#i bought a flat in this city due to this studio being there- without it this place has no more work to offer me. empty city

[ardate]

Things are just so bleak man.

[new2fivesauce]

Please Don't Regret Me - 4. Lavender Sheets

Please Don't Regret Me - 4. Lavender Sheets

4091 words.

No Warnings... I think.

Sorry for the looooooong wait. I hope this makes up for it. I think the ending sucks but I needed to get this out my head fast before I put it off again. Enjoy.

June 2018.

Nelle's departure from being 5 Seconds of Summer’s assistant had been abrupt, leaving her feel like she had left her job incomplete thus causing her to spiral through a series of emotions and phases she believed she hadn’t felt since she was a raging, hormonal teenager.

The day she had given her news, they all awkwardly arrived at the airport at the same time. In her haze of emotions, she had not changed nor cancelled her flight to Australia and since 5sos was also flying international, they were stuck in the same terminal. Luke and Nelle did not speak again since their elevator meet. Michael noticed their tension, but didn’t say anything. His saddened green eyes only flickered between the two as they both tried their best to ignore one another. It wasn’t how she wanted to leave Luke, but she didn’t want to get his hopes up.

Calum, however, was the first to come up to her and apologize, practically beg her to forgive him for being such a selfish, shitty friend. Ashton and Michael followed suit with their apologies letting bygones be bygones. They agreed to keep in touch; everything returning to somewhat normal although the guys still looked bummed walking towards their flight with their new assistant.

She’d spent a couple weeks in Australia, staying in the house duplex she and Calum had bought together with their first good paychecks, but had hardly used due to constant traveling. She spent time with her parents, visited the guys' families, cleaned their empty homes to not waste money on a cleaning service, and took the duties of taking care of Duke from Mrs. Hood. Nelle also hung out with a few old schoolmates but quickly regretted that choice. They all seemed to “remember” how good friends they were, trying to manipulate Nelle for favors or money only because she knew “certain” people.

Mali-Koa, Calum’s sister, came to visit one week. She’d heard the news of Nelle’s leaving, and insisted that she come back with her to London.

“Girl, you needed a break from those dweebs anyways.”

So she did.

Nelle didn’t last very long in London though. Word had been passed of Nelle’s whereabouts which caused a very weepy, distraught Michael to leave a lengthy voicemail about betraying them for Cal's bitchy sister. She wasn’t really enjoying her time in London anyway, leaving Mali about 3 weeks later. She made a quick visit back to Australia before deciding that perhaps living in her vacant loft in Manhattan wouldn’t be such a bad idea. She’d let Calum know that Duke was coming with her before departing to the Big Apple.

She’d only been in NYC for two days when she’d run into a childhood friend that was not Calum.

Sasha Hendricks had been Nelle’s best friend when their parents were in the Army. They’d lived on the same bases and traveled the world together before Nelle’s parents settled in Australia and Sasha’s in Texas. Every year, before Nelle took on her job with 5sos, the girls alternated spending summers with one another in their country. They hadn’t seen much of each other in more than five years so no doubt it was a huge surprise when they both walked into the same small, cozy café.

Sasha had derailed from her parent’s Army footsteps to become a model. Not in the big leagues with faces like Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid, but she was aiming to get there.

With Sasha there, she didn’t feel so alone in the big city. It made her move a lot easier to handle but also there was just something about the city of New York and all of its noise that made Nelle feel at her calmest. She hadn’t been in the city for more than a two weeks now but if she had to be completely honest with herself, this was the best she’d felt in a long time.

<<*>><<*>>

Duke pushed ahead of Nelle, clearly already knowing his way around their block. He sniffed along a passerby's shoe, received a compliment from a passing child, and then decided he has enough the outdoors. He led the way back to the loft.

Nelle had just passed her building lobby’s front desk, when the security officer called her back. She looked down at Duke, where he was already looking up at her as in saying Oh shit, what did we do?

“Padilla, right?” the officer asked her from behind his desk. Nelle nodded slowly. “A package arrived for you while you were gone. Delivery guy didn’t want to leave it outside your door.” He said this as he retrieved a rather large box from the floor next to him. He heaved it over the desk and slid it over to her. She glared at the box hesitantly, not sure if she could carry it up to the 5th floor by herself.

“It’s not as heavy as it looks.” Security said, noticing her expression.

She thanked him for holding her package, grabbed the box awkwardly… he was right. It was not as heavy as it looked, then proceeded, with Duke at her feet, to the elevators.

Nelle barely made it inside her loft with the enormous box. Sure it didn’t weigh a ton, but five floors was a long time to be carrying a box.

Duke ran in, going straight to his water bowl near the kitchen. He didn’t care when Nelle set the cardboard box next to him. She went into one of her kitchen drawers, pulling out a knife to cut through the tape sealing the flaps down.

There were five thin, but square shaped boxes inside with a thousand packing peanuts. She made sure to carefully remove the small boxes without making a mess of the peanuts. She couldn’t risk Duke swallowing one up. The thought of telling Calum if such thing happened nauseated her.

Nelle was in the midst of opening the first thin box, when there was a knock on her door. Duke peeked around the kitchen corner to look at the door suspiciously. He growled a bit as Nelle went up the door.

“Duke… it’s just Sasha.” She clarified after peeping through the door hole and swinging the door open.

Sasha sauntered in, wearing a very see-through top and what looked like plastic pants. Her feet kicked off the six-inch heels with a sigh of relief. One heel slid close to Duke; he growled at it.

“Yeah, pipsqueak. It’s just me.” Sasha stuck her tongue out at the small dog. Nelle thought she imagined Duke rolling his eyes at the model.

Duke was kind to everyone… well almost everyone. Sasha had accidentally stepped on Duke's paw on their first meet. Ever since then, he tolerated her. He let her pet him but for the most part, he just stayed clear of the tall brunette.

Without another word, Sasha found her way to Nelle’s bedroom, emerging ten minutes later in a pair of Nelle’s Halloween pajama pants that were slightly too short since she was taller than Nelle and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt that fit too big.

Nelle hadn’t noticed Sasha wearing the shirt until she came up beside her about to open the first of five packages. Seeing her friend in the shirt made her freeze, her throat closed around a sudden lump that made it almost too hard to speak.

“Hey Sash… where’d you get that shirt from?” Nelle croaked. Sasha shrugged.

“Your suitcase. Why?” the girl looked down at the shirt and suddenly a zesty whiff of it caught her nose. Sasha hardly hung out the boys, only when she been to Australia during the summers, but she knew a guy smell when she smelt it and by the way Nelle’s face had gone temporarily pale, she slowly retreated back to the bedroom because she now realized this was not just some random shirt. Sasha knew all about Luke. She knew it was a bit of a touchy subject. She quickly changed into another shirt that was lying around.

Finally, when Sasha came back into the room, Nelle opened the awaiting first package. The flaps of the skinny box opened fully until they were flat against the kitchen counter surface. Staring up at her were four familiar faces in various shades of yellow, violet, and blue. The word YOUNGBLOOD was written across the middle in a graffiti red font. Nelle carefully lifted the plastic entrapped vinyl record from the cardboard.

Sasha, hovering over her friend’s shoulder, whistled lowly. “Damn, you didn't tell me Cal looked that good now!”

Nelle snickered and threw back a playful hit to Sasha's side. “I've tried to hook y’all up multiple times. You two just hate love so much.” Sasha scoffed as she pulled the new record from Nelle’s grip. She flipped it over to see the back and the track listing.

“Oh, I’ve heard Want You Back just the other day. Was Luke singing about you?” Sasha mused as she put the vinyl down and helped open the other boxes. There were two more of the same record, two CDs, and finally at the very bottom of the original box under the packing peanuts was the band’s clothing merch to go along with the new era.

Nelle ran her hand over the material of one of the shirts that showcased the boys' faces. Her fingers lingering over Luke’s face. “Nah. That song was written before I left.”

Sasha’s eyebrow quirked up, but she shrugged her shoulders. She held up one of the CD albums. “Should we listen?” Nelle nodded. “Good, because we were going to regardless.”

<<*>><<*>>

Nicole: Welcome back everyone. If you’re just tuning in, we have 5 Seconds of Summer in the studio right now! They’ve just released their new album and they were thoughtful enough to stop by today to talk about it. Guys, why don’t y’all say hello again.

Michael: Hey, I’m Michael.

Ashton: I’m Ash.

Calum: Calum, here.

Luke: And I’m Luke. We’re 5 Seconds of Summer.

Ryan: We have a few more questions from our callers. This one is from Mary: Youngblood is obviously the principal track seeing as it’s also the name of the album. Did you know that that was going to be the name of it or was it like a damn, we forgot to name the album, quick, just pick a song to name it after kind of thing?

Michael: HA! Yeah, that last option. Without a doubt.

Ashton: No, really! It was. We had other titles that we were referring the album to during the recording session, but we had to scrap a bunch of songs and basically start over. The album wasn’t fully completed and to our satisfaction until just last month. We had the promo pictures, the whole works, and then they were like ‘Is this going to be named Untitled?’ and Mike was like ‘What’s our next single? Just call it that.’

Nicole: Woow! I guess your fans really know you, huh? So I’ve been listening to it pretty much on repeat and some of these songs are really deep, heart wrenching, very mature. Very different from your previous albums. Can you explain the writing process and how this album was not like the others?

Luke: With Youngblood, they gave us a lot more creative permission, I guess is the right way to put it. Our other albums were done when we were teens so lyrically and musically, they didn’t give us as much freedom as they did with YB. We had to take a break after the release and touring of the second album because we were just so worn down; our physical and mental health were at an all-time low.

Ashton: It just sucked, really. We couldn’t focus or concentrate on what was going to be our new album when we just weren’t feeling like ourselves. Halfway into our break, Want You Back just came to me. When I played it through for the first time to the guys, everything else just came naturally from there. I guess that would be the rawness and deep, wrenching sound you hear so different from our previous work.

