#if you get this reference through the level of parody. gold star

[painted-piggy-ships-archive]

Barbara, trying to convince me Betelgeuse is a bad idea: Hannibal THIS IS A CORPSE.

Barbara: HANNIBAL THIS IS R O T.

[worldsover]

Judgement to the Desiccated ft. Karina

length ✦ 5573

genres ✧ sm type future; asphyxiation; blackmail; virtual_servant!Karina;

✦✧✦✧✦✧

Air did a poor job of not being polluted so Lee Soo Man flooded the world instead. The man himself certainly must be long gone and could not have been in charge of that decision but the legacy of his company far exceeds the legacy of any other human collective in history. Once on this planet, gas was the fluid of choice for respiration and breathing was an unconscious reflex. Now there’s Aether by SM. How very on-brand of them to have the liquid air you breathe follow perfume naming conventions.

Open your eyes and exit the sleeping chamber. Aether has you work for each inhalation, it desaturates the color of the bedroom—maybe there’s a subtle but uncomfortable tinge of yellow—and it makes your nose itch. Your muscles wield much less force than they used to because of the lack of resistance the fluid provides. Moreover, it smells like hairspray as though the ozone layer is taking sardonic revenge.

Screens impersonating windows track your eyes to ensure realistic parallax, playing the scene of divine blue heavens that could not exist. An azure sky is a reward for those planets that have an atmosphere and a sun for light to scatter. Your walls are either chrome or drywall white and your whole bedroom is plainly decorated just like the day you moved in.

“Etymology of bedroom,” you think out loud, though it falls on no ears.

“Bedroom is a compound noun consisting of bed and room. Bed goes back to Old English bedd ‘sleeping place, plot of ground prepared for plants,’ which goes back to the Germanic-”

Plants and sleep are both strong words to use nowadays. The former doesn’t exist in nature and it seems you’re the only one who bothers with the latter. Faint buzzing distracts you from the AI’s response and signals you to the nano drones that swim throughout the liquid to process carbon dioxide from your lungs. This whole ordeal could’ve been much worse if you didn’t have brain interfaces doing the hard part of controlling your diaphragm. The most you need is a purposeful thought. Still, it gets tiring having to think the same thought every three seconds. In. Out.

Was the metaphorical Soo Man teaching a lesson in perseverance? You love K-pop and imagine it’s how trainees used to practice dancing, singing, being charismatic. Being an idol had to be as natural as breathing air. Inhale and exhale. Right now with any antiquated programming language you clung on to, you could write a single for loop that did the same job. For every three seconds: breathe in, breathe out.

“What’s for breakfast today?” Not loud enough. “What’s for breakfast?” you think it louder.

“Welcome, master. Ae-Karina is ready for service.” It’s quite a kindness for SM to blur the bland dystopia you live in by augmenting reality through your neural device. A bosomy woman in a gold-lined but otherwise modest maid outfit appears from the corner of your eye and she bows. Ae-Karina is bewitching and almost becoming of her basis as its graphics have gradually upgraded over the rotations but you wouldn’t misconstrue the avatar as human.

“I said, what’s for breakfast!” It feels impolite to scream in your head, there’s other residents there, but finally the fridge lights up.

“Of course master. May I remind you eating is unnecessary?”

In. Out. Every day, she does remind you, yes. How kind of the company to put all your nutritional requirements in the new air. Aether goes in then Aether goes out. You wish the thoughts of breathing could fade into the background but they’re just like your cravings for food. Always hungry but never starving, whole though not once satisfied. Your eyes pause at her gorgeous face and she tells you there’s bacon. Take it from your fridge. Bacon goes in. Well, the drones take care of the out.

Your assigned living space is the entire 207th floor of a tower. Two hundred and seven floors below the surface. The neighbor a few floors upstairs says that he thinks living deeper is a sign of status. What a luxury. That guy should check the status of his facial muscles, maybe improve his code that lets him tell lies while he’s at it. A couple hundred flights of stairs to swim up is a useless skeuomorphism of skyscrapers in the days of the sun. In fact they were more than useless, you would've preferred a single vertical hallway as it would have let you propel upwards unimpeded. Each floor is the exact same, a glass door that affords no privacy for its residence, a false tree on each side. At the upper levels, malls, convenience stores and other gaudy retail, but it’s the gyms that mock you that you mock in return. They’re always empty.

Finally reaching the top is no true break even if it is a change in scenery. Inhale. Aether tastes a little different up here. Exhale. Can’t say you like it.

Countless satellites form a parody of the star from which the planet flew away, the false image refracted by the upper boundary of Aether. They can’t take away your memories of this star. Looking up at the sky once blinded you with ultraviolet radiation, burning your cornea. It was beautiful. Now everyone’s decided that if they’re playing the part of corporate dystopia, they might as well fit the aesthetic. In a way, it’s self-fulfilling. They wouldn’t have chosen a neon pink sun to compliment the blue and metallic gloom of the cityscape if it weren’t so ingrained in popular media already.

Still, you would’ve expected Google or Walmart to become the megacorp responsible for the state of the world, not a Korean entertainment company. Must’ve been quite the red paperclip scenario. Instead of material design or utilitarian architecture, tacky artistic structures line the streets. The same advertisements for albums that they’ve been selling for the past however long. It's all so obvious, the city could've been designed from scratch to accommodate new forms of travel and goddamn liquid air but instead they went with futuristic Tokyo.

Dubstep permeates your inner ear implants. A notification informs your thoughts that it’s “Hip-hop EDM dance pop with a strong jungle house groove and urban influences.” It’s dubstep. Liquid carries barely any sound so SM affords the option for implants if you're nostalgic for one of the senses. Even though it’s a slower form of communication than direct neural transfer, the noise comforts you. Of course the company would choose dubstep as their background music, but maybe they make money off refunds somehow. It switches to Ice Cream Cake. Much better.

You walk the not so busy roads towards a short brick warehouse in the distance and heavy rain soaks your clothes. No such thing as weather without the sun and water but it’s all simulated anyway.

A warm Seulgi adlib and you know it’s Psycho that starts playing. No, none of your senses are real. The most you could trust is your vision but even that’s being lied to. You could be living in a vat and fed all these thoughts, but then why make it so mediocre? Not paradise, nor torture but a lukewarm in-between. Guess that's what happens when SM Entertainment manages the post-apocalypse. Good on them for trying. The alternative would be a frozen hellscape without solar radiation. Can’t deny their work with geothermal and nuclear energy to keep the Aether warm so that you didn’t have to live underground for the rest of human history. It’s quite great PR to save humanity.

“Hey now, we’ll be okay,” repeats a few more times than you remember.

The Idea Factory Alpha White Delta Green says the neon tubes lighting the front of the brick and mortar building. Your ID card bears a name but it’s not yours, not until they approve your name change. Those usually get processed faster with how often people liked changing their names.

Sit at a desk with a sterile white keyboard and slick new monitor. Type and empty words appear on the screen: “Think for the many, not for the one. We need to think ahead.” A thumbs up. The company appreciates the input. That’s probably enough work for one day. Some SNSD live stages help the time pass, SM certainly appreciated the streaming numbers and it would net you some social points.

It’s hard to say what comes to mind when they ask you to envision a world without the sun and air, especially since it’s what you’ve known for... Two hundred years? There’s no frame of reference, that much you can tell from when you counted seconds to see how often the satellites completed their orbit. SM really took time to have them propel at random speeds, they love withholding sensitive information like that from citizens. To be fair, time is sensitive. Guess the meaning of that phrase changes like all parts of language.

Look around. Dozens of employees at identical workspaces all try to answer the same questions. Naturally, there’s no need for manual labor anymore but there will never be a replacement for human ingenuity. Nice slogan but you know you’re only here for data. Can’t see a need for customer retention though—what’s the alternative, skip Earth? See you on another planet?

“Hey bro, you come up with anything new?” Dave says. Two desks away, you see the enthusiastic, surprisingly spry man play around with a Newton’s cradle. The balls at each end bounce back and forth, not slowing down their rhythm any time soon.

“I think I got something,” you say, “Earth is not the answer. It can’t be, long term.”

“Ooh, I like that. Actually, I really like that.”

“What are you gonna do, copy me?”

“Of course not. You know how much SM hates plagiarism.” Click. Clack.

“Ha. As if there’s a single original thought left in the world.” Click. Clack. The imaginary sounds of metal spheres bouncing play in your mind. They got the volume wrong, no way it’d sound that loud from that distance. “You’d think with all their resources, they’d have figured out space travel by now.”

“I don’t think they want to leave, bro. Wouldn’t be great for profits.”

Your mouth opens to laugh and causes laugh8942.mp3 to play in Dave’s head. “I love it. SM probably hates that sass too,” you say.

“Oh no, they’re gonna arrest me for thoughtcrimes. Nah, they love creativity, just when it suits them. Also, if they actually did bust you for wrongthink like rumors say, I wouldn’t have this on me.” Dave twirls a finger and points at you and you thank his absurd flair for the histrionic that keeps you amused with such drab work.

“NewDrug.mp6. Would you like to play it?” the dry system voice notifies you.

“Woah woah there tiger, hold on.” Dave must’ve noticed your intrigued eyes and holds his hands up. “You might wanna experience that at home. But if you’re interested in more, ask for chicken parm at the vegan place. You know the one.”

Dave leaves his desk. He doesn’t return. You finish your work. Inspire. Expire. You’d rather not.

In contrast to your commute to work, the roads fill with others on your way home. You have to know. Take solace in the comfort of a bench where a huge McDonald’s arch bathes the surroundings and its people with a yellow glow. Really shouldn’t watch it now, especially if Dave says it’s a home type of watch but you have to know. A family of five watches you pass out. They, along with every other passerby, ignore your still body draped over the chrome outdoor seating as you look like yet another junkie. The title is correct after a fashion, the simulation is some sort of new drug. The details of the exploits that happen in the immersive replay wash over you but you don’t need them to know that it’s the sort of lewd that SM would not allow—at least not publicly and not without the right exorbitant payment.

Suit pants and underwear go straight to the laundry. That must’ve been an embarrassing sight but no one bothered to stop you, so it doesn’t matter. Look up where this vegan place was that Dave so presumptuously assumed you knew about and you find that it’s about four Avengers’ stores down from work. He must’ve eaten there before.

“Yo Dave, just wanna make sure, what’s the name of the vegan place called?”

“What are you talking about, man? You telling me there’s some secret underground farms that SM wouldn’t know about?”

You can’t tell when you got to work, a lack of standardized timing would help as well the haze of living in a monotonous dark. “Nah, I mean, for the-”

“I have no idea,” Dave emphasizes each word, “what you’re talking about.”

“I see.”

Work flies by, unusually.

“Hey, can I get a chicken-”

“Uh, this is Maron’s Veggies Only, it clearly says on the sign.”

Clear your throat. “Parm.”

The shifty part-time worker looks around and rubs his fingers gesturing for money. “No digital.”

Over the counter, you pass him a gold coin stamped with a holographic 1 and he hands you a USB stick and a laptop in return. How old-fashioned.

“It’ll sync with whoever you have set as your avatar experience aspect,” the worker says.

“Thanks.”

Ever vigilant as the patrol is, the alleys are the last place you want to go to hide with the obvious criminal element within them all but you head to one anyway. Dump the anachronistic technology in your storage pocket dimensions. Looking at its contents, you’d have to clean that mess up later, but the more you look like an average slob the better. The biggest problem with the inventories is all the people squatting in them. Inspectors wouldn’t care about the archaic ruins you left in yours.

“Welcome, master. Ae-Karina is ready to service.”

