#i have decade long working processes slowly chipping away at stuff as i find some time for it

[venterry]

you know im generally very pleased when creative projects feature the same kind of ideas i had for my unfinished works because then i can sort of see it realized even if i couldnt do it myself, however theres always the immediate follow up of daaammmnnnnnn now im gonna have to change this in my story lest i shall be forever hunted by the armada of Guy Who Has Only Ever Seen [currently popular piece of media]

[livesincerely]

it’s so easy (too easy) to love you, ch. 2 (END)

Also on Ao3. Chapter 1 here.

00000

“Jack is such a dumbass.”

Davey blinks his way out of his stupor. Tony is staring towards where Jack disappeared out the front door, his expression a mix of exasperation, annoyance, and sheer bafflement.

“Like, I forget sometimes, but he’s actually just a complete fucking moron, isn’t he?” Tony says. “I can’t believe he’s what counts as responsible adult supervision.”

Charlie heaves a massive sigh, shoving his math textbook to the side. “Yeah, that wasn’t his best moment.”

“Not his best moment?” Tony asks, incredulous. “How many years has it been at this point? Seven? Eight?”

“Eight,” Charlie gloomily confirms, shaking his head.

“Eight years we’ve been tryin’ to convince him to pull his head outta his ass and make a move and this is the shit he pulls? Really? He’s lucky that Davey’s basically a sure thing because Jesus Christ—“

Davey’s never been so confused in his entire life. Tony gears up into a full-on rant, splotches of red creeping further and further across his face with each word; Charlie clearly commiserates, chiming in with his own grievances every now and then.

And Davey’s listening, he’s doing his best to follow along, but he must not be understanding correctly. He can’t be. Because it sounds like Tony is implying that Jack…

“—I mean, he’s been in love with him for ages, so he musta had a plan, right? Some sorta idea, even if he’s too chicken shit to do anything with it? Well, I guess somethin’s better than nothin,’ but come on, you’d think he could do better than plantin’ one on Davey by accident—“

Davey’s heart does a series of pirouettes around his chest. He croaks out, “Wait, what?”

“I said, Jack shoulda done better than kissing you, then takin’ off—“

“No, I mean—“ Davey pauses, swallowing around a sudden dryness in his throat. “Go back to the part where you said Jack’s in love with me.”

“Uh, okay, what about it?” Tony says, brow furrowed—like he doesn’t understand what Davey’s getting at.

Davey stares at him. “Jack isn’t in love with me.”

Tony and Charlie exchange a loaded glance.

“Yes, he is, Davey,” Charlie says cautiously. Davey thinks he’d be more irritated with the gentle handling if it weren’t for the fact that his world is tilting off its axis.

“Jack isn’t in love with me,” Davey repeats. The words feel numb as they leave his lips, but he says them anyway. To think otherwise seems unfathomable. “Jack isn’t— Jack can’t be in love with me. I’d know if he was.”

“Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t ya?” Tony mutters.

“No, he is,” Charlie insists. “He’s, like, ridiculously in love with you.”

Davey doesn’t know where to even begin processing that statement. He leans back heavily in his chair and a small, distant part of his brain is grateful that he’s already sitting down, as this revelation would have sent him to the floor. The larger part of his brain is screaming.

“What makes you so sure?” he eventually asks, once he finds the words.

Tony throws him a look. “I have functional fucking eyes.”

“We’re sure, Davey,” Charlie cuts in patiently. “We are absolutely, definitely sure.”

The possibility rattles around Davey’s mind, then starts to take a more solid form. Jack’s in love with me, Jack’s in love with me, Jack’s in love with me.

“He never said anything,” Davey says.

“Yeah, no shit. If it was up to him he woulda taken that one to his grave,” Tony says, rolling his eyes. “But you don’t really need him to say anything—you can just tell.”

“I can’t tell!” Davey disagrees, the tone of his voice edging towards shrill.

“But that’s just you,” Charlie says, like that explanation makes any kind of sense. “Trust us, it’s really obvious to everyone else. Like, painfully obvious.”

“You do realize that the two of you have basically been married for years, right?” Tony asks, raising his eyebrows. “You’re, like, disgustingly domestic and you flirt with each other all the time. Like, all the time.”

Jack’s in love with me, Jack’s in love with me, Jack’s in love with me.

“Please get together already,” Charlie pleads. “I can’t take it anymore, and obviously Jack can’t be trusted to make good decisions—” Here he and Tony exchange a commiserating look; Davey can only imagine what they’ve been privy to when he isn't around. “—so it’s gonna hafta be you.”

“What do I do?” Davey asks, completely overwhelmed. “I mean, he ran away! Should I go after him?”

“What, are you gonna chase him down in the rain?” Tony says with a snort. “Just talk to him when he gets back.”

“Give him a chance to calm down,” Charlie advises. “And, uh, maybe you should calm down a bit too—you kinda look like you’re gonna pass out.”

“Well, that was kind of a lot,” Davey retorts, but the words have no heat behind them.

“Besides, it’s not like Jack can hide from you forever,” Tony adds with a shrug. “You know where he sleeps.”

Davey can’t decided if he loves or hates how reassuring that is.

00000

The streams of sunlight that cut through the blinds wake Davey up the next morning. A glance at the clock tells him that it’s nearly nine; he’s surprised he slept through Charlie and Tony leaving for school, but after the emotional upheaval of last night, they must have made a point not to wake him.

He lays there for a long time, blinking up at the ceiling and watching the overhead fan spin in lazy circles. Jack had sent him a single text last night, warning him that his phone was about to die and he had to stay late at work; Davey had tried to wait up for him, but finally fell asleep a little after three am. There’s a flicker of worry at the thought of Jack—wondering if he was making up excuses to avoid him, wondering what to say when he sees him next—but the anxiety of last night has transformed into something hazy and distant.

Davey’s been in love with Jack for years; he’d long since resigned himself to living with that love quietly. The only thing that’s changed is there’s a possibility that Jack loves him back, so really, what’s there to worry about?

Eventually, he throws back the covers and hauls himself upright. He pulls a sweatshirt on over his pajamas, disregarding the way it makes his already tousled hair even more of a disaster, and shuffles slowly down the hall.

The growl of his stomach reminds him that it’s well past his usual breakfast time. Davey wanders into the kitchen and begins pulling supplies out of the cabinets by route, and before he knows it, he’s got the beginnings of a breakfast going.

Everything takes on a different aspect in the light of this new day—details that Davey’s always known, but has never been fully conscious of. The skillet he grabs is a hefty cast iron monstrosity that belonged to his Bubbie—it lives at Jack’s place because Davey’s dorm’s kitchen is the size of a shoebox and hasn’t been renovated in decades, and also because Davey’s never been in the habit of cooking for one.

The coffee maker is new: he and Jack had to get a new one last month after their old one finally crapped out. They’d spent the better part of an hour at the local Bed, Bath & Beyond, bickering back and forth about which one to get until a salesperson finally took pity on them and pointed them towards a sturdy model solidly in the middle of their price range. Davey grabs his favorite mug—a pale blue one with a chip on the handle from where Tony dropped it one time—and fills it with the first pour of a fresh brew. The coffee, of course, is from his favorite place around the corner, a blend that Jack always claims is too expensive, but keeps on buying for him.

It’s scattered all around him, the countless ways that his and Jack’s lives are intertwined. Davey almost can’t believe that it’s taken him this long to notice, but maybe that’s just it: this has been his normal for ages, so why would he notice it?

Davey hums softly to himself as he works, the quiet punctuated only by the buzz of the refrigerator and the hiss of the coffee maker, which is why it’s so surprising to glance up and notice Jack standing in the doorway, his expression a little pinched around the edges and still dressed in his clothes from yesterday, though noticeably rumpled.

“Jack!” Davey says, startled. “I didn’t hear you come in. When did you get— wait, did you spend the night at the office?”

Jack looks at him funny, like he was expecting Davey to say something else. “I missed the last subway and I didn't have money for a cab.”

“Maybe you should start keeping some things at work,” Davey says, frowning slightly. “Like, a pillow and a toothbrush and stuff like that. You’ve been having a lot of night shifts recently and that couch in your break room looks like it’s older than I am, so I know it can’t be comfortable to sleep on—“

“Are you making breakfast?” Jack interrupts, one hand braced against the doorframe. There’s something pointed about the question: accusing and disbelieving and conflicted all at the same time.

Davey looks at the assortment of ingredients gathered around him—milk, flour, butter, eggs, blueberries—then down at the bowl of pancake batter he’s in the middle of whisking. “Uh… yes?”

Jack barks out a laugh, but it’s tinged with a hint of hysteria. “I thought you’d be— But instead you’re— Why?”

“I always make breakfast on Fridays,” Davey says, because it’s true. He beckons Jack forward with a nod of his head. “Here, come help me with this, you’re better at flipping the pancakes than I am.”

Jack scrubs a hand over his mouth, then seems to rally himself.

“Okay,” he mutters, clearly not intending for Davey to hear him. “Okay… so it’s like that. Okay.” Then louder he says—with an incredibly lackluster attempt at his usual grin that wouldn’t fool anyone, let alone Davey—“Yeah, sure Dave, I gotcha.”

Davey lifts himself up to sit on the counter next to the stove while Jack steps up to the cooktop. He watches silently as Jack pours the batter into the skillet, nudging at the edges with his spatula until they start to firm up. It should be an easy, simple moment together—something they’ve done countless times before. Instead, the space between them is thick with unspoken tension.

Davey considers his options. He takes in the stiff line of Jack’s shoulders and remembers the look on Jack’s face yesterday—soft affection burnt away by panic. He waits for just the right moment, then says, “So, Tony and Charlie seem to think that you’re in love with me.”

The reaction is immediate. Jack jerks in surprise—a full-body flinch—and the pan slips out of his hands. It hits the burner with a clattering bang and the half-cooked batter goes flying halfway across the kitchen, then hits the floor with a splat.

“Yeah,” Davey comments mildly, taking in the mess with no small measure of satisfaction. “That’s about how I felt too.”

Jack makes a strangled noise: like he’s going to deny it, like he thinks he has to deny it, like it’s never occurred to him to do otherwise. And sure, Davey had never considered broaching the topic either, but Davey’s not the one that kissed and ran.

