspect of human interaction.

The weirdos who are old enough to remember when the internet was their turf close ranks and start watching each other for the first signs of Turning Normie--itself something that's antithetical to actually following one's own star and drawing from whatever cultural tradition you find satisfying. The weirdos who aren't old enough grin and bear it because "you're constantly being judged by everyone" is just normal life for them. The stuff that's so popular that liking it puts you in the biggest box possible will benefit; stuff that was never gonna be popular under any circumstances will keep trucking. It's the cultural middle class, as usual, that suffers the most. Again, as I keep emphasizing, this cultural panopticon being both unending and global is unprecedented in human history.

I really think a lot of current cultural neuroses are due to this, although I can't really prove it and don't have the resources to research it. This sense of modern technology revealing to people how fundamentally uninteresting they are and rebelling against it explains a lot to me--the tendency of people to ideologically self-sort to narrower and narrower levels, the uncanny ability of observers to categorize even the relatively-novel versions of those self-sorts, the tendency of some people to just give up and openly embrace everything the hivemind says about them, "be yourself" as a zombified and omnipresent cultural meme when millions of people are struggling existentially with exactly that, every culture absorbing ambient victim-mentality and thinking they're the only right-living people in a world gone mad, the 'cultural class' getting deeper and deeper into objectively-adolescent pop-cultural obsessions and lashing out at the idea they should try something more challenging, the aging-out-of-relevance hipsters Freddie discusses being mortified by the idea of being perceived as exactly that.

The problem, for me at least, is that I understand there is a way out, and if anything it feels worse. I may be a bit younger than the type-case Freddie describes, and am not in an industry where I have to constantly prove my relevance to myself and others, but I am doing the opposite of aging gracefully. Instead of constantly trying to convince my social circle (I don't have a social circle) that having the political, cultural, and artistic preferences of a 21-year-old means I still am one at heart, I engage in the much-healthier practice of spending every waking moment fantasizing being 21 or 18 or, shit, even 14 again. I know nobody really likes getting older. I also think that if everyone was as obsessive and self-loathing about it as I am, society would cease to function. My regrets and pining are definitely unhealthy, obsessive and all-consuming, but I don't really talk about them because there's no way it ends other than "Yeah, that sucks."

But a lot of the people in Freddie's comment section are saying things like "Once I realized I was fundamentally unimportant and my opinions didn't really matter, I could get down to raising my kids/doing my job, which matters more than my feelings." And maybe ten years from now I'll be OK with that. Hell, maybe I'll actually have kids, unlikely as that sounds now. Right now that mindset sounds like a self-administered lobotomy. Maybe I'd be OK with it if I'd actually lived it up in my teens and twenties, tried to become an actual person and discovered what I like about myself, instead of just vaguely Following Rules and assuming there was a payoff to that. Maybe I'd accept that there comes a point in life where my destiny is to be a good parent/worker and that necessarily implies shaving off the hard bits of your personality. Or maybe even the people who were good at being young struggle with getting old. Maybe our cultural/technological moment is just making that a struggle for everyone. Guess I'll never know.

But as we creep closer to no one's parents, then no one's grandparents, remembering a world without the eternal and all-consuming Now of the internet, I suspect I won't be the only one aging with a complete lack of grace, and I suspect we as a culture are completely unprepared to deal with it.

[rickie-the-storyteller]

Happy WBW! What are the coffee shops like in your world? Or what are the coffee shop equivalents? Are they bustling? Overpriced? Are they decrept or college-kid only territory? If you wanna get into it, feel free to add on your characters' interactions, feelings, or orders!

Here's an interesting one...

My main story (Steph's Crew) is set in a real place (fictional London in 2010), so I suppose the answers here would be similar to real-life coffee places lol.

There was a wide range of coffee shops catering to different tastes and preferences. Let's take a look at some of them, and explore the way my characters might feel about them...

High-End Specialty Cafes:

These spots irl are known for offering a selection of single-origin brews and meticulously crafted drinks. The prices tend to be higher, attracting coffee aficionados and those who appreciate a carefully made cup.

This place would likely be less popular with the crew since they're all pretty young and would prefer to get their coffee from a cheaper spot. They'd probably acknowledge the good quality of the drinks from places like this, though.

Bustling Hipster Joints:

These coffee shops are popular among the younger crowd, typically college students and young professionals. In other words, right up the crew's alley lol.

They have a trendy, rustic vibe with exposed brick walls, cosy seating, and indie music playing in the background. The atmosphere is lively and often bustling with people working on laptops, socialising, or simply enjoying a cup of coffee.

Artistic Bohemian Spots:

These cafes often double as art galleries or performance spaces. They're slightly more offbeat, attracting a creative crowd and hosting open mic nights or art exhibitions. The decor might be eclectic, with mismatched furniture and colourful murals.

Bret would love these lol. He's the creative one in the group, and he has a passion for art. I could see him taking El to places like these...

Quaint Traditional Cafes:

These places exude a more classic charm, attracting a mix of locals and tourists. They might have a more refined or vintage aesthetic, with wooden furniture, soft lighting, and a relaxed ambience. It's a spot where people come to unwind, read, or have casual conversations.

El would be particularly into the vibe of this kind of place. She's into the more simple, straightforward and traditional stuff... probably due to the way she was raised.

Hidden Gems:

There are also tons of fun little hidden gems in the city - small and obscure coffee shops that the group might discover together. These places offered unique coffee blends and were not too expensive, making them perfect for their diverse tastes.

This is a fun one since it is a minor plot point in book 1! Bret and El have this tradition where they walk each other home and get "lost" along the way... discovering new parts of the city and all. That's how they find their favourite spots, including their favourite record shop. It's also how they met Stevie.

Here's what their go-to drink orders might be:

Stephanie:

Vanilla latte - she'd likely enjoy something both sweet and has a strong coffee flavour, reflecting her dynamic personality. The smoothness of the latte with a touch of sweetness matches her charismatic yet layered character. Plus, it's a simple, straightforward order.

A venti iced caramel macchiato with extra caramel drizzle - she loves the indulgence and complexity of this drink. The sweetness of the caramel and the kick of caffeine are just a nice combination, and again, fits her personality quite well.

Caramel Frappuccino - these just look really good to me lol. Never had one myself, but I think Steph would be into them.

Iced Caramel Macchiato - another thing that looks/sounds nice haha.

Bret:

Double shot espresso or a simple black coffee - he would likely prefer a strong, no-nonsense drink that wakes him up and gives him a jolt of energy. He's straightforward and doesn't fuss over elaborate flavours in the same way that Steph likely would.

A black coffee (Americano) - yet another simple but strong choice that suits his vibe quite nicely.

Elise:

Chamomile tea with a dash of honey- she really appreciates simplicity and comfort. Fits her personality, too... calming, soft and sweet all at once.

Plain cappuccino - simple straightforward order that gets the job done.

Chai Latte - these are really nice... I just think El would really like these. It reflects her understated yet warm nature.

Dylan:

Americano - similar to Bret's reasoning before. He's straightforward and doesn't fuss over elaborate drink options. He'd like a strong, no-nonsense drink choice that wakes him up and gives him a jolt of energy.

Flat White - the perfect balance between bold coffee and a hint of sweetness

A large iced mocha with extra whipped cream - something that's both indulgent and energetic, mirroring his outgoing and active nature. The mocha provides a mix of chocolate and coffee, and the whipped cream adds a touch of sweetness!

Alice:

Mocha - she likes the comforting blend of coffee and chocolate for a touch of sweetness.

A flat white with a side of carrot cake - straightforward but still sophisticated, just like her (very all over the place, but still has a touch of class lol). Carrot cake is also a guilty pleasure of hers.

Vanilla Latte - if she's not feeling in the mood for a mocha, she'd likely go for this instead.

[lizzygrantarchives]

Q Magazine, February 2012

She is the most talked about new artist on the planet, but who is the woman behind Video Games and could she possibly be for real?

She looks demonic standing here in her white slip dress and prom queen crown, blood running down her forehead, staring into the camera. Her expression switches by the frame from looking either like she’s mourning someone or about to knife them. She photographs like a model, which is to say the camera accentuates the big deep pools of her eyes and the epic pout of her lips.

During a break in the Q cover shoot in this West London photo studio, Lana Del Rey walks over to a computer screen that is projecting back each picture of her taken. The one on the screen now is an extreme close-up of her face: on it her mascara is streaked and her crown askew. She appears bruised and broken.

“That,” she says, pointing an extravagantly nailed finger at the screen, “that’s my life.”

Until she posted her self-made clip for a haunting torch song called Video Games onto YouTube last May, Lana Del Rey was almost entirely unknown. She’d recorded her first album, Lana Del Rey aka Lizzy Grant, in 2008 but it didn’t surface on iTunes until January 2010, and then only briefly.

The Video Games clip, with its found footage and sunburst images of her, made a sensation of Del Rey. At the time of writing, it has had more than 50 million views on YouTube. There are many homemade reinterpretations of the song on the site and it’s been covered by acts as diverse as Kasabian, Bombay Bicycle Club and Jamie Cullum.

Influential blogging sites such as Pitchfork were quick to embrace Del Rey, suggesting she “hit the sweet spot Cat Power has vacated” and positioning her as indie rock’s new queen apparent. But the tide turned. In September a blog was posted on Hipster RunOff entitled Lana Del Rey: Exposed. It huffed that Del Rey had been backed by major label Interscope all along. Soon doubts were cast about whether she’d really made the Video Games clip herself or even written the song. Since she came from a well-heeled family, bloggers asked why she’d spoken of living in a trailer park if not to burnish her own myth. Then there are the claims of her having had plastic surgery. In photos of her performing as Lizzy Grant, her lips seem not so fun, evidence enough for some that she’d since enhanced her appearance.

Such is the nature of modern fame: in a flash Lana Del Rey went from being hailed as a bolt of lightning to battling accusations she was an elaborate construct.

Notwithstanding that the arts of reinvention and myth-making are ingrained in the fabric of popular music (cf. Lady Gaga), one suspects Del Rey upset tastemakers simply because of the way she looks and the fact that she wasn’t Cat Power after all.

Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, President of Polydor Records in the UK, dismisses the notion that Del Rey is a puppet. He insists that he didn’t sign her until last September, having first mer her a year previously.

“Lana knows what she wants like few artists I’ve ever met,” he says. “She like to control every aspect of her career. Often we come across someone who is really good at writing songs or singing them, or has a great visual sense, but Lana is that rare thing – someone who can do it all.”

A week after the Q photo shoot, the end of November, and I’m having coffee with Lana Del Rey in her hotel bedroom. She is wearing a white crop top and jeans; her feet are bare there’s little evidence of make-up on her face, which is hypnotically beautiful.

She is bright, engaging and unfailingly sweet. While her mannerisms are prim like those of a ’20s high-society belle from the pages of an Edith Wharton novel, she has a laugh that escalates from girlish giggle to filthy cackle. This morning she cleaned her own room. It is spotless and clear of any kind of clutter of personal effect.

Lana Del Rey, née Elizabeth Grant, was born 25 years ago and grew up in Lake Placid, a village of less than 3000 inhabitants in rural New York State. Her father Rob is a real estate investor, her mother pat a former account executive at an advertising agency. She has two younger siblings, sister Caroline and brother Charlie. She had a typical small-town upbringing, singing in the church choir and attending the local high school, until she was 15, when she took off to boarding school in Connecticut.

Have you any notion of what made people respond to Video Games?

I know that i’s a beautiful song and I sing it really low, which might set it apart. I played it for a lot of people [in the industry] when I first wrote it and no one responded. It’s like a lot of things that have happened in my life during the last seven years, another personal milestone. It’s myself in song form.

You said at the photo shoot, the more intense it got, that it was like your life…

Because Simon [Emmett] kept taking pictures and saying, “Look like you’re not sure what’s happening”. My face would fall and he’d say, “That’s exactly what I’m looking for!” Well, it’s not that difficult…

What is your natural disposition?

Happy… and at peace with myself. It’s something I wanted for a long time when I was younger. I had a lot of inner conflict.

What is your most enduring memory of growing up?

It’s of going away on vacation to Florida and of lying in the ocean with my Dad. I don’t remember much from when I was younger… Lake Placid was really quiet. Were were in the middle of a national park, six hours from the city. It was tangibly far removed.

I lived very much in my own mind. I was confused about where we came from and why. I was a very cerebral child. My mom says I thought I was a grown-up when I was little – and that her friends were mine.

Isn’t “precocious” the word?

Well, I didn’t want to say it but that’s the word she uses. Very good!

Were you the prom queen?

No, I wasn’t. I went to one prom when I was a freshman, at 14, and then I never went to another.

Why not?

[Fifteen-second pause] I don’t know… [Two-second pause] No one ever asked me.

And then you went to boarding school…

I didn’t go willingly, uh-huh. My parents sent me. I was a bit wild when I was younger. I enjoyed living life after hours. It was a long time ago.

Lana Del Rey says she’s always hoped to sing but didn’t begin writing music until the moved to New York, aged 18. In Lake Placid, outside of seeing Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box video at a friend’s house (“I thought about Kurt Cobain all the time – just from watching him for three minutes”), she says she knew nothing of pop music.

In New York she studied metaphysics at college, began teaching herself guitar and discovered hip hop. The latter, she says, inspired her: “People talking about their real lives – it gave me the freedom to write about whatever I felt over whatever strange melody I wanted.”

The first song she wrote was called Pawn Shop Blues. A melancholy acoustic track, she sings it in that now instantly recognisable sad, deep pitch.

She first performed it at an open-mic night in Brooklyn and at a local talent show she entered. She didn’t win the competition but one of the judges was an A&R man for a small indie label. This led to a $10,000 recording advance and her collaborating with producer David Kahne, who’d recorded The Strokes and Paul McCartney. She spent her advance renting a trailer in a park in New Jersey. The record she made with Kahne was almost instantly deleted.

Metaphysics sounds complicated…

Not as much as it sounds. I felt comforted by finding other thinkers who wondered why we were here. The origins of the universe…

Have you arrived at any answers?

Mmm… They call philosophy the science of questions with no answers. I’ve found my own personal reason to be here, which is just to be of service to the people around me in any way I can.

How was coming to New York?

The way I always pictured it is exactly the way it is: the most beautiful thing I’ve seen. Since I got there it’s been split between music and service work, those are my two worlds. I like to go out and see what’s going on, but I don’t “go out” at night.

What kind of service work?

Part of it is homelessness outreach – helping people get their social security numbers back, so they can apply for jobs again. There are other divisions of it, like imparting knowledge I have about how to make things easier in your life. It’s something I do with a small group of people I’ve known since I was 18.

How did it first feel playing to an audience?

The same as now – scary. I was 18 and I took along my guitar to this place in Brooklyn on Bedford Avenue. I played the one song I’d written, got offstage and two boys followed me out of the club. They said, “You’re good, come and open our show.” Quickly I realised that I was going to have a nice simple career in Brooklyn. I could open for anyone I wanted to… and that’s what I did for a few years.

Those early songs are recognisably you – but they lack the darkness of Video Games or Blue Jeans.

Maybe I’ll send you my first record. My inspirations have remained the same, which ism life and… everything that’s beautiful, whether it be certain film scores or looking at the old architecture on Wall Street. This is just the next phase. Whether it’s got darker… I don’t know, not sure.

The trailer park part does bring a gothic feel to your story…

[Sighs] That wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. For the very reason that, on top of what I look like, I knew it would be what other people wanted to talk about. But a journalist found an interview with me that was done in the park in 2008.

When my first label gave me that $10,000 I didn’t have anywhere to live – it’s not something that I glamorise. For $500 a month I could actually have my own place. For me it was something nice that happened – you don’t plan on people later on talking about it as part of “The Story”.

The 16 November and Lana Del Rey is about to play the third show of her first UK tour at the Scala in London’s King’s Cross, which is packed tight to its 3000-capacity. Prior to this, Del Rey had not played live for well over two years.