“I’d like to go on a date. A special date.” You highlight the key word special and sit on your living room couch. No one’s going to look in your glass door and regardless, you wouldn’t be the pervert for glimpsing into someone’s home.

“Ah yes, master. Ae-Karina is ready to fully service,” she says with a provocative tint in her tone, her sclera disperses to black to match. A pole drops from the ceiling while parts of her maid outfit dissolve which reveals more of the silky skin of her thighs, her lissom arms and most importantly her overflowing breasts. Ae-Karina wraps her legs around the pole and spins around, teasing fingers trace curves on her body to harden you. Her dance is precise but sultry regardless. She pulls up her short skirt to flaunt more of her ass beneath white panties and then pulls down to flourish her cleavage, not trapped by a bra. “Are you enjoying your maid’s show?”

“Very much so, yes,” you say.

Half of a smile forms before a glitch occurs and she teleports next to you, fully nude. It doesn’t pull you out of the illusion however. You just stare and drink in the splendor of her created body.

“You’re not going to touch?” Ae-Karina says.

A feel of her tits and you find it softer than pillows you used to rest on. Soft isn’t much of a character that exists anymore when the whole world is engulfed in liquid. No one has beds, especially with the rarity of sleep. Therefore, her mounds are a consummate dedication to the texture as you squeeze and pinch at her cute nipples.

Her maid outfit rematerializes as she straddles you. It provides more friction to your pants as she begins her lap dance. The weight of her body dragging across your legs and clothed erection induces your carnal impulses further. If only you could fuck the virtual idol. You have to make do with the imprint of her pussy lips on your bulge sliding up and down. Breath in. Breath out.

Ae-Karina pulls down your boxers and spits on your erection. It's not real but her hands so slick on your cock and you let reality slip. Real is for the past, you have desires gratified in the present. There is no real person nibbling at your neck but your nerves activate in sexual desire without discernment for truth. No, she doesn't love you, but when the voracious mass of ones and zeroes says it loves its master, you say it back.

"I love you."

ILOVEYOU infected ten million computers in 2000. An explosion. Calibration engaging. It’s 1:21 PM, Sunday, July 18, 2286 and hypothetically the sun would be out in its full rage. At this latitude and longitude, you’re at what was once the epicenter of all—Seoul, where a fountain caused a chain reaction allowing the hopeful remnant of a world to exist. It lasted a surprisingly long time without the sun and without Aether but the dying planet would succumb inevitably to the ever-increasing contamination so SM of all corporations took charge. A different kind of chain reaction occurred when they acquired a restaurant chain that discovered the recipe for liquid air. The law is on its way and prepared to punish you to its full extent.

You reel while your ears ring. An even sexier version of the woman you already fantasized about appears from your peripheral vision in the crater of your floor. A skimpy cop outfit, striated with reflective material that seems to wane black at different angles, outlines Karina’s curves. She has a tool belt with absurd gadgets, such as a knife baton hybrid, a taser combined with a spray bottle and a Tamagotchi. None of this is necessary. They could just immediately arrest you, impose limitations on your devices. Sure, SM cloned people to deal with underpopulation, but why Karina would be the enforcer is a whole nother issue. Maybe the entertainment company loves their irony?

“Halt. You’re under arrest. Any resistance will be penalized according to the combined Terms of Service of all SM and SM associated products.”

Fucked anyway, you figure you might as well go for it. Escape into your inventory and only seconds later you’re forced out. You manage to get what you need regardless.

“Violation of access rights will be charged to your account.”

It’s so obvious but there’s a reason you kept so much gold in physical storage. As you swim away, the sides of your apartment start to bubble. Bubbles? Already, your limbs feel unsteady. Something’s wrong in the Aether.

“This is standard procedure for escaping suspects that are indoors. Again, this is all agreed to under the Terms of Service.”

“When the fuck did I ever click accept to that shit?”

“When you were born in this world and decided you want to stay in it,” Karina says out loud. You hear her say it. Your physical ears process the vibrations in the air that come from her mouth. Gravity thwarts your desperate escape as your limp body floats on the limit between liquid and air. The atrophy of your muscles becomes apparent within the gaseous atmosphere. She watches you sink down as the room drains of all the false air though her eyebrows crease when she inspects you closer. Your breaths are involuntary. Despite your muscles shorting out, the force of gravity and the pressure of the gas bearing down on you, you’re breathing and you don’t mean to. Her eyes wander farther down. On your pants, a concrete rod stamps the fabric.

“Oh, you like what you see?”

“Shut up, criminal. Anything you say can and will be used against you.”

“Your pussy,” you say and she scoffs.

“Original.” Karina bites her lip as your erection continues to grow behind its prison. You use all effort to put your hands up.

“Please, miss Karina. I’ve been bad.”

“I could punish you even more for sexual assault.”

“Then do it.”

Heat radiates the room in a way you haven’t felt in a while and droplets of sweat form on each of your bodies, especially on the thighs that her revealing outfit parades. Her facial features contort in deliberation and the wait kills you. You bat your eyes at her before Karina takes off her tight shorts and drops herself into your anticipatory face. This makes no sense but none of this life made any sense so you decide to go with the tides.

Centuries of training your respiration has led to this moment, but when you finally have real air to breathe, you spit at the opportunity and choose to suffocate. Then you spit at her pussy and lap it up. Karina’s nectar transfixes your olfactory glands, for once a smell that isn’t the sterile Aether. Your eyes are mesmerized in parallel because of the perfect design of her pussy, a single crease that leads into her hole that your tongue emphatically explores. Karina spreads her thighs wide to reveal a small nub that craves attention. So give it. Suck and swirl and flick your tongue, and the woman provides you the tight clench of her legs as a gift. And the sounds, rediscovered glorious noise. Loud, almost too loud, and clear is how they assault your ears, even surrounded by the flesh of her thighs. Muffled by the weight of her legs, you hear Karina moan in approval but she’s still clearly in charge with how she chokes you with her legs. This is not about your pleasure but hers, and any satisfaction that you derive is not only incidental but probably punishable by SM copyright law.

Karina squirms her hips subtly on your mouth. Her eyes are sharp and she’s just about to stop your hands from moving but she notices them clasp together.

“I’ll do anything to make you cum, please.” you say sloppily as her pussy juices fill your cheeks and drip down your chin.

“God. I can’t.” She takes deep, contemplative breaths. ”That’s more time added on for inappropriate behavior.” Her groaning and brief squeals make her words sound incogent.

You give her a concluding lick and a kiss on her slit. “So what have you been doing right now then?”

Point to a corner of the room and a subtle red light indicates a recording camera. At once, she pulls out a hose from a pocket that could not fit it and the vacuum submerges the room with noise. Her expression shifts quickly to serious.

“We don’t play games here in SMTOWN unless it’s SuperStar so don’t fuck with me.”

“Look who's trying to be a comedian. How about you fuck with me any further and the video gets released.”

“That’s funny, you think you have any sort of power-”

“Yoo Jimin, I suggest you don’t push me more.”

“Where do you know that name from? Right now.” She weighs herself down on your neck.

“You think I don’t have contingencies for if I die too? Karina, we can make this a  win-win scenario. We both get to cum, we both get to walk away unscathed.”

“Fuck you.”

Your weak arms wander between her thighs. At any moment, a feeble punch towards your face or another ten seconds of asphyxiation and she could call your bluff. Even if you did have the ability to expose her perversions in any way, there would be no permanent recourse, not as long SM was in charge. So it surprises you when Karina takes off her shorts. 

“Goddammit. Your cock just looks too good. And your mouth, how are you so good with it?” Put up five fingers when she motions to remove her top as well, and instead she opts to take off your clothes, seizing your pants and throwing them to join the rubble in the room.

A finger slips in, then two and a third dares. Her flawlessly architected pussy lips clings to your digits and Karina shudders in reply. You explore her wetness and find it’s smooth to the point of having no faults, but her juice inside is gloppy and causes your fingers to stick more than the liquids she spills from her slit.

“Who said you’re allowed to have more?”

You lap up the nectar on your fingers. “Then why’d they make you taste so good?”

Your thumb teases her sweet tight asshole and puts just the slightest amount of pressure on it while you finger her with more intensity. The mass of her butt burdens your torso the closer she gets to orgasm. Her eyelids squeeze close and you see her body ripple in anxious pleasure. Karina shows off her pearly whites, teetering on the cliff of hysteria.

“Yes, yes! I’m so close,” she screams.

"Not yet."

“Fuck." Karina sobs, "God. Damn, fuck I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just fuck me.”

“My pleasure,” you say. There’s no need for you to grab her since she brings herself down to your groin, which you’re thankful for as your arms are as good as jelly now. Fortunately, your cock throbs as hard as ever while Karina’s slit rests on it.

“Say you’ll delete it all, all the evidence, promise me.”

“You’re gonna fuck me first or what?” Your breath hitches while she makes a strangled noise as her velvety walls swallow your cock whole to leave no room for comfort. Her tightness is stifling and you have to start counting just to breathe again.

“One two-”

“Be quiet.”

But there is no quiet when pleas for your cooperation intersperse her excessive profanities when she seats herself into your cock and ricochets up and down. Sweat emanates from her creamy skin while her legs widen to find a better angle for her supporting knees in her cowgirl position. Grapefruit and other citrus mingle with the scent of the sweat, fruits you haven’t seen except on billboards in music videos. As much as your mind crackles and your blood roars for every atmosphere of pressure Karina’s walls provide on each thrust in and out, you can’t help but reminisce on sweeter, more innocent times.

The white fluorescent lights in your apartment sputter. For all the advancements in technology, some among many things never change. Light refracts differently in air, less bright, but you can see the pure enjoyment on Karina’s face no matter the luminescence. Karina slows her ride to pull her hips down harder instead and she jolts when your cock finds the most tender spots inside her pussy and it interrupts her babbling.

Karina almost hyperventilates when she gets up to spit on your cock. She pulls out some kind of meter from her tool belt and sighs when there’s no beeping and you recognize it having to do with carbon dioxide. She gets back to dribbling saliva and the filament trailing down to your shaft mesmerizes you. This spit is real, not simulated, and it wettens your erection in a mix with her pussy juices to paralyze you further in your already listless state. Her bare thighs jiggle and you can’t exert much force with your hands but her buttcheeks are firm with just a bit of give.

“Thank you for this cock, thank you for being bad,” Karina says as you watch her ass sink deeper while her pussy holds your dick taut. She’s frenetic when bounces up and down to play an unadulterated orchestra of slick noises between your groins.

“You’re welcome,” you accomplish getting out the words between planned breaths. Your hands cup her buttcheeks but you fear they may break with how she strikes her ass into you.

Karina turns around once more to give you the spectacle of her facial expressions as she fucks herself into you. Knead her calves laying on your torso and they take no energy to spread them though she brings them back together, compressing your hard shaft within her pussy. A new game you play with her, a separate rhythm of loosening and tightening. Her feet press on your chest to help her bounce, but the way they bear down on your lungs against the timing of your breathing causes you to fumble. Your cock bends straight forward as she plunges herself into you and it sends prickles to your entire skin, making the new angle difficult but worth it. Karina takes your hand and starts sucking on your fingers.

“You want my promise that bad?” you say.

“Yes, as bad as I want your cum. I swear, I need it.”

She draws her knees up to her torso and hugs her legs to keep thighs as tight together as possible. Karina couldn’t keep her word, she was trying to kill your cock with constriction.

“Fuck, your pussy is so fucking tight. God, Karina, fuck. You’re so good.” Even if good isn’t the word you want to use to describe her.

“Do it, please, please. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, baby. Karina can be a good girl, a good maid, a good cop, whatever you want. Just don’t get me in trouble, please.”