“No, don’t even start with that,” Davey begins before Jack can say anything. “You’re in love with me, I know you’re in love with me. The boys finally told me last night—apparently it’s obvious, but I never would’ve guessed if they hadn’t said something. And if you hadn’t kissed me.”

He gestures at the remnants of breakfast. “That’s for leaving me to freak out last night, by the way. Also, Tony told me to tell you that you’re the World’s Biggest Dumbass, and I can’t say I disagree with him.”

Jack’s eyes have gone very wide. An assortment of emotions flit across his face, but none remain long enough for Davey to identify them.

“Sorry about that,” Jack eventually says. The words come out slow and a little jagged, like he’s having trouble keeping his voice steady. “I shouldn’t have done that—I didn’t mean to kiss ya, it just kinda happened—but I understand if you’re mad at me or if ya need me to—“

“Oh my god,” Davey says, shaking his head even as a surge of affection rushes through him, “you really are a dumbass.” He jumps down off the counter and holds out a hand. “Jackie, come here.”

Jack stumbles forward, visibly unsure. Davey can’t imagine what he’s thinking is about to happen, can’t imagine how Jack can stand here with him in their kitchen in their home and not know that they’re in this together, just like they always are.

Davey threads their fingers together, tugging Jack those last few steps so that they’re standing chest to chest. He brings his other hand up to Jack’s face, dragging his fingers over his forehead until the furrow in Jack’s brow relaxes, until his expression begins to brighten with tentative hope, then down around the curve of his jaw to tilt Jack’s head that much closer to his own.

Jack moves easily, immediately, when Davey touches him—only the slight hitch in his breath indicates that this is unexplored territory—and it’s so simple for Davey to just lean up and kiss him.

Soft. Sweet. It feels brand new. It feels like they’ve done this hundreds of times.

“Just in case that wasn’t clear enough,” Davey murmurs as they part, impossibly happy and feeling like his heart might burst with it. “I want you to know that I’m in love with you.”

Jack’s answering smile seems to light him up from the inside out. “Oh yeah? Well, word on the street is, I’m in love with you too.”

[resonanteye]

via http://resonanteye.net/current-events-condensed/

current events; condensed

A condensed post including short writings on current events.

CONSPIRACIES ARE NOT SECRET IN THIS CENTURY

open up? conspiracies? here’s the real one.

  if They want to “cull the weak” and control us better, what better way than to present a false choice between going back to work and risking lives, or slowly going broke at home?

it’s a false choice. there are hoarders, greedy fucks holding money they’re not entitled to, billions. enough for everything to be covered. hell, the Pentagon LOST enough money to pay EVERYONE’S rent and mortgage for the best six months. LOST IT.

The conspiracy? PRETEND THAT MONEY ISN’T THERE. force people to fight over scraps, pretend there are only two options. don’t let people come together and agree that TOO MUCH MONEY IS IN TOO FEW HANDS, because that might mean we can beat this thing.

unity among the poor? PREVENT AT ALL COSTS. if you kill a few hundred thousand people in the process, fuck it. that doesn’t matter to Them. They want to keep their grip on power, forcing us to behave like serfs working at their pleasure, dying for their capital gains. Living in their damn bunkers.

There is more than these two choices, don’t let them suck you in. the current garbage video circulating is MORE OF THEIR SHIT. it’s part of this. it’s not “secret info” or “exposing an evil plan”.

to get what They want – they’ve just got to keep us arguing about whether to open up or not. that’s it. that’s all they’ve got to do. circulate some fake anti science garbage to make sure it goes over easy.

and murder a ton of people to make another dollar.

THAT’S your conspiracy. THERE’S your elite takeover.

they don’t need micro chips, 5g, or any of this other shit. vaccines aren’t “Them”, the anti vax movement is THEM trying to murder the “useless”.

” WAKE UP, SHEEPLE ” it’s obvious as fuck and you don’t need to go out on any limbs to see it. it’s plain as day. they’re saying it out loud. there’s no need for this conspiracy to be secret. half of you are HAPPY TO JOIN IN.

stop that. join together. fight for the end of greedy leeches stealing from us then pretending that money is gone and they can’t help. the big banks? THEY FUCKING OWE US ONE. it’s time we collect, TOGETHER. right/left/middle. all of us. they owe all of us.

Divine is disgusted by slumming yuppies

SEGREGATION, A REAL THING

in a post about this photo, someone from Europe, younger, asked if segregation was a real thing, a real law in the US. comments were then closed, so I’ll post my reply here instead, in case anyone was not aware.

Elvis sits to eat at a segregated lunch counter while an elderly black woman stands, waiting for food to take away. she’s not allowed to sit there.

it was law, and when it wasn’t the law it was the unspoken rule, for a very long time.

lunch counter (restaurants of all kinds), bus sections, bathrooms, water faucets and schools were separated by race. the fight to desegregate schools is most well known, as it lasted a very long time and required buses, because people of color had also been segregated by neighborhood- many towns refused to sell and owners refused to rent to anyone of color in a “white area”. (the TV show “the Jeffersons” addresses this, and it’s also known as “redlining”)

many politicians on both sides of the aisle supported it, but the Democratic party eventually worked to pass the civil rights amendment and related bills to stop it, although there were those in the party who still argued in favor of these laws.

https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-said-desegregation-would-create-a-racial-jungle-2019-7

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Maddox

(of note- this happened after desegregation, that’s how strongly politicians felt about it! ten years in and they were still arguing that it had been a good thing.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance

after it legally ended, thanks to the civil rights movement, there was blowback; people trying to vote, to eat lunch, ride the bus, go to school, were viciously attacked by crowds or groups of white people.

FILE – In this May 28, 1963 file photo, a group of whites pour sugar, ketchup and mustard over the heads of Tougaloo College student demonstrators at a sit-in demonstration at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Miss. Seated at the counter, from left, are Tougaloo College professor John Salter,and students Joan Trumpauer and Anne Moody. John Salter, who also used the name John Hunter Gray, died Monday, Jan. 7, 2019 at his home in Pocatello, Idaho. Relatives say he was 84 when he died Monday after an illness. (Fred Blackwell/The Clarion-Ledger via AP, File) ORG XMIT: MSJAD701

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

during this time, due to so much police and community violence, the Black Panther formed to monitor and protect people.

https://www.wglt.org/post/director-chronicles-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed#stream/0

members of the Black Panthers, preparing to feed the community

GENERATION X

sure, we are slackers. yeah. we’re ok with staying home. you have just told a generation of latchkey tech addicts raised during the bridge from antenna TVs to HD internet streaming to sit at home. if you’d feed us, we wouldn’t even blink at it. this quarantine stuff? that’s not the hard thing.

but we’re watching friends and family die. a lot of us have been down this road before. we’ve watched right wing pigs (yes, I’ll say it) allow our friends to die before. we’ve been down this road of denial and greed and prejudice and all of it. we’ve seen what happens when politicians value money and ego over human lives, and we know it SUCKS ASS.

hell, we watched Reagan. Bush. Bush. Clinton, too-he was only a hair better. and so-

when we need to, we pound the pavement. we toss the bricks. we get arrested. we wipe mace out of our eyes and stampede.

we always tend to be masked, regardless of standards of the moment. I don’t think, in my life, I’ve been to a protest that didn’t have a contingent of masked people wishing to avoid cameras. Now, a protest for actual assistance for people? a real protest, a fight for better conditions, the 300-some strikes that have happened that the news ISN’T covering? yeah. surgical masks. they’re brilliant photos, but not as interesting for the crap media as a few fat guys with guns.

because that’s the joke they want to show us, yeah? not people actually fighting in solidarity, to protect each other, get better work conditions, protect the disabled, get better healthcare for all, support people financially… the shit the majority of people really want. no. they’re not covering that real shit.

the news, they like a spectacle.

we need to find ways to make the facts spectacular.

I have rarely seen my generation protest FOR corporate interests and find any such thing suspicious as all fuck. I don’t believe a bit of that shit. That’s paid for, that’s arranged, that’s a pony show. That’s the same tiny batch of zonked out cultists that don’t have a trump rally to travel to right now. it’s like a damn road show, the same hundred people, like some Boomer deadhead traveling bus shit. I don’t trust it and I don’t believe it. the older folks at them, yeah. they’re that little band of travelers. sure. but us?

Seattle police use gas to push back World Trade Organization protesters in downtown Seattle Tuesday, Nov. 30, 1999. The protests delayed the opening of the WTO third ministerial conference. (AP Photo/Eric Draper)

because even though we will go do Things, we are, in fact, ok with staying home.

and we don’t like your fucking company. and corporations bought our music and art and killed it in front of our eyes, and there’s no getting our trust back. and we will wear a goddamn busted ass thrift store sack before we spend money on slave-sewn clothes. and we would rather read and write and play music and watch movies all damn day, than go to jobs in cubicles.

War protesters and march to Gas Works Park protesting the US involvement in the Persian Gulf and the buid up to war against Irag January 15 deadline 1991 Seattle Washington State USA

I mean, we’ll usually go, because we gotta eat. so feed us. give us bread. you already poisoned the roses.

  THE ASSHOLE FACTORY

this is where your conspiracy videos are made. in the asshole factory.

what do you notice about these photos? do you see the threats? what kind of people are there?

it is almost like there’s a monthly event they’ve been going to, that’s been cancelled, where they could hold up trump signs and boo anything reasonable… wonder what that event is. where have you seen some of these faces before? I’ve seen a few in the rally photos and videos.

check out “small business” guy. who is he? does he own a “small business”, you think? (photos by Orin Louis)

  ON THE PANDEMIC

a lot of people talking about immunity/reinfection and that study.

that study is just saying we don’t know yet. we just don’t know yet.

it’s early days.