When she walks on, in white trousers and looking nervous, she is greeted by whoops of encouragement. Her set runs just to eight songs, but the whoops return after each. In between she sings to hushed silence – her voice seeming to stop air in the room. At one point a woman next to me tells her friend: “I’m not gay but I’d sleep with her.”

There’s an obvious reaction from men to the way you look, but also comments online from women about how you make them question their sexuality…

Ha-ha! That’s not where I thought you were going with that, my dear! I haven’t seen that, no.

You’re aware of the general fascination with you, though: this sense of you being an enigma?

That has nothing to do with me. I’m not that mysterious and I’ve never said anything was a certain way when it wasn’t: everything I’ve said is true. I did write my songs and make my videos… I wasn’t going for an enigmatic presence.

According to Wikipedia your stage name references the Hollywood actress Lana Turner and the Ford Del Rey car…

Fucking Wikipedia! I don’t even know what movies Lana Turner has been in. “Lana” was just because it’s beautiful, “Del Rey” the same thing. It’s not like it’s a different person. I considered what I was doing an art project – I was making my own videos and setting them to classical music. I just had a name for the musical world I was building.

The Strokes have said they were lucky arriving at the time they did, because no one then could post footage of all the terrible bands they’d been in and fashion disasters they’d had…

That’s interesting. Well, you know, record labels don’t have money to spend meticulously on one person any more. The reason they signed me was because I already had a growing fanbase. I Was personally fully formed long before people knew me.

All the scrutiny about your face…

It is uncomfortable but it doesn’t have much to do with the life that I live. The only thing I can say i, the people and friends that I’m involved with in New York don’t know much about my singing and stuff. When I tell them what people write it doesn’t resonate with them.

Here are some other facts about Lana Del Rey. She doesn’t like flying. She says she never remembers her dreams. She smells nice but not perfumed. Off the cuff she sings a husky, coquettish version of Why Don’t You Do Right?, the torch song voiced by Kathleen Turner as cartoon femme fatale Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

There’s a nice visual line in Kind Of Out Luck: “Femme fatale, always on the run, diamonds on my wrist, whiskey on my tongue”…

Do you actually like that? I mean, I think other lines sum up who I am better. I’m not actually a femme fatale and I don’t drink any more.

Are you on the run with diamonds on your wrist?

Yes, that much I have going on.

You said you don’t drink any more. Assuming you once did – what sort of drunk were you?

Just drunk a lot. I haven’t drunk since I was 18.

Who first broke your heart?

There was someone in high school. He was very beautiful. Every time I saw him I’d go bright red.

Who’s great?

Elvis. Any period. The first thing I love is his face and then it’s is voice. Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain…

It didn’t end well for any of them…

It’s not the tragedy I’m drawn to – I genuinely like their music. I don’t like much, but that’s what I listen to at home because It makes me feel good.

A week prior to her Q cover shoot, Lana Del Rey sent me an email, with images of Sissy Spacek in Brain De Palma’s Carrie and stills from Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides attached.

She wrote: “Having looked at the recent shoots I’ve done I think they look beautiful but they have a rather empty energy to them.” She went on to suggest the tone and mood of the pictures she wanted to have taken and how they could be more reflective of who she felt herself to be.

She will reveal more of herself on Born To Die, the album she releases this month. It was 16 months in the making and features input from several producers, including Kanye West collaborator Jeff Bhasker. She says she writes in two ways – “Walking around New York, singing words and melodies into my phone…” and with a producer “helping put my words to music.”

At the shoot while her two managers, PR and stylist look silently on, she is vocal about what she does and doesn’t like, dismissing an early set-up as “too Playboy”.

Over lunch she shows me the final cut of the video – tigers, sex, death and all – for the album’s irresistible title track on her laptop. She says making it meant a lot to her but she doesn’t know why that is.

One the live version of Born To Die you sing, “Let me fuck you hard in the pouring rain…”

It got edited to “kiss you”…

“Fuck you hard” is better.

I’m singing it to my boyfriend and it’s not about fucking. It’s more about… When I found someone that made me feel really happy, that was so different to the way I’d felt before in my life.

Metaphysically speaking, what do you think happens when you die?

I’ve been told not to think about that because it worries me. I don’t do that good when I’m in fear – it’s hard for me to function.

Write your next chapter…

I like the record. The rest of it I’m not sure about. I’d like to go back to New York and continue the things I’ve been doing there, outside of music.

How do you want us to see you, Lana Del Rey?

I’ve a clearer idea of how I don’t want to be seen – as someone who does what everyone wants them to.

Originally published in the February 2012 issue of Q Magazine with the headline The Breaking of Lana Del Rey.

[mintchochipkookie]

Why does hating Zuko and willfully misinterpreting his character seem to be the trendy new thing to do in this fandom?

Oh my godddd!!!!!! The mere fucking THOUGHT of Zuko slander makes my blood boil why do you do this to me lmaoo. But, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I would see this stuff in the tags just when I joined the fandom and didn’t realise that there is a slight possibility that someone could not adore Zuko with every fibre of their being. I see people refute them on my dash from time to time, but I just scroll past any stupid ass i-hate-zuko takes because I simply refuse to subject my eyeballs and brain to that nonsense.

The TL;DR version is: The hoops people need to jump through to justify ‘zuko was bad actually’ is exhausting. It’s such a stupid take, that disproving it requires you refuting so many untruthful interpretations of the source material, it’s almost impossible to untangle all the knots in their logic. (Also, I don’t wanna act like fiction and real-life have one to one parallels, but since antis like to pretend that it does, I figured I could take a few shots at the British Empire.)

Rest of my thoughts below the cut.

I gather that this is a new phenomenon, since the resurgence of the show’s popularity. I feel like it’s a result of younger people watching it now, who grew up with the internet and cancel culture (I don’t completely disagree with cancel culture, I just think there’s a very clear line that it frequently crosses). By that I mean, this mindset that if anyone has or has associated with someone who has said or done something vaguely not PC, they are a bad person forever now. This is a much more complex topic, and I do not think the intent behind the current mindsets are bad, quite the opposite. But no one seems to want to strike a balance anymore or view anyone or any piece of media with any kind of nuance. It’s the thought process of ‘since this book has racism, it is condoning it’ like no, maybe sometimes a book has racism because it is about racism and is trying to portray the horrors of human society.

There also seems to be a new take on the 2010s Tumblr hipster attitude of ‘i liked it before it was cool’ to ‘anything popular is probably not that good so we must drag it to hell and back even if that means distorting the actual themes and writing and disregarding context’. Personally, I don’t even think ATLA is as good as everyone told me it was, it has a lot of shit writing moments (on top of the uncomfortable racism and misogyny, but it was another time, so the standards were different), but I DO think it’s an overall enjoyable show and Zuko is one of the most perfectly written characters to exist (barring 2 very specific moments but we don’t need to get into that right now). Have we considered that maybe, just MAYBE, the reason Zuko is so widely considered to be such a great character is simply because he IS. Not every popular opinion is a good one, but a lot of them are popular for a reason. You don’t even have to particularly like Zuko, but if you cannot see the absolute beauty in his character and his journey, then I just don’t trust you.

I am an extremely character-driven person. I still maintain that had Zuko not been on the show, I never would’ve finished it. Zuko starts as a bratty hot-headed prince but here’s the really important thing. He’s shown in a very sympathetic light almost right away. E3 (or whenever that bitch Zhao shows up) all we’ve seen so far is Zuko trying to capture our protagonists and throwing temper tantrums, but you still feel for Zuko. My partner and I looked at each other after that episode and were both like ‘so they’re clearly setting him up for a redemption arc right’ (and we knew nothing going into the show idk how I'd avoided spoilers). They make it pretty obvious that he’s been through some shit and I think Zhao was a very clever idea. This is some old man in a position of authority over Zuko, mocking him for being a disappointment. It’s clearly unfair, and it’s just another Fire Nation imperialist who thinks Zuko is worthless because he has a conscience, probably. Zuko is consistently put in these positions of powerlessness, interspersed with flashbacks from his past, and he consistently pushes against it. He fights against it all and tries to regain some amount of control over his life.

The thing about anti-Zuko arguments is that it requires you to flat out pretend that a lot of the explicit dialogue on the show didn’t happen. Since this was a show targeted at kids, they go out of their way to say the key defining moments out loud. Ffs Iroh is literally just there to spout words of wisdom for Zuko so that his journey is made even clearer. The most common argument tho, I presume, is the one that Zuko personally is a coloniser and let me just heavy sigh do y’all even know what words mean anymore? Look, I’m the first person to jump on the ‘fuck colonisers’ train. Like, I constantly shit on the British. Trust me, I get it. But here’s the thing. I don’t actually think that every individual British person is a coloniser. Do y’all see the fucking difference????? The country absolutely is, and I will continue to hate their guts till they have the decency to accept what they did and pay for it, but most of the common people are not.

This btw is also a theme on the show. Multiple times. Hama’s (I have thoughts on how she was treated, but that’s not relevant rn) whole thing was exactly this. She was an actual victim of the Fire Nation’s cruelty, but her wanting to take that out on the FN citizens was wrong. For exactly this reason. You can’t help where you were born. Katara, the person antis love claiming was the biggest victim of the FN’s imperialist agenda and hates them SO much, goes out of her way as the Painted Lady to protect their citizens. Like. People see this right? They understand that Katara, the person who hates the FN so much for taking away her mother, still gets this distinction and acknowledges that the people responsible are only the ones who are actively colonising and killing people.

Anyway, I can bet the follow up to this argument is ‘but Zuko was Fire Nation royalty’ and I repeat. You can’t help where you were born. I know people are gonna point to S1 Zuko but again, nothing he does is out of malicious intent or for the betterment of the Fire Nation’s rule. People joke about how Zuko screams about ‘honour’ and then just completely miss the point of it. He was a child fighting to get his dad’s approval. He even says this out loud multiple times. He doesn’t get the horrors of colonialism, because he was raised in the FN. Do people just not remember his monologue when he’s confronting Ozai???? They explicitly tell us that the FN lies to their kids to make them believe that they are the greatest country. And he was raised in the actual palace, where would he have gotten any information to the contrary???? There are grown-ass adults with complete access to the internet out there who still believe that Winston Churchill was a great man and not a white supremacist because that’s the garbage narrative the West feeds y’all but a child raised in the royal family of a colonising nation who didn’t realise the lies until he left home is the idiot. Okay.

Now, had Zuko gone out of his way to torment people, simply chosen not to care, or was too scared to fight against them, that would be a whole other story. And funnily enough, these traits all exist in other characters - Azula, Mai, Ty Lee. Azula is also a child of abuse and I think it’s clear from the flashbacks that she always had a streak of cruel, but she was groomed by Ozai, Ursa didn’t seem to give Azula the same kind of attention and love that she gave Zuko, she didn’t have Iroh to guide her as a teenager, so she simply did what came naturally to her and promoted the FN agenda. Mai also comes from a high ranking family that is very much on board with the whole ‘Fire Nation First’ rhetoric and she helps, but only because she is apathetic. That’s her whole thing, she just doesn’t care. And when Zuko leaves, she calls him a traitor, so she clearly is loyal to her country to a fault (again, she was a kid who didn’t have someone to tell her better, I’m not hating on her). Ty Lee I think is closer to the representation of a citizen or maybe a soldier. They don’t explore this thread (a wasted opportunity imo) but in her introduction, it seems that she has no interest in this war and only ends up joining because she’s scared of Azula. It’s her way of survival. She knows she can’t take a stance against Azula and escape unscathed.

I think Zuko at some point goes through all these stages, but he is by nature, more caring, a fighter, and he makes his own destiny. Remember, that thing that’s said out loud???? Zuko’s journey is so incredible because he has to confront all the lies he’s been fed and the hand he may have had in the destruction, as collateral or via complicity, head-on. He has to live in the Earth Kingdom and listen to people talk about what they’ve been through and he is clearly horrified. He tries to protect them and when they find out who he is, they turn on him. I love this choice actually (as much as I hate to see Zuko hurt) because clearly, the show itself is aware that Zuko just claiming that he’s not like other Fire Nation royals isn’t enough for him, or for others. Zuko has to work his butt off to get anybody’s approval (re, the Gaang) because of course people are gonna be sceptical of him.

He has a bumpy road to redemption which is what I fucking loveee because life is messy, and your journey to being a better person is going to be too. You can’t expect yourself to just have a linear trajectory from Point A to Point B, because are people familiar with the concept of humanity. It’s going to look more like a bunch of messy scribbles and you’re always gonna mess up and I cannot stress how much I ADORE that they wrote that into his arc. You can do some dumb things but aren’t beyond forgiveness. BUT. They also acknowledge that just because you’re sorry now, doesn’t entitle you to someone’s forgiveness now, or later. And Zuko doesn’t expect it so he works tirelessly towards making amends. He goes above and beyond and he still doesn’t think he’s worthy of being forgiven all the time (like when he’s nervous to go see Iroh).

AND (oh my god there’s so many ands but he’s such a complex character and there are so many layers to his redemption I’m sorry I’m gushing) most importantly. He takes a fucking stand against the Fire Nation. He does all these things till he finally makes his way back home. He thinks this is what he wanted, he has his father’s approval, he’s got his honour back, he’s the crown prince, he has a FN girlfriend...so then why is he unhappy? (Again, these are literally his words asdfghjkmhngbfds.) Because he has changed. Because he actively disagrees with their ideologies now. Before he was banished, he clearly didn’t agree with their ways, but now he doesn’t want a part in it. We see his empathy and inner conflict again when Ozai asks his opinion on taking over the Earth Kingdom. See how that works? He had every chance to be a colonising little shit, but he didn’t take it.

I can’t believe the amount of strength it took for Zuko to walk away from this life of comfort and prestige, face off against that abusive dickhead who calls himself a father, and then just...join the “enemy” to defeat them. And he wants to defeat them because he hates what they stand for on a FUNDAMENTAL level. Seriously, did people just turn off the volume during that scene in The Day of Black Sun? This is what I mean by blatantly ignoring the dialogue to come to these conclusions. Zuko, as a fucking teenager, had the courage to fight against his own family because he believed the world could be a better place and he recognised that that meant his own family needed to be defeated. He was literally willing to die to take them down and protect the people that he cares about, good GOD I cannot deal with this. That’s more than any Brit ever did, but go off. I guess by this logic, no irl white person is allowed to be happy ever, because y’all probably have some ancestor who colonised a country or was a slave owner or something, sorry. Oh, also, antis who love harping on about Zuko’s ancestors and family - did they also forget that he’s the literal descendant of Roku too? You know, the Avatar, the guy who tried to fight and stop Sozin too? Or does that just not fit their narrative, so they decided to only pick the parts of his lineage that do?

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: The League of Evil Exes

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is one of the greatest cult classics of the 2010s for a wide variety of reasons: it had great performances, it got a video game adaptation that didn’t suck, it had an awesome soundtrack, and best of all, it apparently ruined an entire generation of women! What couldn’t this movie do (besides make a profit at the box office)? Of course, more than anything, this movie delivered on the promise of its premise by having Scott Pilgrim fight against the seven evil exes of his manic pixie dream girl Ramona Flowers.

That’s right: There’s not one, not two, not three, but seven villains to talk about in this movie!

Thankfully, this massive amount of villains makes it a lot easier to talk about them, because each of them basically gets only a single scene with which to establish their characterization and deliver a fun, exciting battle. Still, it’s pretty interesting to look at them, especially since not all exes are created equal. As a note, I’m obviously not doing a “Best Scene” for these guys because... they basically have one scene each. It would be redundant.

Motivation/Goals: The League of Evil Exes has a very simple goal: to control the future of Ramona’s love life. As Lucas says during his battle with Scott: “The Seven Evil Exes? Coming to kill you? Controlling the future of Ramona's love life?” This is especially funny because Lucas is probably the least evil of the lot. While this is an incredibly simple motivation, it fits with the tone of the movie; this is a sort of a Bowser-esque motivation, one that perfectly fits a movie that is so steeped in video game culture.