Karina’s mouth stops saying words though her lips writhe, drunk in increasing lust. Her cheeks flush, before the rest of her skin joins in redness while she grapples your chest and whatever spare limb she can find. You still struggle wresting control of your body but nature seems to take over when you drive yourself into her and match her needy cadence. The air in the room is replaced by a new air but it isn’t Aether. Passion, sweat, heat and all fluids that you both exude join squelching sounds, slaps and moans in harmonic bliss when her body tenses and she screams. As her body tightens, her pussy especially holds your cock for dear life and endeavours to wring out all your semen as her wetness throbs and spills. Karina starts counting to three repeatedly and you laugh though your amusement quickly subsides when you feel her juices become more viscous and she continues her ride, even in the dying pulses of her climax.

“Was I good?” Karina asks.

Just a moment goes by before you mentally send her a screenshot of all the recordings being deleted. Karina hasn’t stopped fucking you yet so at least it wasn’t a ploy.

“Thank you, thank you, I love you.” The flexion of her pliant legs brings them all the way back to rest on top of your legs. Karina lays prone above you and finally give you a kiss. The citrusy flavor may be closer to lime than grapefruit but it’s been so long that you can’t remember which scent is which. Lips crash and her tongue lashes out at yours trying to establish dominance. Keep still to let her investigate your mouth while her pussy does the same to your shaft.

You savor the way Karina’s top emphasizes the bouncing of her tits synchronous with the rebounding of her waist on your cock, but your mouth waters when she frees them. Take the shortest moment to relish in the sight before Karina smothers you with her plump globes. You wriggle your face to try to breathe. Inhale, up and exhale, down, but all you inhale is the scent of her orbs’ sweat. Her hips undulate with a pace at least double yours breathing and the echoes of slapping flesh resonate throughout the air-filled chamber. The loudness is unlike any you’ve experienced in a long time. It’s almost a flashbang every time her ass slams into your lap, especially as you start to see white when orgasm threatens to overload you with preludial pulses.

The last words you hear infected ten million computers in 2000. Fade to black. Cut. You’re slammed out of existence back into existence as a sun rebirths both within you, heating your core to a dangerous high, and from your eyes, dazzling you in an unforgiving white light. In the throes of unconsciousness relapsing to consciousness back to tenebrosity, your streaks of semen suspend in the Aether like a dead tree resting from the wind. What flashes your mind in its orgasmic state are two things only you would remember, plants and weather. Your hyperventilation is unconscious but not unwelcome, as it’s the first time in a while your breaths were reflexive even in the liquid air. However, basking in your newfound power, you start to choke. Right. You breathe in and out again. In and out. In. Out. In. Out. Back in.

“Replaying KarinaArrestsYou.mp6.” A hint of vexatious glee in the system’s otherwise dry voice. You don’t stop for it.

✦✧✦✧✦✧ 

AFF, AO3

It’s pretty silly but the idea danced around in my head ever since I saw the absolute Black Mirror concept that SM had for aespa and I concur that Karina is insanely hot.

As I’m writing this, this Kurzgesagt video on the idea of a rogue Earth comes out and now I have to rewrite stuff to make it at least a little consistent. I’m obviously already going nuts with all these ridiculous sci-fi concepts but this video almost feels too targeted to me writing this for me to ignore it.

[mcmansionhell]

50 States of McMansion Hell: Top 10 Waukesha County, Wisconsin McMansions

Howdy Folks! We’re continuing our out-of-order-for-dramatic-effect tour of the 50 States of McMansion Hell today with perhaps one of the most underrated McMansion counties in the country: Waukesha County, Wisconsin. These houses were so bizarre it was hard to choose just one to do a takedown of. So, without further ado... 

#10: Doom McGloom

This 2002 estate, thanks to the clever machinations of whoever took these photographs, looks less like an enticing investment property and more like a prime candidate for the Chernobyl ripoff set in America that has 2 stars and is only available on Amazon Prime. 

#9: Headquarters of Tree-Haters Anonymous

This 2004 manse is $1.4 million dollars and yet its creators couldn’t afford more than a single (invasive!) tree. I don’t know what kind of sociopath wakes up in the morning and actively hates everything taller than a malnourished shrub. Whoever they are, this is certainly the house for them. 

#8: Roofer’s Paradise 

A post-recession 2011 McMansion, this house clearly didn’t learn anything from the recent past. With many McMansions, I can conceive of ways to improve them to make them better. With this house, I simply do not know how to rectify its main problem: it’s, like, 90% roof. In my head I refer to houses like this as “turtle houses” but frankly this does a disservice to the noble turtle. 

#7: Haunted Geometry

This house was built in 2014, a time when people should definitely have known better. Its inclusion in this list is solely due to the absolutely bizarre geometry of its roof, a kind of geometry formerly unknown to mathematics until this time. Bonus points for the continued animosity to trees found in the wealthy populous of this county. 

#6: McEscher

Nothing about this house makes sense. I’m serious. I’ve looked at it from several different angles and have yet to perceive any coherent spatial logic to how it comes together. This is house is an SCP. It’s an X-Files case. House of Leaves was actually based on this house. It’s an Escherian nightmare. 0/10 would not go inside even if you paid me. 

#5: Obligatory Beigehaus

You know when a bad stand up comedian tells a joke that just keeps going way too long? The audience is like, okay, we get it, you need therapy, but he (and it’s always a he) just keeps going on and on. Well, this is the house equivalent of that. 

#4: House of Lumps

Whoever built this house was utterly incapable of picturing in their minds eye what a house should look like. The very conception of a house is foreign to them. They have never seen a children’s book with houses in it. They probably didn’t even have a childhood. 

#3: Play-doh Playhouse

This house made it so far in the countdown because it is, frankly, weird. I don’t know why it is painted the color of jaundice, or why they have transformed every gable into a hollow cavity longing for death. Lots of things are happening here, though none of them could appropriately be called “architecture.”

#2: Farmhouse Freak

Let your eyes glaze over as you look at this “farmhouse” - the more you look at it the less sense it makes. What are they farming, you ask? Why, turf grass of course! Bonus points for this image in which the house appears through a haze of ozone or something. 

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for...

#1: Corinthian Catastrophe

It’s one thing to have oversized Corinthian columns on your absurd McManse, but it’s a whole new level of extra to spray paint the capitals gold. This house takes all the elements found in the other houses (treeless sociopathy, turret lust, garish mismatched windows, foam) and ramps it up to 11, which is why it earns the number one slot in the county. Also, as a bonus, I find it incredibly funny that they embossed the letter “C” everywhere. I guess whoever buys it either has to have a name starting with C or has their work cut out for them. The C represents the grade they got in home design class. 

Anyways, that’s it for Wisconsin, folks! Stay tuned for a special essay on whether or not brutalism is good, as well as the next installment of the 50 States: Wyoming. Have a great weekend. 

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[beardycarrot]

Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is an... interesting, game. As the name implies, it’s a reboot, and has nothing to do with the original game. In the original Shaq Fu, Shaq is in Tokyo, for some reason, and finds an old Chinese kung fu master, for some reason, and is transported to another world... for some reason. I mean, it’s a SNES fighting game starring an NBA star and sponsored by Pepsi, so there’s really no point in criticizing the story.

Anyway, Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn takes a different approach. Rather than the Shaquille O’Neal we know, this game features a Shaq who washes up in China as a baby with a lotus flower birthmark on his neck, and is trained by a kung fu master because he’s the chosen one or something. Instead of a fighting game, this one is a brawler, with you doing the typical “walk the streets, beat guys up, pick up objects to use as improvised weapons” thing. It does still have product placement, though. What could be more fitting than...

...No, actually, I guess Shaq’s soda line was already dead and gone by the time this game was made. The product placement in this game is A LOT more stupid:

Yyyyep, you occasionally come across containers of Icy Hot, which fully restore your health. There’s also a joke about Gold Bond at one point, but they didn’t license its likeness for the game, so I’m not sure whether it’s actually product placement or just one of the game’s many smirk-but-no-laugh jokes.

Most of the humor just falls flat completely, and I don’t even get a lot of the jokes. Like, the second level features a whole lot of grape soda, and the boss is a character called Baby Face... who I *think* is supposed to be Justin Bieber (the bosses are all parodies of celebrities), but his method of attack is a gun that shoots chickens. What, uh... what’s the joke, here?

Anyway, the gameplay is... eh? You mash the Y button to attack, which after a few hits lets you press A to unleash a giant foot attack (the game constantly reminding you that Shaq wears a size 22 shoe). You have an AOE ground-punching move that you have to fill a meter to use, and there’s some kind of dash attack that you can use if you’ve collected enough blue balls... though I’m not sure if that attack actually does anything, as it’s only ever gotten me hurt. The game is pretty bad at conveying things, and doesn’t really give you invulnerability frames when using moves like that. There are also potions that transform you, though are only used in scripted segments in the game. Still, it’s a nice change of pace, and the only part I would describe as actually kinda fun. Well, aside from the end of the Shaqtus section in the fifth level, where untelegraphed mines are falling from the sky and getting hit by them twice in a row took out my entire health bar.

Unfortunately, the control overall feels pretty clunky, and you’re just fighting through waves and waves and ambush after ambush of bad guys, almost none of which pose any kind of threat... and even when they do, you just start over from the last checkpoint with full health, full meters, and no consequences other than losing any money you collected when you die. Not a huge loss, considering the money doesn’t count towards your end-of-level score, and there isn’t anything to spend it on. At first I was sure there would be a shop, or maybe a Luigi’s Mansion-style reward at the end of the game depending on how much you collected... but nope, when viewing the coins in the game’s encyclopedia thing, it’s revealed that they do literally nothing. This would probably be funny in some contexts... but this game has so many stupid pointless things already.

The game is pretty short, especially considering it got a physical release. I mean, it’s a budget release at twenty USD... but it absolutely should’ve been a five dollar digital download. I paid five dollars for it, knowing it would be bad and getting it just to point and laugh, and even I feel like I should’ve gotten a better deal on it. There are only six fairly short levels, with the last one being an invaded-by-demons reskin of the first (even shorter) tutorial level.

At some point, I think at the end of the fourth level, the plot point of Shaq’s real mother is introduced... by which I mean, he says “I wonder who my real mother is” out of nowhere, for no reason, before Miley Cyrus crashes her jetpack into the wall he’s sitting on. Yeah man I dunno the game is weird. As you might expect, at the end of the game it’s revealed that Yen-Lo-Wang, the evil demon overlord, is actually Shaq’s mother... and uh, is also Madonna. I mean, her name in the game is Destiny, but it’s supposed to be Madonna. Oh, and she’s also not his real mother because she adopted him... look, the game is dumb.

In the end, Shaq defeats his Momdonna and... I guess destroys an obelisk that can be used to summon demons from hell (he destroys one at the end of every stage, but it’s never explained what they are or why he’s doing it before this point), and then he and his mentor decide to go kill Kanye West. Roll credits.

There’s a lot of stuff in this game that falls into the category of "random pop culture reference”, and a lot of jokes that don’t connect at all. Like, Shaq says that he knew Diamond (a parody of Paris Hilton) was a demon because of the way her eyes glowed in a “low-budget film”, referring to the night vision in the Paris Hilton sex tape. At the end of the game, Shaq befriends a whale named Seymour Prophet, who I’m pretty sure is designed to look like Michael Moore.

The fifth level, Fiji, has you fighting against... militaristic nazi Scotsmen. Why? Brexit, apparently. The boss of that area is Benedict Fender, a Mel Gibson parody in his Braveheart costume, because... anti-semitic Scotsman, I guess. Now that I think about it, they must’ve decided to use Mel Gibson first, then went with a costume people would recognize him in, and then based the rest of the enemies in the area on that. Why they went with Fiji for the setting, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe they just wanted variety after two levels based on Los Angeles.

edit: I looked it up, and apparently Mel Gibson owns a fifteen million dollar private island in Fiji. So uh, guess that’s why. Like I said, this game’s references are a lot of deeps cuts that very few people will get.