Coronavirus is not influenza, they’re two different families of virus. VERY different.

this is more related to the common cold (in its behavior)than to the flu. (the cold is a rhinovirus. SARS & MERS, and Covid-19, if you want to find out more about these viruses, don’t look up the flu-they are Coronaviruses.)

it is contagious the way a cold is, but it has serious effects on any part of the body with ace2 receptors. (simply put- blood, lungs, heart, kidneys, brain)

they have been working on a cold vaccine for decades. no success. BUT. again, it’s early days. there’s never been this kind of pressure for a vaccine for it. so, to be direct: we don’t know yet. they’ve never been this desperate, this well funded, to find a cold vaccine.

this could be a seasonal thing, eventually- it could mutate to be less lethal and become just another cold we can get every year. it could mutate to be even more vicious and we all are in serious danger all the time. it could create immunity, and some will be ok for a year or a month or a decade… it might not, and people can catch it again and worse.

we just don’t know yet. the whole reason we are isolating the way we are is to buy time for science to find these answers. we’re not in quarantine to “kill it off” or stop it. we are slowing it down so science can have time to find answers, so less of us die while that happens.

  every day we don’t infect other people, is a day in which researchers can work. we need them to work. they are doing that. every day we don’t infect other people, is a day this virus doesn’t get a chance to mutate and change. this helps a lot.

science needs time. all this economic mayhem- it’s to buy them time to help us, to figure it out. the answers won’t come right away and during this time we may hear things that are being tried and tested, some may not work at all, some may be worse than nothing, so information won’t be steady or always correct. when you read a thing, wait a day. read more about it. read the actual study- and if you can’t, wait a few days and read what scientific sources say about it (the lancet, NEJM, etc). don’t rely on NBC, fox, etc to do a great job reporting on science. you’ll have to have patience, even science is having to watch and wait while things are researched, right now.

nobody has the answers; it’s NOVEL. brand new.

they’re testing, they’re researching, they’re learning this thing’s secrets as fast as they can, while we wait that process out.

be as safe as you can be while we buy them the time.

image: pink pangolin drawing in frame

  COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE

FOR ACCURACY

You shouldn’t leave the house unless you absolutely have to: food, medicine, or other necessity of life. This includes going to other people’s houses.

Masks are good at protecting others if you are infected, and help protect you too, just not as much as others. Wear one.

Stores are closed, unless they provide food or medicine. Alcohol is a necessity for alcoholics who will have actual seizures and could die from withdrawal, so some of those are open. (Some states have been pressured into letting other things stay open, and people insist on going to church and being able to buy guns in public stores, but that’s political shit and you shouldn’t go places unless you have to.)

This virus is deadly to many people, even healthy ones, is as contagious as a common cold, and has killed more people in a month than the flu does in a year. You don’t want to catch it, and if you do, you want to catch it when doctors and nurses aren’t overworked from other people catching it too. There are 8 strains identified right now. This will change over time, because it’ll mutate- like every virus. EVERY virus.

Glovesw help, unless you change them after touching a contaminated surface. They’re good if used properly and if you’re not sure how to do that, don’t bother. Just wash your hands often.

Everyonen to stay home, but you can go outside- away from people. Staying a good distance from people is really the whole point of staying home.

There will be shortages of some things at the grocery store as supplies run out, and as things are shipped to replace them. Chill out.

The virus does spread through and sometimes kill children, but we weren’t aware of this until we had better information.

You will have many symptoms when you are sick, but you will be contagious for up to two weeks before you get sick. YOU WILL BE CONTAGIOUS WITH NO TEMPERATURE OR SYMPTOMS.

You really shouldn’t be eating restaurant food, unless you can reheat it. Wipe down or wash off your groceries.

You are safe if you maintain six feet distance from others, if everyone is masked and nobody is coughing or sneezing. If they are, you need about 27 feet of distance. Keep space from people.

The virus remains active on different surfaces for a time. The surface being porous may or may not matter; like many things, research by science will give better answers as they have time to figure it out.

We count the number of deaths but we don’t know how many people are infected because most places have not got enough tests to see who is infected. Until we can test everyone, stay home, stay away from people.

We have no treatment. There are clinical trials of many different drugs and at least one vaccine, right now, but it will take time to find out what works.

We should stay away from people to avoid spreading this virus until scientists can offer a treatment or preventative measure like a vaccine. There is no reason to infect people, help the virus mutate, or fuck around with this.

If you are an essential worker of ANY kind, you deserve a living wage, hazard pay, full PPE and kindness from everyone who needs you right now. we should be fighting for your safety, not to make things more dangerous for you.

Stop spreading misinformation. Science doesn’t know everything about this yet, information can and will change or become more specific as time goes by. Yes, business interests and governments have handled the entire thing like a clown show, but you don’t have to be part of making it worse.

  THE VALIDITY OF PROTESTING IN THIS TIME

protest for:

stronger unions

better pay

stronger social safety nets during a pandemic

your right to own and bear arms

your freedom of speech/freedom from unwarranted surveillance

safer working conditions

medical care for all

free education

fair elections

physical safety from police violence

safety from racist/hate crimes

NOT FOR:

fuck, BUYING things. don’t protest to be able to go buy shit? what the hell is wrong with you?!? you can buy a gun next month, dipshit. you can buy through private sale. fuck all the way off with that.

SOMEONE ELSE TO WAIT ON YOU (haircuts, restaurants, nails, tattoos, etc)

the right to block hospital entrances (we all saw the footage, shut the fuck up)

the right to gigantic church services during a pandemic. YOU CAN DO LIKE GRANDPA DID AND WATCH YOUR PREACHER ON THE TEE VEE.

going to a shit job that you’ve never liked instead of all the things above that would have allowed you to get through this shit without starving to begin with

by the way, local seed and feed stores are open nation wide; agriculture is considered an essential business. you can’t buy whatever the fuck at wallymart right now though, SO SORRY. maybe don’t even fucking shop there?

edit to add; if they were only endangering themselves I wouldn’t give a shit – but you know these fuckers are getting too close to store cashiers, walking the wrong way down narrow aisles, and touching every-fuckin-thing.

  also: 81% of people polled, from EVERY political group, think they should be staying home. and agree with that. THIS IS A CRAP PROTEST BY A TINY, UNIMPORTANT GROUP and should not be getting the coverage it is. they aren’t enough to restore an economy, let alone fill a small concert hall.

    I may split these into separate posts, if you’d like that, comment so I know people need/want that.

[chyrstis]

2 for... all your SR stuff, 6, 18 for your FC5 VERSE, Hana for 21

2: one of your favorite comments/reviews on this chapter/verse?

I’ve received a bunch of sweet comments on But I ain’t finished over the years, one in particular that’s stuck with me ever since mentioned how they couldn’t read any other SR fics without thinking, “Where’s V?” That they had been expecting her, and thinking of her still even then.

I don’t think I can really say just how much that means to hear at all, especially with an OC, and I’ll never, ever be able to forget it.

6: hardest/easiest character to write for?

Next in line is Joseph, but seeing as I’ve written him all of twice (and one of those times is in a hidden wip I’m slowly chipping away at) that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Having plenty of fic to read to help with this has totally been a blessing, though, because he’s one that I definitely want to understand better, and reading different interpretations of how he could think and operate has made him a little less mysterious to work with.

I’d probably say that John’s my number two for characters that are easy to write. He’s very fun to do long stretches of dialogue with, to the point that after writing him for a bit I usually end up with at least 3-5 additional wips with him involved in some capacity. …The jerk. And my two main wips have him present as well, so we’ll see if more manage to spring up in the process.

18: any fanmixes you’ve made for this fic/verse?

Absolutely. :D I think one of the first things I did soon after starting to play the game was sort through music I’ve heard before to cobble together a mini-playlist to write to.

But Hana’s is here! I plead the fifth on the others.

21: this character’s best/worst memory? 

Worst Memory - Easily the night Hana lost her mother as a teenager. She’d been out late, messing around with friends without really thinking twice about it only to find out hours after the fact (and after she’d returned home and was too out of it to check her messages) that her mother was in the hospital. Her mother had been on duty (after being called in on her day off due to a shortage of officers) only for things to take a turn, and she’d been shot in the process.

Hana barely had time to react to the news before she was hit with more after, and hearing that her mother hadn’t made it through surgery brought her whole world down completely.

Best Memory - There’s a couple here. Dragging herself through the Academy and seeing herself in uniform for the first time post-graduation made her feel like she wasn’t anywhere near the fuck up she feared she was (and had become).

But second, decades later outside of the bunker sitting with her family well within reach; flowers placed in her hair by her kids, and the two men she somehow fell in love with in spite of everything - she’s at peace.

[nookishposts]

Weighting

If you’ve grown weary of mid-life navel-gazing and revelations, you can skip this one; I promise not to take it personally. Caveats are us.

I’ll soon be 56 and in general have found my 5th decade to be kinda neat. I finally appreciate all the menopause jokes first-hand, I’ve gotten better at saying “no” to things I don’t want to do, I’ve stopped feeling guilty about not being able to fix everything and stopped feeling responsible for other peoples’ happiness. Like most females my age, I was raised to compromise and keep the peace, to be a good neighbour and host, to avoid rocking the boat, and so on. Some of those lessons have stuck, others not so much, but a few of the qualities of older woman I have admired through the years are starting to show signs of appearing in me. And that is a good thing. Sometimes. Mostly. I think.

At this age, my bullshit tolerance has gone way down. I have discovered I can get to the point more quickly and still manage to be polite. Whiter hair means I get taken a little more seriously and I am not above using that; its nice to be the recipient of a seat offered on the bus instead of the one offering. I still stand for my elders but if there are youngers around I am content to let them step up first. Youngers expect me to say either wisely profound or naively stupid things and I enjoy mixing them up deliberately. Sometimes something comes out of my mouth that I don’t expect and I find myself thinking; “Hmph..not bad.” knowing I may not remember it tomorrow. A dicey memory has it’s advantages; I can summon a wide-eyed innocent face and hold it for at least 4 seconds before it's obvious that I’m lying. You gotta be quick.

It takes me longer to do most things, the days go by much faster than they once did, and if something has to give it may as well be the BS. The problem is that having learned not to give room to anybody else’s nonsense means I have also been forced to face up to some of my own. Damn, there’s always a catch.

I’m pretty active. I use my body a lot in some of the jobs I do and I am the labour force around the house as well. I have never been much of a runner (don’t enjoy it) and have been an intermittent cyclist (unpredictable knees), but could traditionally walk for miles with or without a dog, swim till my muscles turn to jelly, and dance until the wee hours. I go to the gym 2-4 times per week to do both treadmill and strength training. I volunteer regularly, usually in physical ways. I do yoga on and off, especially in winter. But I am 5 feet 5 inches tall and 275 lbs. (Not even my heaviest) My heart is really strong as are my muscles. But I have gotten away with too much for too long and the BS I feed myself needs to be re-portioned for better digestion and distribution.