Performance: Lets go one by one here:

Satya Bhabha is the first of the evil exes, Matthew Patel, and he really eases you into what to expect for the rest of the evil exes, though here “eases you into” means “grabs you by the balls and swings you over the head like a chimpanzee.” Despite his meager screentime, he makes the most of it, delivering a Bollywood-esque musical number complete with fireballs and demon hipster chicks and generally just hamming it up. This right here is just a warmup, though, because things get crazier from here – just like in a video game, really.

Lucas Lee, the second evil ex, is a big-shot movie star regarded as a pretty good actor by all who see him. Unfortunately, they got some unknown weirdo named Chris Evans to play him, but casting this obscure indie actor certainly paid off, because Lucas Lee’s smug, over-confident portrayal combined with his affable nature make him one of the most enjoyable characters in the movie. He really comes off as a cool, cocky guy who just happens to be going up against our hero as opposed to being an actual antagonizing force.

Todd Ingram is the other best evil ex, and much like Lee it’s mostly because he’s a pretty nice guy. However, the key difference is while Lee was cocky and affable, Ingram is just kind of a ditz. Played by one-time Superman Brandon Routh, he opts to go for the more subuded route, a cold ham as opposed to a large ham, and he definitely makes it work; I did call him the OTHER best evil ex, after all.

Then we come to Roxy Richter, played by Katara herself, Mae Whitman. She’s a very angry, tomboyish lesbian who gets in a lot of great lines and shows off a very jaded, irritated personality in her limited screentime. She’s definitely a lot of fun, though apparently she has a lot of elements of Envy Adams due to being combined with an early idea to make her Ramona’s evil ex in the movie.

The Katayanagi Twins. Ken and Kyle, are… nothing. Because Keita and Shota Saitou (Kyle and Ken, respectively) did not speak English, the twins have no lines and don’t really get to establish much of a presence before dying. It’s a bit unfortunate, because it becomes really easy to forget these two are here as a result.

Gideon Gordon Graves is a smarmy, smug, condescending jackass. You have met a man like him before, and you have wanted to punch his face in. Jason Schwartzman really amps up the sleaze when playing this creepy, controlling bastard, making him a fitting final boss.

Final Fate: Each and every one of them is defeated by the end of their scenes, bursting into progressively larger amounts of coins, with Patel being pretty meager in terms of value and Gideon literally making it rain when he’s defeated. It does kind of feel weird that the twins are worth more than a beloved actor like Lucas Lee, or that Roxy is worth more than both Lee and a musician like Ingram, but frankly this isn’t really a movie where you should be overthinking stuff to begin with.

Best Quote: I don’t think I can really say Patel or Gideon have amazing, quotable lines to the extent as some of the others, but I’d be pretty remiss to not mention Todd’s legendary “...Chicken isn’t vegan…?” and Roxy’s equally legendary “Well honey… I’m a little bi-FURIOUS!” here. Lucas Lee has a lot of good lines but he’s quite frankly too consistent for me to pick one; Chris Evans really just went all-out for this one.

Final Thoughts & Score: Once again, let’s go one by one:

Matthew Patel

Matthew is the definition of a warmup boss, at least by the standards of this film. He brings a lot of insanity to the table all at once, what with his demons and Bollywood musical number and sick dance moves, but the fact he’s probably not the most insane and baffling character in the film really tells you something. He definitely makes the most of his screentime, and while his fight is relatively short, it’s a lot of fun. This man deserves an S-L-ICK 8/10.

Lucas Lee

Lucas Lee is probably the second best evil ex in the movie. He’s just so cocky, arrogant, and hilarious, and he still manages to come off as a bit polite. Its like if Captain America and Ransom Drysdale had a baby, Lucas Lee would be it. The fact he’s played by a pre-superstardom Chris Evans really is the icing on the cake here though, because his battle is fun and ends with Scott defeating him by playing into his arrogance. Ah! But he didn’t get his autograph… Oh well. Lucas Lee is an easy 10/10.

Todd Ingram

As much as I love Lee, I have to say that Todd easily has the most impressive fight in the entire film, in large part due to his awesome psychic powers he gains from being a vegan. I gave one of his legendary quotes up there, but frankly, the entire battle is awesome and quotable, the fact that at least half the battle is a rock-off is great, and the fact Scott tricks him in the most stupidly amazing to defeat him and put him at the mercy of the Vegan Police is just amazing. There’s also just the sheer novelty of how, with the power in hindsight, we got to see Superman (Routh) dating Captain Marvel (Brie Larson portrayed Envy, Scott’s ex and Todd’s girlfriend and bandmate). Todd is just a perfect, lovable idiot villain, and deserves nothing less than a 10/10.

Roxy Richter

Roxy actually gets to show up twice in the film, getting a brief scene with Scott a while before her identity is revealed. While her screentime doesn’t really amount to much, it really is incredible how much characterization they managed to pack into her limited screentime, her dialogue really selling how she is easily the most bitter and angry off all the exes. She seems genuinely hurt at some points that Ramona left her and considers her just a phase, though this of course doesn’t stop her from trying to ruin her life. In a weird way, I’d almost call her the most complex of the exes, and Mae Whitman does a great job at selling her. I will say though, despite her fight scene being filled with some of the best dialogue in the film (which is saying a lot, mind you), the overall fight is a little lackluster, and Ramona getting in makes it reek of “designated girl fight.” Still, there’s nothing so egregious about her that I’d give her anything less than a 9/10.

The Katayanagi Twins

These two, quite simply, suck. They get absolutely no characterization, they get no dialogue due to the actors not speaking English, they get no personality. They are, quite simply, just there, and they are just there because Scott needs to fight a fifth and sixth ex. There’s really not much to say here except that their fight scene is admittedly pretty cool and it’s fun to imagine how the hell their relationship with Ramona worked. Did they date her one after the other? Were they in a weird poly relationship? Did they both just spitroast her on the weekends? For those two things I’ll save them from the very bottom of the barrel and give them a 2/10.

Gideon Gordon Graves

Gideon is a smug, evil, controlling creep for sure, and he is the final evil ex Scott must face. But the thing is, he kind of doesn’t feel any more wieighty than any of the others? Gideon is for all intents and purposes the final boss, and while he does get a little buildup, it all comes in the final acts of the film. It certainly doesn’t make him a bad villain – he actually manages to temporarily kill Scott, and puts up more of a fight than any of the others – but considering how awesome Todd, Lucas, Roxy, and Matthew were in style and personality, Gideon kind of comes off as underwhelming. Yes, he is definitely the most evil of the exes, but he just doesn’t really have the “WOW” factor the others do. He’s an 8/10 for sure.

Well, I guess that’s it, that’s every villain in the mo-

Wait?

What’s this?!

Psycho Analysis: Nega Scott

…

[techouspeaks]

Short Review on Ducktales 2017

With it’s cancellation announced, I take a look back on the reboot and share my final thoughts on it.

Now, a while back I did say that I didn’t care too much for the show, that I couldn’t get into it, but that was when the first or maybe even second season came around and I wondered if my thoughts changed over time after watching some episodes.

What are my thoughts on it? About the same...-ish. I dunno if I stated this before but I always felt that the 2017 reboot was trying to be too edgy and what I mean by that is that it tries to do more of the Darkwing aspect and often seems to put too much action when Ducktales was more about adventure than action. I mean, sure in some episodes they do stop a bad guy or they save the world in the old show, but they kept this more humble and light hearted feel to it and overall, kept it more of an adventure than just action. All the characters are always pumped up for action and adventure and craziness and not enough seem to be in between that. I especially didn’t like what they did with Webby because she felt like a Gosalyn 2.0. I don’t mind strong female and flawed leads but I felt like 2017 DT was always afraid to show a full on nurturing character, especially a female character. 

Don’t worry, we’ll get to her in a minute!

Take Flora from Winx Club. 

Her nature is kind, loving and nurturing. She’s completely feminine and vulnerable too. However, she can be pushed to her limits especially when she realizes she’s been taken advantage of and she’s useful in terms of magic and her nurturing side is seen as a strength since she can heal others and take care of things when it’s time for relaxation.

In DT 2017, all the female characters are strong and do have a nurturing side too but there aren’t too much of variety. They’re usually tomboys and as a tomboy myself and gender fluid, there’s nothing wrong with that but I like variety. I don’t think all female leads have to wield a sword or desire action all the time. Sometimes the greatest strength can come from say a seemingly “weak” character because their kindness and even loving nature is their strength and as long as they seem to be useful in some regard and have a brain, I don’t think it’s bad. I think what people assume feminism is that you can’t have even one or two female characters that aren’t bad ass action packed girls and that’s not really what it is. Basically there’s hardly any balance of female characters or even characters in general. They’re all about the same always crazy and pumped up characters or they’re too serious. 

Louie is kinda not so much that but he also comes across as whiny especially since his actor is clearly a man doing a kid voice and more often than that I don’t mind it, but their voices for all triplets sorta grated on my nerves and even though I appreciate making the triplets different and having different voice actors, they still kinda sound the same and when they whine it actually hurts my ears. If you don’t have child actors, maybe settle for a woman doing a kid voice. Least even when it’s sorta noticeable it’s not as annoying and yeah I get it. The voices of the old triplets were annoying too but least they sounded their age. I always felt like their voices in the reboot sounded like a man getting strangled whenever they shouted.

Than you have Gyro in the 2017 reboot. They took what used to be this humble, shy friendly male character and turned him into a hipster jerk! I mean come on! Look at his get up! The moment someone sees him they’re gonna know the show was done in the late 2010s. He’s not settle in that appearance and his attitude. He’s so full of himself too! I absolutely HATED that! He’s not even like how Darkwing was full of himself, where he was full of himself but because it was sorta childish full of himself, he came out as charismatic! 2017 Gyro is just...Stuck up, jerk full of himself. I mean, yes he has his kinder moments sometimes but if you’re gonna do strong, action packed female leads, why not make some of the male leads have a humble, shy side? You could go Flora with him and made him sweet and nurturing but still very brilliant. That’s what Gyro was! And I know they wanted to change him up but they didn’t change Scrooge all that much, so I don’t see why they couldn’t have kept Gyro the way he was!

What made the old DT good and even timeless was the fact most of the characters were more humble, the show had a humble feel and I get that the new series characters can be too but the thing is they CAN be, but not most of the time. It’s not their complete nature and yeah that makes them seem rounded in some ways but it also can take away what made the old show welcoming.

And again, I feel like the show is trying to be a bit too action packed and not enough of the adventure or mystery. It seems like the characters are always on edge and ready for anything and again maybe trying to be too much like what Darkwing was instead of more of it’s own thing. Though, again, this is just my opinion and maybe I’m just trying to explain more of the feeling of why I can’t get into it as much as others do and I’m not a nostalgia purest either! I really do try to be open minded with new things! I do even like some of the Disney remakes even if they’re not perfect or no way close to the original. Shoot, another reason that could be is while I did like the original DT, I wouldn’t say I was a die hard fan of it either. In some ways, I think even the original DT can be overrated and wish other shows of the old days got more attention.

Color pallet and art style is okay. I kinda miss the more colorful pallets they used but by no means is awful. It goes make the colors they want to pop out do pop out so it does it’s job. I just think it could have a bit more brighter colors.

Now does that mean I hate DT 2017? No! Far from it! As much as I complain about certain aspects of the show, there’s a lot to enjoy too and even the aspects I don’t like about the reboot, I can understand and get why others may like it. I can admit when something just simply doesn’t do it for me but by no means makes it awful. I do really like Della Duck, despite being another crazy tomboy! She kinda reminds me of me in some ways except for the fact I’m not adventurous in that way and I hate traveling due to anxiety.

I think why I like her the most instead of the other female leads is just she feels more genuine to me. I feel like with characters like say Webby or some of the other female leads, they were like “See! We got a crazy tomboy gal! We’re going against the gender norm!” and focus too much of that and not enough of just making a female strong lead for just simply making a good character.

 With Webby, I felt like they were trying too hard to go against the gender norm. Like “Look, she’s totally not the old Webby so you gotta like her! She’s smart, she’s over the top and total geek!” Which, with her I found kinda cheesy and almost fake. I know that’s kinda harsh to say and I kinda feel bad saying it, cuz I know people like this version and I don’t hate the character, I just couldn’t get into her character and again, it felt like they made her the way she did because of the SJW appeal and not out of honesty. 

(Note: I’m not entirely against SJW since I do agree with some stuff, but I’m not completely for them either. Put it short, I put myself in between AntiSJW and SJW as I always believe in being more balance especially when it comes to certain topics, thus being fair to both point of views.)

While with Della it felt they just honestly wanted to make her a good character and really funny too! I also like the fact she’s an adult and admits to her mistakes and tries to do better. That’s how you make a strong, GOOD female lead.

(Disney, take freakin note when doing your live action remake female leads! Lookin at you Mulan 2019!)

And lastly, the stuff with Darkwing Duck, YES! I loved it! Anytime they do something that had to do with Darkwing Duck I was down for! I felt like I did when I was watching Darkwing Duck back in the old days! Took me back to my childhood days! I even started to like the new Gosalyn! Like I was with everyone else and wasn’t sure if I liked it but she really grew on me! I really do like her and I’m all for the new remake of the show if it starred these characters!

And I think that’s why I felt this sort of action pack and kind of edginess with the characters fit more with Darkwing Duck than it does with Ducktales. When they did Darkwing Duck it’s fine because Darkwing was about that. With Ducktales, it’s okay but it also feels a bit out of place for me anyway, cuz I always associated the old show with adventure with more humble characters.

So how would I even rate Ducktales. I would probably rate it around a 6 or 7 out of 10 stars, if I had to rate the show at all. It’s not bad and the stuff I don’t like really has to do with more of a personal opinion, rather than something I find wrong with the show. I do recommend seeing it at least a few episodes before drawing a personal opinion and if you have kids that like action and adventure, I know for sure they will get into it.

[joemuggs]

James Blake: Before Before

James Blake has a new EP out, called ‘Before’. It’s really good. I like him, he’s authentic. I’ve spoken to him on and off since he very first released music, and it’s been interesting to see his transformation from north London bohemian to LA superstar bohemian. Below is the text of the first time I interviewed him - I think the first feature length interview he did - from Mixmag in 2010. 

James Blake is good at confounding expectations. At a recent gig at Shoreditch's warehouse-like XOYO, Mixmag saw the 22-year-old play a super-heavyweight mutant dubstep set, then immediately afterwards start larking about with Beyonce and Ms Dynamite tunes, much to the delight of the messy ravers – and yet the tune that's getting him known outside clubland is the deeply odd Feist cover 'Limit to your Love' with its haunted croon and folky repetitions. So, when we catch up with him in a Brixton pub a few days after the gig, we make a point of asking him what his ultimate musical ambition is – thinking it might reveal a common thread that draws these disparate sides together. "I'd like to play a solo piano show at Carnegie Hall," he says without hesitation, referring to one of the most renowned classical venues in the world, which has also played host to legendary shows by the likes of the Beatles and Pink Floyd; "maybe not even singing, just the piano." We think he means it.

That's how he is, though: pretty much every tune he's put out so far has come as a curveball. Going from the soulful mutant dubstep of 'CMYK' – which has ruled underground clubs all year – to the four tracks of gorgeous, weightless piano-laced electronica on his 'Klavierwerke' EP alone was a more radical shift than most artists his age would even think of making. But to then not only make the leap to the intense weirdness of 'Limit to your Love', but to make it work to the point where it is all over radio and sitting alongside 'CMYK' in everyone's “best of 2010” lists demonstrates a boldness that it making heads spin throughout the industry, and generating the sort of anticipation for his major label album that doesn't come around often. In a climate of insane gener meltdowns and turbulence stirred up by dubstep's big push into the mainstream, he truly is the maverick's maverick.