There are a lot of other weird minor things. Halfway through the game, Shaq goes from pronouncing his master’s name as “Yee-Yee” to “Yay-Yay”. Aside from bosses, most of the male enemies are just normal location-appropriate guys (nazi Scotsmen in Fiji aside), but every single female enemy in the game is a brightly-colored demon with big horns... I’m guessing Shaq didn’t want to be depicted hitting women. At one point Shaq complains about the endless waves of enemies to the game’s programmer, who agrees to give him something fresh... but then it’s just another Shaqtus section, followed immediately by another wave of enemies identical to the one he’d been complaining about.

The weirdest inconsistency is regarding the Kanye West joke at the end. In that, despite his name being Matisse, it couldn’t be more clear that it’s meant to be Kanye... but then, when you start Barack Fu, they’ve completely changed him. Oh, did I not mention Barack Fu?

Yeah, it’s a short two-level epilogue in which you play as Barack Obama. In it, Matisse is now referring to as Con-Ye, and while he’s still recognizable as Kanye West, he doesn’t resemble the version from the ending at all. This little bonus game is... okay. It feels a bit less responsive than the normal game, since Barack still controls just like Shaq, but isn’t a huge lumbering guy so he comes across as a lot more sluggish. The game starts in France (so, naturally, the standard enemies are guys in black and white striped shirts wearing red berets and using baguettes as weapons), and ends on a space station in which every enemy is some kind of a Con-Ye clone. It’s a bit less of a mess than the normal game... but only because the cutscenes have a guy doing a pretty good Obama impression and delivering cool lines. It’s a shame they decided to end it on a Michelle Obama anal sex joke.

[postgamecontent]

Duke Nukem 3D

Original Release Date: January 29, 1996

Original Hardware: MS-DOS PC

Developer/Publisher: 3D Realms/GT Interactive

After the massive successes of both Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, id Software was gaming's newest golden child. This has always been an industry that, for various reasons, has sought to create its own celebrities, and id Software had "rock star" written all over it. Their games combined amazing software technology with excellent art and rock-solid design, and with DOOM being so far ahead of Wolfenstein 3D in basically every regard, few doubted that their next game would be even bigger. Nevertheless, the company's ambitions had started to chafe some of the team members, and for a relatively young company they had left an uncharacteristically high number of jilted lovers in their wake. As these things tend to go, id Software was eventually brought down from their lofty position largely through a combination of their own mistakes and the rivals they had spurred on.

Apogee Software, id's original publisher, ended up being that developer's biggest rival in the burgeoning first-person shooter market. It seems that id Software was pretty confident about how popular DOOM was going to be, and they allegedly weren't quite sure that Apogee was going to be able to handle all the orders that would come in. Thus, after a rather successful relationship of several years, id Software decided to go it on their own. This left Apogee without both one of their star developers and a proper follow-up to one of their hottest releases. Still, Apogee had other developers to their name, and indeed did a fair bit of internal development themselves. And id Software was more than willing to license out their Wolfenstein 3D engine, having made the decision to abandon it for their own use. Apogee could create their own first-person shooter brand.

The first attempt at such went disastrously. Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold was developed by JAM Productions and published by Apogee. The game used the Wolfenstein 3D engine, but had a lot of new features that made the game feel quite fresh in some regards. Unfortunately, it released exactly one week before DOOM did. The game's initial success and positive buzz was inevitably drowned by id Software's latest. Although a sequel was eventually released, that would be the last game developed by JAM. Meanwhile, Apogee had already been working on the next attempt. This internally-developed game would also use the Wolfenstein engine, albeit with a few modifications to make it feel less antiquated.

Rise of the Triad: Dark War was originally planned as a follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D. The game was largely designed by id Software co-founder Tom Hall, who had left the company late in DOOM's development over some disputes with John Carmack over that game's direction. Unfortunately, well into the development of Rise of the Triad, Apogee's Scott Miller was contacted by John Romero and informed that they were canceling the project. Apogee decided to finish it up as a separate project, releasing it in December 1994. While it didn't exactly set the world on fire, the game was able to find some success. It was clear, however, that the Wolfenstein engine just wasn't going to cut it anymore, enhanced or not. Luckily, they had another iron in the fire.

Hope can be found in the strangest places sometimes. For Apogee, it was going to be found in the bedroom of a high school kid. A young whiz programmer named Ken Silverman had created his own first-person game using an engine he had built himself. Silverman pitched the project to a number of publishers under the title Walken. It would eventually see release in 1993 by Epic MegaGames as Ken's Labyrinth. Considering it was the work of a kid who wasn't even old enough to vote yet, Silverman's engine was impressive. It was easily up to the standards of id Software's Wolfenstein engine. The game itself was kind of lousy, but the kid had undeniable talent as an engine coder.

As Silverman was finishing up high school and preparing for his first semester of university, he was also getting started on his next big coding project. The engine he was developing would come to be known as the Build engine, and Apogee had their eyes on it quite early. Silverman would officially become an employee of Apogee in August of 1993, and the company finally had an engine that not only felt like it could hang with the DOOM engine but also exceed it in a number of ways. Of course, it would take a couple more years before they could do something with it, and id Software was hardly standing still.

That being said, there were things that id Software did well, and things that they didn't. For as much fun as their games can be, there's an odd sterility to them that only seemed to increase with each new release. It's possible this was a reflection of John Carmack's vision gradually overpowering his fellow founders, but whatever the reason, there was a hole waiting to be filled by a properly-equipped competitor. After all, just because you're playing from the character's viewpoint, there's no reason that character has to be a player cipher. And wouldn't you know it? Apogee had a fairly popular character whose previous adventures made him a good fit for a shooting game.

Duke Nukem was a blond-haired, eternally smiling action hero with a chiseled jaw and an itchy trigger finger. He seems to mostly take after Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first couple of appearances, where he battled through side-scrolling run-and-gun stages against an alien menace. Duke was generic as all get-out, but the games were solid and he was at least easily recognizable as a design. The few story snippets in the first two games he starred in painted him as a pastiche of action heroes like Dirty Harry, John McClane, and so on. He wasn't played completely straight, though. He comes off like a deliberate parody at times, the kind of tough guy with a bloated ego that could be found in many a Saturday morning cartoon.

Apogee obviously saw a lot of potential in Duke Nukem, and decided to make him the star of their first big game built on the Build engine. A relatively small team was put together with some faces returning from the original Duke Nukem games along with a few new additions. After a lengthy development period, Duke Nukem 3D finally released in shareware form in January of 1996, with a full release coming a few months later in April. The game's story picked up from the ending of Duke Nukem 2, sort of, with Duke arriving back on Earth only to discover it had been invaded while he was off-planet. The streets are mostly empty of humans, with aliens and monsters patrolling in their place. Duke vows to make the aliens pay, and he does just that over the course of the game's story.

Duke has become something of a punchline over the two decades that have passed since Duke Nukem 3D came out. Some of the jabs were well-earned, I suppose, with the saga of Duke Nukem Forever's seemingly never-ending development providing fodder for many jokes. I feel like some of them may be misplaced, however, while others are a result of things that happened after the release of Duke 3D. Duke Nukem, as I see him, is a complete parody of the Hollywood action hero. He's ridiculously over-the-top. He carries more one-liners than bullets, and he's got a lot of bullets. He makes a bizarre threat to the game's first big boss, and then he actually follows through on it, whistling his theme song while he reads the newspaper. I can't imagine taking him at face value, even if you don't take into the account the game's frequent forays into fourth-wall breaking and pop culture references.

Taking him at face value is just what plenty of people did, and many still do. It happens to parody all too often, and I suppose it's not entirely surprising that a game whose hero was an overblown caricature of popular action heroes would attract fans of the same. Later games featuring Duke didn't help, as it seemed even the publisher was interested in having Duke as more of a straightforward bad-ass hero. Duke-as-parody only seemed to show up again in Duke Nukem Forever, and he had unfortunately aged about as well as any cultural satire. It's certainly fair to criticize Duke Nukem 3D for its sexism, violence, and what-not because the game is definitely crass, but if it comes off as an outdated pile of stereotypes and cliches, I'm fairly sure that was by design.  

In video games, however, being funny or charming will only get you so far. There has to be a good game backing it, something Matt Hazard found out the hard way. I feel like that's something that gets lost in the conversation about Duke Nukem 3D all too often. The parodies, gimmicks, and edgy themes are all important contributors to the game's success, but the main thing Duke Nukem 3D has going for it is that it's a great game even if you strip all of that away. The weapon selection is solid, and having a number of support items you could use at your leisure was something that separated this game from id Software's first-person shooters. Granted, many of those items are only really useful in multiplayer, but it at least gives you the illusion that you can do more than just point and shoot.  

It's important to note that Duke Nukem 3D was built to be enjoyed in both single-player and multiplayer. It's clear in the weapon and item selection, but it's also baked into almost every level. There's a somewhat linear main path in each stage that takes you from the start to the goal, but the areas are more open than they initially appear to be. You may not even notice it until you play the game in multiplayer, but most rooms have multiple exits and there are usually at least two ways to get from any given point A to any given point B, provided you have the appropriate items. The jetpack is particularly great for breaking the levels, but even the ability to destroy certain walls with pipe bombs and RPGs feeds into this goal.

Adding to the fun in either mode is that many of the levels are based on real-world locations. It may seem quaint now, but at the time Duke Nukem 3D was released, most games in the genre were set in abstract representations of potentially real locations or in out-right fantasy worlds. Duke's first stage sends you through an adult movie theater complete with a concession stand and an arcade. There's even a proper bathroom where Duke can regain some health by relieving himself. The second stage sends you into an adult book store and a gentleman's club. Whether or not these are places that you would visit in the real world, you at least know of them. It was novel at the time to have shoot-outs in places drawn from reality.

These spaces were made to feel alive through adding a number of details not seen in competing games, too. I've mentioned the destructible walls, but there are also a number of toys to play around with like light switches, billiard tables, and monitors. With the game's first part set in Los Angeles, earthquakes occur while you're playing through the levels, apparently changing the geometry right before your eyes. One of the first big displays of the Build engine's capabilities comes in the second stage. Without an obvious way to move forward, Duke resorts to manipulating some buttons in front of him. Hit the right combo and a switch will appear. Pull that switch and the entire building across the street will collapse in an explosion, leaving rubble with a yellow key card in it that allows you to move on.

Less obviously amazing but certainly more important is that Build allows the game to have a lot more happening vertically than its competition. Going back to DOOM after playing Duke feels so flat until you re-adjust. Duke can aim up and down, jetpack through the air, swim, and even jump from platform to platform. Indeed, if you want to find the game's secrets, you'll have to think vertically. Most of them will literally go over your head otherwise. This aspect of the game really comes to life in multiplayer. If you were using to just looking for other players at eye level, you've got a whole new dimension to figure out here.

An interesting thing that I noticed on this playthrough is how the game gets started. It's a common trope now to let players have a fully powered-up character for the tutorial only to take most of those abilities away and force them to start from scratch. But Duke Nukem 3D was a little ahead of the curve on that. The first two levels are packed with just about every gun, most of the items, and so much ammo you'll likely max most of your capabilities out. Basically, you get a chance to play with everything from jetpacks to rocket-propelled grenades. It holds back a few fun surprises for later, but you get to feel like a real superhero very quickly. Then at the end of the second level, Duke is captured by the pig cops. They strip him of all of his goodies and you start the third stage in an electric chair with nothing more than your boots to your name. You have to build up from scratch, and this time it's a lot more stingy with the good stuff.