The following statements are true:

I am broad shouldered

I carry a lot of muscle

I come from a long line of larger people, female and male

I know exactly how to eat well and exercise effectively. I even taught it.

The next statements are also true:

I avoid mirrors because the chassis does not reflect the sassy; it shocks me every single time I see myself outside of my own head.

I use a CPAP machine because of apnea, my weight prevents me from restorative sleep if I don’t.

I take a medication for pre-diabetes, another for blood pressure and a third for GERD

I rarely dance in public any more because it looks like there’s a litter of puppies squirming around my middle, in my back pockets, and under my chin.

I stopped playing guitar and singing in public because I physically cannot reach the fret board comfortably or breath well enough to hit the notes fully.

I am slowly losing the ability to do some of the things I love most.

So, navel-gazing (and critical thinker that I try to be) has shown me a few home-truths. Some but not all of my behaviours are learned. Think about how we use food to celebrate or punish: “It’s Christmas, have some more boozy fruitcake!”. “If you don’t behave yourself, you’ll get no dessert!” “Its a buffet, better get your money’s worth.” “ Clean your plate, other people in this world are starving.” We all heard and sometimes have perpetuated those messages. We are surrounded by Super-Sized everything, packaged for convenience and crammed with stuff our bodies don’t actually need much of.

And some of my behaviours are totally self-imposed. Tim Hortons cheese tea biscuits and a coffee on the way to work at least 3 mornings a week. Choosing potato chips over a handful of grapes. Not eating enough protein or drinking enough water throughout the day. Slouched in a chair with the laptop, reading nonsense articles. Having one more slice of pizza because I can. Fries on the side of anything eating out. Buttery toast at 9pm. The common denominator is that those choices are easy and fast. No thought, no planning, just unconscious cruise-control laziness. Satisfying the subterranean sugar miners.

I’ve known for years about emotional eating. Mum fed us when we were upset and when we had done well. Lean years meant inexpensive carbs that filled the belly; bread was the go-to, as were potatoes. Mine was the first generation to experience pre-packed, processed foods that meant less time in the kitchen. We were the fast food generation, feeling all modern and chic and powerful in our freedom to have anything on the menu. Those menus created some false expectations and some serious side effect habits hard to break. I have contemporaries who are addicted to diet soft drinks and lite cigarettes, all of them intelligent and capable people.

Raised to be a people pleaser, I learned early to swallow my negative emotions, stuff them down and drown them in something momentarily satiating. I also learned to feed others, to make sure they had plentiful choices and second helpings. I still enjoy cooking, hosting picnics and brunches, and I still over-do. Which means leftovers. Which must not be wasted. Becoming waist-ed instead.

And, like any child, I don’t like to be denied or told what to do, even by myself.

I was reading recently that we carry our heart-aches in the form of extra pounds around our middles., that we quite literally pad our hearts against hurt by insulating them in extra fat. I got thinking about it and realized that that rings some truth for me. I did not too badly until I got married in order to breathe life into an already troubled relationship. We’d been together a decade and it made sense to take that next step as a way of cleaning the slate with a public declaration. Lots of people have done it, and it seldom works. I lived with a person who did not hesitate to express volatile and complicated emotions but could not hear mine. She would graffiti the room in complaints and blame and walk away feeling ever so much better, but leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. Pointing it out, asking for accountability, disagreeing, only made things worse. I had neither the patience nor the courage to stand my ground and insist on equal space. But I developed literal guts by eating the frustrations that the situation left me with. I enabled her behavior and I enabled my own. The fatter I got the more she pointed it out and we both behaved badly in our own ways in response. So, in time and out of desperation, I ended the marriage and ultimately it was the kindest thing I could have done for either of us. But even that I had to do alone. She needed someone to blame and I just needed out.

But here we are all these years later and its only now at this age that I can understand and articulate all of that. I am in a much healthier and much more balanced partnership with someone who loves me for who I am , yet I am still distracting myself from fears and failures with dis-comfort food. The yelling is all internal. I am finally safe enough and loved enough and wise enough to address the real issue, which has always been mine. Its about courage. That’s the key I have come to understand that I am looking for.

There’s the kind of courage which will spur you to rescue a drowning person, pull a child from in front of a car, or march on government in a protest on behalf of human rights. There’s a kind of courage upon which we float our hopes for the inherent good in people eventually winning out against the world’s evils. I think I understand those ones, and can probably call on them as needed.

But the courage I seek is totally an inside job; its that nugget of risk deep in my fears that grows into the courage to change both habits and perspective. It’s the courage to believe that scarcity is unlikely to ever be an issue and it’s okay to not be stuffed beyond the ability to feel and move freely. Its the courage to fail, more than once, in the quest to do better. Its the courage to let go of those nasty looping messages in my memory banks, fed to me by those loved ones and collaterals fighting battles of their own with tools as dull and pointless as mine. Its the courage that understands perfection is not a real goal, but self-awareness and self-forgiveness, and self-appreciation are attainable once the self-loathing and shame are shed like the tired, prickly moth-eaten cloaks they always were. It will take a bit of faith, a bit of discipline, and the determination to just keep trying, no matter what, that even giving up is allowed to be temporary as well as a stepping stone.

I recently began a project of helping others to tell their stories. The biggest and most awkward gift in that process is that I also need to tell my own. Honoring the truth of my history as well as my dreams, knowing that some things can change and will, with or without me. I’d rather be part of making  choices on a more realistic and  balanced menu than remain a victim of the one I have advertised to myself up to now. With a side of compassion. Hold the B.S. please, I’m adulting.

[s-c-i-guy]

A New Blast May Have Forged Cosmic Gold

For decades, researchers believed that violent supernovas forged gold and other heavy elements. But many now argue for a different cosmic quarry.

Across history and folklore, the question of where Earth’s gold came from — and maybe how to get more of it — has invited fantastical explanation. The Inca believed gold fell from the sky as either the tears or the sweat of the sun god Inti. Aristotle held that gold was hardened water, transformed when the sun’s rays penetrated deep underground. Isaac Newton transcribed a recipe for making it with a philosopher’s stone. Rumpelstiltskin, of course, could spin it from straw.

Modern astrophysicists have their own story. The coda, at least, is relatively clear: About four billion years ago, during a period called the “late veneer,” meteorites flecked with small amounts of precious metals — gold included — hammered the nascent Earth. But the more fundamental question of where gold was forged in the cosmos is still contentious.

For decades, the prevailing account has been that supernova explosions make gold, along with dozens of other heavy elements on the bottom few rows of the periodic table. But as computer models of supernovas have improved, they suggest that most of these explosions do just about as well at making gold as history’s alchemists. Perhaps a new kind of event — one that has traditionally been difficult, if not impossible, to study — is responsible.

In the past few years, a debate has erupted. Many astronomers now believe that the space-quaking merger of two neutron stars can forge the universe’s supply of heavy elements. Others hold that even if garden-variety supernovas can’t do the trick, more exotic examples might still be able to. To settle the argument, astrophysicists are searching for clues everywhere, from alchemical computer simulations to gamma-ray telescopes to the manganese crust of the deep ocean. And the race is on to make an observation that would seal the deal — catching one of the cosmos’s rarest mints with its assembly line still running.

Supernova Trouble

In 1957, thephysicists Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle laid out a set of recipes for how the lives and deaths of stars could fill in almost every slot in the periodic table. That implied that humans, or at least the elements making up our bodies, were once stardust. So was gold — somehow.

“The problem itself is rather old, and now for a long time has been the last stardust secret,” said Anna Frebel, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Big Bang left behind hydrogen, helium and lithium. Stars then fused these elements into progressively heavier elements. But the process stops at iron, which is among the most stable elements. Nuclei bigger than iron are so positively charged, and so difficult to bring together, that fusion no longer returns more energy than you have to put in.

To make heavy elements more reliably, you can bombard iron nuclei with charge-free neutrons. The new neutrons often make the nucleus unstable. In this case, a neutron will decay into a proton (popping out both an electron and an antineutrino). The net increase of a proton leads to a new, heavier element.

When additional neutrons are thrown into a nucleus more slowly than it can decay, the process is called slow neutron capture, or the s process. This makes elements such as strontium, barium and lead. But when neutrons land on a nucleus faster than they decay, rapid neutron capture — the r process — occurs, beefing up nuclei to form heavy elements including uranium and gold.

In order to coax out the r-process elements, the Burbidges and their colleagues recognized, you would need a few things. First, you have to have a relatively pure, unadulterated source of neutrons. You also need heavy “seed” nuclei (such as iron) to capture those neutrons. You need to bring them together in a hot, dense (but not too dense) environment. And you want all this to happen during an explosive event that will scatter the products out into space.

To many astronomers, those requirements implicate one specific kind of object: a supernova.

A supernova erupts when a massive star, having fused its core into progressively heavier elements, reaches iron. Then fusion stops paying off, and the star’s atmosphere crashes down. A sun’s worth of mass collapses into a sphere only about a dozen kilometers in radius. Then, when the core reaches the density of nuclear matter, it holds firm. Energy rebounds outward, ripping apart the star in a supernova explosion visible from billions of light years away.

A supernova seems to tick the necessary boxes. During the star’s collapse, protons and electrons in the core are forced together, making neutrons and converting the core into an infant neutron star. Iron is abundant. So is heat. And the glowing ejecta keep expanding out into space for millennia, dispersing the products.

By the 1990s, a specific picture had begun to emerge in computational models. Half a second after the core of a massive star collapses, a gale of neutrinos streams out, continuing for up to a minute. Some of that wind would blow off iron nuclei that could serve as seeds, along with lots and lots of neutrons.

“That was the hope,” said Thomas Janka of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. “This was, I would say, the most interesting and the most promising site for forming the r-process elements for almost 20 years.” And the explanation still has its adherents. “If you open a textbook, it will tell you that the r process is made by supernova explosions,” said Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

But as supernova models got more and more sophisticated, the situation got worse, not better. Temperatures in the neutrino-driven wind didn’t seem to be high enough. The wind might also be too slow, allowing seed nuclei to form so abundantly that they wouldn’t find enough neutrons to build up heavy elements all the way up to uranium. And the neutrinos could also convert neutrons back into protons — meaning there might not even be a lot of neutrons to work with.

That left theorists circling back to one of the strongest points of the supernova model. Supernovas make neutron stars, which seem indispensable to the process.