So, we ask him, what is with all of these stylistic shifts? “I get bored!” he laughs. “When I get a sound, like the 'Klavierwerke' tracks, I will just do it and do it until I literally can't do it any more, so then I just have to move on and do something different.” There's an intense air about James, not in the nerdy or over-serious way you sometimes get with electronica musos – quite the opposite, in fact: he's fun and engaging company, and our interview quite frequently gets derailed into just chatting away merrily about tunes, nights out and mutual acquaintances – but nonetheless with a fierce intelligence on display and a maturity way beyond his years. He'll fix you in the eye when he speaks, but often, especially when talking about music that he loves, his gaze will divert up and to the side, darting back and forth as if browsing some inner database to locate exactly the right reference, and he speaks with the clarity and lucidity of someone who has spent a serious amount of time thinking about their plans and beliefs.

As you might expect given the strangeness and diversity of his music, James's upbringing as an only child in the London suburb of Enfield, wasn't entirely conventional. His artist mother and singer/guitarist dad never listened to pop radio but played vintage blues and soul constantly – then as soon as James took up playing the piano his musical interest focused 100% on that. “I listened to Art Tatum and Errol Garner, and I listened to Bach and Satie and Chopin,” he explains; “it wasn't about being into a style, it wasn't a jazz thing or a classical thing, it was just piano, just technique.” And that was that – until finally he discovered dubstep as a teenager, and instantly realised that this could be, as he puts it, “a vehicle” for his musical ideas. “It was,” he says, “just massive for me.”

Listening to the likes of DMZ's Mala made him realise that electronic music had possibilities like the blues he grew up with: “it has that thing where if the ideas and the personality of the artist are strong enough, they can do whatever the fuck they like – Mala could take one simple idea and stretch it out for ages, and it would just work because it's him, and because it has that dread and intensity, and you go with it because you trust him.” It also gave him a way to be musically creative without simply relying on his previous schooling. “When I hear a producer is 'classically trained',” he scowls, “I'm suspicious, to me it's usually a euphemism for 'doesn't have any ideas'. Just because you can read the dots on the score and play complex pieces doesn't mean you have any ability to come up with something new.”

Music production took over his life completely from then on. “I went through a lot of shit, but once I got to 18, 19,” he says, “I just decided that I didn't really give a shit about anyone else. Not friends, not girls – I mean, girls are great...” – he flashes a grin – “...but I didn't want to be distracted. And I didn't want to socialise for the sake of it, go to some shit club just because my mates were, I knew that music was my focus and that was that. I knew from my parents that if you're serious about your creativity you have to be alone a lot.” He did, however, very quickly make connections with fellow one-offs Mount Kimbie and Jack Dunning aka Untold. The latter, after hearing a DJ play one of his demos on Rinse FM got in touch and became something of a mentor, releasing James's first 12” on his own Hemlock label. Mount Kimbie also got in touch after James sent them “a really gushing email about their music” and ended up performing live with him on vocals.

From thereon in, things snowballed fast, with dancefloor-oriented releases on Ramdanman and friends' Hessle Audio and the legendary Belgian techno label R&S – but he was also honing a freakier sound: the sparse, folky vocal tracks that would make up his new album. Only three other people got to hear these initially– Untold, this Mixmag correspondent, and a friend of James's who works for major label A&M records and persuaded them to take a punt. These all feature James extraordinary and emotionally intense singing voice, and are, he says , all about restraint. “I get fed up when people keep describing me as a 'soul' singer, because I'm not,” he insists – “I don't let rip, I just sing the notes as I write them. It's like the production: I don't want to just bang away, I use silence and quiet for effect, and then when it does build up to something tougher it hits much harder in contrast.” And he makes a surprisingly violent punching motion.

The result is something that is both completely removed from trends, and perfectly suited to the current climate of genre meltdown. It's possible to hear everything from ancient echoes of folk and blues to the influence of the crispest modern hip hop, particularly the anything-goes aesthetic of Outkast, who James says are “the Beatles of today, maybe not in sales, but definitely in importance and technical innovation.” It also completely tramples over the idea of dubstep as macho, with a real sexual ambiguity to both James's voice and playing. This is very deliberate: one of his greatest desires is “to learn to play piano in a female way – there's a particular way that Joni Mitchell plays, and also Nina Simone, that is technically incredible but isn't flash, that supports the voice without coming too much into the foreground, yet is incredibly beautiful in its own right.”

There's no disconnect from the dancefloor in any of this, though. He still talks with passion about dancing to his friend Joy Orbison's DJ sets in small, dark clubs - “at one point I completely lost track of where I was, and felt plugged into something bigger,” he says, “like the music was joined into a wider history” - and at XOYO Mixmag witnessed at first hand how even his oddest, most strung-out tracks have a sense of dance dynamics that grabs people on a very basic level. Surveying XOYO's punters, we met everyone from electronica dorks who proclaimed him “the deepest British producer since the Aphex Twin” through indie hipsters waxing lyrical about his voice, to a couple of girls in borderline hysterics about how fit he is (James is indeed striking looking, not to mention well over six foot tall). With this breadth of support, the sky would seem to be the limit for James right now; but whether in five years he's perfoming solo piano or singing with Andre 3000, evidence suggests the results will be beyond anyone's abilities to predict.

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

Myrkur: the strange and surreal journey of Amalie Bruun

From hanging out with Martin Scorsese and Billy Corgan to appearing in a Michael Bolton video, Myrkur's Amalie Bruun is a black metal star like no other

An old painting hangs on the wall of the compact, one-storey house an hour’s drive out of Copenhagen that Amalie Bruun calls home. It depicts a blonde girl lost in reverie as she walks a grass path high above a fjord: a scene that’s elemental and ethereal at the same time.

The picture, by noted Norwegian landscape artist Hans Dahl, belonged to Amalie’s late grandmother, a refined woman who smoked cigarettes from an ivory holder and drank gin and tonic on a Friday morning. Amalie’s mother used to say that it was Amalie in the painting. It’s not hard to see why.

“I had a connection to it from before I can remember,” says Amalie today, as we sit at a dining table in a living room that’s one part uncluttered Scandinavian stylishness, one part hygge-style cosiness. “The album sounds like the painting looks.”

The album she’s referring to is Folkesange, her third as Myrkur, the one-woman  project she founded in the mists of the early 2010s.

Where Myrkur’s past releases have bridged worlds – black metal, post-rock, blackgaze, classical – Folkesange is different. This is traditional Scandinavian music played on traditional Scandinavian instruments, sung predominantly in Danish. There are some covers, some originals, though there’s not a trace of metal in the music or the vocals. It’s all there in the title: Folkesange. Folk Songs.

That Amalie Bruun is releasing an album of sometimes beautiful, sometimes melancholic Scandinavian folk music really shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed her journey. Partly because that aspect of who she is has always been present in Myrkur’s music – all she’s doing with Folkesange is separating it out.

But mainly because Amalie Bruun has lived more lives than most other people. That, as much as anything, is what puts her out there on her own.

Two life-changing things have happened since Myrkur’s last album, 2017’s expansive and brilliant Mareridt, both inextricably linked.

One: Amalie Bruun got married. Her husband, Keith Abrami, is a fitness instructor and drummer with American death metal band Artificial Brain. The pair became romantically involved after Keith began playing as Myrkur’s touring drummer.

Keith is around, though he stays in the back bedroom today. This is because he is attending to the second life-changing thing that has happened to Amalie recently: the couple’s nine-week old son, Otto.

If Mareridt was the product of the vivid nightmares its creator endured before making it, Folkesange was defined by pregnancy and the impending birth of her first child.

She describes motherhood as joyous, though in her case the elation is edged with sadness. She discovered she was pregnant soon after she started writing the new album. “But I miscarried,” she says simply.

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We ask if she’s OK talking about this. She nods, and explains that the miscarriage pushed her deeper into making Folkesange. A few days after entering the studio with producer (and Heilung co-founder) Christopher Juul, she discovered she was pregnant again. And that’s when the emotion really hit her.

“I was totally out of it, but in a beautiful way,” she says. “I wasn’t my normal human self. I become something else.” She laughs. “Very nauseated.”

She noticed that her vocals were different. “I never felt so in tune with singing as I did then. I had this power and this clarity, which was crazy. But it was the exact place to be, recording folk vocals with this new life growing in you.”

There were worries, of course, as well as other emotions. One of the songs on the new album, Gudernes Viljie (English translation: ‘The Will Of The Gods’) is about the miscarriage. “There were conflicted feelings, dealing with both this new life and this guilt feeling of this other life that never happened,” Amalie explains. “It was never a heartbeat, but you still feel like a mother. It was very intense.”

Amalie Bruun grew up listening to Scandinavian folk music. It resonated with her on a different level. “With my spirit,” she says. “It’s like in England: you have that singer-songwriter folk tradition, it’s historically ingrained. It shapes who you are, even if you don’t know it. Because it’s folk music, it’s told by people for people. So it’s inherited into the spirit of a population.”

Half of Folkesange’s 12 tracks are her versions of songs that she grew up listening to, while the others are her originals, though you’d be hard pushed to tell which is which. “This is a record that I wish had existed when I was young,” she says. “And it doesn’t exist, so I wanted to make it.”

Music, folk or otherwise, is in her blood. Her father, Michael Bruun, is a retired musician. He was semi-famous as a pop singer-songwriter in Denmark in the early 80s. “But he was not interested in fame,” says Amalie. “He’s shy and misanthropic.” Does she take after him? She smiles. “I do. Sometimes I wish I didn’t but I do.”

Her mother, by contrast, was a Jungian psychologist. “She tried her best not to bring her work home, but she did. You get analysed every day.”

As well as folk music, Amalie loved classical music as a child. She learned piano as a toddler, took up violin at five, and eventually attended music college as a teenager. “I wasn’t pushed into anything. It was all my choice. I was never interested in anything else.”

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The first metal record Amalie Bruun fell in love with was Transilvanian Hunger, Darkthrone’s sub-lo-fi black metal masterpiece. Before that she’d listened to the stuff teenagers listen to: Nirvana, Björk, that kind of thing. Aside from her older brother’s Metallica and Judas Priest records, she’d never listened to much metal.

“Usually that transition takes years, right?” she says. “But all of a sudden I hear Transilvanian Hunger. It reminded me of classical music.”

“The Starter Pack” is how she jokingly describes Transilvanian Hunger today. “If you like that, a lot other black metal sounds really pleasant. A lot easier on the ear.”

When she was 22 years old, Amalie Bruun bought herself a one-way plane ticket to New York and started another life. It was the city’s rich and romantic musical history that drew her there: the poets, the punks, the freaks, the superstars. She arrived with no cellphone and nowhere to stay.  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. “But that’s what New York is. You just go there and see what happens.”

She found a place to stay with friends of friends from back in Denmark, and walked all over the city, giving her demo CD to venues. “Just piano music,” is how she describes what she was doing. “Me singing little melodies.”

She played anywhere that would have her, in front of whatever crowds were there. “Oh, it wasn’t the cool people,” she says. “It was definitely uncool. But it was never about fame. I just wanted to go out and earn my stripes a little bit.”

In the early 2010s, she met guitarist and co-vocalist Brian Harding, and they put together Ex Cops. Based in oh-so-trendy Brooklyn and playing shoegaze-inflected alt-pop, they basically screamed ‘hipster’.

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She recoils at the suggestion. “I fucking hate that,” she says vehemently. “I hate the whole hipster thing.”

Ex Cops were ultimately small fish in a big indie rock pond – their main claim to fame was that their second album was executive-produced by Smashing Pumpkins major domo Billy Corgan. Amalie liked being in Ex Cops, but she liked the music industry a lot less. Or at least the part of it she where she found herself.

“I would be in the studio, working on ideas I had written and people would say, ‘Let’s just let Amalie get it out of her system,’” she says. “I was so offended by that. There were comments on what I would wear, whether or not I could have armpit hair in photos. It takes away your agency as a musician and as a woman.”

There were two Amalie Bruuns while she was living in New York. Or rather, there was one living two separate lives.

There was one Amalie Bruun who was making music with Ex Cops and dipping her toes into the world of modelling – she appeared, raven-haired, in a Chanel advert directed by the legendary Martin Scorsese – and, even more bizarrely, alongside 90s crooner Michael Bolton dressed as Forrest Gump in a video by spoof R’n’B group The Lonely Island (Bolton was dressed as Forrest Gump, not her).

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Then there was Amalie Bruun the black metal fan. She mentioned her love of the genre in Ex Cops interviews, even if she sounded almost apologetic about it. “I was,” she concedes. “People thought it was too weird.”

Few people picked up on the references anyway, let alone knew that she was quietly working on a project of her own in the shadows: Myrkur.

She had been writing folk melodies on the violin for years. Gradually she added more and more metal elements. Once in a while she dared play it to other people.

Eventually word reached underground metal stronghold Relapse Records, who released her self-titled debut mini-album in 2014. Back then her identity was a mystery: she was as much apparition as musician. “I wanted the music to speak for itself,” she says of her anonymity, as if it’s the most obvious thing ever.

But mysteries don’t stay mysterious for long these days. When someone joined the dots and uncovered her other life as one half of a trendy Brooklyn indie-pop band, the keyboard warriors went into swivel-eyed overdrive. She was a fake. A poser. Worse, a woman – one who’d dared gatecrash the testosterone-heavy sausage party that is the black metal scene.

“I was blissfully unaware of it,” she says of the negative attention she initially attracted. “Then it was, like, ‘Why am I being hated by people who don’t know me at all. At least get to know me.’” She shrugs. “It didn’t affect me much. I was there to play music, not fuck around with all that stuff.”

She has a theory: that people objected to the fact that she’d worked with Kris ‘Garm’ Rygg, frontman with former black metal avant-gardists Ulver. “Honestly, what really pissed off a lot of people in the beginning was that I did work with some of the Scandinavian black metal artists that they look up to. I think that was very annoying and provocative to that crowd.”

Not that she was a woman? She thinks carefully.

“I think it’s the fact that I didn’t follow the rules of how women in metal should behave. I’m not the first woman in metal, I just did it a little bit more my own way.”

Anyway, she says with a faint smile, she wasn’t above a little button-pushing herself.

“I was never deliberately provocative,” she begins. “But when I realised how little it took I did take a bit of pleasure in it. I knew that if you post a picture with Attila from Mayhem, then they’re just going to go off. But it’s not like I did that just to piss people off...”

If Mareridt silenced the haters, or some of them at least, then Folksange, with its absence of volume, will probably fire them up again. Amalie Bruun couldn’t care less if it does. She has more important concerns. Such as her new life, as the mother of Otto.

She’s not pretending that motherhood won’t impact on how she approaches her career. There will be no big world tours around Folkesange, for one. “You can’t pretend it doesn’t play into it as a woman. Maybe as a man, it’s different. I know a lot of metal musicians, they have kids and they continue the same life. That’s cool, but when you’re a mother you can’t do that. I want the two sides of my life to co-exist.”

Has she worked out how that will work?

“I don’t know yet how that works.”

Is she looking forward to it?

“It’s nerve-wracking.”

Is she worried?

“No, I’m not worried. I’m in control. It will be how I plan it to be.”

With perfect timing, the sound of a baby crying drifts from the back room. Amalie gets up and returns a few seconds later holding Otto, a tiny bundle of nine-week-old humanity.

It’s only then that you realise how unique Amalie Bruun, and Myrkur, is: not just a woman operating in such a male-dominated field, but a mother as well.

Before we leave her and her family, she says that she’s looking forward to following up Folksange with “another metal-style record with distorted guitars”. But for now that’s in the future. Another chapter, another life.