There are a few levels that don't really come together the way they should, and there are certainly some highlight levels that stand out from the pack, but on the whole the level designs are consistently strong in Duke Nukem 3D. Even when it temporarily abandons the real-world settings for more sci-fi inspired fare, the stages manage to be exciting and enjoyable. It also has some highly memorable boss stages that were absolutely ridiculous by the standards of the time. In most cases, Duke can be played as slowly or quickly as you like, but the boss stages will force you to get the lead out and go on the hard offensive.

I'm not ashamed to say that I still love this game. It's admittedly sloppy at times, but in all the most awesome ways. And while the humor and references have both aged a lot, the core mechanics and level layouts are as great as ever. It's not hard to track down Duke Nukem 3D on a variety of platforms these days, and while you'll need to keep its era in mind as far as its themes go, I still strongly recommend playing it if you haven't already. I played the Vita version in preparation for this article, and that's a great choice if you want to play it on the go.

Duke Nukem 3D proved to be the huge hit Apogee (by this point known as 3D Realms) had been looking for. While it didn't take all of the wind out of the sails of id Software's soon-to-be-arriving DOOM follow-up Quake, it did demonstrate that there was now real competition for the first-person shooter crown. The Build engine would go on to be used in a few more fairly successful commercial ventures, while the Duke Nukem 3D team got to work on an ill-fated sequel titled Duke Nukem Forever. GT Interactive and 3D Realms oversaw a number of other Duke Nukem games in the interim to capitalize on the character's popularity. None were as successful commercially or critically as Duke Nukem 3D, but they kept the fires burning for a little while.

Things largely fizzled out for Duke in the mid-2000s when it became apparent that Duke Nukem Forever was not coming anytime soon. Nevertheless, Duke Nukem was the first FPS to give id Software a bloody nose, and at least for a half decade or so it felt like it was the king of the genre. As Duke so nicely put it, quoting as he often did from Army of Darkness, "Hail to the King, baby!"

Previous: DOOM Next: Quake

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[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/lifestyle/is-it-camp/

Is It Camp?

Explainers

This year’s Met Gala theme has us wondering about things we treasure.

May 4, 2019

In 1964, Susan Sontag defined camp as an aesthetic “sensibility” that is plain to see but hard for most of us to explain: an intentional over-the-top-ness, a slightly (or extremely) “off” quality, bad taste as a vehicle for good art.

“Notes on ‘Camp,’” her 58-point ur-listicle, builds on that inherent sense of something being “too much,” and also fences it in. Camp is artificial, passionate, serious, Sontag writes. Camp is Art Nouveau objects, Greta Garbo, Warner Brothers musicals and Mae West. It is not premeditated — except when it is extremely premeditated.

Her list of camp dos and don’ts has grown since it was first published. Some, including the filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, have updated and expanded it to include references as categorically specific as “Twilight” (bad straight camp) and Sarah Palin (conservative camp). Still, Sontag’s treatise remains the top-cited attempt to define a slippery concept.

The essay is also the founding document of this year’s Met Costume Institute exhibit and its attendant gala. On Monday, when Anna Wintour’s campers ascend the Met’s steps for a first look at “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” few of us will be among them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t camp on our own terms. What, among a random sampling of our exciting and tacky enthusiasms and passions, is — and what is not — camp?

Dog shows began alongside county fair-type events: cow and poultry shows and the like. Today, they show no trace of the messier side of animal behavior. Perfect doggy specimens are pampered and fawned over like models, but tragically the dogs themselves never know exactly what’s going on, or realize how hot they are. Personalities and desires are projected wildly onto the furry celebrities by owners, announcers and spectators with pure and unbridled enthusiasm.

For every Westminster Dog Show brought to you by Purina Puppy Chow, there are thousands (more than 22,000, actually, according to the American Kennel Club) of smaller events happening across the country where you can find handlers trotting around bright green synthetic show rings wearing every shade of pastel suit jacket and A-line skirt you can imagine. It’s a world of caricatures, of fans who identify with a breed as strongly as a religion. The dog show ring is also the only place where one can win the covetable title of Select Bitch. EDEN WEINGART

Cher was the picture of camp long before she discovered plastic surgery. Rhinestones, bugle beads and feathered headdresses — furnished by her partner in kitsch, Bob Mackie — helped build her outsize persona in the ’70s. Over time, Cher developed a reputation for humor and almost self-consciously terrible taste.

For every movie in which Cher wowed critics, there were half a dozen songs establishing her as the sultan of schlock. The one she’s most proud of is “Believe,” a trifle of pop music that sounds like Everything but the Girl’s “Missing” as reimagined by Nancy Meyers. But even Cher can’t take Cher seriously. “I’ve made millions of albums, and most of them are absolutely no good,” she told The New York Times in 2018. Of course, that’s what made them good. It wasn’t an accident that she became the first bona fide A-list diva to razzle-dazzle audiences for years at a time with residencies in Las Vegas. Or that a show of her life ultimately made its way to Broadway. Sontag asks, “When does travesty, impersonation, theatricality acquire the special flavor of camp?” The answer is: whenever Cher appears. JACOB BERNSTEIN

Donatella Versace

Is it camp? Yes.

She is hair (blonde), she is tan (tan), she is jewelry (gold), she is gloss, she is heels, heels, heels. She is Versace, both literally and proverbially, and yet she is so much Versace, so impossibly anything but Versace, that she is never called Versace. She is Donatella or, to her staff, DV. The Versace, like a radiant halo, announces itself.

If Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, Donatella is a fashion victim’s idea of a fashion idol: everything skintight, everything bellissima, the jets, the parties, the famous friends, the Milan mansion, the gesticulating cigarette (she quit, but a cigarette, like a phantom limb, will always trail DV). This idea, which in lesser hands could be gaudy or merely glitzy, is sewn into each of her garments; once, at a private showroom appointment in Milan, a designer at Versace described to me in utter seriousness the “important shoulder” that distinguished a jacket.

Improbably, all of it works. Fashion critics, even the harrumphing ones, love her, love it. The people love her. Versace is one of the few places where they agree. She has the operatic grandeur of public tragedy (she took over Versace after the murder of her brother, Gianni) and personal struggles (the drugs, the rehab). And so she has been taken up, by drag queens and YouTubers, Penélope Cruz (who didn’t do her justice) and Maya Rudolph (who did). A benevolent queen, DV proved herself in on the joke and joined faux-Donatella onstage, shoulder to important shoulder. Bellissima. MATTHEW SCHNEIER

Kathie Lee Gifford

Is it camp? Daytime television camp.

Morning show anchors are inherently campy, having dedicated their lives to sprucing up news — information that is by nature alarming or, on a good day, banal. Among such campers, Kathie Lee Gifford is a counselor. Her sentences are delivered as smoothly as if they were lines she memorized years ago for her starring role in a play about herself, a role she is perpetually reprising for one night only as a treat for fans. Take her final (ever) seconds on “Today.” “Am I supposed to say something?” she wondered. “Might as well!” said Hoda Kotb. In an instant, Ms. Gifford, champagne in hand, was delivering a voluminous bible quotation directly into the camera (Jeremiah 29) while, beneath her, a cartoon Kathie Lee toasted a credit reading “PROMOTIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FURNISHED BY CARNIVAL CRUISE LINE.” She closed the program by singing a composition written by herself. Cheers. CAITY WEAVER

Villanelle

Is it camp? Hot assassins are always campy.

From the instant Villanelle, the lightly self-mocking assassin of “Killing Eve” played by Jodie Comer, dispatches a Mafia don by plunging a hairpin into his eye, her predilection for theatrical extremes is plain. In fact, you can’t really miss it. After all, for Villanelle, murder is nothing more or less than a high-style form of playacting.

Watch with a mixture of horror and mirth as this wily assassin, dressed in a pervy variation on a milkmaid costume, eviscerates her victim in the window of a brothel. Could you be faulted for taking her performance as a brazen joke? Even Villanelle doesn’t seem to be taking it too seriously — her approach to the kill is so comically efficient, so artfully contrived, that it rises to the level of self-parody.

That archness extends to her wardrobe. Villanelle dresses for excess, effusively wicked in pink tulle or satin, a high-collar Edwardian shirt, or a regal negligee worn by day with gilded chandelier earrings. She represents the essence of extravagance, the hallmark of an aesthetic that Sontag likened to “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.” RUTH LA FERLA

John Waters

Is it camp? He is the king of camp.

No one channeled the joy of bad taste as efficiently as the director John Waters. His muse was Divine, a 6-foot-2 drag queen who, in the director’s self-described “trash trilogy” — “Pink Flamingos,” “Mondo Trasho” and “Female Trouble” — treated sexual assault, foot fetishism, coprophilia, incest, baby kidnappings and murder as big jokes. While Divine’s bouffants reached to the heavens, her outfits barely covered her crotch. She did not so much act as perform onscreen karaoke. Her gestures and facial expressions were almost as big as her appetite. Only rarely did Divine play characters who could easily be described as likable. But empathy was not Mr. Waters’s top objective. “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation,” he wrote in the opening of his autobiography. JACOB BERNSTEIN

[Read about the king of camp’s sleep-away camp for adults.]

Russ Meyer

Is it camp? Thoroughly, albeit a straight-male subset.

Before there was John Waters, there was Russ Meyer. The grindhouse king of the 1960s made low-budget sexploitation films with titles like “Vixen!” and “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” that contained a Pride Parade float’s worth of campy costumes, not to mention campy dialogue by campy female characters whose over-the-top vampiness was so broad that they might as well have been played by Divine. Never mind that Mr. Meyer’s soft-core sex films were targeted to straight men looking for any opportunity to gaze at large, bare breasts in the days before pornography became widely accessible. Eventually, the dirty-raincoat crowd abandoned this auteur, known as King Leer, for more explicit, and boringly literal, films starring Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers. Mr. Meyer’s legacy was left to those who could most appreciate him. John Waters said that “Pussycat!” was “possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” If he was kidding, that makes it even more camp. ALEX WILLIAMS

Internet Astrology

Is it camp? It is artifice, but not camp.

If calamity defines this moment, internet astrology is a potent antidote. It’s a pseudoscience exaggerated with a wink through memes, an everything-in-quotation-marks lens for culture. Photos of Rihanna with a wine glass, Lady Gaga posing with her Golden Globe in a periwinkle Valentino gown, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi with the cast of “Queer Eye” become a way of understanding — with questionable specificity — the habits of the signs. Do Leos “despise taking orders”? Are Geminis people who “aren’t easily offended by jokes”? Are Sagittariuses merely defined by the concept of “athleisure”? It doesn’t matter. In a world fated with no future (see: threats of authoritarianism, climate change and the impending artificial intelligence takeover), astrology’s assured predictions ease collective anxiety while allowing us to indulge in a shared identity, however absurd. LOVIA GYARKYE

In 1933, Mae West cemented her status as Hollywood’s original queen of camp in the vaudeville-esque film “She Done Him Wrong.” The story takes place in a boozy saloon, where West’s character Lady Lou rules the roost, chewing up and spitting out every scoundrel who’s “warm for” her. Back then, female sexuality onscreen was largely synonymous with vulnerability. West changed that. She makes her cinematic entrance in a carriage, wearing a giant feathered hat and holding a parasol. Hands on hips, eyebrows raised, the term “woman” doesn’t begin to describe her; she’s a broad. Her dresses have almost as much sparkle as her jewelry. Her greatest distaste is seriousness. Not even a visit to a boyfriend in the clink rattles her. When one of her many suitors tells her that her life is in danger, Lou says, “You’re going to protect me? From what?” Then she adds: “When I need protection I’ll write you a letter.” JACOB BERNSTEIN

‘Strangers With Candy’

Is it camp? Yes.