“They are fantastic for this type of nucleosynthesis,” said Stephan Rosswog at Stockholm University. “You start with this gigantic amount of neutrons that you don’t have anywhere else in the universe.” But a neutron star also has a strong gravitational field, he said. “The question is just, well, how can you convince the neutron star to eject something?”

One way to crack open a neutron star would be to use the same explosion that birthed it. That didn’t seem to work. But what if you came back later, and tore one open again?

The Neutron Star Story

In 1974, radio astronomers found the first binary neutron star system. With each orbit, the pair were losing energy, implying that one day they would collide. The same year, the astrophysicists James Lattimer and David Schramm modeled what would happen in such a situation — not specifically the clash of two neutron stars, since that was too complicated to calculate at the time, but the similar merger of a neutron star and a black hole.

While supernova explosions can briefly outshine the entire galaxies that host them, neutron stars are extremely difficult to see. The supernova that produced the Crab nebula was observed by many different cultures in the year 1054; the neutron star it left behind wasn’t detected until 1968. A merger of two neutron stars would be still more difficult to find and understand. But although nobody had ever seen one, this kind of exotic event could be responsible for the r-process elements, Lattimer and Schramm said.

Picture two neutron stars approaching their final embrace. In the last few orbits around each other before glomming together into a bigger neutron star or a black hole, the pair are wracked by enormous gravitational tides. The collision ejects enormous amounts of material.

“Kind of like you squeeze a tube of toothpaste, stuff comes flying out the end,” said Brian Metzger, a theoretical astrophysicist at Columbia University. Behind each neutron star stretches a tail, with perhaps 10 neutrons to every proton, all heated to billions of degrees. Heavy nuclei form in about a second. Because they have so many extra neutrons they are unstable, radioactive. They glow, eventually decaying to things like gold and platinum.

At least, this is how it works in simulations.

A Golden Galaxy

Neutron star mergers and supernovas are both capable of making making r-process elements. But there’s a big difference in just how much each of those options can make. Supernovas produce perhaps our moon’s worth of gold. Neutron star mergers, by contrast, make about a Jupiter-size mass of gold — thousands of times more than in a supernova — but they happen far less frequently. This allows astronomers to search for the distribution of r-process elements as a way to track their origins.

“Think of r-process [elements] as chocolate,” Ramirez-Ruiz said. A universe enriched in the r-process elements predominantly by supernovas would be like a cookie with a thin, evenly spread glaze of chocolate. By contrast, “neutron star mergers are like chocolate chip cookies,” he said. “All of the chocolate, or the r process, is concentrated.”

One way to assess the distribution and rate of r-process events is to look for their byproducts on Earth. Long after supernovas light up the Milky Way, the nuclei they make can coalesce onto interstellar dust grains, slip past the solar and terrestrial magnetic fields, and fall to Earth, where they should be preserved in the deep ocean. A 2016 paper in Nature that looked at radioactive iron-60 in the deep-sea crust found traces of multiple nearby supernovas in the past 10 million years. Yet those supernovas did not appear to correspond with r-process elements. When the same team looked in deep-sea crust samples for plutonium 244, an unstable r-process product that decays over time, they found very little. “Whatever site is creating these heaviest elements is not a very frequent one in our galaxy,” Metzger said.

Not everyone agrees with that conclusion. Another team, led by Shawn Bishop at the Munich Technical University, still hopes to find radioactive plutonium on Earth from recent supernovas. In work now underway, his team is searching for hints of r-process elements in sediments that contain microfossils: the tiny remnants of bacteria that take in metals from their environment to make magnetic crystals.

Astronomers can also look for evidence of a chocolate chip-cookie universe farther afield. The r-process element europium has one strong spectral line, allowing astronomers to look for it in the atmospheres of stars. Among the old stars that are found in the halo of the Milky Way, observed r-process signatures have been hit or miss. “We can find two stars that have very similar, say, iron content,” Ramirez-Ruiz said. “But their europium content, which is the signature for the r process, can change by two orders of magnitude.” Because of this, the universe is looking more chocolate chip than chocolate glaze, argues Ramirez-Ruiz.

Astronomers have found an even cleaner example. Many dwarf galaxies experience just one brief burst of activity before settling down. That gives them a narrow window for an r-process event to occur — or not. And up until 2016, not one star in any dwarf galaxy seemed to be enriched in r-process elements.

That’s what made the phone call MIT’s Frebel received one night so surprising. Her graduate student Alex Ji had been observing stars in a dwarf galaxy called Reticulum II. “He called me at two in the morning and said ‘Anna, I think there’s a problem with the spectrograph.’” One star in particular appeared to have a strong europium line. “I made this joke. I said, ‘Well, Alex, maybe you found an r-process galaxy,’” Frebel said. He actually had, though. Reticulum II has seven stars enriched in the r-process elements, all implicating a single, otherwise uncommon event.

New Kinds of Supernovas

To advocates of the neutron star merger model, all of this fits nicely. Neutron star mergers are naturally rare. Unlike a single massive star collapsing and going supernova, they require two neutron stars to form, to be in a binary orbit, and to merge perhaps a hundred million years later. But critics also point out that they might be too rare.

In our galaxy, neutron star mergers could happen as rarely as once every hundred million years, or as often as once every 10 thousand years — rates that differ by a factor of 10,000. “The thing that shook me is: The people who were saying neutron star mergers are going to explain the r process were also taking this highest rate,” said Christopher Fryer, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

When Fryer and colleagues used more moderate guesses about how often neutron star mergers occur and how much r-process material they yield, they found that neutron star mergers can explain only 1 percent of the r-process elements observed in the universe. And if the true rate lies at the lowest end, they could contribute a hundred times less again. “More people are going back to ‘Huh, what other sources of r process can we have?’” Fryer said.

That’s where supernovas may see their stock rise again. If perhaps 1 percent of core collapse supernovas behave differently than the standard simulations predict, they might also be able to make considerable amounts of r-process elements in a chocolate chip pattern. One way to salvage a supernova explosion is if a star detonates with massive, magnetically powered jets instead of neutrinos, argues Nobuya Nishimura, an astrophysicist at Keele University in England, and his colleagues in a recent paper. That would create a rapid explosion of neutron-rich matter, allowing seed nuclei to grow into at least some of the r-process elements. “It’s not like you can have a tea party there,” Fryer said. “You just need to stay [in that region] for 100 milliseconds.”

The answer, many astronomers believe, will end up being some kind of compromise. That shift may already be happening. “R process is really not r process anymore now,” Frebel said. Maybe it can be broken in half, with the “weak” r-process elements lighter than barium coming from supernovas, and the heavier ones like gold coming from neutron star collisions.

Listening for the Boom

And there’s one more dark horse still lurking out there: the merger of a neutron star and a black hole, which Lattimer and Schramm had originally considered. The neutron star in the pair would still eject material, just as before. But the rate of those events is even fuzzier. “Maybe even they are the dominant ones producing r-process elements,” Janka said. “We don’t know. We need better data.”

That data may already be on its way. The last few orbits of a neutron star merger or a merger between a neutron star and a black hole warp and drag space-time so much that gravitational waves roar out of the system. LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), which has already succeeded at “hearing” such a crescendo between merging black holes, is approaching a sensitivity that should let it start picking up neutron star mergers in distant galaxies. The longer it doesn’t, the less often it seems these events occur. Once LIGO reaches its full design sensitivity, a nondetection could spell doom for neutron star merger models. “If they still have not found something, there will be a moment in which Enrico [Ramirez-Ruiz] and Brian [Metzger], etcetera, should wonder, and get back to the board,” said Selma de Mink, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam.

The dream, though, is to go beyond making inferences about r-process events and see one actually in action. Two teams may have already done so. In 2013, the Swift satellite picked up a short gamma-ray burst: a type of event also attributed to colliding neutron stars. Other telescopes zoomed in on the aftermath.

In simulations, an observational signature called a kilonova follows neutron-star mergers. The radioactive nuclei made through the r process spread and glow, causing the system to ramp up in brightness for about a week before starting to fade. And these elements are so opaque that only red light can penetrate out. The 2013 event matched both predictions, but it was so far away that it was hard to fully interpret. “It’s not compelling but it’s suggestive,” Metzger said.

Many of the astronomers who made that discovery are now part of teams hoping to find a closer, more definitive kilonova. That entails pouncing on a LIGO signal from merging neutron stars and quickly finding its source in the sky with more traditional telescopes — perhaps even measuring its light spectrum using something like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. In doing so, it may be possible to see a cloud of newborn r-process elements — or to infer something from their absence. “The world of gamma-ray bursts has trained us very well,” said Wen-fai Fong of the University of Arizona. “It is definitely like a race. How quickly can you react?”

[mellofellowblog]

Looking Backwards to Move Forwards

*WARNING: LONG INTROSPECTIVE LIFE STORY REFLECTIVE POST INCOMING*

As an aside from the daily exercises and actual songwriting that you don’t see here I’ve taken the plunge and started getting songwriting lessons as a kind of third prong to my attack on my writing process. Apart from a couple of songwriting workshops and little insights from my old guitar teacher at school over a decade ago my entire ‘songwriting journey’ has been just doing it, chipping away every now and then and glacially figuring out what works and what doesn’t. So this one on one learning experience is quite new to me and a little scary since it makes things really feel like i’m starting again, like a fully grown 30 year old going back to high school to study algebra or something. Well, i guess it’s probably a lot closer to going back to uni and getting a tutor, but even that gives off a feeling of going backwards to a part of my life that I’ve ‘moved on’ from. It might seem like i’m throwing everything I’ve built out the window and starting again this year with my overhaul, but I think its really more so that I am hyper focussing now on something that always had an air of “...and later I’ll put in the work and hone this properly”. That said I think its important to acknowledge where I’ve come from and give my old self a little bit of props despite the fact that I’m mentally burning all the progress I’ve made down, because really, although I hope this ‘reset’ helps improve my songwriting a lot and fixes areas that I have neglected over the years at the end of the day nothing can really erase the instincts I carry in regards to music that I’ve built up over the years. That and theres still a part of me that rejects the notion of putting myself out there as “starting again” when if I stop to think about it, I have actually put in a lot of work over my life so far. Obviously i still feel that I have a fair ways to go, but I thought it would be fun to look back at my humble beginnings and give a rough timeline of musical events that have got me to where I am today, with a rough focus on songwriting. So basically a TLDR mellofellow life history lesson that nobody asked for but I thought might be fun to do. Welcome to my musical “this is your life”

1998/1999?: My first guitar Not sure if i was 8 or 9, but at around that age on one of our family trips to my grandparents in Mount Gambier (South Austrailia) my dad bought me a 3/4 nylon string acoustic guitar. I remember he got a good deal on it because when removing the price sticker it peeled off a little section of the paint on the bridge next to the saddle. My best friend at the time was getting lessons and I don’t think there was anything really extra that motivated me to get one, but I have distinct memories of the day we bought the instrument home and I had it sat on the bed at my Grandparents place, blindly pulling at the strings to make sound come out of this foreign wooden box. No idea that this was the start of something that would consume my life in years to come.