[nickjunesource]

Interview: Max Minghella, Who Plays Nick in The Handmaid’s Tale, is the Enigmatic Brit in LA About to Make His Directorial Debut

(link to article — PAYWALLED — full text below)

Astro is an obscure diner in Silver Lake, Los Angeles’s hipster area. When it comes to trendy nooks in Silver Lake, there are options beyond this, but Astro is one of Max Minghella’s haunts. He’s sipping on a cup of tea in a booth, blending into the background. He wears cord trousers and trainers. The cords are his version of dressing to impress. At 33, the actor and director is taking heed of friends’ advice that he needs to “grow up. I literally don’t have any trousers,” he says, chuckling. “I only had sweatpants until a week ago. My clothing looks like it was made for a 12-year-old. Too many people have said something to me.”

Minghella is dashing — the type of guy who could maybe get away with wearing a uniform of tracksuits and a flannel shirt for decades beyond his youth. He has a refined English accent but with a transatlantic twang. Born in Hampstead, north London, he moved to LA when he was 17, to act, and has lived between the two countries ever since. You may know him from The Social Network (2010) and The Ides of March (2011), but his star has risen recently due to his role as Nick Blaine in The Handmaid’s Tale, currently on its third series. He is also celebrating his directorial debut: Teen Spirit is a Cinderella story, starring Elle Fanning as Violet, a Polish immigrant girl-next-door living in a small British town and seeking to become a pop star. It has been a labour of love for Minghella, and it crept increasingly closer to his heart as the process unfolded. “I wrote the first draft 10 years ago,” he says.

At first, the script was an excuse to indulge Minghella’s guilty pleasures: Swedish pop star Robyn and sports shows and movies such as Friday Night Lights and The Karate Kid. “It was masturbatory,” he laughs. The inspiration came with Robyn’s album Body Talk and its lead anthem, Dancing on My Own. The first scene he wrote was Violet performing the hit song in a TV talent contest akin to The X Factor. “It was also originally a foreign-language film,” he says. “But I thought the combination of subtitles and expensive pop music made it a silly endeavour. The script was a shambles,” he adds. The actor Jamie Bell, Minghella’s best friend, helped to turn it into a real script. “We’re yin and yang,” says Minghella. “Everyone I work with is incredibly hard on me. I’m addicted to that. By the time we got to shooting, every comma had been argued over.”

Minghella is tricky company. He can be curt, offering vague answers, professing to being “very private”, or simply responding with a “sure” or a shrug. It doesn’t surprise me that the story of how he and Bell became friends begins with them as enemies. “We met really young and had a tempestuous initial meeting, where he’d heard that I’d been saying things about him behind his back, which was untrue,” he recalls. “I heard that he was saying things about me, so we were very wary of one another.” Years later, in 2005, Bell emailed Minghella and they went to dinner. “We fell in love instantly. Most of my closest friendships have been spawned in similar …” a pause. “I’m very wary of people,” he says finally.

Growing up, Minghella says he was obnoxious. “I loved school socially and still miss it,” he says. “But I was not an academic student. I did badly and was in a lot of trouble.” He recently bumped into an old history teacher on the Tube. “He said, ‘We just didn’t know what to do with you,’” Minghella laughs. His parents were both hard-working — his mother, Carolyn, came to England from Hong Kong when she was 18 to be a dancer, and his father, Anthony, the writer and Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, had an Italian immigrant father. Minghella’s older sister, Hannah, 40, is the head of TriStar Pictures.

Dropping out of school a year early, Minghella headed to LA with no A-levels, landed some roles, then, guiltily trying to appease his parents, applied to university. He was accepted to only one, Columbia, to study history — he “charmed his way in”.

Anthony died of a haemorrhage in 2008, when he was 54 and Minghella was 23, and he carries with him his dad’s life mantra. “My father would always say, ‘When nine Russians tell you that you’re drunk, you should lie down.’”

Teen Spirit is set — and was filmed — on the Isle of Wight, where Anthony was born and raised. Minghella gets defensive when I ask whether Anthony’s legacy intimidated him as a film-maker. “I don’t grapple with it,” he replies. “A lot of people in my family work in film — my sister runs a studio, my uncle [Dominic Minghella] is a successful producer. The reason for it taking so long is for no good reason except my twenties were very wasteful. I didn’t utilise them in the right way. I’ve made a lot of things I probably should have released in some shape or form, but I’ve always been a private person. The amount of hours I spend acting? Very few. Directing for me was a relief.”

That said, he loves working on The Handmaid’s Tale — and with its lead, Elisabeth Moss. “She’s just a joy,” he says. “A very easy, chill person. I feel privileged.” The show has been universally lauded, winning 11 Emmys and two Golden Globes. Nick is someone of initial suspicion, who winds up being a saviour and love interest to Moss’s June/Offred. Given the current threat against abortion rights in America, I wonder if Minghella is excited to be exploring that on camera. He shakes his head. “None of it was intentional,” he says. He does admit to relief that “it’s on the right side of the conversation”, but he feels “quite antithetical” about using his platform to talk social change. “Activism in film-making is not interesting to me. I don’t like to be told what to think. I like to interpret.”

Teen Spirit’s Violet was inspired by his mother. “She didn’t speak a word of English when she moved to Britain,” he says. “There’s a huge amount of her in Violet. There’s a lot of my sister in Violet.” Initially, Minghella was looking for a Polish actress, but rewrote the part when Fanning expressed interest in being in the film. “I was her biggest fan. And then we sat down, had lunch and [it] became clear that she was probably the only person who could play the part. A lot of her real life is absorbed into the character.” Like what? He squirms. “I don’t know if I want to talk about that. There’s something funny about film sets. The amount of confession that happens … It feels out of turn.”

Reportedly Minghella and Fanning, 21 — 12 years his junior — are in a relationship. They were spotted holding hands last July in Florence and attended this year’s Met Gala together. They gush over each other in interviews, but neither has confirmed a relationship in as many words. To confuse things further, Minghella used to date the actress Kate Mara, who is now married to his best mate, Bell. I ask him whether it was special to work with someone in a creative capacity that he was romantically involved in, referring to Fanning. He laughs. “I don’t wanna answer that question.”

We manage to find some common ground as Brits in LA with a shared nostalgia for the things we miss back home. When he feels homesick, he listens to BBC Radio 1 and he says that nothing makes him happier than a Branston pickle sandwich. He spent some time living in New York in the early 2000s, but wouldn’t move back there. “I love New York, but I don’t know anyone there, so I always end up feeling lonely and strange,” he admits. As our interview finishes, I wonder if Minghella considers himself more British or American, as clearly his connections to both are so strong. “I’m not sure I’d call LA home per se,” he says. “But it is comforting. When I drive by the 7-Eleven on Silver Lake Boulevard from the airport, it’s the one place in the world that feels settled.”

[garageprojectmotorcycles]

Royal Enfield Continental GT650 review / ride report.

When was the last time you read a bad bike review in a magazine or online? Was it the debacle that was the Bimota V Due? Even Braap’s are given a positive spin by reviewers even though they had 5 product recalls in less than a year. So many motorcycle reviews these day are either a reworded press release or a well written advertisement. Now I reckon there are two reasons for that; the sceptic in me says if the magazines don’t write a positive review, then the advertising dollars stop flowing. There are plenty of examples of that car companies having a dummy spit when they don’t win car of the year so it no doubt happens in the motorcycle world too. The other reason is that it’s 2019, motorcycles have been manufactured for a long time, manufacturers have got the basics down pat. This is were Royal Enfield excels, the basics.

I wasn’t planning on writing a review but my bike was getting serviced and it wasn’t going to be ready in time for the Perth Café Racer Run to the Hills ride, so I needed a suitable replacement. As my review of the Benelli Leoncino got an amazing 36 likes (amazing because that’s 34 more than I thought it would get once Ric and I liked it) and a couple of sales, I thought Ric might be open to the idea of handing me the keys to something else. Scanning the showroom floor at MotoMax, a Ducati Sport Classic, Triumph Thruxton, Rickman Honda and a cluster of classics caught my eye. Ric handed me the keys to a mildly customised Continental GT650. Ah well, beggars can’t be choosers.

We both had conditions, Ric’s was simple “Bring it back with a full tank you tight arse bastard and if you drop it, you bu….”. I’m not sure what he said as Peter was saying “look, look” while pointing at a lady across the road who was jogging past. It was far more interesting watching the world go up and down. My condition was the same as always, I wasn’t going to write a positive review just because I got a bike for the weekend. If the bike is shit, then I’ll say so but you don’t have to post the review.  So here it is….hang on…before we get to the review, lets get some background.  

Royal Enfield sold 32,000 motorcycles in 2017 and not many of those were sold outside of India. They now sometimes sell double that in one month with their top selling model the Classic 350 outselling all their other models combined. It sometimes cracks the monthly top 10 list of number of bikes sold in India. Royal Enfield sells more Classic 350’s in one month than all the road bikes sold in Australia from all brands in one year. Unfathomable figures when you consider the company was at the brink of bankruptcy in 1991.

When Sid Lal’s dad bought the company, nothing really changed until 2010 when the Indian Tech economy boomed and hipsters finally had some disposable cash. Sales picked up and then skyrocketed the company to the fastest growing motorcycle manufacturer in the world. The success of the brand in recent times is partly because they upgraded (think EFI, ABS etc) their Bullet/Classic line to make it relevant while keeping the looks of the old motorcycle. Boomers started realising their bucket lists were getting longer and they were running out of time to cross stuff off. Learners around the world are often restricted to motorcycles that take more time to get to 100km/h than it does for a politician to answer question in parliament and Royal Enfields are perfect for that market.

The increase in sales meant Sid (the CEO at the time) had cash burning a hole in his pocket so off he went to the UK and bought Harris Performance which I remember reading about in the UK magazines for making custom frames for GP bikes. They’ve developed the chassis for all the new models including the Continental GT Café Racer, the Himalayan adventure bike and the recent 650 twins. The Café Racer handled as good as it looked but it didn’t get many hearts racing and only sold in low numbers, hence it was discontinued after a couple of years. The Himalayan has been known to get a few hearts racing which has more to do with them being ridden where they are named after. A devoted fan base will see the Himalayan continue to be developed for many years. The real game changer for Royal Enfield though, are the two 650 twins, the Interceptor and the Continental GT 650. Royal Enfield are exporting more than they are selling domestically and dealers in Oz are selling far more twins than they are of the 350cc and 500cc singles.

I’m not a brand snob so will any bike I can get the keys to. My list of motorcycle brands I’d like to put my bum on is topped, like most peoples, by the Italian exotics such as Bimota, MV Agusta etc. For me, Royal Enfield sits a long way down that list; I’m no fan boy who gets excited when a manufacturer changes the colour and releases it as a 2020 model. I lived in the world of sportsbikes and track days so Royal Enfields never registered on my radar; I always felt they were a little weird looking. Sort of like a girlfriend I had  in the 90’s that looked like a cockeyed Nicole Kidman without the Botox. Like my girlfriend, if you ride a Royal Enfield a few times you start appreciate the attraction and you end up falling in love. Since my first Himalayan motorcycle adventure in 2013, I have ridden all of the Royal Enfield models in Australia and in the harshest of conditions that the Himalayas can throw at you and while I still wouldn’t consider myself a fan boy, I would say I was an advocaat. Damn, it’s 11pm and I’m out of beer and wishing I had a liqueur cabinet. Is there an Uber drinks?   

The Conti I got had a few subtle changes made to it. The tank hand been replaced with the rounder tank from an interceptor, bar end mirrors had been fitted and the bike had been encouraged to find its voice with some aftermarket reverse cones mufflers fitted. The bar end mirrors worked perfectly, completely vibration free all through the rev range however the bike was a little quiet for my liking. You could certainly hear it under throttle and it let out pleasing pops and crackles on a decline but I’d like a deeper, louder sound. More Tom Jones than George Michael. If you’ve got standard pipes on your bike and you’re bored with it and possibly considering a change of bike, put an aftermarket set of pipes on and you’ll fall in love again. The Interceptor tank looked great on the Conti and helped take my eyes off what I consider to be the ugliest seat in the market. For some reason, Royal Enfield in Australia decided that the dual seat would be standard and the solo seat with a cowling that is used for the promo pics, and is standard in most of the 50 other countries that it is sold in would be option for Australia. I know looks are subjective but the transformation that the single seat makes on this bike is amazing and I wonder why more people aren’t swapping them over when it is such a cheap option. Maybe it’s just me. 

I am trying to squeeze myself into my daughters Katy Perry T-Shirt when Andy arrives early on his Ducati Sport Classic. With no time for Small Talk, it was time to Roar into Leederville to meet the others. We took the back roads before getting onto the freeway and this is the Conti’s playground. With narrow 100/18’s on the front and 130/18’s on the back, the bike flicks left and right really quickly. On familiar roads, I found myself turning in too quickly and having to readjust my line which the bike did without drama. Later on in the day when the speeds picked up a little and the mercury wanted to blow its load, the front end felt squirmish when going over the bitumen that is poured into the cracks of the road. No one else felt it so again, maybe it was just me.

Our group heading to the start point of the ride consisted of a Sport Classic with Zard pipes, a Thruxton with Staintunes, a V7 Guzzi with Lanfranconis, a Honda CB1100 with an aftermarket 4 into 1 and a W650 with open pipes. It was amazing listening to all the different sounds as we lined up at the Christmas trees, sometimes known as traffic lights by boring people. The Sport Classic consistently got the jump on the rest of at the lights but the rest of us all had a turn at coming second without any clear next fastest. The Conti is styled as a Café Racer of old but it is no race bike with ligths like they were in the old days. Sid Lal himself says “…we (Royal Enfield motorcycles) aren’t going much faster than 100 miles an hour. If someone wants a quicker motorbike, go elsewhere.” During the week, the media reported that a car was hooning through the tunnel at the outrageous speed of 140km/h. The bar had been set low so there was simply no need to crack the ton in the tunnel. Absolutely no need. By my calcs, I reckon 170+ is possible but as I never break the speed limits I’ll never find out.

Riding along the Tonkin, I rolled the throttle on and off, looking for flat spots but couldn’t find any, it just smoothly accelerates all the way to the redline in a very linear fashion. The 5 speed box has perfectly spaced gear ratios and I rarely looked for a 6th like I constantly do on my W650. We joined the rest of the riders and took off along the escarpment as the pace crept up through the hills. The bike was in its element, enjoying being thrown around and asking for more. I worked my way to the front of the pack and when there was a break in the traffic I gave it what it wanted and took off. On these sort of roads, I neither needed or wanted anymore power, I just enjoyed rolling the throttle on and rolling it off coming into a corner, letting the engine compression slow me down with only a slight dab on the rear brake when needed. The Pirelli Phantoms had more than enough grip and never troubled the ABS system. I considered putting the Phantoms on my bike but baulked at the price so Royal Enfield aren’t skimping on quality to ensure they stay at the $9990 price point.

After a cool down and a group photo, we headed to lunch at Parkerville and to pay our respects to Kevin the kookaburra who had his head ripped off recently by a complete and utter wanker. As we hit the road again, I found my right hand feeling a bit tingly which is a little unusual. My bike has thicker grips so maybe the thinner grips on the Conti passed on the vibes or maybe I’m just old and the years of abuse I’ve given my right hand is coming back to bite me. The suspension soaked up the bumpy roads but my bum was starting to feel a bit numb. The seat looks flat but is actually slightly rounded which was giving me numb bum…which would have come in handy when it also got years of abuse in a previous life. These are the only two faults with the Conti GT that I could find, both of which wouldn’t stop me buying one as I’d change the hideous seat and put thicker grips on anyway. Everything else was perfect; the horn is louder than my cars, the clocks are easy to read, clutch and brake lever action is effortless, the gearbox is ridiculously smooth, riding position is spot on.

At under 10k, the only bike that is comparable to the Conti is its stablemate the Interceptor. The visually challenged Harley 750 is being run out a similar price, Suzuki threw a bikini fairing on its SV650 and called it café racer and is watching them gather dust on the showroom. The Benelli Leoncino and the oddly styled Husqvarna Svartpilen are similar prices but I doubt the circles in the Venn diagram of people interested in these three bikes would overlap.