“Strangers With Candy” stars Amy Sedaris in half a fat suit as Jerri Blank, a 40-something dropout who returns to high school after years as a junkie, prostitute and eventual inmate. In a format modeled (loosely) after the “ABC Afterschool Special,” our heroine encounters hardships both universal and specific: impressing the popular kids, resisting the temptation of drugs, finding out she’s Native American, getting lured into a cult. Each episode ends with Jerri breaking the fourth wall to tell the viewer what she has learned, which is usually nothing. But there are some take-aways. Having someone to make out with supersedes self-respect; violence doesn’t resolve conflicts, but it wins them; being a single mother is easiest when one is neither single nor a mother. It’s a highly aestheticized work of absurdist comedy. Jerri’s makeup is thick. Her overbite is pronounced. Her hygiene is questioned. So if these parables leave you scratching your head, do as Jerri says: “Think about it — I haven’t.” THOMAS LOTITO

Supreme

Is it camp? Not exactly, but it’s definitely “too much.”

When The New York Post, for a long time the most camp of the city’s daily papers, placed an ad for Supreme on its front page, the brand’s acolytes rushed to pay $20 for a paper that usually goes for $1.50. This kind of excess is wrapped up in the fact that the people who want to own Supreme far outnumber the people who can actually buy it. Every time the brand has a “drop,” hundreds of people swarm its stores just to wait in line to spend hundreds on a pair of boxer shorts. In a Supreme devotee, we see how one can be “serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious,” as Sontag puts it, to the point where even the founder James Jebbia is dumbfounded. In a phone interview with GQ, when asked if he ever thought Supreme would become as globally recognized as it is today, he compared the unlikely outcome to the election of Donald J. Trump. ASTHA RAJVANSHI

President Trump

Is it camp? Much political theater is camp, but he’s upped the ante.

Camp “can be actually a very sophisticated and powerful political tool, especially for marginalized cultures,” Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, told The New York Times when that show’s theme was announced. We tend to associate “marginalized cultures” with underrepresented minorities, but if you think about it, the frustrated white men who make up Donald J. Trump’s base would certainly describe themselves that way, and he has been their blunt-edged weapon. An orange-hued one, with tanning-bed-goggle eyes, an elaborate blonde pompadour and extra-long ties — because, well, you know what they say about ties: long ties, long … What? What’s that you say? They don’t say that about ties? Well, in the alternative universe of Trumpland, they do.

Born from the camp crucible of reality TV, President Trump has become synonymous with behavior that elicits exactly the kind of reactions Sontag deems key to camp: “It’s too much” and “not to be believed.” Superlatives rule the president’s speech — his crowds are the biggest ever, his memory the best — and his aversion to political correctness is practically a signifier. He’s a Louis XIV for our times. That he has his finger on the button just makes it more jaw-dropping. VANESSA FRIEDMAN

‘Riverdale’

Is it camp? Like many other programs on the CW, it’s intentional camp.

“Riverdale” is the love child of every teen soap in history and “Twin Peaks.” Accordingly, it makes no sense. Are the characters living (and dying, once by crucifixion) in the present, or in 1960, as the anachronistic décor suggests? Is Riverdale an hour outside of New York City, or somewhere near the Canadian border? How are the parents so evil, and their children so hot? The flimsy dramatic arc, conflicting details and distractingly attractive cast serve to foreground the show’s look and feel. There are foggy drives down forest roads, after-school milkshakes in a retro diner, cult initiations with all-white dress codes, practically unwatchable musical episodes. That’s fine. “Riverdale” isn’t here to make its viewers more intelligent; it’s visual candy, a comedy dressed up as horror. BONNIE WERTHEIM

Queen Elizabeth II

Is it camp? The British monarch is the most camp at Buckingham Palace.

The hair. The hats. The handbags. The extreme matchy-matchiness of it all. Queen Elizabeth II doesn’t just rule over Britain and the Commonwealth — the world’s longest-serving female head of state also does head-to-toe monochrome more thoroughly, and multi-dimensionally, than anyone else. She has inspired legions with her signature rainbow shades (the better to stand out in a crowd) and her favored off-duty tweed, silk scarf and pearl get-ups.

One of her more outspoken style admirers is Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director and a co-chair of this year’s Met Gala, who in 2016 told The New Yorker: “The Queen is one of the most quirky people in the world. She is very inspiring. It is clear that she loves color.” Insofar as camp is about extravagance, her preference for unmissable outfits, along with the vast palaces, ornate state banquets, glittering horse-drawn carriages and decades of polished public performance, surely fits the bill. ELIZABETH PATON

Jim Steinman

Is it camp? His songs are pure schlock.

The producer Jim Steinman specializes in excess. He helped bring us Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Holding Out for a Hero,” Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” plus every song on Meat Loaf’s albums “Bat Out of Hell” and “Bat Out of Hell II.” He is implicated in the Barry Manilow catalog and the Air Supply discography. He is in the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.

A murder of academics have nearly defined camp out of existence. But schlock, Mr. Steinman’s specialty, has less nuance. Camp’s shuffle-footed, irony-free cousins, objets d’schlock are in such poor taste that they repel even regular viewers of the television network CBS. Even for those who love them (me), Mr. Steinman’s miniature operas of heartbreak and desperation are critically irredeemable — too solemn and silly to even pretend to sophistication. But when “so bad it’s good” is a commonplace, maybe the irredeemable is the only refuge left. JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH

‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’

Is it camp? Decidedly.

Nothing says camp like getting to watch two aging divas go to war with one another. That’s what happened in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” wherein Bette Davis plays a drunk, deranged and delusional former child star who seems to have caused the car crash that cripples her prettier, kinder, and more successful sister (Joan Crawford), whom she holds captive in the once-glamorous house they share. For more than two hours, Davis wears jealousy on her frayed chiffon sleeves, turning away her sister’s visitors, plotting against nosy neighbors, even murdering her sister’s pet bird. “I’ll clean the cage,” she says before literally cooking it up as a meal that she serves to her sister. JACOB BERNSTEIN

Ed Wood

Is it camp? Maybe too campy to be camp.

He used hubcaps for flying saucers, cardboard for sets, and had a bad habit of leaving the boom microphone in the shot. He’s been called the worst director of all time. Ed Wood’s Z-movie science-fiction project from 1959, “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” is often called the worst movie of all time, although his 1953 ode to cross-dressing, “Glen or Glenda,” starring Mr. Wood himself in resplendent angora, gets votes too. But maybe he was better than we think.

Since Tim Burton’s affectionate 1994 biopic, “Ed Wood,” starring Johnny Depp, Mr. Wood has been the subject of a critical reappraisal of sorts, with defenders casting the director’s crude productions as a kind of outsider art. “What comes over isn’t directorial competence,” the writer Johnny Mains told The Independent in 2017, “but exuberance in abundance, enthusiasm and I would take that any day over a film that’s technically brilliant but lacks any soul.” “Plan 9” manages a not-terrible 67 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, where it’s described as the “epitome of so-bad-it’s-good cinema.” And some have lauded the sympathetic portrayal of gender nonconformity in “Glen or Glenda” as decades ahead of its time. At the end of the day, the film is 60 years old and we’re still talking about it. Maybe sometimes bad is actually not bad enough. ALEX WILLIAMS

Moira Rose

Is it camp? Yes.

“Schitt’s Creek” follows a family of uber-rich narcissists who’ve fallen on hard times. Moira Rose, played by Catherine O’Hara clad in reflective fabrics, is the show’s matriarch and chief brat. As is typical of “artistes” who compulsively seek the spotlight, Moira has many secrets. Why does she have a North American accent with scattered Shakespearean and French vowel sounds? What’s going on underneath her elaborate wigs? What combination of pills is she on, and can I have some? Why does she wear waistcoats and brooches to bed? In her bombastic totality, she embodies the grotesque effects of extreme wealth. Moira Rose makes me want to burn the rich to a soundtrack of her saying “bebe” on repeat. ELEANOR STANFORD

Liberace

Is it camp? Yes.

If the center of American culture has historically been New York, Las Vegas is its capital of camp. It’s where Siegfried and Roy made magic macabre. It’s Cher’s spirit city, home this summer to yet another of her concert spectaculars. It was also once home to Liberace, the piano peacock known less for the music he made than for his $300,000, 16-foot, 175-pound sequined capes and giant bed underneath a $50,000 replica of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Liberace never had any doubt who he was. He is also remembered for his aphorisms, including: “Nakedness makes us Democratic, adornment makes us individuals.” “When the reviews are bad, I tell my staff they can join me as I cry all the way to the bank.” And, of course, “Don’t wear one ring, wear five or six. People ask how I can play with all those rings, and I say, very well, thank you.” JACOB BERNSTEIN

Professional Wrestling

Is it camp? That is the only explanation.

Imagine Liberace on steroids, donning his most Vegas-ready sequined ensemble to pantomime a parody of a professional athletic event. Or, you could just check out any old WrestleMania video on YouTube. (“Macho King” Randy Savage and Hulk Hogan are good entry points.) To fans of regular sports, World Wrestling Entertainment and its ilk have always been a mystery. The costumes? Ridiculous. The action? Ludicrous. The emotions? As artificially stylized as the masks of comedy and tragedy.

Pro wrestling makes perfect sense if you accept an Urban Dictionary definition of camp as “something that provides sophisticated, knowing amusement, as by virtue of its being artlessly mannered or stylized, self-consciously artificial and extravagant.” Oddly, however, there is no clear evidence that anyone involved with the sport has ever made the connection. Google “professional wrestling” and “camp,” and you find numerous sleep-away options for Junior to practice his or her back breakers and power slams. The sport — spectacle? — seems to have escaped critical study since 1972, when the French literary theorist Roland Barthes called wrestlers “the key which opens nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil.” Academia, it turns out, can be camp too. ALEX WILLIAMS

‘Clue’

Is it camp? Maybe not, but it’s good.

A dinner party coalesces inside an old mansion on a stormy night in 1954 New England. All of the usual suspects are present: Mrs. Peacock with feathers in her hair and cat-eye glasses; Miss Scarlet in her off-the-shoulder satin dress, chiffon shawl and oversize rhinestone necklace; Professor Plum, dapper in a bow tie and pocket square, smoking a pipe. All are from the D.C. area. Each one has a secret. And they’re being blackmailed because they are, in their extortionist’s estimation, “thoroughly un-American.” As the night progresses, characters are mysteriously murdered by violent means: In the kitchen with the knife! In the study with the wrench! In the library with the pipe! Everyone is a suspect.

“Clue” the film was a box-office flop but ultimately rose to cult-classic status. Initially it was perceived as a gimmick. Perhaps rightly so — it’s based on a board game, after all. It evokes its precursor in every scene: The narrative is full of misdirection, secret passageways and a complex array of outcomes. The movie has three different endings. Which did you see? If the answer is none, you’re in for a treat. KAREN HANLEY

‘Coronation Street’

Is it camp? This show should get its own Costume Institute exhibit.

“Coronation Street’ is the world’s longest-running soap opera. Set in a fictional neighborhood of Manchester, it’s a celebration of Northern British working-class culture. The enduring popularity of “Corrie” (as the show is affectionately known) seems to rely most on its feisty, gossipy female characters: Elsie Tanner, Bet Lynch and Liz McDonald. Strong women who got by on their wits, sassy one-liners and style. There’s huge bouffant hair after a day spent at the pub in rollers; fake eyelashes and long red talons; nosebleed high heels, leopard print and shoulder pads. Queens of shade with hearts of gold, these women have captured the imagination of the British fashion world for decades (and our drag scene too). If you get on their bad side, though, they’ll happily smash your front windows with their handbags. ELIZABETH PATON

Paul Verhoeven

Is it camp? Yes.