1999?-2003: First lessons from a one horse town I grew up on a farm near a very small town in rural Victoria called Derinallum and went to the appropriately named local school: Derrinallum College. with about 20 kids per year (that always dwindled towards yr 12 due to most people either changing schools or dropping out to pursue farming) it had a pretty small population of about 90 people, but there was still a music teacher who taught everyone who wanted to learn all the basic instruments they wanted to from flute to trumpet, piano and yes, guitar. I remember having a few different teachers early on as people would come and go, the first one showing me my first G chord and giving me a chart for “knocking on heaven’s door” much to my fathers delight, but soon after my regular teacher had started me basically learning single note flute music with letters written under the dots (something that simultaneously gave me a keen ear for picking up melodies but absolutley ruined any chance at sight reading properly). I remember picking what I considered the hardest tunes to play at the annual performance recitals, the melody from “the entertainer” and the bassline from “the theme from Peter Gun” are pieces that stand out in my mind but my biggest claim to fame from this point in my life was figuring out how to play the melody from “all the small things” by blink 182 all by myself by ear. I felt like I was freaking Mozart not needing to be taught or read something and still being able to play it and that discovery gave me those initial inklings of the potential for what I could do with this wooden box.

2004: New school, new lessons and the Led Zeppelin live dvd So at the ripe age of 13 I had made the big move up in life from Derrinallum to Ballarat Grammar boarding school in Ballarat, Victoria. It was a pretty wild transition from the get go, but musically was initially a little discouraging as at my first guitar lesson (from an amazing human being Laurie) I found out that I had basically needed to start all over again and that the biggest carry over from my entire 4 years of musical pursuits had yielded me the one G chord i still remembered. It was acknowledged that the solo flute lines I had learned were good for training my ears, but really had no real value for the things one would typically learn in a guitar lesson. Laurie had asked me what type of music i enjoyed or would like to start learning and I remember saying that I didn't really had any preference for music, that I liked “anything with a bit of a beat” so I quickly was given my first chord charts in 4 years and it looked like I was going to become a acoustic rhythm type of guy. But then everything changed about halfway through that year when one of my friends got a dvd of a little band called Led Zeppelin... Apparently the year before at the end of year house performance the year 12s had done a rendition of Stairway to Heaven which got my friend to chase up this dvd but oh my god. I have never had such an influential experience as I did watching that live version of stairway. I remember playing that song on repeat for months every morning before class (I’m sure much to my 6 roommates detest) and from there everything about my relationship with my guitar changed. Rather than just putting in a half hours effort before each lesson out of worrying I would disappoint my teacher, I was practicing 3, 4, 5 hours a day for just the fun of it working on my magnum opus of being able to play Stairway to Heaven all the way through. I remember slowly accumulating the entire Zep discography, learning each section of stairway bit by bit until finally being able to nail everything including the solo on my black ashton acoustic. I had made friends with a boy who had a real Gibson electric guitar and remember being dead set on getting a Les Paul of my own, scoping out my dream guitar like Jimmy Page’s on a school field trip to Chapel street in Melbourne and begged my parents for one that Christmas, to which they obliged and I was over the moon.

2005 - 2007: Musical identity and my first songwriting baby steps With a full back catalogue of Led Zeppelin and my Epiphone Les Paul at my side I flourished musically over the next couple of years, cementing my identity as a “long haired guitar guy” mastering improvising blues licks and the discographies of Zep, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Sabbath, Queen, Cream and anything else that came from that same vein of guitar centric late 60s/early 70s music up to an unhealthy obsession with Van Halen and guitar virtuosos. I ended up getting school colours for music in my year 11 and 12 for the work I was doing in the school jazz band and by the end of my tenure at high school was expanding my musical repertoire to singing and piano because even though my quick pentatonic blues licks were the cornerstone of what I enjoyed playing I still had some shred of understanding that if there wasn’t also a song behind the guitar solos, things quickly became a little too wanky for my liking even at the time. Van Halen seemed the perfect blend of being able to show off when the solo came, but still ultimately still be servicing the bigger picture of a song. I would print off chord charts from entire Pink Floyd and Beatles albums and sit in the practice rooms and sing them front to back at the piano as a bit of a break from my ruthless 5+ hour guitar practice schedule. Near the end of year 11 my beloved guitar teacher was putting on a songwriting workshop where I learnt the basics of songwriting and started putting together my own really embarrassing silly songs. I remember finishing my first one called “Clayman’s Desire” which was an acoustic folk track in the vein of Queen’s “39′” about a little clay person who goes on an adventure to make friends. Even though there was a huge disconnect between the guitar centric virtuosic stuff i was playing I still felt super proud of it. I had high hopes that just like Brian May in Queen I would find a vocalist who would sing over all the riffs and music I was coming up with, but I would still get a song or two on each album that I would sing myself for variety and a way to show an extra notch in my belt not just as a guitarist, but as a guitarist who could also write songs too. Throughout year 12 I kept a little songwriting book where I would write poetry in hopes that i would turn everything into songs. It was all nonsensical wannabe surrealist kinds of stuff inspired by songs like “I am the walrus” by the Beatles, a band that I was gorging on in between my shred guitar escapades. By the end of year 12 in the holidays before starting uni the following year I made my first “album” of basically demo recordings on a CD i called “The Project”. It included some psychy guitar riff instrumentals as well as some very basic songs that were more or less just vessels for me to put little guitar solos into all recorded either DI or with the one microphone I owned (drums too). Still nothing like the shred guitar i was still all about playing, but uniquely me and something I felt that if i kept at it would eventually get to a point where i could write things that sounded closer to the greats I had admired. Even back then I knew everyone had to start somewhere and even though I was proud of the stuff I had made I still rightfully felt that any dreams of making good quality music were far off into the future and that was okay.

2008 - 2009: College After school I basically lived in the music room at college spending any time I wasn't out drinking with friends or cramming before tests playing with anyone who would give me the time and forming a covers band but in terms of original music things had already started to die down so early. I was still coming up with riffs and licks that were inching closer to the sound of things i knew i wanted to make but I kind of fell off the wagon in terms of songwriting throughout the semester, it wasn't until the semester break that I decided I wanted to follow up on my previous writing adventures with a focus on mimicking the styles of early Beatles with a little EP I called “Meatlebania” a cringeworthy attempt to focus on imitating the greats and ending up far from the mark. I remember posting tracks on my facebook page and getting criticised by some of my friends who expected something a lot better given my guitar playing abilities that they knew me for. It was pretty disheartening but to their credit looking back it was some of the absolute cringiest pieces of music i had ever made, let alone released. It had all the awkwardness of an 18 year old falling in love for the first time and not knowing a thing about good songwriting that came off as horrendously bad poetry and I didn't even put much effort into the guitar side off things, thinking that I wanted to bring the music down to the level of the songwriting and slowly move the quality of both of parts up together. A little bit of a profound foresight in concept for the quality of the finished product but again I was hopeful that this was still just the very beginning of my journey with music and that I needed to make these mistakes to move forward even if it was a pretty slow process. every step was going to get me closer to making something I could really be proud of.

2009 - 2010: Open mics and Comedy songwriting After the whirlwind of college came and went I was living in a shared house with some friends I knew from high school. It didn't take long before me and my housemate sussed out a local open mic night and were playing acoustic covers down there every week. It was actually a ‘reunion’ of an original band we started back in boarding school called Alloid (that resulted in some instrumental rock songs that had lyrics I wrote that were very ...not good). We were playing things like Hendrix and Rush acoustically with my housemate on bass and me on guitar/vocals but it wasn't until a few months in that I had a big light bulb moment of bringing a kazoo to do the solos to songs that things really fit into place. We would do things like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird with kazoo solos that hit all the guitar ones i knew note for note in a kind of over the top silly comedic fashion and with that I had found a new angle for music as a source of entertainment. After a while I started doing the acoustic/kazoo guitar rock thing by myself and phased in some originals that i would introduce with a bit of funny backstory. I remember playing Clayman’s Desire (the first song I had ever wrote) and getting a wonderful reception from the half dozen or so people at the open mic who were very supportive and saw the humour in playing an obviously undercooked song with a bit of charm in the cute awkward stage presence I had started to hone in on. Listening to comedy songwriters like Flight of the Conchords and Tim Minchin I ramped up the writing of quirky songs that i would put together and perform every week before eventually I had my first open mic “hit” with a song I wrote about a man crush I had on the Doctor Who star David Tennant. I would incorporate the shows theme song as the beginning and reprised it as a kazoo solo in the middle 8. It went down well at all the open mic shows I played, which were fast approaching 3 per week. With the disguise of using the fact that songs I was writing were “not serious” I was able to finish a lot of songs and figured out a ton about melody and the fundamentals of writing. I saw this as something I would do to hone my craft and eventually get back to writing “serious music” and apply these skills properly. I was building up a repertoire of comedy songs I would throw in in between over the top ‘kazoostic’ covers of rock songs like Killer Queen and the aforementioned Freebird to a pretty decent reception at the open mics. It was basically a real life meme before I knew memes were a thing. Eventually one of my friends from college was coming to see a fair few of my shows and loved my David Tennant song. She was a drummer with an amazing comedic musical theatre background and I thought I might be a wonderful idea to take our shared love of pop culturey things and start a band together.