For $13,000, the W800 from Kawasaki is another option but I’d rather have the Conti and spend the difference on customising it. The only other option is to buy a Triumph Street Twin at $16,000 and then throw some money at it to make it a café racer. Buying a bike that 100’s of other people have got and keeping it standard, doesn’t make any sense to me. If I had Triumph money to spend and the option was to have stock a Street Twin or a one of a kind Continental GT with a big bore kit, killer paint job, custom seat and a custom exhaust then it’s a no brainer. I’m in the minority though as most riders are happy with buying a good looking bike and leaving it alone. The Continental GT can be enjoyed as is but also makes a very smart choice as base for a custom motorcycle.

[a-room-of-my-own]

Authenticity & empathy: Meghan Murphy

Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010, is the founder and editor Feminist Current, Canada’s leading feminist website and has published work in numerous national and international publications.

This is the text of the speech she gave at the 22nd meeting of Woman’s Place UK.

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity lately. We’re currently living in a culture wherein authenticity has been traded in for fakery. We support and reward virtue signalling and punish those who are real, those who tell the truth, those with integrity, those who insist on making political arguments based on critical thinking and what is right, rational, and ethical, instead of based on what is politically correct or popular.

I have a rather overzealous commitment to authenticity, which I think has played a sizable role in my insistence on pushing back against gender identity ideology and legislation. I know I have friends, or acquaintances, or friends of friends, or random internet followers with self righteous opinions who think maybe I should just back off of this. Or who claim I’m being ‘mean’ or unempathetic, because I continue to operate in reality rather than the fantasy land we’re told is the new normal, wherein black is white, up is down, and men are women.

But I see no empathy for women and girls on the part of trans activists, that is to say, those pushing gender identity ideology and legislation. What I see is bullying, threats, ostracization, and a misogynist backlash against the feminist movement and much of the work it’s accomplished over years.

I see no empathy for women who are now being forced to compete against male athletes in sport, essentially rendering women’s sport nonexistant, as they can no longer compete on fair ground, if forced to compete against men. I see no empathy for the female athletes speaking out against this reprehensible trend — instead they’re being smeared and threatened. I see no empathy for the lesbians being bullied right out of their own events and communities, as the LGBTQxyz+++ whatever movement does nothing to support them, and in fact seems instead to support the men pushing them around and hurling verbal abuse at them, simply for asserting that lesbians are females who are attracted to other females, not heterosexual men interested in playing around with lipstick.

We held an event in Vancouver earlier this month, addressing the issue of gender identity and kids, and our venue — the Croatian Cultural Centre — received so many threats they had to file a police report, hire their own security, and bring in the Vancouver Police Department to keep protesters off the property. They, for once, didn’t blame us — women, feminists — for the threats of violence sent their way, and rather asked, with disbelief, how it was us the trans activists were accusing of being ‘hateful’, while simultaneously verbally abusing and threatening violence against the venue’s staff.

Somewhere between 150 and 200 protesters showed up, and stood outside with signs saying things like, “Support trans youth”, “Love and Solidarity”, “Love trans kids”, “be careful who you hate, it might be someone you love” and “love wins.”

All this branding around “love” has been incredibly successful, of course. We — women fighting for women’s rights, people fighting for the truth, those of us who insist on acknowledging that biology is real, that females and males are real things, and that, no, there is no such thing as a “female penis” —have been painted as hateful, intolerant, and bigoted, despite the fact that we are the only ones engaging (or trying to engage in) respectful, civil, rational debate and discussion, and being shut down over and over again.

Despite the fact that WE are the ones concerned about male violence against women and how gender identity ideology and legislation will hurt women, as well as kids, who are now being sent down a path towards hormones and surgery that will destroy their bodies permanently, simply because they don’t conform to sexist gender stereotypes, it is trans activists who have positioned themselves as caring and politically correct, and us as cruel and intolerant.

As I was leaving the venue after that event, the stragglers screamed at me that I had blood on my hands. Which of course I do not, and which, of course, is incredibly ironic considering how many times I’ve been told I should be murdered on account of my belief that you can’t change sex, and that it is not possible to be ‘born in the wrong body.’

I see no empathy in trans activism for the girls who will lose scholarships and opportunities to boys who can easily beat them in athletic competitions.

I see no empathy for women and girls who don’t feel comfortable with naked men in their change rooms at the pool. I see no empathy for youth being put on hormones that will have a lasting impact on them, including permanent sterilization, all to accommodate adults who don’t want to see trans ideology questioned under any circumstances.

I see no empathy for the women and their children who will have nowhere to turn if their local transition house is defunded on account of a women-only policy.

I see no empathy for Kristi Hanna, a Toronto woman and survivor of sexual assault, who had leave her room at Palmerston house, a shelter for recovering addicts, because she was made to share a room with a man, and did not feel safe.

I see no empathy for the 14 female estheticians who were asked to give a male a brazilian bikini wax, then dragged to court when they declined, saying they only offered the service to women.

I see no empathy for the girls allegedly predated on by this man, who is being protected by our very liberal, very progressive society that’s choosing to put male feelings and desires above all else, under the guise of ‘inclusion’, and thanks to trans activism.

Women and girls are being told they may not have boundaries. That they may not say ‘no’ to men. And this is what we are told it means to ‘choose love’. This is what we are being told is ‘feminism’.

Trans activism says women may not define their own bodies as female. That we may not have our own rights, services, and spaces, that ‘exclude’ men. It says gender stereotypes are real and innate, but the female body is a social construction. It says that ‘woman’ is based only on adherence to or an affinity towards femininity, something feminism has fought against for years.

So much of what women fought for over the past century is being rolled back, and progressives are insisting we all shut up and take it, because it’s ‘nice’, and of course, women must always be ‘nice’, even if it means putting our lives, autonomy, safety, opinions, and rights aside.

NOTHING about the trans movement is progressive and nothing about it is feminist.

I brought up authenticity earlier on, partly because I am sick to death of this social media based culture wherein we put forth personas we believe our audience will like, modeling perfect faces, lives, and thoughts, which I find incredibly boring and depressing, but also because I see this devaluing of authenticity as having an incredibly destructive impact on political discourse, and certainly it’s manifested itself powerfully in the trans movement.

I don’t believe that, aside from a few exceptionally delusional or troubled people, a majority of the population believes it’s possible to change sex. I don’t believe that all these so called progressives look at a man we call him ‘she’, and believe he is literally a woman. I don’t believe all these people claiming ‘love wins’ and insisting women be more ‘empathetic’ as they give up all their rights and spaces, while these activists spout vile, hateful insults and threats at us, are really very loving at all.

I think people are not telling the truth. I think they are repeating mantras and going along with ideas and policies in order to appease their Facebook friends. I think they value social status a lot, and are willing to give up ethics and truth in order to be liked. And I think it’s pathetic. I think that these people are throwing women under the bus and even selling themselves out in the process, knowing that they’re spouting lies for virtual cookies and using us all to fake politics.

And I refuse to be used as some kind of stepping stool for empty headed, cowardly hipsters — these extremely privileged people who have fetishized oppression, but have no idea what marginalized groups actually face and deal with on a daily basis, because certainly it’s not ‘misgendering’ that is keeping people poor and vulnerable — who can’t be bothered to read, listen, or think before announcing, boldly, that women with actual politics, who actually understand history, and who are bold enough to take a stand against actual bigotry and oppression should be silenced, punched, or even killed.

The wrong side of history is an embarrassing place to be.

But unfortunately I worry that, by the time these people realize how much damage they’ve caused by going along with such a destructive trend, it will be too late. What does give me hope is all of you. This massive and growing movement of people standing up and saying ‘no’, we won’t take this silently and sitting down. This groundswell of people insisting on telling the truth, despite the fact that we lose friends, jobs, social status, and sometimes safety, for doing so.

And the more we keep doing it, the more will join us.

Meghan Murphy

20th May 2019

[chamaquito-v1]

The Hipster

I have hate

**I wrote this article in 2013 for my college newspaper, I was such a different person then.**

Ah, the hipster. The stylishly disaffected breed of twenty-somethings whose aura of irony covers Williams — well, just about everywhere. The hipster haunts every street, campus, and café, creating nostalgia for times and things never personally experienced. Most people encounter this contemporary urban clown, hijacking out-of-date fashions, mechanisms, and hobbies, responding in ridicule.

John Molson from the School of Business, Concordia University at Arsel and Helen Churchill Professor in the Marketing Department of the Wisconsin School of Business Thompson, the beats of the ’50s and hippies of the ’60s and ’70s, both of which had an admirable authenticity about them, gave rise to “the millennial hipster,” which “came to be represented as a super consumer of trends and as a new, and rather gullible, target market that consumes cool rather than creating it.”

Generally, psychologists who study consumers understand that people are largely motivated to spend money not just on things that they materially need, but that reinforces their identity. They purchase not only goods and services, but mythologies. Imagining themselves as rugged, rebellious patriots, they buy a Harley-Davidson. Imagining themselves as respected and affluent, they buy a Lexus. Hipsters, though, follow a different archetype. Their problem is that their purchases tend to place them within a category whose mythology they despise. That’s right: Nobody likes hipsters, not even hipsters.

So allow me to deconstruct, first and foremost, that hipsterism is about things and materialism such as Pink Floyd’s discography on vinyl as well an iPhone packed with apps. Throw in a steady certainty that your tastes are superior to everyone else’s, and you’re on your way to establishing a hipster aesthetic. The second element is imitation, the mixture, and patchwork of elements from pop culture to create sensibility. Whether it be the entire film career of Wes Anderson or house remixes of your favorite records, imitation is essential to hipsterism. Finally, there’s irony, a way for hipsters to emotionally distance themselves from sincerely appreciating things.

In Emerging Adulthood, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett offers a handy numbered list of features that he sees as characterizing “emerging adulthood”:

It is the age of identity exploration, of trying out various possibilities, especially in love and work.

It is the age of instability.

It is the most self-focused age in life.

It is the age of feeling in-between, in transition, neither adolescent nor adult.

It is the age of possibilities when hope flourishes when people have an unparalleled opportunity to transform their lives.

Relating contemporary aesthetics to “emerging adulthood” might give some social background to recent art-theory hand-wringing that the pattern of “post-modernism” — a term that, for all its limitations, still had some critical and intellectual juice in it — has given way to the looser, merely descriptive term “contemporary art.” The two things seem a lot alike — just the way the experimentation of contemporary young people looks a lot like the angst and soul-searching of their parents in the sixties and seventies. The difference is that the experimentation has become a norm that is passively inhabited, not a territory to be claimed.

Hipsters produce irritation in me, one that until recently I could not explain. I realized they provoke me because they are, despite the distance from which I observe them, an amplified version of myself. And regarding the hipster’s ironic “appreciation” of things that are not traditionally considered cool, I’d argue that some hipsters do sincerely appreciate all of the aforementioned, either as a form of nostalgia or as a celebration of the culture they’ve been instructed to avoid.

Let’s get real: For every cynical slacker sitting around ironically watching Flight of the Conchords, there’s a legitimate artist who’s working their arse off making something worthwhile. There’s no ironic detachment, for example, to the music that band TV on the Radio produce. They are artists too, and yes, they are cool. And perhaps it should go without saying, but hipster profiling is about as effective as racial profiling. Owning a pair of skinny jeans doesn’t make someone cool, but it doesn’t make them a “hipster scumbag” either.

Here’s the thing — as fatigued as we all may be, hipsters, are here to stay. They’ve been far too exposed to be considered an “underground” or “countercultural” movement anymore; the hipster aesthetic has been aided by advertisers and the mainstream media, and they have only managed to grow in number.

After all, in the rubble of this fury, what remains for artists and bohemians who are legitimately trying to be part of a counterculture? One might get the sense that if Jimi Hendrix were to show up in Echo Park today, he’d be publicly mocked in a style-section piece on blipsters for wearing a feathered fedora. Critics continue to complain that we live in an era where all art is derivative and lacks substance, but if Hendrix, Duchamp, and Warhol were alive today, we’d be doing all we could to hinder their self-expression, dismissing them as hipsters.

There’s no shortage of hipsters worthy of our mocking, but our challenge is to make the distinction between the artists and the posers. Otherwise, when the next generation finds its Jackson Pollock or Dorothy Parker, we’re likely to stifle their talents with our misappropriated cynicism; or worse, we’ll turn them into a joke. http://zeyneparsel.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/arsel-thompson.pdf

Not caring is a plague. the disease can be traced back to the Fonz and James Dean. They made women swoon for them by simply not caring and for an adolescent male, whatever can be done to get the ladies will be done. Since then, there’s been an internal competition between males to see who cares less as if we’re saying, “I get more ladies because I don’t care about anything.” This virus spread on to popular culture and birthed a subculture of people that completely remove themselves from the things they love and create a certain irony. AKA, the hipster.

Everyone has a different view and stereotypes of hipsters and frankly, it’s easy to get categorized as one. All you have to do is like an art-house film and/or introduce your friend to a musician he’s never heard of.

I’d like to introduce a new subculture, we’ll call it post-hipsterism. This new subculture is filled with people that care and are not afraid to show that they care. They like TV on the Radio because of their experimental sounds, not simply because no one ever heard of them. It’s filled with people who won’t stop liking something simply because everyone else likes it (Theoretically, isn’t that what you want? To have things in common with others?) When you ask someone if they’ve seen a show on Netflix, it’ll be because you genuinely want to introduce them to a fantastic story; not shame them for allegedly living under a rock.

This new movement is based on caring. Not only legitimately caring about yourself and your tastes, but caring for the consequences of your actions and how they affect your fellow humans.

[torontotravelblog]

3 DAYS IN TORONTO

We begin listening to a growing number of usually regarding Toronto, this city located in Ontario, Canada. I didn't have particular assumptions regarding my 3 days in Toronto, however I had a feeling I would certainly like it. We consistently see Toronto as one of the world's most comfortable cities in numerous rankings. Furthermore, people I understand who saw Toronto before I did mostly all informed me they suched as the city! Toronto is additionally put on the spotlight and also is regularly advertised by Drake. Undoubtedly, he typically admires his hometown. It's time to see what to do in Toronto and also begin my check out to the city.

DESCRIPTION OF TORONTO

Toronto is an English-speaking city. It's the biggest city of Canada, as well as the 4th largest city in The United States and Canada in regards to population after Mexico City, New York and also Los Angeles. We call Toronto "The Queen City", or "The 6" trigger there are six towns in the city: Old Toronto, East York, North York, York, Etobicoke as well as Scarborough. It's a vibrant city, as well as without a doubt it looks great to live there.

Toronto is additionally a cosmopolitan city. Undoubtedly, fifty percent of the people residing in Toronto weren't birthed in Canada! That's an actual fusion! The five most talked languages in Toronto are English (certainly), after that Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi and lastly Italian! French isn't also in the top 5, although there are various other cities in Canada like Montreal where French is the main language!

A great deal of individuals say Toronto is simply a pale duplicate of big US cities, however located in Canada. By the way, in some cases people call Toronto "The little New york city". There are additionally high-rises, an organisation center and also Dundas Square, a location reminding people of Times Square. Toronto is also a city that never ever rests, there's always something to do! A lot of motion pictures apparently happening in New york city are really shot in Toronto!

However there's still this little Canadian taste. Citizens of Toronto are big followers of sport, as well as the most popular one is ice hockey. I heard individuals pay a ticket generally 300 dollars, to see an ice hockey match! If you do not have all this money, comfort on your own and go to the Hockey Hall of Fame. It's a museum dedicated to the history of ice hockey!