Ryan: One of our listeners is asking if any of the songs are about anyone in particular. Girlfriend maybe?

Calum: Umm… no? Ha, I don’t think so. At least none of the songs that I input in aren’t about anyone. I mean… sure, we take from our past experiences and put them into song, but for me, that’s a no.

Michael: Cal is anti-love, everyone. I think, like Cal said, we take from our past experiences; we’ve been up, down, and around the world for a long time. That does it make difficult to be in a relationship with someone and actually make it work. I’ve tried, Ash has tried, we all have. It’s just not in our cards right now.

Ashton: Unless you count our personal assistant…

Nicole: Whoa! Personal assistant? Who’s dating the personal assistant? … … Listeners, everyone is looking at Luke.

Ryan: Aww, he’s blushing.

Calum: He’s not dating our personal assistant. What Ashton means is… our EX-assistant, who had been with us since before the beginning, ya know, quit on us just before we released Youngblood the single. We’ve never been with any other assistant than her. So, it’s been challenging to say the least and Luke, who’s probably the most dependent person EVER, has been having a grueling time adjusting without her here.

Ashton: Yeah, yeah! Nelle was the best! She was like f*cking top-notch. I think like Rihanna, One Direction before their hiatus, uhh, I want to also say Fifth Harmony have tried to hire her when she was still with us. She’s like the fifth member of the band. She’s the fifth Second.

Michael: Dude, that was lame. But so damn true. Funny story, she used to come out in a lot of our paparazzi pictures and the fans would just ugh, be so nasty to her because they thought she was one of our girlfriends or whatever. We had to come out with a statement saying like yo, chill, she’s just our assistant, she means no harm, she’s just walking me to McDonalds… Then the fans were like OMG Nelle has the best style and she’s so beautiful blah blah blah. So, she’s a Yale student now with one of those influencer instas… so make sure to follow @seeyouneller…

<<>><>><<>><<>><<>><<>>

The hotel room was tense. No one dared to make a sound as Luke paced back and forth. His fury running off him, his hands were clenched at his sides, his mouth in a scowl, his light blue eyes were dark as the ocean floor.

Calum nervously looked at his blonde friend, worried that even just glancing at him might cause Luke to erupt. The longest five minutes passed before Luke stopped walking. He turned his body to the cowering three. He inhaled and then signed the heaviest sigh.

“I swear, you have the biggest fucking mouth!” Luke exclaimed towards Ashton.

Ashton shook his head, his red locks bouncing around his head. The newly dyed red hair matched Ashton’s hot head nature and with Luke going off on his, Ashton didn’t know how much longer he could hold it in.

“It was just a statement! I didn’t exactly say Oh Luke is dating our ex-assistant because it’s not fucking true. It was just a quip. You two left off on… whatever the fuck ya’ll left off on, so… It was nothing, Luke.”

Luke glared at the drummer. His breathing was hard, making it look like his whole body was shaking. His fists were clenched at his side, knuckles white to the bone.

“Yeah, dude. I mean, it could have been me who was dating her.” Michael chimed in. “Sorry we looked at you. I don’t know what to really say… It’s just one interview of like a hundred that we’re going to do. No one is going to get anything out of it.”

Calum, who had remained quiet this whole time, suddenly cleared his throat. His friends all turned to him, Luke’s eyebrow raising in a bold way.

“You know we are in New York though.” Calum started. “And we were on satellite radio… You guys remember Sasha… Nelle’s other best friend. Would spend the summer with her every other year? Had braces for like ever then the last summer she visited, she was super hot?”

“Yes, we know you have the hots for her.” Ashton said exasperatedly. “What about her?”

“Anyway, she texted me. She heard the interview. Nelle listen to it. No biggie.” Calum tried to smile, but failed tremendously. Michael darted his eyes to Luke.

“We didn’t say anything bad about her. She’s fine, right? Fuck… I should text her. We should ask her to get dinner with us. She’s back at the loft, right?” Ashton pulled his phone out his pocket as he spoke. He was already tapping rapidly on his phone before anyone could answer.

Luke furrowed his eyebrows, cocking his head to the side. “You’ve been talking to her?”

At this question, Ashton slowly lowered his phone to his lap. He gulped audibly. His words were stuck in his throat. He hadn’t meant to slip up. It had been decided that he with Michael and Calum were not going to tell Luke where Nelle was living at. He had already tried to follow her to Australia once and London.

It had been unpredicted what each member would go through at Nelle’s departure. Calum was sad for a few days; he wasn’t sure what to do with himself without his travel buddy, but quickly adjusted to the new assistant. Michael, too, was upset, but he was adapting well. Ashton wallowed for a bit, maybe more so than Calum and Michael, because like Luke, he still crushed way too hard on Nelle. He knew that there was nothing ever going to happen between the two; he’d realized that Nelle did have feelings for Luke, so he had to get over it, and she was always a text or phone call away, so the adjusting wasn’t too difficult. It was just she was not there anymore, physically.

However, Luke went through a tantrum phase. Anything the new assistant did was absolutely wrong. He blew up at the smallest things. If he asked for room temperature water, but got slightly cool water, he would throw a bitch fit. He distanced himself from the band for a bit. He only spoke with them when they had shows or interviews. He’d stayed locked up in his bus bunk, hotel room, wherever they were staying at. He’d text Nelle and she’d never reply. He had tried to go Home whenever he’d spoken with his mother and she told him that Nelle had just left her house. He tried to go to London when he’d overheard Michael leaving a rather upsetting voicemail about her disowning them for Mali-Koa. The sudden vastness of her being not there threw him for a loop. This crush, intense liking, feeling for her was messing with him severely. If she’d departed the band at any other time, he knew he wouldn’t be reacting this way. She just had to leave when his emotions for her had just blossomed.

Fuck.

Calum suddenly raised up from his spot on the couch. He was nervously spinning his phone in hand, checking the time after every third spin.

Suddenly he stopped, facing Luke. Calum’s head tilted slightly, confused at once.

“I just don’t fucking get it.” He mused. This time it was Luke to look bewildered. “Why? Why are suddenly so strung up on Nelle? You’re acting so clingy and it’s weird. You’ve never shown any interest in her. We go on hiatus, start touring again and all of sudden you’re acting like her boyfriend. Giggling, sleeping in her room, fighting to sit next to her, inside jokes…”

“Ya know… now that you’re saying it like that, it definitely seems like Luke is keeping something from us.” Michael chimed in. Ashton’s head perked up towards the front man. Could Luke been harboring a secret this long, months on end? Luke was never good with keeping quiet.

Luke’s eyes darted around his bandmates. His scowl dropping, being replaced with nervous lip chewing and nervous hand twisting.

He inhaled and exhaled heavily.

“We kissed.” He blurted out after what felt like minutes of awkward silence and three pairs of eyes awaiting eagerly.

Michael clutched his imaginary pearls, his very exaggerated gasps filling the room.

“What? When? Where? HoooOOOOoOW?” he howled. Calum shot him an annoyed glance.

Calum was neither shocked nor upset about the statement. He just wanted to know what happened between his two best friends. He just wanted his band to go back to normal.

“It was when we were on break.” Luke exclaimed. Ashton’s eyebrow raised. He recalled him spending time with Nelle, not anymore than usual, yet she never brought up the fact that she had kissed one of his best friends.

“Well that explains fucking everything.” Michael stated sarcastically. “C’mon, there’s gotta be more.”

Luke sighed, shaking his head.

“I was supposed to be doing my therapy sessions, but every time I'd get in the car, I’d have these intense anxiety attacks that kept me from driving. I told Cal and he suggested he drive me… I said okay and on the next time I went to his house so we could ride together. He wasn’t there but Nelle was.

“She was supposed to be on vacation just like us but I explained to her what had happened and she insisted. She took me to my session and we got lunch afterwards. It was weird. We didn’t say much, just made polite conversation.

“On my next session, same thing happened. Cal forgot, wasn’t home, Nelle took me. It became a routine. She took me to all my sessions even after I objected to wasting her time and I could easily get my mom or one of you to take me.

“The day that Ash came up with Want You Back…” Luke paused, his cerulean blues looking towards Calum wearily. “After the session, I was reading the texts from you, telling me to all meet at Cal's because Ashton called a band meeting so we got there but obviously no one was there yet. Nelle invited me into her house. I’d never been inside but that time we helped her and Cal move in…

“By this time we had kind of become friends but there was this tension and I know she felt it too. Next thing I know we're making out… like full-on making out, with her pulling me towards her room. We get in there and we collapse on her bed. I remember black everything and lavender sheets. It smelled like her pop rocks smelling lotion with a twinge of weed. We're kissing. Intensely.”

Luke stopped talking again. All the boys were staring at him, in awe of the story he had been struggling to keep internal. Calum noticed the way Luke reached up to place a hand on his chest; he clutched the material of his gray shirt, a far off in the distance glassy gaze on his handsome face.

“She heard Calum’s car on the driveway before I did. I’d been so absorbed in her, thinking how the fuck is this happening? Is this really fucking happening right now! She separated from me so fast that I felt literally cold and empty. Then she acted like nothing happened. She didn’t say anything about it. Just went on like… as if it just didn’t occur.

“But I couldn’t forget. I tried to talk to her about it and she just acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about so I did the same. Then we started touring again and working on the new album and it was a distraction. A good one… until I realized that I liked her. That’s why I was getting to know her, bothering her, hanging around her. She couldn’t tell me no knowing that it would look suspicious to you. I think she gave in to me eventually because I know she feels the same. She feels the same way I feel for her.

“And I'm sorry. I’m sorry to all three of you for keeping this secret. For being a fucking asshole. I just… I think it’s beyond the like stage. I think I’m like… at the L-word stage.”