Sharon Stone’s star turn as an ice pick wielding serial killer who revealed her nether regions to police officers in “Basic Instinct” had nothing on the performance Elizabeth Berkley gave in Mr. Verhoeven’s next film, “Showgirls.”

Her alter ego, Nomi Malone, hits Vegas with dreams of making it big and ends up removing her clothing with great frequency. Critics reached a near-consensus of disapproval, drag queens lampooned it and world-class film professors such as Wesleyan University’s Jeanine Basinger placed it in their syllabuses.

Mr. Verhoeven’s next brilliantly terrible (or just plain brilliant) social satire, “Starship Troopers,” also bombed in theaters but was later critically reassessed. The premise: A testosterone-fueled military unit is assigned to save the world from insect-like aliens who basically bomb earthlings by farting asteroids. Over the course of the movie, the costumes worn by the leaders of the “federation” become increasingly S.S.-like. The war is sold by a nationalistic, Fox News-like network (that also broadcasts criminal executions live). The film stars Denise Richards, whose subsequent marriage to and divorce from Charlie Sheen led perfectly to her turn on reality TV’s biggest camp franchise, “The Real Housewives.”

The negative reviews perplexed Mr. Verhoeven. “‘Starship Troopers’ was at least a reflection of elements in American society that were visible at the time, a kind of neoconservative thinking that became dominant in the Bush administration,” he said in a 2007 interview. “Showgirls,” he added, was meant as a “hyperbolic” commentary on the “absurdity of a certain American reality.” JACOB BERNSTEIN

‘Wet Hot American Summer’

Is it camp? It takes place at camp, but no, it’s not camp.

A day at camp can crawl along like beads of sweat under the summer sun, or unravel in a frenzy of hormones and expectations. At Camp Firewood, in the summer of ’81, time mutates and age is a costume — a young camper counsels a 30-something arts-and-crafts instructor through her divorce, while an associate professor makes a machine to shift the course of space debris using doughnuts and cans of Spam. In the space of a day, multiple romances are destroyed and resurrected, rescue operations are undertaken, and one person learns to control the elements. Halfway through the film, several campers and the director head to town, where they smoke weed, drink beer, steal money, buy cocaine and go on a heroin binge. When they return to camp, looking no worse for the wear, one character says: “It’s always fun to get away from camp, even for an hour.” VALERIYA SAFRONOVA

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[nitrateglow]

Movies watched in 2017 (35-45)

My 2017 movie journey continues! On this installment, I come across some foreign silent gems, mediocre superhero movies that make my sister angry, and the colorful madness of a certain Baz Luhrmann.

The Informer (dir. John Ford, 1935)

May just be my second favorite John Ford film after Young Mr. Lincoln. The Informer is a sound picture, but its storytelling and heavy, thorough use of incidental music make it very much like a silent movie. The use of music is a great example of what is now derisively referred to as “Mickey Mousing,” yet it never feels corny or silly because the music underscores the action and emotions of every scene so well.

While the plot is simple (former IRA member betrays a fellow rebel for money), it explores sophisticated moral and political territory. The ending is deeply moving, even if the religious symbolism is laid on a little thick. Then again, the film is heavy with expressionism, so perhaps that is warranted. Such a shame this movie is so underrated. (10/10)

Macbeth (dir. Justin Kurzel, 2015)

Words alone cannot convey my disappointment. Stills and clips made this film look like it was going to be the most stunning version of the Scottish play to date, but alas, it’s a mostly uninspiring affair. Sure, the extreme long shots of the fog-ridden and rocky landscapes are breathtaking. Sure, those fight scenes look cool. But no one seems to have much passion here—all the actors mumble and murmur the lines, every scene feels like it was shot with the trailer in mind and not because the content suited such a style. (5/10)

The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963)

The original Haunting is both a horror movie and the tragedy of a lonely, trapped woman. Eleanor may or may not be experiencing the supernatural, but there is no doubt she brought many of her own personal demons to that haunted house with her, mainly her craving to belong and be loved. While I found the voice over a little awkward at times, it eventually grew on me. Julie Harris is brilliant in the lead, one of the best horror movie performances ever.

The Haunting reminded me a lot of another gothic 1960s horror, The Innocents. I preferred The Innocents, but both are great movies about lonely women and their ghosts (literal and/or metaphoric).

And no, I do not ever plan on watching that 1990s remake. EVER. (9/10)

Danton (dir. Andrezj Wajda, 1983)

This was a wonderful movie, which makes me embarrassed since I have very little to say about it. It’s about the extremism of the French Revolution and the ideological conflict between the idealistic Robespierre and the less extreme Danton, who feels he is partially responsible for the Reign of Terror and wants to make things right. Their discourse on the nature of revolution and holding to one’s ideals is riveting from beginning to end. Even though Wajda’s sympathies lie with Danton, the film avoids painting Robespierre as a villain, showing him as a man of high ideals that were not born of power lust or evil. Both men become tragic figures in the midst of a troubled age.

The historical atmosphere is great too. Not since Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon have I seen a movie capture the look and feel of the eighteenth century to the point where it feels as though I have actually stepped back in time and am not merely witnessing a recreation. (9/10)

Japanese Girls at the Harbor (dir. Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933)

One of the things the best silent films excelled at was packing the simplest of narratives with beauty and emotion. Japanese Girls at the Harbor is one such film. At little over an hour, it tells the story of a young woman who commits a crime of passion and falls into geisha-dom as a result. At first, the movie’s story resembles a Mizoguchi film like Osaka Elegy or Sisters of the Gion, where women are forced into compromising situations through poverty or the failings of the men in their lives, but as the notes on the Criterion release say, Shimizu is much more optimistic about the potential to overcome society’s prejudice and find some little piece of redemption once you put your mind to it. The ending has a muted sense of optimism; Shimizu makes no guarantees that everything will turn out okay, but he does have hope.

There are some striking cinematic flourishes, such as the progressive close-up which precedes and antecedes a violent act. It made me think of the scene where we see the monster for the first time in James Whale’s Frankenstein. (9/10)

Moulin Rouge! (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

Part of me finds Moulin Rouge! brilliant; part of me finds it stupid and totally understands the hate it gets—regardless, I really liked it and am itching to watch it again. I first heard about it when Doug Walker claimed it was one of the movies he found most annoying and overrated, and from his description of the fast edits and some of the annoying tropes used in the picture, I expected to dislike it too. Nope. I admire its audacity, its willingness to be nothing less than bat-shit insane and unashamedly naïve in its fairy tale love story. It’s pretty much a live-action cartoon, complete with freaky close-ups, wild gesticulations accompanied by Looney Tunes sound effects, and general campiness all around. The aesthetic is like George Melies meets the 1950s MGM musical meets the 1990s music video.

That said, it isn’t perfect and I did get annoyed once the stakes started rising. I think the part of the movie which does not work for me is the second half. It’s not that the tragic stuff couldn’t work alongside all the goofy scenes (just look at Bollywood movies, which were apparently an inspiration for this movie), but sometimes the characters act way too stupid in order to move the plot along. I understand this isn’t meant to be a psychological study of jealousy or romantic love, but some of the things they do in the latter part of the movie strain credibility, even for a film in which the leads fall in love after one song.

I also feel the film’s themes aren’t explored in a compelling manner—which would not be a problem if the film was content with being mere romantic escapism, but I don’t feel that was the case. The film seems like it wants to be more than an exercise in style or an escapist melodrama with its protestations of the importance of love and artistic fulfillment. Roger Ebert claimed the movie was about the way we deceive ourselves as to our true nature (ex. Satine acts like she’s a heartless gold-digger, but she’s truly a romantic who favors the heart over her wallet; the Duke tricks himself into believing Satine truly loves him; Christian views himself as the quintessential suffering artist), but I felt that was never really developed all the way through the movie. Also the themes of love and jealousy are given the shallowest treatment. You can tell that despite its insane style and embracing of old-fashioned romanticism, it does want to discuss these things on a higher level, one it just does not reach. When your bad guy is like a parody of an entitled aristocrat who says lines like “OOH, DARLING LOOK A FROG!!”, you cannot take this movie seriously as drama.

Nevertheless, I did think the movie was a stylistic delight; we’re still feeling its influence now. Out of the Luhrmann movies I’ve seen, this one is certainly his most memorable, even if not everything works. (8/10)

A Woman’s Face (dir. George Cukor, 1941)

How this is one of Joan Crawford’s least remembered roles, I’ll never know. While on the technical side this movie is not terribly interesting, it is an entertaining noir drama and a commentary on how a woman’s worth is often linked closely to her physical beauty. And then there’s Conrad Veidt—oh swoon, oh man, I love his sensual, selfish villain! His line, “the world belongs to the devil” just personifies the amoral philosophy of so many noir villains throughout the classic cycle. (7/10)

Teen Titans: The Judas Contract (dir. Sam Liu, 2017)

I watched this movie with my sister @zany-the-nerd, who is a big Deathstroke fan. If you too are a big Deathstroke fan, I can only tell you that the likelihood of your hating this movie is high, judging by my sister’s reaction to his new characterization. As someone with only secondhand knowledge of the comic this is adapted from, I would say this movie is okay on its own. The animation is good, the fight scenes are entertaining, Nightwing and Starfire are adorable. On the whole, I think it needed a runtime longer than 80 minutes. Tara’s relationships with both the other Titans and Deathstroke could have used more development to make the emotional conclusion more effective. (7/10)

David Copperfield (dir. George Cukor, 1935)

David Copperfield is one of Charles Dickens’ best-loved novels; in 1935, MGM adapted it into this wildly successful film version and populated it with tons of great character actors. One of the delights of this version is how much it resembles the original Victorian illustrations of the novel (even the opening titles are designed to evoke the original cover design of the novel’s first printing).

There are some expressionistic flourishes in the childhood segment, illustrating the innocent David’s clashes with the much harsher adult world and how lost he feels as a disadvantaged orphan within it, and these bits look forward to post-WWII Dickens adaptation such as David Lean’s Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, and the wonderful Brian Desmond Hurst version of A Christmas Carol, all of which had shadowy cinematography that bordered on noir aesthetics. Of course, the film is not wanting in humor, which often appears in the form of several great stars and character actors: WC Fields as an offbeat yet charming Mr. Micawber, Roland Young as a very icky Uriah Heap, Basil Rathbone as the sadistic Mr. Murdstone, Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Peggotty, good God the 1930s had such great performers for this kind of material! My favorite of the bunch has to be Edna May Oliver as Aunt Betsy—I cannot imagine anyone more perfect to play that eccentric, strong-willed woman.

One of the big shocks for me was Freddie Bartholomew as the child David. Child actors in classic-era talkies usually make me cringe, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Bartholomew’s performance. He comes off as sensitive and charming without being cloying, and when he was replaced by the blander Frank Lawton in the latter part of the film, I found myself missing him. About the only scenes where Lawton musters any charisma are the ones with David’s love interest Dora Spenlow (a character I found annoying in the book, but rather liked as played by Maureen O’Sullivan here—maybe I need to revisit the book and re-assess the character). There you’re able to see some of that sensitivity return, but otherwise, he just comes across as callow and passive.