The city remains in full growth. When I was checking out the city, there were building and construction sites anywhere, they were constructing brand-new skyscrapers, and so on. From what I listened to, it's been this way for several years, and also it won't stop anytime soon. I likewise heard building and construction and also realty are the two greatest industries in Toronto, and also not every person can live there! The average lease for a one-bedroom apartment is 2200 Canadian dollars (1500 euros!).

WHAT To Accomplish IN TORONTO?

THE CN TOWER

The sign of the city, among the reasons that Toronto is popular, the CN Tower certainly! It's 553 meters (1815 ft.) high, and also it was the world's highest tower for 34 years, from 1976 to 2010, when it was exceeded by Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Pay 36 bucks (25 euros) and you can rise to the 114h floor. You'll take the lift to get to the top in less than a min (58 secs precisely). From there, you'll have a terrific sight of the city. I recommend going there at the end of your stay. You'll have the possibility to identify the different places you saw in the city. It's possible to stroll on a floor made of glass as well as see what's going on in the street, listed below your feet. Some individuals were also terrified to do it ...

For your information to increase to the 147th flooring, but you'll have to pay an added 12 bucks (8 euros). The view from there is also better. For the bravest ones, you can attempt the edgewalk. It's gon na be a thrill, however you need to pay 225 bucks (150 euros)! More details right here. There's also a dining establishment on top of the tower with a 360-degrees sight! Anyway, do not fail to remember to visit the top of the CN Tower, and also preferably go there early in the morning. Otherwise you'll wait concerning one hr to arrive. Alongside the tower, you'll locate the fish tank of Canada however I really did not go, it's not my thing ... It's 35 bucks (24 euros) to enter.

THE DISTILLERY HISTORIC AREA

The distillery area is a historical area in Toronto. You almost feel like you remain in London, with its buildings made of red blocks. For a very long time, this area belonged to a distillery, yet it's now a pedestrian area. There are numerous small stores, cafés, restaurants, art galleries ... It's likewise possible to taste a number of beers of the distillery. It's truly nice to have a stroll there.

ST. LAWRENCE MARKET

A market dating back to 1803! Perfect location to eat if you're hungry! Without a doubt, it's not usual to see in the area a market with pastry shops, a cheese maker, a pork butcher, a fish shop ... However also fruits and vegetables, as well as various other neighborhood products! It's closed on Sundays and Saturdays, otherwise you have to go! FYI, the National Geographic assigned it the very best market on the planet in 2012!

KENSINGTON MARKET

It's not a market but an area, one of the most popular of Toronto. It resembles Camden Town in London, but Toronto design. It's actually a hipster, a little bit bobo as well as hippie. You'll locate pre-owned garments shops there, yet likewise many vegan dining establishments, organic food, stores offering products from around the globe ... Don't wait to visit Graffiti Street as well as Rush Lane, two slim streets. Their walls are covered with graffiti and street art!

DUNDAS SQUARE

Have you been to New york city? If so, Dundas Square will right away remind you of Times, or to a lesser extent Picadilly Circus in London. You'll see big billboards there yet likewise Eaton Facility, the biggest shopping center in Toronto. For your information, Dundas Square is alongside Yonge Road. That's the longest street worldwide, it's 1896 kilometers 1178 miles) long!

NATHAN PHILLIPS SQUARE

It's quite quick to view as well as admire Nathan Phillips Square, however it deserves the detour! You'll see the old town hall, actually stunning, yet additionally the brand-new municipal government. You'll locate on this square "TORONTO" written in large letters, as well as those letters enlighten at night. There likewise a tiny yard called Peace Yard, opened up in memory of the targets of Hiroshima. From mid-November to mid-March, the lake turns into a skating rink!

TORONTO ISLANDS

Just 10 minutes away from Toronto by ferry, you'll locate the Toronto islands! The islands are not always easily accessible wintertime since the river can be frozen. Otherwise, go to the islands! This is a peaceful place, but most significantly, you have a terrific view of the horizon of Toronto! The weather was truly wonderful when I went there, and it's actually enjoyable since there are no autos there. You can go kayaking, rent a bike, go picnic, there are a couple of beaches if you intend to take a dip ... You need to go to Queens Quay and take the ferry. It's 8 dollars (5.50 EUR), and you can use your ticket all day. There are 3 main islands: Center, Ward and also Hanlan.

TORONTO MUSEUMS

Those that personally understand me currently know I'm very little right into galleries ... That does not indicate I never ever go but I really need to be like "I have to visit this one!" in order to go. That indicates I really did not most likely to any museums in the city but if you're interested, go to the Royal Ontario Gallery, the largest gallery of Canada. It has six millions things associated with natural history and also cultures of throughout the globe, dinosaurs' skeletons ... It's 20 bucks (14EUR) to enter. There's additionally the art gallery of Ontario displaying paintings from Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt ... It's 20 dollars to get in. There's also the Casa Loma, a castle in the north of the city. It's 30 dollars (20 euros) to enter. If you have some time, you can have a stroll at High Park, or Sugar Coastline if the weather is nice.

NIAGARA FALLS

If you have some time, you require to go to the Niagara Falls, 2 hours far from Toronto by bus! It's actually worth the journey as well as everybody states it's a great deal far better to watch the Niagara Falls in Canada (instead of in the US). By the way, here's a schedule for a road trip in Ontario!

I really liked my browse through to Toronto. A vibrant and worldwide city, where there are many things to do. Three days are enough to see Toronto, include another day if you want to see the Niagara Falls. If you most likely to Canada, don't miss out on Toronto!

TORONTO TRAVEL POINTERS

Inspect the visa policy of Canada right here. Most citizens from Western countries can keep up to 6 months visa-free. Take care though. Unless you're a United States citizen, if you get here by air, you are needed to get an ETA ahead of time below. If you arrive by land from the United States, or if you're an US resident, you don't need the ETA.

Do not most likely to the United States without a travel insurance! If something happens, you'll see on your own, clinical expenses are extremely expensive there!

How to get around in Toronto? Take the metro or the metro! You'll notice their trains are long!!! The subway is far from covering the whole city, nevertheless you can go anywhere with the tramways. Buy a suddenly card as well as put money on it (5 bucks, 10, 20, 50 ...). A one-way trip is 3 bucks.

Where to stay in Toronto? There are numerous options, check below.

There are lots of points to do in Toronto. Skip-the-line tickets, go to of the city, bike rental ... Inspect right here what you can do.

3 days in Toronto are perfect, 4 days is far better if you wish to see the Niagara Falls!

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Vitamin Therapy Toronto - The IV Lounge

[yuvilee]

5th November 2019 Student-led seminar 3

Text: Twemlow, A. (2006) No muscles, no tattoos. Available at: http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/no-muscles-no-tattoos (Accessed on: 1st November 2019)

Table of content: Introduction Main part: Reality proximity against intimidation A closer view on BUTT Magazine Heritage? Conclusion Notes: Books and articles Pictures

About the author: Dr. Alice Twemlow earned a Ph.D. from the History of Design program run as a joint venture by the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Her research addresses design’s complex interrelations with time and the environment and manifests in writing, exhibitions, conferences, and education. She is Research Professor at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) where she leads the “Design and the Deep Future” readership, and an Associate Professor at Leiden University, in the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts, where she supervises design-related PhDArts candidates(1).

About the Magazines:

BUTT Magazine was founded in 2001 by Gert Jonkers and Job van Bennenkom in Amsterdam. It was a quarterly magazine for gay men, written in English and printed until 2011. 

In 2005, The Guardian named it as one of its top twenty magazines(2).

Fantastic Man, founded in 2005 by Gert Jonkers and Job van Bennenkom, is a men's fashion magazine printed semi-annually. It focusses on men's fashion in their 30s with interviews of male celebrities and intellectuals with a big variety of backgrounds.

In 2008, the magazine was praised for its art direction, winning it the British D&AD award for Best Magazine & Newspaper Design(3). 

Aaron Britt, in a review of men's fashion magazines for the San Francisco Chronicle, lauded: 

'It comes out only twice a year, allowing the sticker shock to wear off between purchases, but you'll never throw away an issue. Fashion-forward, clever, deeply engaged with the fashion world without the half-baked political exposes Esquire insists on running, (...) is better designed, better photographed and rafts more stylish than the competition. If you buy only one men's fashion magazine, it should be this one.’(4)

Introduction

We are surrounded by advertisements of a broad variety, including fashion and beauty, telling us of contemporary aesthetics of what to wear and how to look, what kind of hair-cuts and shoes are ‘in’ this Autumn and what to look for in Spring 2020, what kind of beauty routine and diet is good for you to look like your favourite celebrity and where to buy your favourite celebrities dress look-a-likes. 

In the fashion industry, models are presented as perfectly shaped: superficial, anorexic young girls and very muscular men with not a single hair on their body. In Magazines, they are presented in eclectic pictures and photo collages, with a focused layout and printed on glossy paper.

Flipping through UK’s most famous magazines like Vogue, Glamour or men focused magazines like GQ, or Ape-to-Gentleman, their aesthetics are strongly stylised and typified. I wonder how you don’t feel a tiny bit intimidated - even as an adult. How must this appear to younger people or teens trying to figure out their changing roles from child to adult and searching for role-models? How must it be for teens that don’t feel like fitting into the black and white man-woman framework?

There must be alternative aesthetics, alternatives for alternative people. How do magazines which focus on such audiences present themselves? Clean-glossy, like their mainstream counterparts? In her profile of Jop van Bennekom and some of his magazines, Twemlow presents some very different examples.

Above: My screenshot of BUTT Magazines 8-11, WorthPoint, (2019)

Above: My screenshot of Fantastic Man Spring/Summer 2010, #11 (2019)

Above: My screenshot of GQ Magazine Collage, Freeport Press, (2019)

Reality proximity against intimidation

Nowadays, Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers are well known for their magazines for gay people. When being asked by James Anderson from i-D Vice online about his motivations to create BUTT Magazine, Gert Jonkers responded that he wanted 

‘something for the contemporary homo. A journal for and by gay men. A meeting ground, figuratively speaking. We wanted the magazine to feel like meeting an amazing man on the train or in a bar and have a great interesting conversation with him.‘(5)

Their focus was as it seems to create something relatable, something close instead of intimidatingly perfect like fashion Magazines in the mainstream are known for. Jonkers also stresses this part: people shouldn’t be living objects for fashion or beauty ads. He reflects on the rhetorical question whether the most stylish charm isn’t actually natural charm. He underlines his previous response about the motivation as BUTT should mirror real, ‘normal un-self-aware’ men.

This strategy seems to work, as the eye-magazine shows in an interview with Andrew Sloath:

‘It has given voice and visual presence to those of us who are trying to figure out our own worlds.’(6)

Bennekom sums this up perfectly: 

‘I wish Butt had been around when I was 22 and insecure (…). Other gay magazines have cut-and-paste, retouched bodies unlike any you’ve ever seen in real life and certainly not like mine.’(7)

Young Bennekom, as a graphic design student, found his inspiration in the work of fashion design students at his university in the Netherlands around the 90s. With newly founded anti-fashion magazine Purple in 1992 and a shifting fashion photography rising, he started to interview his friends and published this in the style of a Q&A.

Above: My screenshot of BUTT Magazine, Summer 2008, #23, (2019)

A closer view on BUTT Magazine

For the BUTT Magazine, this kind of interdisciplinary mix of fashion and art, the eccentric way to display people around him in their natural clothing and living style, must have been a revelation to his like-minded audience. Real people with normal body types, with hair and used looking clothing, with wrinkles and real tousled hair, set in real surroundings with imperfect but familiar settings. They could be a neighbour, a person on the street, at the grocery shop, in the pub. Their stories and themes are as casual and boring as anyone’s, although it starred gay artists and celebrities as well. In this mix of content, one might find confidence about one’s outing, clothes, thoughts, about their body shape, their hair zones, and their sexuality. It seems like this kind of exhibition of normality can liberate people. And it did. People started to imitate the Q&A style interviews and photos and sent in their own content, together with stories, letters, and so on.

Maybe it was also due to its clean layout that readers could imagine to be published and to copy this style. A design that feels like ‘nothing’ can be very complex, dense and tightly controlled in its design process, as Twemlow summarises(8).

This passion and the approachable magazine team created a more significant collaboration and value than the cheapish Zine styled papers would suggest:

‘They’re something you don’t buy and read and throw away,” says Bronson. “You end up keeping them in plastic envelopes, even though they’re kind of cheap.’(9)

Following the trend with an online presence, BUTT Magazine became an even more interactive meeting platform for its readers. Looking at the page, it, however, looks like it has not been very actively moderated in recent times. 

Heritage?

While researching BUTT Magazine and Fantastic Man I was reminded of other magazines that are known to me, like the ZEIT Magazin MANN. Their visual language and layout are similar.

Another example is a rather new niche magazine from the Netherlands, called MacGuffin Magazine, related to Hitchcock’s definition in film. While I could not find a proof in time whether those examples indeed found inspiration from van Bennekom and Jonkers, the visual connection is quite clear. To be decisive on this assumption this would need additional research.

ZEIT Magazin MANN was named magazine of the week by MagCulture:

‘MANN is a standalone, bi-annual that costs €8.50 and aims to fill a gap in the German market which notably lacks obvious alternatives to the big titles like GQ and Esquire.

We’ve selected it as our magazine of the week because, quite simply, this is something that would never be produced by a newspaper in the UK.’(10)

During my research I saw MacGuffin Magazine was also named magazine of the week by MagCulture:

‘The magazine’s strangely dreamy yet academic rigor is matched with soft yet crisp design (...)’(11)

My point here is that niche and eccentric looks in magazines don’t seem like a high-selling product. I believe there is an interested audience on a broad variety of topics. While ZEIT Magazin MANN seemingly found a well-balanced position due to missing supply, it could be difficult for magazines of similar niche focus. ZEIT Magazin MANN is part of a bigger company, DIE ZEIT, hence they can rather easily advertise new magazines. What about new magazines by younger people like van Bennekom and Jonkers without big starting capital? Could new niche magazines still survive in our fast-paced culture, that mainly lives online?

Above: My screenshot of MacGuffin Magazine Issue N° 5 14th December 2017, (2019)

Above: My screenshot of ZEIT Magazin MANN 1/2018, (2019)

Conclusion:

The printed version of BUTT Magazine ended in 2011, after 10 years. A new generation and with it a modernism shift in aesthetic and culture came with a postmodern approach. A rather hipster or emotionally one with a different approach to modern gay life. Also, the style of communication and connectivity switched from MySpace, Facebook, and websites to more fast-paced means like Twitter, Snapchat, and Tinder. At the same time, porn saw changes due to Social Media.

The question here would be if a contemporary re-make still could work or if Social Media got it all covered, no need for a printed version that could be kept for years?

As Nicholas Mirzoeff portrays it:

‘(...) ‘the postmodern is the crisis caused by modernism and modern culture confronting the failure of its own strategy of visualising. In other words, it is the visual crisis of culture that creates postmodernity, not its textuality. While print culture is certainly not going to disappear, the fascination with the visual and its effects that was a key feature of modernism has engendered a postmodern culture that is at its most postmodern when it is visual.’(12).

Notes:

Books and articles

Twemlow, A. (no date) About. Available at: http://alicetwemlow.com/about/ (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

Armstrong, S., Dugdale, J., Gibson, J., Gibson, O., Hepworth, G., McLean, G., Tod, A., Viner, K., Wells, M. (2005) 'Covered in glory’, The Guardian, 12th December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/dec/12/mondaymediasection.pressandpublishing?gusrc=rss&feed=global (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

D&AD (2008) Available at: https://www.dandad.org/awards/professional/2008/magazine-newspaper-design/16666/fantastic-man (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

Britt, A. (2009) ‘A quick guide to men's fashion media’, SFGATE, 15th February. Available at: https://www.sfgate.com/living/article/A-quick-guide-to-men-s-fashion-media-3171839.php?forceWeb=1 (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

Anderson, J. (2014) ‘Forever butt: discussing the revolutionary gay magazine with founder gert jonkers’, i-D Vice, 26th November. Available at: https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/kz8bam/talking-forever-butt-magazine-with-founder-gert-jonkers (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

Twemlow, A. (2006) No muscles, no tattoos. Available at: http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/no-muscles-no-tattoos (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

ibid.

ibid.