[cryptswahili]

Living on Bitcoin Day 7: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’d Definitely Do Again

This is the seventh instalment of reporter Colin Harper's "Living on Bitcoin" experience in San Francisco. Find out what happened to him earlier on Day 1 , on Day 2 , on Day 3 , onDay 4, on Day 5 and on Day 6.

I woke to the sound of thin but consistent rain against the sailboat. A gentle storm soon rolled in to softly rock the harbor’s rustbucket bedfellows, a few spurts of lightning distant and crackling across the bay.

Dustin wasn’t up yet so I made a cup of coffee (gods be praised) and went above the deck of the Velela — the name Dustin’s sailboat came with when he bought it four years ago. The previous owner (a marine biologist) was inspired by the jellyfish of the same name, which can hoist a sail-like fin in the air to propel itself more quickly through the water.

The Velela resting in the harbor.

After Dustin got up (and we wolfed down some bacon-n-egg burritos), we made preparations, which included stuffing a rubber skiff into his Honda Fit, and we set out on the open water. The day was graying as we left the docking area, with a misting of rain so faint you could barely feel it on your skin.

Once we’d motored out far enough, Dustin hoisted the sails. Swelling with the bay’s untamable winds, the sails vaulted us forward and pushed the boat to the right — a bit more than I would have liked.

“This is safe, right? It’s not going to tip over?” I asked apprehensively.

“I wouldn’t exactly call sailing a safe activity,” Dustin said with a smile that managed to be both carefree and severe.

“But it’s not going to tip over, is it?”

“Probably not,” he joked. “But really, there’s a huge weight in the middle of the hull, so we’ll be fine.”

We were headed for the city’s waterfront, a 10-mile trek, give or take. The wind was against us, though, so we had to get there by tacking, a maritime navigation technique that involves sailing diagonally with the wind and cutting an angle to switch back toward your destination (basically making a zigzag pattern).

Roughly 10 miles out from San Francisco, the city’s skyline faintly visible to the right.

Dustin pulled out what he called the autohelm, a smart tablet ((Even the boats in Silicon Valley have iPads) that keeps track of speed, depth, GPS, trajectory and supposedly can even steer the ship using this USB-plunger attachment on the wheel, which looks uncannily like the suction sections of those automatic pumps for milking cows.

He put it to work, the mechanic whir and churn of the plunger struggling to keep the boat on course as the weather worsened. I had the feeling that, under conditions, the autohelm would have performed admirably.

The heavy force of the wind and waves, though, eventually overpowered the automaton’s control over the boat. Dustin “fired” it and took the wheel.

Looking out to my right, I noticed a blackened cloud, dark and gnarly, billowing up, the kind that looks ready to dump at any moment. The rain was falling a bit more steadily (though not too heavily), and the wind was picking up, causing the waves to chop savagely away at the haul.

Before I could convey my concerns, Mother Nature decided to blow them into the open. A gust of wind bruised the sails and sent the ship tipping and the cabin’s contents flying below. The ship was at an angle when the clatter of Dustin’s belongings became audible as they were flung about below.

Should have kept that skiff at hand. And now that I think about it, where are the life vests?

“Let out that line!” Dustin commanded, taking on the urgent persona of a captain as he strained to turn the boat against the lean. “As much as you can!”

I released a line connected to the bow’s sail and it went slack. Dustin rushed to the midsection while I took over the wheel and he let down the mainsail, finally disarming the wind. The entire ordeal, which felt like it took some time, probably lasted a minute at most.

“I think we should turn back,” I observed brilliantly.

“You think so?” he said with a heave of nervous laughter.

We got back (thankfully) right before the boat’s motor died, but we were still eight spots away from Dustin’s space in the dock. With the help of two good samaritans, we towed the sailboat back to its place with painstaking attentiveness. Dustin didn’t relax until she was safely moored.

“Whew! I’m still up on adrenaline!” he hollered when the boat was docked

Most people get stressed into a knot when their car battery dies. Imagine that happening except it’s a boat in open water and it almost capsizes. Oh, and the boat is also your house.

I said goodbye to Dustin over another burrito and sent him some sats for the trouble. After we parted ways, I grabbed a Lyft and headed just south of the Tenderloin district to cryptografitti’s place.

The apartment is on brand for an artist. Sterile, with neutral tones of chrome and white across each room, the flat was extremely well kept. Art of various styles decorates the place: a postmodern painting detailing San Franciscan life, which he had commissioned by a local artist, hangs above a tannish-brown, leather sectional; a puzzle-piece coffee table to accompany the couch; and a metal-matted two-piece fixture in the kitchen with a surface that looks like cells under a microscope that his sister made for him;.

And, of course, his own art is on display in his studio.

One original, United Nodes x 100, hangs directly behind his work desk, while two variants of Currency Exchange lie in the back-left corner and on the desk. Next to the one on the desk is one of his latest: the abstract of the Bitcoin white paper made from USD.

The rest of his office is lined with shelves that are stuffed with various supplies, including the white gloves he wears in each of his videos. On one of the shelves, a bag of hundreds of credit cards for a piece he made to commemorate the late Hal Finney. I was curious as to how he got his hands on that many cancelled credit cards.

“It’s a trade secret. They’re all used,” he said. (You can buy them on eBay, by the way).

We talked art, bitcoin culture and the experiment in a conversation that seemed to intertwine all these topics together.

“To me, it’s all about teaching people about bitcoin through art. I wanted to anchor the work in something that people were already familiar,” he said.

He’s certainly made an impact. The former DJ subsists off the money he makes from his art, and he takes regular commissions, mainly from wealthy, fellow enthusiasts who want an original of the subversive fusion of fiat and digital economies that cryptografitti’s art represents.

“I want to remind people that the materials I use in the work are short-lived and, therefore, so is the entire status quo. And if the old monetary realm is no longer, what should the new one look like and why?”

Carrying on the conversation we had the night before at Stookey’s, he said again that it’s not all that surprising fewer merchants accept bitcoin now. The party’s over and everyone’s gone home. The people who were just there for the good times left with the bull market; but, in the bear, the people who really give a damn are sticking around to deal with the aftermath.

“It’s like when you have a party and your good friends stick around afterward to help clean up after the revelers have left. Go to Bitcoin meetups nowadays and you’ll find the people that care and are willing to put in the work,” he said.

He doesn’t think enthusiasm is dead, it’s just dampened and embodied in a very dedicated core community.

“The excitement is still there, it’s just shifted focus to Lightning,” he said. It’s likely that Lighting is the very thing that may make my experiment easier, if I choose to do it again in the (distant) future.

Black Swan, one of his latest pieces, exemplifies this excitement. The Lightning Network-only auction had 100 plus participants and sold to the lowest bidder — less than 1/100th of a penny. Part-performance, part-visual art, cryptograffiti said he wanted the piece to provoke people to appreciate innovation without fretting about price.

“My work is rooted in activism. When I can motivate people to get involved, it brings more awareness to whatever I am trying to convey. In this case, a lowest-bidder-wins auction was my way of ensuring participation/reach in the project while highlighting the capabilities of the lightning network.

“The fancified promo video that accompanied the art was meant to contrast with the absurdly low micropayments and poke fun at MSM who tend to focus more on price than the groundbreaking tech being built,” he said.

Catching a few hours of R&R, I still had one thing to do before I could call the week quits. I couldn’t get a room at 20 Mission due to San Francisco boarding codes, but I was still game to visit the hacker community house that Kashmir Hill shacked up in during the weekend of her week on bitcoin. I had made arrangements with Berkeley, the community’s head honcho, to visit that night.

The Uber that took me there was yet another Prius, the fifth (maybe sixth) I’ve ridden in this week.

I buzzed myself in with the house’s callbox, entered the foyer and made my way upstairs to a labyrinth of hallways and rooms (the community houses 40 or so people).

A resident came in shortly after, toting an LED-glowing electric unicycle that had an extended handle like a rolling suitcase. I asked him if he knew where Berkeley was, and he pointed me in the right direction.

We made introductions and Berkeley offered me a La Croix, another in a set of San Franciscan constants that include whole bean coffee, 20-somethings ripping Juuls, and Uber rides in Priuses.

Berkeley actually helped Jered Kenna, the cofounder and now owner of 20 Mission, found Tradehill, a once-upon-a-time bitcoin exchange that accounted for 15 percent of the coin’s daily trading volume back in the day when Mt. Gox accounted for 80 percent.

He reiterated some of what Hill talks about in her piece: how 20 Mission was much worse for wear before Kenna first cleaned it up.

“Before that it was basically a seedy crack hotel. Squatters lived there, but it was abandoned for something like 18 years,” said Berkeley.

As we talked, we walked around the house and I surveyed the murals that decorated each hallway. Local artists had done them, including the ones that enliven the house’s glorified courtyard: an open-air space in the middle of the building that’s accessible only through windows and is floored with roofing tiles.

One of the house’s many murals.

At the corners of some of the hallways, street signs with titles like “Litecoin Lane,” “Ethereum Blvd.” and — thank God — “Coinye West.”

The signs made me wonder if the house has an active crypto and general tech community, seeing as it’s billed as a hacker community. They still accept bitcoin for room and board, but the house’s tech focus shouldn’t be overstated, Berkeley told me.

“We have some people working on crypto, but it’s not like everyone is in crypto. For example, we just had a guy here who is a doctor, so it’s a mix.”

Doctors, lawyers, professors, service workers, developers — folks of all kind live in the community.

“With 40 rooms, there are lots of different people. We’re decentralized.”

Unfortunately, none of the crypto-focused professionals were around to chat, either by virtue of being busy or because they were hiding from “the media.” That was all right by me; I understand their need for privacy, and given America’s current media climate and public sentiment, I didn’t find it shocking that they didn’t want to show their faces to a nosy reporter (the industry’s professionals seem to approach the press with serious skepticism).

Satisfied with the tour and the talk, I thanked Berkley and went on my way.

Back at the castle, I had a last supper from Curry Up Now (courtesy, as always, of Bitrefill-funded Uber Eats), relaxed and, just like that, the week was over.