2010 - 2012: Blue Turtle Shell With my pop culture sister from another mister at my side we started an original acoustic guitar/djembe “geek rock” band called Blue Turtle Shell, writing and performing silly songs about videogames TV shows and Movies that would incorporate themes from said pop culture topics into the songs as a kind of expansion of my David Tennant song template. It was so much fun being able to write with someone and to put in all the bells and whistles of vocal harmony and jokes in between songs of our open mic set. At the time i was also busking on the side playing all the pop culture and video game theme songs outside the comic book store in Melbourne raking in a pretty decent amount per hour compared to my bar job and one day I managed to get the band a gig at an anime convention from an event organised who enjoyed what I was doing on the street. We put out an EP as a twosome before becoming a trio with a mutual friend on bass and ended up having some pretty good gigs; getting a residency at the newly opened videogame cocktail bar and even “made it to” the finals of what turned out to be a scammy pay-to-play (well, convince all your friends to buy tickets to play) talent show competition in between open mics that we would play semi regularly that always had a good reception. It felt like we were starting to make traction and form some fans but things eventually faded out as I started realising that I was putting myself into a box songwriting wise. It was amazing to be able to write and play music that was uniquely “me” but I felt that I was never going to be able to do “serious music” so eventually when things died down with the band I just sort of stopped and thought of what I needed to do to get things back on that track.

2012 - 2013: Melbournes hardest working bass player So after my foray into the musical comedy world I thought it would be best to just put myself out there and play in some original bands in Melbourne. I put out a couple of ads on a musical craigslist site “Melband” offering my skills as a guitarist. After a week of no interest or replies I figured I’d chuck up an ad as a bass player and instantly had my inbox and phone blow up with requests. Within a week I was playing in 3 bands; one unnamed that was starting from the beginning in the process of writing what I would later know to be Mars Volta inspired porggy psych rock, another Middle Eastern Progressive Frank Zappa inspired band ‘Land of the Blind’ that was basically performing pre written complicated charts that would also have long improvised sections and finally a alternative indie/pop band ‘The Story Model’ where I was writing my own basslines and eventually contributing to songs. Each band held up a pillar of skills that I wanted to perfect as a writer and performer, the psych and prog nature of the unnamed band and Land of the Blind were much closer to where my head was at musically at the time but at the same time I knew I wanted to blend that with more of a pop influence that The Story Model had. Things were pretty hectic schedule wise but eventually after a few months the unnamed band broke up due to some pretty crazy intra-band politics -sadly before we recorded anything or played our first gig, but I still have some phone recorded demos of our jams that I look back on with fond memories- but even juggling two bands with regular gigs was a struggle that I rose to the occasion to. I was learning so much musically from this new life as a bass player, even just from my role in the band. As a bassist I had a world of appreciation opened up for me about groove and song feel, I’d always been a fan of riffs but the relationship between a bass player and a drummer is a sacred bond that is so powerful in conveying the musical ideas of the song. As the foundation of the musical cake I could also take in all the musical ideas of the melodic icing from the vocals or guitar leads, it felt like I was finally piecing everything together that I needed to eventually write my own music that would be closer to the things I wanted to write from the start. On top of all the gigs i was playing I also experienced my first proper studio sessions making demos with both bands as well as my first professionally recorded EP that I provided bass and backing vocals on with The Story Model. Eventually things died down and faded out with The Story Model which luckily coincided not long after I was stretching myself a little too thin anyways picking up work with another band that had contacted me on Melband a good year after I had initially posted my ad and forgotten to take it down. They were an alternative psychy rock band with a little prog influence with a bit of a following from Brisbane. The singer was moving to Melbourne to try and ramp things up musically after they had recorded their first album. To me it sounded like a dream melding of the pop sensibilities of the story model with the hard edge of bands like Rage Against the Machine and even some motifs that harkened back to my beloved Led Zeppelin. It was a band called Greefthief.

2013 - 2017: Greenthief and the beginnings of Mellofellow I juggled Land of the Blind with my new band for a little while but it didn’t take long to see that this was something I was willing to put more effort into since it lined up with so much of what I wanted to do musically, so I quit LotB and became a one band bass player. Things were so musically exciting and intense that there was no other way about it really, Greenthief was rehearsing 2-3 times a week after we found a drummer and had booked a massive 20-something date tour of Australia in support of the debut album they had recorded and were releasing after a month or two of me joining. I bought a Rickenbacker bass and an ampeg 6x10 fridge and set off on my first tour having the time of my life slamming fuzz riffs and writing new material with the band leader. After the tour we would still play a gig or two a week in Melbourne rehearse 2 days a week and usually I would go to the band leaders house for writing sessions once or twice a week on top of that. I loved the bands back catalog but was hungry to get some songs I had helped craft in to the set, I’d be pouring myself into the writing sessions expanding on a lot of my own writing knowledge while picking up a ton about editing down and how to package a hard hitting pop/rock song. While that side of things was amazing it wouldn't dawn on me until much later that while I was perfecting my role in the band writing wise as an editor, I wasn’t actually landing much of the finished product of songs from my actual musical ideas note wise. Structure and direction absolutely, and I knew I was a great soundboard for floating ideas to, but in terms of how many melodies or song sections in the new material that I had actually contributed and stayed in to the final product when it came time to perform the new tracks at gigs there was a bit of a disconnect between the 10s to 100s of hours I had put in to the little bits here and there that were uniquely me. That said I wrote 80% of my own basslines (and interpreted the other 20% in a unique way) and was changing a lot of ideas of the leaders that would have been a bit different had I not been there, but the bulk of the initial ‘heavy lifting’ writing wise was not mine and thats before you take into consideration that I had nothing to do with any lyrics. Luckily there was one track I had demoed that the leader liked enough to add to the set and it actually became the lead single and opening track of the first album I made with them, although I always had a discouraging sense that it was more of a meta move of the leader that he could sense that I was getting a little frustrated that I hadn’t really had much input in major song sections, but this could have just been a projection of my own self doubt (and i was always told that was not the case). Still, on the side of things while we were putting together our first release I was a part of ‘Tremors’ I was upping the ante of writing for myself as a way to demo things to the band but also with the idea that things that didn’t fit would be fair game for me to use for a kind of solo project. When the band’s musical direction moved a little further from my psychedelic rock interests in hope of chasing that holy grail of being played on Triple J, I ended up with a fair batch of psychy demos that wouldn't fit Greenthief that I would listen to each day on my commutes to work and then edit when I got home before rehearsals. Not a lot with lyrics but entire songs with melodies and riffs soley penned by me. Tame Impala had exploded a year or two before and I would see a lot of obvious knock off bands on the bill at Greenthief gigs with the idea of “i could do that” every time there was a washed out riffy set, so i did. I did do that. The plus side of having such an obvious direction helped when it did come to lyrics, keeping things psychy after being around so many psych bands at gigs I knew the basics of what their lyrics are written around subject wise and interspersed that with the influence of the bands I had grown up loving. A friend I had met through Greenthief had a pretty good home studio set up and I eventually took the plunge and recorded my first Mellofellow single with him on the first of January 2017. The weeks before I had hyper focussed on drumming since I knew that was my weak link musically although i had picked up a hell of a lot first and foremost as a bass player listening to the amazing drummers I had worked with. The resulting track “Journey to the Centre of Your Mind” was something I was hugely proud of and finally scratched the itch of being something I had written that was not a joke song but also got pretty damn close to what I was wanting to do musically in terms of my goals all those moons ago to have something that was on the level of quality that I wanted but could never achieve when I was starting out. Really that goal had already been filled earlier with the recordings I had done with Greenthief, but this time it was also my 100% my own writing. All my friends that I had made playing in bands as well as some that weren’t seemed to like my track and although I didn’t really have the means to push it to many people who weren’t in my immediate circle, that was ultimately the goal. My musical peers’ respect was all I could have wanted from a track that was solely my own and I could have so easily not done something like that with how hectic my schedule was at the time. It was at that point that I had to make the decision that I knew was going to be the final nail in the coffin for Greenthief when I went back to uni to get out of the dead end job that I had in retail. As a band we still played a lot, we had a 10 week residency at one of the most known rock venues in Melbourne, kept touring with releases and put out two albums in my tenure but the last of which I was a bit more checked out contributing a little less than I had on Tremors due to the lack of time I had juggling work, uni and the band. Though at the time I wasn’t too discouraged and was a little annoyed that I could put in so many less hours to writing sessions and still end up with nearly the same amount of contribution to the record musically as I had on the last record -though this was partly because there were some tracks on Tremors that were fully completed before I had joined on- I didn’t have any stand out songs that had started from my demos but there were a few that had main riffs that were my own and I think things just flowed a lot easier letting the band leader take more of the reigns and since we had been together for a few years things naturally came together with input from everyone more quickly than they had on the last record. Unfortunately I had to move to Mildura for placement as part of my degree and had technically played my last gig with the band before the release of that album ‘Mirror Lies’ but in the couple of weeks between finishing the sessions for that album and uprooting myself from the city I booked another session with my friend and followed up Mellofellow’s single recording my first release (technically too long for an EP but a pretty short album). Without being in Melbourne/with Greenthief a few less people got to hear the record than would have heard the single but it was still such a creatively fulfilling thing to be able to put out more of my music. It was a high that would keep me going through my year away from the city. To top things off I even had an made a record from start to finish over a weekend with a mate who had his own solo project Steve Tyssen (actually one of Greenthief’s previous drummers from before I had joined the band) who I had been playing with on the side over the last couple of years whenever he had a new album to release -the dude has made like 7 albums to date now its insane- but apart from that everything musically died down when I had moved out of the city. Still not a bad way to finish it all out, 2017 saw me drop 3 records in the one year! Oh yeah, and in December 2017 I put together a line up for Mellofellow in order to have a proper release gig for the record at a festival held by a friend of mine that was another amazing experience but ultimately the only time I have ever performed any of my tracks with a band. 