Haskell, D. (2008) ‘Very Graphic Design’, New York Magazine. 27th December. Available at: http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/53148/ (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

Morley, M. (2016) ‘Magazine of the week: ZEIT Magazin MANN, #1’, MagCulture. 5th October. https://magculture.com/zeitmagazin-mann-1/ (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

Morley, M. (2015) ‘Magazine of the week: MacGuffin #1’, MagCulture. 17th June. https://magculture.com/zeitmagazin-mann-1/ (Accessed on: 1st November 2019).

Mirzoeff, Nicholas (1998, p. 21) The visual culture reader, London: Routledge.

Pictures

WorthPoint, (2019), [Screenshot]. Available at: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/butt-magazine-lot-issues-11-michael-1725891166 (Accessed on: 31st October 2019).

Magpile, (2019), [Screenshot]. Available at: https://magpile.com/fantastic-man/spring-10/(Accessed on: 28 October 2019).

Freeport Press, (2018), [Screenshot]. Available at: http://freeportpress.com/gq-stares-down-a-multi-channel-revenue-stream (Accessed on: 31st October 2019).

Larson, A., (2008), [Screenshot]. Available at: http://www.andreaslarsson.net/portraits.html (Accessed on: 31st October 2019).

MacGuffin Magazine, (2017), [Screenshot]. Available at: https://www.macguffinmagazine.com/issues/macguffin-the-cabinet (Accessed on: 28 October 2019).

Zeitungen und Zeitschriften online, (2018), [Screenshot]. Available at: https://www.zzol.de/objekt/18099/20180001 (Accessed on: 28 October 2019).

[hetmusic]

Cassette Culture | HumanHuman

Many have assumed that the format war ended with the rise and assumed victory of digital media like MP3 downloads, online music videos and streaming services. That isn’t strictly true. In recent years, we’ve seen physical formats like vinyl take hold with audio obsessives and CDs are still a viable source of revenue for major artists. What vinyls, CDs and MP3s have in common is that they are all well within the public mindset of ways to listen to and own music, and yet there’s another access-point that is gradually growing an underground following. It’s a good old friend - the cassette tape.

Artwork by Edvige Valdameri

Once the premise of road trips and radio-ripped mixtapes, this retro bit of technology is now regarded as the last truly alternative format. With so many other options on offer, we want to know why cassette culture exists and if we’ll soon be filling our glove boxes and shelves with these plastic rectangles of sound.

The thing about cassette culture is… it never really went away. Since the 1970s, there has been an admiration for this affordable, high-quality piece of recording technology with DIY bands and even a few established acts, such as Grateful Dead. This band used the format to share their music, interact with fans and have even inspired one avid tape advocate to document his efforts in collecting every Grateful Dead cassette in existence. The tape community appeared to have reached its zenith in the 1980s with a plethora of small labels offering cassette-only releases and music publications like the NME, Sounds, Factsheet Five and Op Magazine running regular features on this growing culture. As we now know, the good times were not to last and with the introduction and increased availability of alternative and arguably superior technologies, the passion for tapes seem to fade, but as mentioned earlier, it didn’t disappear altogether. So, where’s the evidence of this alternative record revival?

For a while now there have been hushed rumours of this fringe culture, many of which have been eclipsed by discussions surrounding vinyl amour and the huge potential of streaming. One of the overriding arguments for the resurgence of vinyl sales is that the sound quality far surpasses that of digital streaming, and by extension the favoured niche format also has that over tapes. However, it’s important to note that cassettes are not the domain of high-fidelity obsessives, instead there are some comments to suggest that listening to music on tape imbues more life into the recordings than their modern counterparts. For example, in one Diffuser article ‘Vinyl revival? Well, I’m more of a cassette man myself’, the writer Chris Kissel cannot help but take on a romantic tone when recalling that “soft hiss in the background, reminding you that behind it all, the album has its own essence, its own breath.” Another perspective for this reanimated sound was explained earlier this year by Esther Ford, owner of Manchester-based store Deco Records, who told BBC Radio 5 that “I’ve also started selling blank tapes to a lot of the bands who just stick a tape recorder in the middle of their rehearsal room [...] I think they feel like it gives them a truer sound than if they just recorded it off their phones.” Even more support for the tape’s unique resonance comes from Island Fox, aka instinctive electronic artist Jessica Bartlett, who released her own Nature EP on cassette via Post/Pop Records:

“For audiophiles like me, listening to lossless audio such as WAV on tapes and vinyls means an influence of the 'art of individual playing' on the physical format. This modifies the sound and adds to that 'beautiful imperfection' and uniqueness, knowing that it would never sound exactly like that if anyone listened to it again.”— Jessica Bartlett, Island Fox

The sound matters, that’s for sure, but it’s not the sole force behind music consumerism. If that was the case, then streaming services wouldn’t be nearly half as successful which rely on lack-lustre laptop and mobile speakers. The rise of streaming has also shown that people are increasingly unwilling to pay out large sums for the music they listen to. It’s the same reason that vinyl is still associated with the niche and hipster markets, because for many the records and the equipment needed to play them are either unaffordable or inconvenient. What cassettes offer is a low-priced, pocket-sized physical medium for people to own music and for musicians to actually make some kind of return on their hard work. In the case of Norwegian Blue Records founder Tyson Weibe, he was led to cassette culture following an EP release for his own band in 2010, whereby they gave away one hundred free download cards for fans to scan, but the heartbreaking reality was that not a single card was redeemed. Looking for a low cost, alternative to digital files, Weibe began by learning about the ins and outs of releasing tapes via acclaimed subreddit r/cassetteculture and soon after launched Norwegian Blue’s first tape, Mormon Girls’ The Farm Sessions. In addition to the economical motivator behind selling cassettes, this Canadian musician-turned-label-owner found the disappointment of digital sales falling flat in the face of tape ritual.

“I think the sheer act of opening the tape, reading the liner, and finding the card is enjoyable to people. I know I used to do the same with all the tapes I bought as a kid. That act is a tiny moment of connection between an artist and a fan, and it's something that can't be reproduced by the best sounding digital file (sorry Pono, et al.)”— Tyson Weibe, Norwegian Blue Records

Value for money is an enormous driver behind the increased interest in the fifty-year-old format. According to Forbes, the average cost for the manufacture of an individual tape is $2, and that figure at least doubles for vinyl production which can cost between $4 and $6. This reduced rate not only means bands and artists can independently put out physical releases much earlier in their careers, but as Tom Palvich (owner of tape label Mirror Universe) explained to Noisey “when you release tapes you can take more risks than you can putting out vinyl because they are inexpensive.” Perhaps this is why tapes continue to be associated with DIY outfits and experimental genres - it’s a format that harbours risk well. British label Blue Tapes is also a fan of this “underrated medium” for this reason:

“... the fact that it can be duplicated in such small runs (editions of 1? no problem!) means that you don't have to worry about appealing to a mass audience to recoup on costs. You can release really bizarre, unique experiments that probably only have a small audience naturally and cater comfortably to them without punishing your finances, as if so often the case when releasing vinyl.”— David, Blue Tapes

However, that fringe culture association hasn’t stopped the mainstream music industry hopping aboard the tape train, as displayed by the exclusive sale of The 1975’s debut album on cassette via retail giant Urban Outfitters. Neither the band nor the company are hurting for money, so why would they chose to promote tapes? Well, aesthetic trends have a leading role here. As pointed out in a New York Times piece titled ‘Hitting Rewind on the Cassette Tape’, the artistic pliability of tapes gave rise to “Prints and paintings of cassettes; pouches, belt buckles and notebooks made to look like cassettes; buttons with little cassette images on them; envelopes, a watch, even a soap dispenser decorated with the familiar cassette shape.” Rob Walker even comments on how designers and artists are paying homage to the plastic mold, such as Brian Dettmer’s skeletal sculptures crafted out of cassettes and thus becoming the perfect symbol of the seemingly dead format’s ability to live on.

The cassettes physicality has more than an artistic advantage on its side. One outstanding argument against digital music is that it encourages a throwaway attitude to listening and while you may dispose of an unloved tape from time to time, you’re much less likely to dump a whole collection. Even if you have no intention of erasing your online music library, the lack of control over digital storage means it could disappear without your consent. As Wired journalist Graeme McMillian puts it, “If you have a glitch with your digital storage, it could be gone. Whereas with tape, it’s tangible. It’s right there.” This tangibility of music on tape is also a recurring point amongst our contributing experts. For example, this is what the owner of Tape Club Records had to say:

“Nowadays, consumption of music/entertainment happens immediately. If you want it, you're hearing it, and you'll likely move on quickly to the next thing. A cassette is simply one of the cost-effective ways to create a longer-lasting tangible relationship with a fan or listener. It can sit on a shelf, or in your car, or on your desk. It's a statement of commitment beyond just a blast of binary digits that makes us feel a little more involved.”— William Evans, Tape Club Records

That is a real issue we have yet to address within the music industry - the sense of the ritual, the sanctity in music ownership is at the risk of being lost altogether. This is why tape labels and cassette culture as a movement is so important, it reminds you that music isn’t some airy substance formulated in an industry machine. There’s real people, real instruments, real thought, messages, feelings behind so much of our modern music. The next generation of music fans surely deserves something more than a clickable download and a pixelated thumbnail of graphic design. As the online world continues to rule over the music industry, there’s already a growing need for this real world reconnection between the artists, the music and the listeners. As Get In Her Ears radio presenter and avid tape promoter Tash Walker explains:

“We live in a world where more and more of our life and frame of reference is becoming digitalised, so what happens? ...we long for something tangible...enter the cassette tape revolution.”— Tash Walker, Get In Her Ears

Contributions

Island Fox

“For audiophiles like me, listening to lossless audio such as WAV on tapes and vinyls means an influence of the 'art of individual playing' on the physical format. This modifies the sound and adds to that 'beautiful imperfection' and uniqueness, knowing that it would never sound exactly like that if anyone listened to it again. The turn around and ease of releasing cassettes vs vinyl, is much quicker and cheaper from what I can gather; I worked with an upcoming independent tape label POST/POP, which involved a really easy and appealing 50:50 physical split of a limited run of 100 tapes and no contracts etc. I think physical releases of limited edition merchandise will always have that 'rare' appeal to collectors and as an artist grows, become more valuable in many ways as well. POST/POP was a great label to work with as the owner, Jed, really loves tapes and has been taking a stall to many independent record fairs and festivals, as well as working with Rough Trade etc to really get upcoming artists' tapes heard. Cassette Culture was actually also something I grew up with owning a Walkman, and so it was great to physically release on a format that meant so much to me as a kid; an achievement which I could hold in my hands.”

Blue Tapes

“There are still some practical advantages to physical formats. Space on my laptop and other devices is always at a premium, so I'm constantly deleting and losing mp3s. Worse, said devices have a tendency of breaking frequently so it's not uncommon to lose everything. Even when I do have mp3s long enough to listen to them once or twice, I find that digital devices are increasingly glitchy and corrupt and bad at just playing music. Although it's really convenient to have thousands of songs on my mobile phone, it's absolutely terrible at being a music player, and my iPod - when I had one - wasn't much better. I can't listen to music on a computer without also doing other things on the computer (checking email, browsing Tumblr - stuff that isn't just concentrating on the music). These days, myself and most of the people I know tend to use Spotify/Bandcamp for streaming and previewing albums and then investing in the physical when we purchase. It's physically harder to get rid of a chunk of plastic than it is an mp3. Plus they turn up in random places just when you've forgotten about them and you think oh! you! I should put you on and just forget about what I'm doing for a bit. That seems to be harder to do with digital music. There is shuffle, but then you just tend to shuffle through a pre-curated playlist and not really listen to the original album or release in sequence. So that's the case for physical in the digital age, or at least one dimension of it. Of course, there are other physical music formats - LP, CD, 8 track, Mini Disc, etc. Tapes are cheaper than all of these. And they look cooler! Always hated CD packaging. The vinyl boom is making LPs too expensive. Tapes are cheap, convenient and cool, and infinitely customisable. It's hard to do a generic-looking tape these days, and the fact there are so many cool tape labels now really drives people to do ever-more interesting and original designs. So that's why I prefer tapes to other physical formats. Tape is also an underrated medium, sound-wise, and the fact that it can be duplicated in such small runs (editions of 1? no problem!) means that you don't have to worry about appealing to a mass audience to recoup on costs. You can release really bizarre, unique experiments that probably only have a small audience naturally and cater comfortably to them without punishing your finances, as if so often the case when releasing vinyl.” (David)

Tape Club Records

“Nowadays, consumption of music/entertainment happens immediately. If you want it, you're hearing it, and you'll likely move on quickly to the next thing. A cassette is simply one of the cost-effective ways to create a longer-lasting tangible relationship with a fan or listener. It can sit on a shelf, or in your car, or on your desk. It's a statement of commitment beyond just a blast of binary digits that makes us feel a little more involved.” (William Evans)

Norwegian Blue Records

“We can talk about how cassettes are an inexpensive investment, how they are an object that can bring the wonder of new discovery to some people and nostalgia to others, how they are an analog item at a fraction of the cost of an LP, or any of the other myriad reasons that the humble cassette is making a comeback, but to me, the tape is about having something physical in a world of intangibles. In early 2010, my band was about to release a four song EP. Seeing that digital seemed to be the way of the future, we printed up 100 download cards to give to anyone who walked into the venue for our release show. Of those 100 cards, zero were claimed. As an artist, this was heartbreaking. We make our art so other people can interact with it, so to have a zero percent rate was astounding. Even close friends of ours, who played in bands of their own, that attended the show hadn't downloaded it. At this point I started asking people why they hadn't downloaded it. The most common comment was that the card had been lost. The idea that we could put our energy into the EP and people would lose it that easily was so frustrating. So I started thinking of low cost alternatives that people would be unable to lose. After a bunch of terrible ideas (the worst being laser-etching the download codes on rocks. Something I was only ever semi-serious about, no matter what the other owners of Norwegian Blue tell you) I remembered that another local label (Mammoth Cave Records, R.I.P.) had done a sampler of Alberta music on tape. So I started digging into tape culture. From there I found a subreddit (r/cassetteculture) with people who were making tape culture happen. I spoke with them, asked questions and learned about do's and don'ts. Eventually we released our first cassette, Mormon Girls - The Farm Sessions, with a download card included -something we've done with every tape since. That tape has sold across Canada and around the world, but the real kicker is this: for every tape sold, the download card has been redeemed. I think the sheer act of opening the tape, reading the liner, and finding the card is enjoyable to people. I know I used to do the same with all the tapes I bought as a kid. That act is a tiny moment of connection between an artist and a fan, and it's something that can't be reproduced by the best sounding digital file (sorry Pono, et al.)” (Tyson Weibe)

Get In Her Ears

“For those of us who grew up in a world of cassette tapes, our trusty Sony Walkmans were always firmly clipped onto our belts and fed our favourite tunes of the time straight into our ears (my first purchase being Return of the Mac - no judgement). Now over the last couple of years we've seen a resurgence of the trusty tape as more and more bands are releasing their latest EPs in this format. I think it would be hard to argue that nostalgia doesn't have anything to do with this u-turn, but on a more practical note you have the reduction in cost compared to our beloved vinyl, as well as the weight and size of the cassette. There is also the ever increasing demand for the DIY aesthetic that runs alongside the zine, which again has become a lot more popular in line with the 'second wave' of riot grrrl music. We live in a world where more and more of our life and frame of reference is becoming digitalised, so what happens? ...we long for something tangible...enter the cassette tape revolution.” (Tash Walker)

https://humanhuman.com/articles/cassette-culture-renewed-interest-explained