I went to bed thankful I’d be able to use my fiat debit card in the morning.

As Kashmir Hill did in her original journey, Colin is accepting BTC tips to help him along the way.

Tip jar: 3CnLhqitCjUN4HPYf6Qa2MmvCpSoBiFfBN

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[ellahmacdermott]

Living on Bitcoin Day 7: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’d Definitely Do Again

This is the seventh instalment of reporter Colin Harper's "Living on Bitcoin" experience in San Francisco. Find out what happened to him earlier on Day 1 , on Day 2 , on Day 3 , onDay 4, on Day 5 and on Day 6.

I woke to the sound of thin but consistent rain against the sailboat. A gentle storm soon rolled in to softly rock the harbor’s rustbucket bedfellows, a few spurts of lightning distant and crackling across the bay.

Dustin wasn’t up yet so I made a cup of coffee (gods be praised) and went above the deck of the Velela — the name Dustin’s sailboat came with when he bought it four years ago. The previous owner (a marine biologist) was inspired by the jellyfish of the same name, which can hoist a sail-like fin in the air to propel itself more quickly through the water.

The Velela resting in the harbor.

After Dustin got up (and we wolfed down some bacon-n-egg burritos), we made preparations, which included stuffing a rubber skiff into his Honda Fit, and we set out on the open water. The day was graying as we left the docking area, with a misting of rain so faint you could barely feel it on your skin.

Once we’d motored out far enough, Dustin hoisted the sails. Swelling with the bay’s untamable winds, the sails vaulted us forward and pushed the boat to the right — a bit more than I would have liked.

“This is safe, right? It’s not going to tip over?” I asked apprehensively.

“I wouldn’t exactly call sailing a safe activity,” Dustin said with a smile that managed to be both carefree and severe.

“But it’s not going to tip over, is it?”

“Probably not,” he joked. “But really, there’s a huge weight in the middle of the hull, so we’ll be fine.”

We were headed for the city’s waterfront, a 10-mile trek, give or take. The wind was against us, though, so we had to get there by tacking, a maritime navigation technique that involves sailing diagonally with the wind and cutting an angle to switch back toward your destination (basically making a zigzag pattern).

Roughly 10 miles out from San Francisco, the city’s skyline faintly visible to the right.

Dustin pulled out what he called the autohelm, a smart tablet ((Even the boats in Silicon Valley have iPads) that keeps track of speed, depth, GPS, trajectory and supposedly can even steer the ship using this USB-plunger attachment on the wheel, which looks uncannily like the suction sections of those automatic pumps for milking cows.

He put it to work, the mechanic whir and churn of the plunger struggling to keep the boat on course as the weather worsened. I had the feeling that, under conditions, the autohelm would have performed admirably.

The heavy force of the wind and waves, though, eventually overpowered the automaton’s control over the boat. Dustin “fired” it and took the wheel.

Looking out to my right, I noticed a blackened cloud, dark and gnarly, billowing up, the kind that looks ready to dump at any moment. The rain was falling a bit more steadily (though not too heavily), and the wind was picking up, causing the waves to chop savagely away at the haul.

Before I could convey my concerns, Mother Nature decided to blow them into the open. A gust of wind bruised the sails and sent the ship tipping and the cabin’s contents flying below. The ship was at an angle when the clatter of Dustin’s belongings became audible as they were flung about below.

Should have kept that skiff at hand. And now that I think about it, where are the life vests?

“Let out that line!” Dustin commanded, taking on the urgent persona of a captain as he strained to turn the boat against the lean. “As much as you can!”

I released a line connected to the bow’s sail and it went slack. Dustin rushed to the midsection while I took over the wheel and he let down the mainsail, finally disarming the wind. The entire ordeal, which felt like it took some time, probably lasted a minute at most.

“I think we should turn back,” I observed brilliantly.

“You think so?” he said with a heave of nervous laughter.

We got back (thankfully) right before the boat’s motor died, but we were still eight spots away from Dustin’s space in the dock. With the help of two good samaritans, we towed the sailboat back to its place with painstaking attentiveness. Dustin didn’t relax until she was safely moored.

“Whew! I’m still up on adrenaline!” he hollered when the boat was docked

Most people get stressed into a knot when their car battery dies. Imagine that happening except it’s a boat in open water and it almost capsizes. Oh, and the boat is also your house.

I said goodbye to Dustin over another burrito and sent him some sats for the trouble. After we parted ways, I grabbed a Lyft and headed just south of the Tenderloin district to cryptografitti’s place.

The apartment is on brand for an artist. Sterile, with neutral tones of chrome and white across each room, the flat was extremely well kept. Art of various styles decorates the place: a postmodern painting detailing San Franciscan life, which he had commissioned by a local artist, hangs above a tannish-brown, leather sectional; a puzzle-piece coffee table to accompany the couch; and a metal-matted two-piece fixture in the kitchen with a surface that looks like cells under a microscope that his sister made for him;.

And, of course, his own art is on display in his studio.

One original, United Nodes x 100, hangs directly behind his work desk, while two variants of Currency Exchange lie in the back-left corner and on the desk. Next to the one on the desk is one of his latest: the abstract of the Bitcoin white paper made from USD.

The rest of his office is lined with shelves that are stuffed with various supplies, including the white gloves he wears in each of his videos. On one of the shelves, a bag of hundreds of credit cards for a piece he made to commemorate the late Hal Finney. I was curious as to how he got his hands on that many cancelled credit cards.

“It’s a trade secret. They’re all used,” he said. (You can buy them on eBay, by the way).

We talked art, bitcoin culture and the experiment in a conversation that seemed to intertwine all these topics together.

“To me, it’s all about teaching people about bitcoin through art. I wanted to anchor the work in something that people were already familiar,” he said.

He’s certainly made an impact. The former DJ subsists off the money he makes from his art, and he takes regular commissions, mainly from wealthy, fellow enthusiasts who want an original of the subversive fusion of fiat and digital economies that cryptografitti’s art represents.

“I want to remind people that the materials I use in the work are short-lived and, therefore, so is the entire status quo. And if the old monetary realm is no longer, what should the new one look like and why?”

Carrying on the conversation we had the night before at Stookey’s, he said again that it’s not all that surprising fewer merchants accept bitcoin now. The party’s over and everyone’s gone home. The people who were just there for the good times left with the bull market; but, in the bear, the people who really give a damn are sticking around to deal with the aftermath.

“It’s like when you have a party and your good friends stick around afterward to help clean up after the revelers have left. Go to Bitcoin meetups nowadays and you’ll find the people that care and are willing to put in the work,” he said.

He doesn’t think enthusiasm is dead, it’s just dampened and embodied in a very dedicated core community.

“The excitement is still there, it’s just shifted focus to Lightning,” he said. It’s likely that Lighting is the very thing that may make my experiment easier, if I choose to do it again in the (distant) future.

Black Swan, one of his latest pieces, exemplifies this excitement. The Lightning Network-only auction had 100 plus participants and sold to the lowest bidder — less than 1/100th of a penny. Part-performance, part-visual art, cryptograffiti said he wanted the piece to provoke people to appreciate innovation without fretting about price.

“My work is rooted in activism. When I can motivate people to get involved, it brings more awareness to whatever I am trying to convey. In this case, a lowest-bidder-wins auction was my way of ensuring participation/reach in the project while highlighting the capabilities of the lightning network.

“The fancified promo video that accompanied the art was meant to contrast with the absurdly low micropayments and poke fun at MSM who tend to focus more on price than the groundbreaking tech being built,” he said.

Catching a few hours of R&R, I still had one thing to do before I could call the week quits. I couldn’t get a room at 20 Mission due to San Francisco boarding codes, but I was still game to visit the hacker community house that Kashmir Hill shacked up in during the weekend of her week on bitcoin. I had made arrangements with Berkeley, the community’s head honcho, to visit that night.

The Uber that took me there was yet another Prius, the fifth (maybe sixth) I’ve ridden in this week.

I buzzed myself in with the house’s callbox, entered the foyer and made my way upstairs to a labyrinth of hallways and rooms (the community houses 40 or so people).

A resident came in shortly after, toting an LED-glowing electric unicycle that had an extended handle like a rolling suitcase. I asked him if he knew where Berkeley was, and he pointed me in the right direction.

We made introductions and Berkeley offered me a La Croix, another in a set of San Franciscan constants that include whole bean coffee, 20-somethings ripping Juuls, and Uber rides in Priuses.

Berkeley actually helped Jered Kenna, the cofounder and now owner of 20 Mission, found Tradehill, a once-upon-a-time bitcoin exchange that accounted for 15 percent of the coin’s daily trading volume back in the day when Mt. Gox accounted for 80 percent.

He reiterated some of what Hill talks about in her piece: how 20 Mission was much worse for wear before Kenna first cleaned it up.

“Before that it was basically a seedy crack hotel. Squatters lived there, but it was abandoned for something like 18 years,” said Berkeley.

As we talked, we walked around the house and I surveyed the murals that decorated each hallway. Local artists had done them, including the ones that enliven the house’s glorified courtyard: an open-air space in the middle of the building that’s accessible only through windows and is floored with roofing tiles.

One of the house’s many murals.

At the corners of some of the hallways, street signs with titles like “Litecoin Lane,” “Ethereum Blvd.” and — thank God — “Coinye West.”

The signs made me wonder if the house has an active crypto and general tech community, seeing as it’s billed as a hacker community. They still accept bitcoin for room and board, but the house’s tech focus shouldn’t be overstated, Berkeley told me.

“We have some people working on crypto, but it’s not like everyone is in crypto. For example, we just had a guy here who is a doctor, so it’s a mix.”

Doctors, lawyers, professors, service workers, developers — folks of all kind live in the community.

“With 40 rooms, there are lots of different people. We’re decentralized.”