2018-2019: Slowing down and songwriting revelations So after my whirlwind musical year of 2017 everything got a bit quieter. When I got back to Melbourne I was still playing in Steve’s solo project on keyboards and had slowly been working on tracks for a follow up to the first Mellofellow record, but Greenthief had disbanded while I was away after they released Mirror Lies with a hired gun bass player. I suppose things needed to die down though since the last semester of my course needed to be pretty much my sole focus. I actually started playing open mics again when I got the time, doing acoustic versions of Mellofellow tracks but I’ll admit that it more so confirmed my suspicions about the holes in my songwriting ability. It might have been from seeing Steve’s solo tracks work so well in an acoustic context, but there was an obvious drop in quality in the stuff I had written that was taken out when you removed the drums and guitar solos. While a couple of tracks worked alright stripped back, the majority of them failed to have the same punch without the groove of a full band rhythm section and with the focus being placed more on the lyrics I felt awkwardly naked and could see that at the end of the day my songwriting fundamentals left a lot to be desired particularly on the lyrical front.  So I started trying to write songs primarily acoustic first with the goal of performing them at things like open mics and maybe even booking acoustic gigs with the knowledge that the songs could easily be expanded into full band tracks when it came to recording. This turned into more of a transitional period than I had hoped, partially not helped by the fact that after graduation I had to move back to rural Victoria for the first job I got out of uni in my chosen profession, which is an amazing but time demanding gig. 

So I’ve got another 10 or so Mellofellow tracks in the chamber ready to record from the last couple of years that I’m heading in to the studio with next month but I don’t feel like I totally stuck the landing with the transition I was hoping to make, there are still a couple of tracks that wouldn't really work acoustically and if anything my realisation of my room for improvement lyrically has lead me to second guess a lot of the lyrical choices on these tracks to the point that I just want to finish them acknowledging their flaws and move on to the next record that I will make now that I am undertaking this whole process of honing my songwriting craft. That said there are some tracks I’m getting ready to record that I’m most proud of as a songwriter, songs that I hope are a sign of things to come. Either way I am excited to clear out my bottom drawer of songwriting to see what lies ahead. I’ve already made some big changes to the ways I write and I know things are going to get better.

[caveartfair]

The Artist Who Conjures Beauty from Refuse and Rust

Portrait of Virginia Overton. Photo by Tess Mayer. Courtesy of White Cube.

Virginia Overton, Untitled (OM brick), 2014. © Virginia Overton. Photo by George Darrell. © White Cube.

Sure, Virginia Overton is an artist. But she’s also an amateur aquatic botanist; a collector of broken machinery; and a haggler over tree trunks, metal trusses, and tow-trucks from New Jersey. It’s fairly likely that she hasn’t set foot in a typical art supply store in recent years. Why should she? Overton’s domain is the scrapyard, the warehouse, the wider world with its avalanche of refuse and rust. Her work is quietly heroic, despite being battered. She borrows the language of Minimalism, and of the readymade, and births it into something stranger—like a fat hock of Spanish ham slowly gyrating over a metal pipe, or a 1996 Toyota Hilux, disassembled and  reordered into a scrappy totem.

When I meet Overton at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City—where’s she’s busy installing a sprawling outdoor solo show, “Built,” that will open May 6—she’s wearing a Carhartt work vest and standing next to a pick-up truck. The truck is part of the art. A beat-up upholstered chair nearby is not—or at least, not yet. “It may go in the dumpster, or it may go somewhere,” the artist tells me, her Tennessee accent syrup-thick.

Many objects have a similar fate in Overton’s world; the line between useless and useful is fuzzy, and prone to change. “I want these things to continue working,” she says of her materials, whether that’s an old roofbeam or a piece of trashed Plexiglass. It’s an impulse Overton traces back to her upbringing on a farm outside Nashville, Tennessee. As a result, her art practice is a thrifty one, full of canny upcycling.

Virginia Overton, Untitled (HILUX), 2016. © Virginia Overton. Photo by George Darrell © White Cube.

For instance, the Dodge Ram 150 pick-up truck at Socrates has had several past lives, popping up as a component in exhibitions from Montauk to Miami. (At Socrates, she’ll fill its bed with water and a multitude of lotus flowers.) Other elements in the exhibition have similarly disparate resumes. A giant steel drum nearby was originally used to ship airplane engines before it ended up in Florida and became a recycling bin. Overton bought it off a guy there in 2014, using it as a sculptural water receptacle for “Flat Rock,” an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA). She’s resurrected it for Socrates, where its battle-scarred mass will be coated with white reflective road paint and dangled from the back of a tow-truck, like a “giant mobile,” she says.

Overton doesn’t think of herself as working with readymades. “It’s not like I just turned a bottle rack upside down or something,” she explains, alluding to Marcel Duchamp’s 1914 provocation. “I do stuff to them, even if it’s the relationship of one found object to another.” When confronted with an item that still has creative potential, Overton says that she finds herself wondering: “Why would somebody throw that away? There’s still so much you can do with that.”

Her acquisition process seems to involve a lot of bemused exchanges with people who aren’t quite clear on why she wants their junk. That can work in her favor: The wood that went into constructing a giant gem-shaped sculpture for a show in Tucson, Arizona, cost her a mere $55. Overton doesn’t mind a bit of shabbiness; she has a way of making qualifiers like “decrepit as shit” and “total crap” sound almost loving.

Installation view of Virginia Overton, Untitled (Fountain), 2014, at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami for Virginia Overton: Flat Rock, 2014. Photo by Daniel Portnoy. Courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park.

The artist, 47, has taken a winding path to get to this point. After leaving Tennessee in her early twenties, she rambled. There were stints in New Mexico (working as an assistant to a feminist artist) and a teaching job at a Quaker school in North Carolina; she spent over a decade chipping away at her undergraduate degree, bouncing between five state schools in Tennessee. She finally got her BFA in 2002 at the University of Memphis, then stuck around for graduate school. “It was what I needed,” she says. “I learned a lot of skills—I ran the foundry, learned how to weld, and work with wood.”

Circa 2004, she relocated to New York, where she shared a studio with Olivier Mosset and Chuck Nanney that had previously been occupied by the late Steven Parrino. “I didn’t know I would be making shows,” Overton says of her decision to come to the city, which had more to do with seeking a new cultural climate. “I was just like: ‘I’ve gotta get out of the South.’”

She showed steadily, and was included in the 2010 “Greater New York” survey at MoMA PS1. A solo exhibition at The Kitchen followed, as well as others at galleries like White Cube in London and Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York. For a 2013 show at the latter, she constructed an imposing wall of red cedar planks (sourced from the property around her childhood home) and a ramshackle sculpture for which the artist MacGyvered a semi-functioning jacuzzi out of a coffee machine and a beat-up bath tub. “It was activating the space in a way that felt like there was a lot there,” she says, “without very much being there.”

Virginia Overton, Untitled (Suspended log), 2016, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2016. Photo by Chris Manning. Courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park.

Virginia Overton, Untitled (KO’s Ham), 2016, at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York.  

In 2014, she installed a nearly 500-foot-long outdoor brass handrail at the Storm King Art Center. Other shows—in Zurich, Memphis, San Francisco, and elsewhere—gave her further opportunities to explore: to suspend a simple tree trunk from a metal armature as if it were a valuable relic; to install windmills and foster an environment of aquatic plants, as she did on a terrace at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016. She’s now represented by Bortolami in New York, which is in the process of planning a future solo debut with her.

It’s tempting to typecast Overton as a “Southern artist,” given her choice of materials. But even when working with something as loaded as an old pick-up truck up on blocks, she’s striving for something that reads more universally. “People have trucks all over the world!” she says. “It’s funny—when I talk to people, because I have this Southern accent, it becomes a regional kind of expression. For sure, my history and upbringing play into what I make and why I use things over and over again, but it’s more about economy of material, or getting as much value out of something until it’s just not usable anymore. Because I make things wherever I go, in some ways they take on the language of wherever I am.”

That flexible, on-the-fly method of working can be exciting, but also a little stressful. For “Why?! Why Did You Take My Log?!?!,” her 2017 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Overton had a little over two weeks on-site to conceive and execute new pieces. She recalls being awake at 2 a.m., piecing together a small-scale model of what would become the exhibition’s largest sculpture using plastic coffee stirrers and first-aid tape. “There were three other artists installing at the time, and they were nervous for me,” she laughs. “Artists get so nervous for me! I’m like, ‘It’s okay, it’s gonna be fine.’ I mean...hopefully. You never know, but that’s also part of it. I wouldn’t say that every single thing is a success. And that’s okay. Even if I spent months and years planning something, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be a success, either.”

Installation view of Virginia Overton, Untitled, 2012-2013, at Edison ParkFast, for High Line Commissions, New York. Photo by Austin Kennedy. Courtesy of Friends of the High Line.

Meanwhile, “Built” has been slowly coming together in Long Island City. Overton has been amassing additional materials over the past six months, gradually adding them to the mix. She compares the process to baking: “You get the ingredients out on the counter, it looks like not much is a happening—and all of a sudden you’ve got a cake.”

There are steel roofing trusses sourced from Philadelphia, and a piece of Plexiglass found by the side of the road. One of the sculptures will include a found object plucked from the Socrates site itself: A large gantry, used to lift and move heavy materials. Since artists commissioned by the park often do much of their work outdoors, in public view, Overton’s exhibition promises to create interesting confusions: Which parts are the art, and which are the tools used to make it?

The artist’s utter lack of pretension is refreshing; she comes across as someone committed to constructing things—however strange or inexplicable—solely for the sheer joy of making. Sometimes her pieces are exhibited and then stripped apart and reconfigured: “Yeah, I’d pretty much take any sculpture apart and use it again,” she says, a sentiment that is nicely at odds with the demands of the market. She might fill up the back of one of her trucks with mortared bricks and exhibit it on the High Line, as she did in 2012, then scrap the bricks and start driving the vehicle again. (“Good thing for Toyotas,” she says approvingly, “they start up even a year after being unstarted.”)

She’s grateful for the chance to experiment across the ample acreage of Socrates. “I’ve never had that opportunity, unless you count at the farm where I grew up, where I’d make shit and my parents would be like: ‘What is that?’” she says. Even when visiting them now, Overton adds, she’ll busy herself with offbeat sculptural tasks—affixing a ladder to the side of their house, for instance. “You want to keep those wheels greased,” she explains, in a way that suddenly makes you want to to go tie a ladder to your own house, just to see how it feels.

Overton tells me that, when she was a kid, her mom was an amateur painter. Some of that influence seeped in, but so did the lessons she got from her father about how to construct hunting decoys. Her family tree has “a long lineage of people making stuff, whether it’s ‘art’ or not,” she muses. “This ingenuity that’s employed when you’re trying to figure out how to do something that doesn’t have a prescribed method. I would say my artmaking is closer to fixing something, than anything else.”

from Artsy News