Unfortunately, none of the crypto-focused professionals were around to chat, either by virtue of being busy or because they were hiding from “the media.” That was all right by me; I understand their need for privacy, and given America’s current media climate and public sentiment, I didn’t find it shocking that they didn’t want to show their faces to a nosy reporter (the industry’s professionals seem to approach the press with serious skepticism).

Satisfied with the tour and the talk, I thanked Berkley and went on my way.

Back at the castle, I had a last supper from Curry Up Now (courtesy, as always, of Bitrefill-funded Uber Eats), relaxed and, just like that, the week was over.

I went to bed thankful I’d be able to use my fiat debit card in the morning.

As Kashmir Hill did in her original journey, Colin is accepting BTC tips to help him along the way.

Tip jar: 3CnLhqitCjUN4HPYf6Qa2MmvCpSoBiFfBN

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

from InvestmentOpportunityInCryptocurrencies via Ella Macdermott on Inoreader https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/living-on-bitcoin-day-7-a-supposedly-fun-thing-id-definitely-do-again/

[itswonhosthighs]

Sike Pt. 3 1/2

Birds chattering, the smell of coffee and a surging light laid upon the city by now, as it had gotten early already.

The sun shined through the windows, its rays spreading onto white sheets as their light was broken down by the window, leaving a warm lingering behind.

As one had looked through the net all night long, the other was cuddled up into the warm embrace of their best friend, snuggling close whilst strong arms held them captive.

"Wake up.." A raspy voice echoed through the bright room, a smile on the owners face.

"Just 10 minutes.."

"Forget it. You promised to go to the studio with me and get your new tattoo.. I didn't make up time and send away dear coustumers for 'ten more minutes'. Come on. Let's go get your sketch and go there. You've made the sketch, right??" The last part came a little rushed and harsher than intended.

Hel was truly a chaot, she'd forget her head if it wasn't secured safely, for sure, but seeing Mokyo with a disappointed face would break her heart with earnest, which meant, that as an egostical and almost narcissistic person, she wouldn't do anything to harm herself anymore. She used to be a victim of selfharm, but rather physically, not mentally.

"Of course I did..!" She pleaded innocent and smiled up to see the sweetest smile ever from her companion.

"Good Girl." He praised her, kissing her temple softly, causing her to giggle.

As both had lifted and dressed more properly, they headed to the ever so disapproving home in which Hel stayed, she quickly opened all doors and went into her rather messy apartment, sketches, full drawings, texts and books all spread along.

Only kitchen and her shelves seemed to be the extremly tidy places.

Looking through every sketch in her 'inkfolder', she found the one.

A rose, black and white, rather less details, petals not coloured but left blank with only tiny black dots inside, throns, a hell of thorns and a white hand, rather the outlines of one.

"Here." Hel stated happily as she walked out and reached her tattoo artist the paper.

"Looks good. I know what you mean. I will make it perfect within an hour or some, therewhile, you make breakfast." He exposed his plans as they both made their way down the road where the studio was at.

Between all boring buildings, there was one, black building, neon lights, pictures and artistic graffiti on some spots.

As they entered, the smell of ink and pain of others met them, but they knew it already.

"Great.." Mokyo exhaled as he stretched himself.

"Let's get to work.."

At the exact same time, Hoseok had gotten drunk to forget his past crimes he used to be involved in.

And as if it was so easy...

He had found one whole chapter based on himself by that crazy admin of that site.

His name had changed but his crimes hadn't.

It was driving him nuts. How did she know so much about him?? Where did she get those horrible informants from???

And as if it was now his destiny, he got himself into a fight, so early, it wasn't even 1pm yet.

One hit, his nose started bleeding but Hoseok wouldn't go down, his opponent wasn't tall nor built like he was, his own fist grazing the others face hard as he hit him, blood smearing onto the probably younger male.

Next hit landed by Hoseok was his knee burying into the man's guts, his blood splashing onto his designer jeans.

"You fucking asshole.." Tipsy Hoseok exclaimed as he grabbed the other by the collar, crashing him against the wall..

And from across the street one woman watched, sadistic smirk spreading onto her visage as she held the fresh bread she bought from the friendly baker few blocks away.

'Going back already? You read my text? I know you well, Hoseokie.' She thought to herself. But suddenly her thoughts were broken apart as a sweet voice woke her up.

Her othed best friend, named Shania, a girl with chocolate skin, smooth and beautiful, big mesmerizing brown eyes, and lips to kiss.

"Oh god.. Isn't that Shin Hoseok..?"

"Call Hyungwon, isn't he a cop?"

"Well, he is..But I don't want his handsome face hurt if he goes against that..thing."

"Truth be told. Bring the bread into the studio, call the police and I'll go get him.."

"Hel.. are you sure?"

"Yes."

With that, Shania, whose beautiful eyes moved to gaze at her friend before going inside, tucking her smartphone and gradually calling her crush, who ironically was a soon to be investigator for crime scenes.

"Where's Hel?"

"She went to get Hosuck.."

"This woman again... Ah..."

Mokyo, faster than a lightning ran out just to see his beloved bestie trot over to the beast Hoseok had become as he fought his attacker and his friends.

"Don't go after her. She'd be mad.."

"I know. But if that guy hurts her. I'll ram my tattoo needle into his eyes." He warned with an unfazed grimace, causing a shudder crawl onto Shania's back, knowing too well how serious the man was.

"Okay, okay. Hosu- Hoseok.. Stop this here, they are idiots but you'll be charged more as you have records as everyone knows, plus the injuries you gave them is far worse, let's see.. You broke that guy's jaw..Come on. Be smarter than this.." Hel tried to convince the inflamed male, without succeeding.

She stood there in front of his pray, arms spread as trying to calm a horse a little.

"Get.. out.. of.. my fucking way weirdo.."

"I prefer Hel, but whatever..."

Still, his muscular body dumped into her, Hel sticking out her arms, holding him back.

"Stop this. Just stop. Okay???" She argued again, pushing him back again.

"What's this? Is she your bitch or what? Put a leash on her or should I??" The drunken strangef smirked smugly, hitting a red line in Hoseok.

Within Hel, fury built but as much Hoseok tried to get back on that jerk, she held him back and in that moment, the police car arrived and when she became distracted, eyes searching for Hyungwon, Hoseok took a step and was able to escape her wall, punching his target, making Hel stumble back a little.

Both Officers ran to the 4 men, Hyungwon the taller one trying to take advantage of Hoseok..

As the preditors eyes laid upon Hyungwon, his jaw clenched. Their shared past ever so bitter sweet.

As teenagers they were friends for life, Hoseok would've died for Hyungwon back then, until, one day, Hyungwon, 5 years ago, decided to cross the borders and go against Hoseok.. He snitched him to the police, told them about their plan to rob the town bank in the smaller part of Seoul they lived in back then, there he himself was able to get out of it due to the police taking his side, whilst Hoseok ended up in jail for 2 years and 8 months.

From then on, the older man decided to hunt down his ex-bestfriend for betrayal at its finest.

Seeing that familiar face again, the face he hated so much, made him go crazy, attacking the now officer.

"You moron! A stick can't stop me here!" He yelled, throat sore.

Before Hyungwon's colleagues could react, Hel's hand darted out, the L space of between pointer finger and thumb aiming for Hoseok's wind pipe, flat hands hitting his firm chest.

With that, the beast fell, trying to catch his breath.

Hoseok opened his eyes, blended by bright lights surging their ways through his pupils as well as they could.

"Fuck.." He cursed, trying to adjust to the new feeling.

Still a little dizzy, he sat up.

As he looked around, he could recognize one thing he had seen too often. Around his wrist. Freedom taken by the cold metal keeping him still.

'That bitch...' He thought to himself, remembering how the girl had just beaten him ever so swiftly.

Hoseok sat alone as he thought to himself,

Hyungwon was being taken care of.

His wound formed from the hard hit he had to take was being grazed by a wettened cotton piece, before Shania herself started to treat his wound.

"You look even prettier up close." It shooted out of the suddenly confident man.

"Don't make a pass at me!" The nursing girl warned before putting some alcohol onto his wound, causing him to hiss.

"Almost done." She informed her secret crush.

His previous and beautiful face had been hurt by that drunk fuck. Even the thought at that jerk made her stomach twist.

"If I wouldn't have call-"

"You called the right one. I know that punk.. I kind of deserved this punch, but he'll be having a hard time for it." He reassured to calm her down a little, taking her anger with his ever so soft smile.

"You owe me after I treat you, so the medical bills won't bother you."

"Dinner on me-"

"Free dinner?? I am in!" Mokyo almost screeched and held his stomach, faking his hunget for a meal as he hadn't eaten, yet.

"Yeah. Me, too..!" With that, Hel caught the deadliest glare ever given to her by the ever so lovly Shania.

"I actually meant-"

"Let's go!" Mokyo didn't wait a second longer before he and Hel grabbed the seemingly lovebirds, walking outside of the studio , leading to the best BBQ in Itaewon. As Shania was about to go inside, Hel stopped her and pointed at a fancy restaurant near-by.

"Go there. Mokyo and I reserved for you guys." She whispered softly.

"Thanks" Shania mouthed as she grabbed her Hyungwon, walking off, leaving him a little stunned.

[basstunnicliffe]

“Fast forward 11years and my return to buying vinyl was less fuelled by my frugal background and wholeheartedly driven by my mental health”

Vinyl is often associated with nerds, musicians and the old. While that kind of generalisation doesn't really have any place in discussing anything of any kind, there definitely is some sort of visceral or fanatical drive behind most record collectors.

We have heard reports that the average record buyer these days is in fact not teenagers revelling in a technology that only recently thought of introducing its self to them but in fact is people who were there back in the day and by now are aged between 45 and 54. The data is thought provoking in itself and has me wondering just what the catalyst was for thousands of middle aged people worldwide to suddenly delve back into this not-cheap, not convenient, not small format that they gave up on twenty years ago. When these people were children vinyl may very well have been the only option available to them so I find myself intrigued as to what chain of events drew them into revisiting that part of their youth. My story involves a revisiting of sorts but I am not old enough for there to have been a twenty year hiatus in between. That said, it's still a long one. Grab a brew.

Roughly twelve years ago I got into buying records for one very simple reason - it was the cheapest way to have both sound and information in one physical package. I am a nerd. Through over-engineered packaging, greed and an incessant norm of twenty-ish tracks per album, CDs had become ludicrously overpriced and retrospectively were acting as a womb for music lovers to develop their own alternative means of accessing the music they loved. I wasn't a record collector, I was just skint. The nerd in me just couldn't do without the credits and liner notes so while my brother was perfecting the dark art of illegal downloading I was listening to my records on repeat as I put my music in alphabetical order or making sure the metadata in my iTunes of imported CDs was painfully accurate; an amazingly effective way of showing people you're simultaneously preoccupied and lonely.

Vinyl wasn't where it all started for me though. Since as far back as I can remember, I have always parted with what small money I've had in order to have the music I love. The epitome of this was hiding Michael Jackson's Dangerous cassette when I found it in my local Woolworth's in order to buy me time to convince my mum to lend me the pennies I needed to top up my saved pocket money and make it mine. I was only a nipper at that time but over the following years approaching my teens this obsession with dancing to MJ cassettes in our living room had transformed into me becoming a bass player in a punk band. This is what I did professionally from the age of fourteen onwards and through this time CD prices fell, Amazon came into my life and my collection came to include an enormous amount of music that I felt I just needed to hear. Stylistic and creative decisions made from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance was the name of the game and it did me well.

Fast forward 11years and my return to buying vinyl was less fuelled by my frugal background and wholeheartedly driven by my mental health.

I got to the age of 25 having made a healthy living from being a professional musician around the UK and elsewhere off the back of the amazing support of those around me as well as the innumerable lessons I found sat in the numerous albums I had chased down (regardless of their format). I had become deeply unhappy. Naive to the fact that I was facing some crippling mental health issues, I had fallen out of love with music which at the time was an all-encompassing force that was my primary social vehicle, means of financially supporting myself and hugely woven into my identity. I returned from a tour and almost immediately cancelled all future work I had planned and entered a Spring period of hiding in a studio flat in Cardiff watching films and drinking alone. Throw in relocation to a new city, a fleeting experience at a university degree as well as somewhat skipping over the recent death of my dad and the combination was as toxic as it was bleak. The problem could not be with me. The problem must be that music had become boring. In an effort to fix music I had bursts of intrigue to the extent that I would collate obnoxious articles that claimed to showcase 'The Top 100 IDM Tracks You **NEED** To Know' in order to have a spreadsheet catalogue of source material from which to delve into a new style, a new career or just anything to take me away from where I was. IDM, techno, footwork, house, jungle, electro and trap were all styles of music I oddly knew nothing about (my life as a bass player has touched on most other styles in quite great depth) and so I made use of YouTube and got listening.

Quite a lot of this time for me is a blur. The Spring and Summer of 2016 felt like an eternity yet reeks of 'where the hell did it all go?'. What I do know about that time is that at some point I watched a video diary of the life of house DJ Seth Troxler where he said : “I kinda wanna be a bit like Laurent Garnier, y'know? Laurent Garnier is a guy I have the utmost respect for 'cause he's taken his career and done it on his own terms”. I had nothing else on so I misspelt then pursued this 'Laurent Garnier' figure by first watching him being interviewed by the fantastic Lauren Martin for Red Bull Music Academy. In a word: eloquent. I saw a connection in Mr. Garnier between him and the music he's tirelessly promoted and developed for longer than I've been alive. I saw a younger me in him. He had held onto something I had very recently lost and so I combined his inspiring anecdotes with a delving into the brooding intensity of techno. By June 2016 I had bought a pair of turntables on eBay and remembered to rescue the DJ mixer my Mum had given me after it was donated to the charity she worked for. I had intended to throw it away on account of it being of no use to a live musician but had completely forgotten it was there.

Despite being drawn to techno's balance of visceral euphoria, tribal sense of percussive momentum and occasionally almost violent aggression I did immediately come up against Cardiff's lack of used techno stock and the resurgence of vinyl having driven up the price of new 12” releases online. 10 years had passed since I had first (albeit briefly) had contact with these enormous black disks and it seems funny that in that time the price had polarised enough to go from being an inviting quality to a reason to steer clear. What was in abundance in Cardiff though was second hand vinyl shops where I could access the stunning craftsmanship of the great dancefloor songwriters who had me dancing on the rug as a child. Michael Jackson came through first and was swiftly followed by (mainly cheap 7” copies of) some of the funk, Motown and disco records I had encountered during my research as a bass player. Despite having performed jazz and other styles of music equally rife with snobbery I have never been too proud to say that I enjoy getting down to music that is written to sell in large numbers. When done well, pop music is teeming with social references, gives you what you need when you want it and teeters on the line between what we know well enough to feel comfortable and delivering us something new that holds our attention. My cardboard record boxes grew fuller day by day but the most important development at the time was much deeper than the physical acquisition of stuff I wanted. In one of my nights of drinking I had successfully returned to my flat, made a cup of tea (yes, I am British) and fallen asleep only to find in the morning that I'd spilt said cup of tea and left my poor iPhone to spend the night in the milky, sugary puddle I'd created on the desk. This meant that in my first months of collecting I went to the dusty shops of Cardiff armed with an actual notepad with names of records to dig for in case I drew a blank when I was stood in front of the crates. My time at these record shops became quite sacred. In a world where the majority of communication is done online, my disappearance from Facebook, the iPhone world (my replacement was a drug dealer-esque £10 phone with no camera or online capability) and the professional capacity through which I normally maintained contact with the people around me was undoubtedly going to raise many conversations I wasn't ready to have. I hadn't even identified a problem yet let alone found an answer. I would walk briskly to the record shops and I would be there most of the day getting my hands dirty and relishing the lack of phone signal as I buried myself in buying music that I was only buying for me. Flicking through records was therapeutically autonomous and had only two outcomes – either I found something I had been looking for or I (often) found something I'd never even heard of which I found astoundingly intriguing. The idea of buying music that you don't like may sound completely barmy to many people but in the world of being the bassist hidden behind the writers and front people of the industry knowledge is power and that knowledge is sat in abundance in classic albums. This approach served me very well but meant that my 21 days of music in my iTunes from purchased CDs was not my music but the music of the bass player I had become. A training ground for technical proficiency and for anecdotal references to pull out on new clients over a coffee at soundcheck. In stark contrast to my professionally broad CD collection was a couple of ever-growing boxes of vinyl singles and LPs that were bought for no reason other than to cheer me up. They meant something to me and immediately held less professional weight due to my not being able to listen to them on the move. I loved that about them. My Mac meant the internet, internet meant people and, in turn, people meant questions. I could put on my records without even having to engage with the chain events that would be so strenuous to face. Escapism through music was in my life again and providing me some respite in an otherwise very tough time for me.

Having failed my year at university I left Cardiff and stayed in a static caravan on Anglesey outside the house of two close family friends with everything I owned either in my car on hidden in storage. My records and turntables were with me that Summer and my time was still plagued by my asking questions about my place in the world and I was very much still not in a healthy place. I was, however, getting some relief from this by spending many afternoons trying to desperately mix together the small amount of music I owned in the hope of someday sharing it with someone. I had fallen in love only months before leaving Cardiff and the only sense of purpose my time in a caravan on Anglesey had was to complete and record collections of songs that I and my girlfriend both enjoyed and send them to her in some sort of cohesive narrative. My first mixes were titled:

'Check Us Out, We're In Love'

'Too Weak to Dance, Too Busy to Rest' (my other half was writing her Masters’ dissertation)

'It's Fun To Dance Where It's Hot' (My mum was moving to Greece)

Only a fortnight before the start of term I was informed by post that through appealing I had been granted one final additional year to try and survive 2nd year at university. I left Anglesey for Cardiff and undertook a torrent of flat viewings which swung from the unaffordable to the downright inhospitable until I was fortunate to find a gem that someone had dropped out from at the last minute. All was well very briefly as I was distracted by meeting new, enthused students, unpacking into an unfurnished flat and just being in a different city. This did eventually wear off and I did find myself completely disengaged from the jazz degree I was studying and was back in a very dark place once again with a complete misunderstanding of how I was so incapable of being content in anything I did. The drinking resumed and I increasingly neglected any form of healthy eating and hid myself again.

One evening of that December last year I was speaking to my Mum on the phone while she was at her new home in Greece. In discussing how I was doing I stated I had “gone from wanting to avoid the normal things in my life to actively wanting to do nothing”. My Mum, ever understanding and being the amazing woman that she is responded “there's a name for that ,Ben. It's clinical depression.” and she insisted that I go and get help. She said she'd be calling me all morning until I had called my GP for an emergency appointment. The prospect in itself had me stuck awake all night out of the sheer fear that I could detail all of my feelings to a complete stranger only to be told that there was nothing wrong with me. The thought of being told such a thing would have made my life unbearable and I was the most frightened I think I have ever been. Running parallel to my fear that night was the obsessive nature of searching for new records online. I had been struggling in recent months to find a means of moving from one track to another in my mixing due to both a lack of number of records but more importantly the records I did own were never recorded metronomically like electronic music traditionally is. In short, this just makes it nigh on impossible to perform long hand overs between two tracks which is a style of blending that we all seem to now expect from a DJ. I needed an alternative and that night, through some miracle I googled something that brought me to a Discogs discussion that contained within it a link to numerous DJ mixes recorded at a time where metronomic music simply didn't exist! With that goldmine of real 'period' mixes  aside, there is a lovely opening story in that Discogs discussion about a man's personal link to Underground Disco. The enthusiasm and humanity of the connection the people in that short, long-since abandoned discussion had for Disco encouraged me to read their stories and also follow-up the tracks they mentioned.

“On that same CD is the almost 12 minute version of Dan Hartman's ”Relight My Fire” - downtown.music

The above quote had me intrigued and while I didn't find the 12 minute version I did find a 9 minute recording prefixed by 'Vertigo'; that'll do. It was getting light by this point and I lay in bed with headphones as I clicked play on the track wondering what I was about to hear. The intro was as odd as it was dramatic but I had learnt in the past months of auditioning unknown records that it was both polite and sensible to stick with a track for at least 3 minutes to see where it would take you. Almost exactly 3 minutes in and I am engulfed by the most dramatic bar of orchestration I think I have ever heard. An unapologetic, muscular combination of instruments quite literally woke me up in preparation for the rollercoaster that was to be the main body of the song. Poignantly appearing when I was dangerously circling the drain, I finally fell asleep after a dozen listens and was woken up before 8am by my Mum's phone call.

I was given an emergency appointment on the day and through the wonder that is the tireless workers of our NHS I met with a doctor who listened, who understood and who saw that I needed to leave with a short term solution in order to have the strength to fight long term.

With a prescription in my hand I walked all the way across town to my flat in the rain only a fortnight or so before Christmas. Having spent every penny of the £40,000+ I had inherited from my dad passing away, money was very tight but I thought such a triumph for my own wellbeing deserved some recognition so I stopped at the record shop closest to my flat. Those of you who have spent more than 20seconds in a record shop will know that you scarcely find what you want and invariably leave with something you tried on a whim and found you liked. Not this time. The 12” singles are separate at my local and somewhat hidden so I pulled up a chair and flicked through for what can only have been a couple of seconds before producing Vertigo/Relight My Fire by Dan Hartman in a well-stained, blue Epic records sleeve. To be sure, I carry it over and demo it on the better turntable and cry for 9 minutes while facing the wall. I brought it home and proudly did the same but at a volume I can only describe as defiant. My mum rang me that evening and I find no shame in telling you what I told her which was that both being told by my GP that I was suffering at the hand of mental illness and in turn allowing a 9 minute disco record to remind me that night of what power there is in people was the first time in a long time that I had thought that what I was going through wasn't going to kill me sometime soon.

I am now months away from that pivotal moment in my life and records have continued to have an immensely positive impact on me since that day. This was a story about just one of them and there's far more still to come. I have made chasing the happiness they bring a focal point in my life as I move forward and I'm excited to see how far they will take me.

[shawnwang8117-blog]

DART8117 Critical Reflection PUT LEGO IN REALITY—a digital compositing project

This semester I took the DART8117 with 12 units as my major project. With the experience of the previous three semesters that I have tried life-action shootings, stop-motion animating and digital compositing, I intended to combine what I have learnt and do a experimental work. Briefly, my proposal was about composite Lego stop-motions into live action scenes, so to create a visually  surreal hyper world. The film was assumed to be based on live-action background and composited with  stop-motion animated elements. A set of photography work, Lego outside Legoland, by Domenico Franco, an Italian photographer living in Roma, inspired my original idea. In his amazing work, he has digitally introduced a series of Lego sets at a miniature scale into the everyday urban landscapes of Roma. ‘The aim is to transform ordinary contexts in extraordinary ones,’ said by Demenico, ‘thus compelling the toys to get out of the idyllic and politically correct landscapes belonging to their perfect and idealistic cities, with the result of instilling in them those vices, virtues and desires typical of human beings.’ As an architect as well, Domenico dealt really well with scale between the Lego bricks and real life-action scenes. To quote Domenico from his blog: In this personal project I integrated inside Rome some shocking elements, original Lego vehicles. The aim is to transform ordinary contexts in extraordinary ones, thus compelling the toys to get out of the idyllic and politically correct landscapes belonging to their perfect and idealistic cities (e.g. LEGOLAND), with the result of instilling in them those vices, virtues and desires typical of human beings. How many among us would not wish to land by helicopter just beside the Colosseum? I preferably used some sets in minifig scale, therefore made with few bricks so that the integration would look even more piercing. As being inspired by Lego outside Legoland, the anticipative visual effect would be very close to the photography work, Domenico admitted that he used green screen to shoot, and did lots of cutting out with PS and color correction due to the great reflectivity of the LEGO bricks. So some similar methods will be taken in my project to reach the goal. The beauty of Domenico’s work is using the real lego sets. Unlike the official Lego commercials or films which are full of CG elements, using the real sets to be the animated and composited subjective would give a more visually dramatical contract to the footage. Briefly, the audience would feel nothing unreal in the film although everything looks absurd and abstract. I looked up online, there is no such lego-reality compositing in form of  video work. So I decided to start it, and do something innovative.

Thanks to Kit, Lucien and JP, a animation studio was provided to me during the most semester for my project, I’m really grateful about this. The first thing I ought to do is set up the workshop. I bought a backdrop kit which comes with stands and background clothes with three colour. I set up the green backdrop on a large flat table, two spot light and a LED panel light were available to undertake lighting jobs. Then I bring most of my Lego sets to the studio, as an enthusiastic collector of course I have a a lot of them. I did some test shootings in the first few weeks, mostly still pictures. I put them in photoshop to look into scales, angles, perspectives and so on, I knew matching would be the key of compositing and all of them should be accurate. After that, I draw some storyboard to keep some interesting thoughts on my mind. The first problem I met was to decide whether to start with stop-motion or life-action shooting. As I did Lego stop-motion last year, I felt confident to chose the former but it turned out to be a mistake. Most of my earlier animation works were done in vain because it was really hard to find out a proper life-action footage to match them. Then I figured out that animation in my project should be the layers over the background which would be life-action scenes, I couldn't make a pizza without a base first. So, I would always keep this as a principle of compositing in the future. I spent the mid-term break to shoot life-action footage, and some catch-ups in the later weeks. The scenes I chose were quite common in city views like streets, parking lots, bus stops and etc. Actually most scenes I shot twice, one with real cars, people which would be the reference for studio shootings, the other would be clearer environment. In order to get some footage with less interfering elements in the frame, I had to shoot very early in the morning, about 7’o clock, with sufficient sun light. April was full of sunny days, there were lots of footage I shot in the sunny days that I couldn't use because they are too bright and with excrescent contrast. I prefer to shoot in cloudy days, there wouldn’t be strong shadows, the clouds were acting as diffusers, all the lights came from areas rather than a single spot. It’s important to simulate natural lighting in studios, I used paper tapes to seal two white paper on the front of both spot lights, so they could act as diffusers, made it an area to soften the beam. Although most of the studio equipments are flexible to adjust, it was difficult to make the studio lighting perfectly match the nature, I have to sort out the problems in post-grading.

The stop-animation animation did challenge my patience a lot. At first place, I planed to shoot as 24 frames per seconds, and I did try some test-shootings actually. However it turned out to be very difficult because of the limits of the lego toys. In the rate of 24fpc, a simple motion could be decomposed to some slight movements, they should be arranged in right place in order to make the whole sequence play smoothly. The lego bricks are too tiny to achieve that, so I decide to make it as 12 fps. I took Kit’s advice to drop some frames in my life action footage to match with 12fps after she recommended me a short film, Stanley Pickle. I was not clear about how to drop frames evenly without changing any frames or duration. I tried to do it manually and then found out it could be done in Nuke. I used O-flow nude to make the original two or three time faster, changed the solution to be frame from motion blur, and export as 12 fps. I didn't calculate very precisely when I was doing the stop-motions, and some problems about timing came up. I did some adjusting like hold some framed or re-align the image sequence to make them look more smooth and natural while I did the animating in Dragon Frame, which I used before. The most common toys I was working on with were the vehicles and mini-figures. Vehicles were easier to animate because they have moveable wheels, the trouble was to deal with the reflection and shadows, at meantime, the lighting , physical position, camera perspectives should match the life-action images I intended to use. The animation of mini-figures were a little more complicated, I planed some simple actions like, eating, sitting, talking, walking and dancing. I used a 24X24 green brick plate as a base, fixed it on the table with blu-tape. To sort out the annoying shadows on the plate, I came up with an idea to mount them up with some 2X2 bricks, so that I could cut off the shadow parts in post-processing without touching the mini-figures. As an consequence, I had to animate them as stepping in place in some walking scenes, this method was not too bad but left lots of work to do in compositing later. Another thing I couldn’t over come is the shallow depth of field while I was using a long focus of length or put the object very close to the lens, this is an physical barrier that obstructed me, I have to make it look better by some post-processing as well. When it comes to  compositing, which is the most important thing in all, I have too much to talk about. I did a 6-unit project about compositing last semester, Nuke was not strange to me anymore. I knew some basic nodes but not quite skilful. This project provided me a great opportunity to learn something new. In most of my materials, there are some complicated relationship between foregrounds, focus and background. Sometimes it’s not gonna to work if I simply put the lego layers over the background because some foreground elements should be on the top. Kit showed me a very helpful way to solve the problem, it needed the help of Photoshop to create an alpha ‘mask’ that make all the background black and leave foreground parts to be white, then make it work for a premult node with shuffle copy to connect the original footage and the final merge. This method helped me a lot in this work, some simple stuffs like telegraph pole or road signs are very easy to deal with, but the things like trees and wires took me much time to work in PS. The other issue was the solution to shadows. Firstly I remained the original shadows I got in the studio but they hardly match the natural lighting, I was suggested to key them out and do them digitally. It was not hard to do the shadows this hand-draw rotos, the tricky part was to animated them to match the motion of the objects. I am not skilful at doing animation in Nuke because I couldn't be patient enough to focus on every details, hopefully there are much space could be improved. This project eventually turned out to be a short 4.5 minutes, with a rate of 12 FPS. The whole process concluded  a variety of techniques and approaches to take a lot of stills of a Lego set and then animate them with the method of stop-motion, then composited them in the live-action footage shot before. I knew it would required much pre-works before the the shooting, so I allocated the first five weeks to them, did the things like test-shooting, storyboard and so on. Most of works were put in the second half of the semester, so at last time is a little bit pushing in the last few weeks, I was even doing studio shooting till the day before the assessment. The work load of my projects was a lot. Unlike the still photography, the production of this short film project was a really hard work matching perspective, lights and shadows precisely frame by frame. Approximately over 3800 pictures were shot in the animation studio, 3-hour length footages in total were taken in both life-action and green room , and almost 50GB files were stored. However, the actual used materials occupied less than one third of the lot. I regard this project as an interesting experiment, so the whole process is full of testing, practicing and learning, there were lots of remakes after lots of failures. I am glad that I did learn a lot from this ‘painful’ experience and I believe that I would do better than this in the future

[kalachand97-blog]

New Post has been published on Globeinfrom

New Post has been published on https://globeinform.com/how-clown-pants-saved-my-lifestyles/

How Clown Pants Saved My Lifestyles

Last January, after a lifetime on the East Coast, my then fiancée, Amanda, and I moved from The big apple to L. A. and right away fell in hapless portions. Our reasons for moving were sound. She’d been presented a good task out right here, and she or he become uninterested in winter. We had been approximate to get married—I’d already pledged to observe her anywhere she went. Plus I preferred the concept of trying something new. So I followed her to L. A.. We rented a house at the aspect of a hill above Hollywood and leased matching motors with sequential license plates. She labored on a studio lot a short force away, and that I worked from home, wherein I wandered around our house and marveled at the thick silence that had settled in around our lives.

One aspect nobody told us approximately Los Angeles is that it’s one of the loneliest towns within the international. All people who live here is aware of this, however, we did no longer. It’s flat regular splendor summons you out of doors, and then there you’re: outside. You and the coyotes and the palm timber and the guys hoping to get paintings on Away to Escape with Homicide. Neither folks had moved given that we had been embryos, basically. I stored getting caught on elemental matters, like what to put on. How do you dress whilst the weather requires without a doubt nothing of you? The big apple became the place I grew up, and what I wore there has been a blandly literal expression of the character I grew into: prideful however in general nameless, quiet, however, with any luck, tasteful. In Los Angeles, a town that prizes none of those features, 1/2 my cloth cabinet—darkish blue sweaters, scuffed-up shoes, clothes that might move from a wet sidewalk to a neon-lit subway vehicle to a stylish workplace and lower back, in The big apple manner—appeared efficiently useless.

The opposite half of made me feel like I nevertheless lived in New york however changed into somehow trapped here, journeying. It turned into a sensation I began to realize well: that dislocated feeling, like being on a permanent excursion from the sector I knew to be real.

and then I commenced to realize it even better. 13 days when we left NY, I learned that my mom has been diagnosed with breast most cancers. I used to be lower back in the city on a reporting trip while my father e-mailed my sister and me and told us we ought to find each other and expect a smartphone call. We sat around the smartphone in my sister’s Brooklyn condo even as she wrote the information down on a blue Publish-it note. Metaplastic—a form of most cancers so uncommon, my health practitioner father advised us, there was no setup a remedy. Her docs had determined to deal with it like its closest analog, some other shape of breast cancer I’d by no means heard of: triple bad. It becomes a Friday night time. My mom became approximately 90 miles away, at domestic in Philadelphia, her voice parabolic with worry. My sister and that I went out and drank ourselves blind. The following morning, drenched in helplessness, I was given on a aircraft lower back to Los Angeles.

It changed into Amanda who first intuited what I was doing. I used to be handling some matters, she knew that, and she was looking to give me area—but had I observed, possibly once I looked in the replicate, that every day I was sporting something extensively extraordinary from the Closing? As though the garments I owned have been a deck of cards and I used to be absentmindedly shuffling them. This will be been unremarkable given what I’d moved to La with. but I’d been shopping. I’d been replacing the matters I owned with… I guess I wasn’t certain what those new matters were.

It started out in a garb save in Culver town—I’d gone there with a close pal of mine, Sean, and our partners. Sean knew the co-founder, Josh Peskowitz, a touch. Josh had long gone into business with Levi’s to make these jeans—they were 501s but reduce wider, with greater panels of denim sewn into the legs, hemmed comically excessive, around the mid-calf. They have been…clown pants. Sean wouldn’t even pop out of his dressing room with them on. I did and became rewarded with Amanda’s disbelieving laughter. For something motive, I carried them to the sign up anyway. Maybe because they made me sense like someone aside from myself. Or due to the fact I wanted to head on the offensive against what was happening to my family, and this turned into the dumb reptile manner I chose to fight back. All I truly understand for sure is that I have become their owner. and then I kept going.

Bins from far-off places started out to reach our house weekly, each day. The things I wore were broadening, going horizontal. At GQ, we pledge allegiance to tailoring, to in shape. This turned into something one-of-a-kind. This changed into a David Byrne in shape—billboard-sized, rectangular—constructed from cotton and denim. a few days I looked like two guys status side by means of aspect, or Perhaps one very beaten boy. A just-landed paratrooper thrashing around in his own parachute. Hiding in the material. I did laps around our dwelling room, attempting out new shades and shapes.

The silhouettes that emerged from those experiments have been dopey and various. Amanda said she in no way knew who might come out of the bedroom at any given moment. To be sincere, I didn’t, either. I zigged, zagged, light to dark, light to colorful. Dignified to, frankly, ridiculous. I bought a turtleneck that had the word CACTUS right on the neck, upside down, a garment that I lacked the self-assurance to put on 98 percent of the time—however a man, those 2 percentage days. I cherished a grey Tim Coppens sweatshirt protected in stiff, random blotches of colour—the sort of garment so deliberately weird human beings needed to renowned it when I wore it. After Donald Trump’s election, I blacked out and came to on New Yr’s Eve carrying a turtleneck threaded with gold. Sean stated I seemed like a washed-up Italian film director attempting his twenty-third movie. It becomes now not intended as a compliment.

Subsequently, it was given to the point in which I desired to talk to a person approximately what I was wearing. someone professional. I used to be on a journey without knowing in which I used to be going, and i stored by accident guidance off the street. (here I think of the pinstriped pants by means of Our Legacy, thin and diaphanous and accommodating, that Amanda refused to let me wear out of doors the house. Or within the home.) Who may want to take my education wheels off, give me permission to move deeper? I wished a person to assist me sort out my emotions approximately garments—or the emotions that had led me to have feelings approximately clothes. a person to train me sufficient about style to get through this tough patch in my Lifestyles in a planned and aesthetically captivating manner. I wasn’t proud that this turned into what I had chosen to awareness on at a tumultuous time in my Life. However the idiot thoughts desires what it desires. Hiroki Nakamura. Fashion designer of the cult label Visvim. Famously elusive, but additionally famous in fashion circles for making clothes with the identical emotional the rest, that lingering inchoate magic, that a museum-caliber work of art has. He resided inside the zone I desired to enter, where garments were more than garments. I’d well-known his designs for years, even as in no way being able to come up with the money for even an unmarried object. The fringed moccasin sneakers he’d emerge as recognized for; the denim jackets, hand-completed, heavy with an air of mystery; one-of-a-type painted shirts; robust, historical-searching pants. Hiroki’s inspirations have been antique workwear, the turquoise, and silver of the Yankee Southwest, and the insane stages of artisanship he’d seen developing up in Japan—indigo dyers, silk-weavers, folks who had been glazing porcelain for hundreds of years.

He’d once labored at a skiing organization, Burton, which gave him a technical savvy. however in 2001, at age 29, he’d left to start Visvim. His garments are prohibitively highly-priced—flannels that cost $975, unstructured jackets that value two times that—and coveted by the likes of John Mayer and Kanye West. Hiroki’s pieces have the feel of artifacts—of uncommon materials assembly uncommon craftsmanship but coming collectively in familiar forms, like denims or parkas. They appear like they have been hand-sculpted after being dug out of the earth in a few far-off desolate tract. They have strength.

inside the few interviews, I should find, he becomes slightly…gnomic. A person of noticeably few phrases. However the matters he designed seemed reassuring. Like they’d fought off demons and received. I idea Perhaps he’d have a few advice on doing just that.

Rapidly earlier than Memorial Day, Amanda and I flew lower back to Big apple and drove north into the Catskills to get married. My mom wore a wig to approximate the hair she’d misplaced, and walked me down the aisle. by this factor, she turned into hollowed out from chemotherapy, but her doctors have been constructive—the same drugs that have been annihilating her were annihilating her cancer. She become going to live. For our wedding ceremony, she’d skipped her weekly chemo consultation so that she’d have the strength to pop. She danced! And for a second, everything went calm and quiet. In June, she had surgery—they took her ovaries, each breast. My father informed me he dreaded the instant after the stitches came out when the reality of what she’d lost might set in for her. After the surgical procedure, I flew to Philadelphia, and we took walks across the block—as soon as a day, after which twice, and then practically every hour. You cannot preserve my mother on a couch. by the fall, she turned into nearly herself once more. Her hair had begun to develop back; she got her first haircut in months. She had gone thru hell and got here out looking like Jean Seberg in Breathless. It becomes the maximum magnificent aspect. at the telephone, I told her how I’d been coping, and asked if she might thoughts if I went similarly, Perhaps even documented whatever bizarre quest I was on. She admitted that she’d noticed that my clothes had gotten more and more…whimsical. If I desired to write approximately that—approximately her—she became ok with that.

I reached out to Hiroki. It wasn’t clean—he’s, via layout, difficult to locate. He’s usually on an aircraft, or on an avenue experience without his cell phone, or meeting with the planet’s one armadillo-skin harvester in an undisclosed vicinity. Finally, some weeks after the election, I heard back. He become amenable to the concept of gambling therapist, of trying to dispense a few emotional and/or sartorial advice. He requested if we’d meet in January, in Paris.