To be honest, the book is much too long and complicated to cram into two hours and ten minutes—a three hour runtime would have served the filmmakers better (that or cutting more out, which they seemed unwilling to do). Apparently producer David O. Selznick wanted to make this book into two movies, which would have been an even better idea, allowing both halves of the story to breathe and develop. While David’s childhood in the first half of the movie is paced well, the second half with his adult counterpart feels more like a greatest hits reel, a quick summary. Agnes and Steerforth in particular are barely developed. As a result, the movie feels kind of rushed toward the end, leaving you less than satisfied. But no matter, this is still a charming, well-made movie, and a treat if you are a fan of Dickens in general. (8/10)

Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (dir. Yevgeni Bauer, 1913)

I was first turned onto 1910s filmmaker Yevgeni Bauer when I saw his 1917 picture Dying Swan last year (FYI, that movie is awesome and you should all watch it). Twilight of a Woman’s Soul is an earlier and slightly less sophisticated work, but by the end of its 48 minute running time, I was impressed nevertheless. It tells the story of a rich young woman named Vera whose life is altered after a vagabond rapes her. She murders him in self-defense afterward and runs off shaken and ill (an event which seems to have next to no effect on what happens next, but still satisfying). Time passes and though she is still affected by what happened, Vera does find romance. Engaged to an upright and tender nobleman, she wonders if she should tell him about her past trauma, only to learn that her allegedly loving spouse sees her as only damaged goods after that.

What ensues is not at all what one would expect from a 1910s melodrama and just in case you watch this film, I dare not spoil it for you too much, as I was incredibly surprised by how progressive it was in terms of gender politics and in terms of how it portrayed rape from the victim’s perspective. Needless to say, the woman is able to find healing and peace without the aid of a love interest to avenge her honor. Heck, she avenges her own honor and doesn’t have to pay for it morally or legally!

Like many films made before WWI, much of the story is depicted in a series of tableaux; a medium shot is the closest the camera ever comes to any human subject. Nevertheless, this is hardly a filmed stage play. For one thing, the static scenes are saved from dullness by lovely composition, each set decorated  and lit with a sensitive eye for detail. The editing is also adventurous for 1913. In an early scene, the filmmakers employ a slow-moving forward dolly shot to create a sense of depth in the space of the heroine’s boudoir. The film suddenly, almost violently, cuts away from the rape and the murder that follows it the split second before each event occurs. The acting is also very subdued, not at all the wild gesticulations 21st century audiences expect from a silent film of this vintage.

And that seems to be the running theme of this journal entry: this movie is not what people would expect from a 1913 picture. Progressive artistically and socially, it has me wanting to watch even more of Mr. Bauer. (8/10)

[adland]

Lately, I’ve been fascinated by these commercials for Rosland Capital, starring journeyman actor William Devane who you might know from 24, The Grinder, or if you’re in your senior years, the early 1980’s soap opera Knot’s Landing. My guess is this audience these commercials are intended for know him best for the latter.

  Rosland Capital is one of those companies that tend to appeal to listeners of talk radio, preppers, survivalists, tin-foil hat wearers and senior citizens who are always worried that their hard-earned money might one day vanish overnight because some foreign regime or shadowy cabal has taken it.

Like other companies of this nature or commercials by ambulance-chasing lawyers), they exploit fear by promising security in an insecure world. Unlike other companies, however, the production value of these is higher.

Watching Rosland Capital commercials are as oddly soothing, mildly patriotic and hypnotic as they are laced with barely concealed paranoia. The premise is always the same. William Devane on location. Never the same place twice. He introduces himself, explains why he’s in that particular location, and references some timely topic in a generalized way. And then there’s a slow wind up that leads to why he buys gold from Rosland Capital, making sure the emphasis is on the word “gold.”

  He relaxes at home. He’s flying a plane. He’s doing yard work. He’s standing in front of what could be the White House. He’s on a battleship. Yeah. A freaking battleship.

  I started wondering where else William Devane could be, just to mix it up and keep it fresh. And I hereby give Rosland Capital permission to use these premises.

“Hi, I’m William Devane. Like you, I worry about chemtrails. They contain lead, arsenic and other heavy metals. Until QAnon infiltrates the CIA and puts a stop to their nefarious plans once and for all, I’ll stay the fuck indoors and order precious metals from Rosland Capital.”

  “Hi, I’m William Devane, laying down some bass in Steve Albini’s studio. With the exception of math rock, the only thing I’m more obsessed with is the sound math that'll make my retirement goals a reality. That's where Rosland Capital’s gold comes in.”

  “Hi, I’m William Devane, here at the farmer’s market. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Know what’ll keeps you from having to eat cat food in your golden years? Gold. I buy mine from Rosland Capital.”

  “Hi, I’m William Devane. If you’re like me, you are utterly convinced we’re living in a computer simulation, like unwitting characters in an absurd video game. I don’t know about you, but the only way to win is to play for keeps. That’s why I do two things: Play dirty. And level-up my gold and silver with Rosland Capital.”

  “Hi, I’m William Devane. See that tree over there? I can make it move by telekinesis. What I can’t do on my own though, is protect my retirement funds. That’s why I always buy gold and silver from Rosland Capital.”

  “Hi, I’m William Devane, getting some dental work done. Even though we still call it novocaine, most dentists have replaced it in favor of newer numbing agents like Lidocaine because it’s faster-acting. In all honesty though, there’s no better tingling sensation than knowing all that money you worked for is safe because you invested in gold through Rosland Capital.

  “Hi, I’m William Devane. Did you ever turn your back for five seconds on a perfectly ripe avocado only to discover it turned brown? I don’t know what’s up with that, but I do know if you buy gold from Rosland Capital, your financial future won’t spoil.”

  “Hi, I’m William Devane. And I’m on the phone talking to my agent. Because if I’m going to do another year of these Rosland Capital commercials, they’re going to pay through the nose. In gold.”

  “Hi, I’m William Devane, on the set of a pornographic film. I was blessed with three things: A birth name that sounds lewd. Natural stamina. And the ability to plan my future wisely. That’s why I buy gold from Rosland Capital.”

  *Record Scratch.* 

*Freeze Frame.* 

“Yup, that's me, William Devane. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. Stuck in Suvarnabhumi airport customs. Sweating bullets. Yuri said this would be the last time. He always says that. “Just one more job, boychik.” If I put my foot down, he shows me those photos again. Threatens to tell the police. "You can do almost anything in Thailand, but not that. What will the authorities think? You'll spend the rest of your days in a Bangkok prison, boychik."  Just how valuable can peacock feathers and python venom be? Lord knows what he does with them, or who he sells them to. If there's a lesson to be learned from this, it's that you should never trust a Ukrainian with a glass eye. Well that, and keep your money secure from a volatile stock market through the purchase of sound financial investments like gold and silver from Rosland Capital.”

    In addition to being a freelance CD CW (ask for the password to my portfolio) I’m also an author.

United States

advertising jokes

advertising jokes

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-- via Adland

[flauntpage]

Skater Jagger Eaton is Already a Star, But Can He Hang in the Streets?

Encinitas Skate Plaza looks like a parody of Southern California. It's the kind of place where a boombox is always playing early 2000s Offspring singles, where shirtless dads are forever weaving through crowds of shirtless teens, and where, at any given moment, a helmeted eight-year-old stands on the brink and prepares, for the first time, to drop herself down the cement walls of a never-functional pool that's twice as deep as she is tall.

Poods, as locals refer to the park, is a 13,000-square-foot slab of grey and orange concrete planes and waves and ledges, pierced by flatbars and stairways to nowhere, and surrounded by a parking lot, a soccer field, and a few palm trees that don't provide any shade. Show up most days around noon and there's a decent chance you'll notice one skateboarder, Jagger Eaton, standing out slightly from the rest. It's not that he's doing bigger tricks, necessarily, nor anything especially complicated. And it's not that he literally stands out—he just hit 5'7''.

There's just something almost effortless about the way he cruises around the park. There's an ease in the way he pops his board out of a ramp, the smile as he bails, the pat on the back he gives to check on the well-being of whoever he just slammed into at the bottom of an eight-stair rail. When Jagger does a run of tricks through the park, other skaters stop whatever they're doing, watch, and ask their friends if they saw that.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Though he still has to, as he puts it, "finesse" his way into R-rated movies, Jagger has already taken the top spot at many of the major contests open to amateur skateboarders; this year alone he's won the Phx Am and two gold medals at the X Games, in Amateur Street and Amateur Park. But as the website Quartersnacks often notes, we're in the "everyone is good" era of skateboarding: "Anyone (well, anyone who's good) can nollie flip a fourteen-stair nowadays or switch crook a gnarly rail, but it will be the behind the scenes videos that help us decide where our allegiances with various athletes stand." Jagger might have more contest wins, but there are dozens of other kids who are just as eager to make a name for themselves, who can do (most of) the same tricks and who would like to go pro in his place. For now what really separates Jagger from other 16-year-old skate phenoms—and, presumably, the reason VICE Sports sent me to San Diego to talk to him—is that he is also a TV star.

Jagger Eaton's Mega Life was a Rob Dyrdek-produced reality show that premiered on Nickelodeon late last year. During the show's 20 episodes, Jagger, family, and friends travel around the country partaking in "mega" adventures—outdoor activities like shark diving, jousting, heli-boarding, and playing beach volleyball with the U.S. women's beach volleyball team. The show gets its name from the mega ramp (also the subject of episode 17), an approximately 60-foot skate jump that Jagger has been riding since he was a child. It was on this ramp, when he was 11, that he captured his first major headlines by becoming the youngest-ever X Games competitor. While even Jagger will admit that there are times when he cringes to hear his younger voice—"I'm like, how do people even watch these videos?"—the show is more entertaining than you'd expect a Nickelodeon reality show to be. He possesses a boundless enthusiasm—evident in the way he uses G-rated swears like "gosh" and "heck" to intensify the "unreal"-ness of an activity—that makes me wish I could recapture that pre-cynical YA worldview wherein it's possible to be passionate about things like ziplining.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Since Mega Life ended, Jagger and his brother Jett, 18, have moved from their hometown of Mesa, Arizona, to Encinitas, a suburb in the North County section of San Diego that's been an epicenter of the skateboarding world since the '80s. When I met him at Poods, he was setting up a new board (he goes through one every three or four days, about the same rate as shoes) and eating a plastic cup of Fruity Pebbles. With his sunspots and striped Stussy shirt, he looked like a quintessential California teen—Zonie or not.

"I wouldn't say my life is the typical 16-year-old life," Jagger admits. "I mean I'm living out in Cali by myself. I took my GED so I basically dropped out and graduated. I'm stoked where I'm at." There was a time when having a TV show meant someone was definitely a celebrity, but, thanks to the internet's destruction of what was left of the monoculture, it's easier than ever to be huge in some circles and totally unknown in others. When I ask Jagger if he feels like he's famous, he seems to have a pretty accurate gauge on things. "I get recognized at skateparks and sometimes at, like, grocery stores, but mostly I just focus on what I need to do. I never think of myself like I'm some sort of celebrity. [Having the show] was super cool and I'm stoked to have a following off it, but I don't think I'm famous at all. I hang out with my family and my friends."

When I follow up with a similar, slightly more pointed question—"You're a 16-year-old living a state away from your parents, with 163,000 Instagram followers, many of whom are girls posting emojis about how cute they think you are. You never get into trouble?"—Jagger tells me that, "Me and my brother both have career goals that we want to accomplish. We're not playing heehaw with the fuck-around gang." And, partially because skateboarding has been his entire life since he was five and partially because he tells me he says he spends time listening to self-help audiobooks like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I believe him. Though, when pressed, he admits to sending the occasional DM. "It's always important to make new friends," he laughs, but adds, "I don't ever let it get to my head. I'm just stoked to have some fans and some people who like me."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Jagger has more contest wins and TV appearances than the average 16-year-old skater, and he's sponsored by core brands like Plan B, Independent, and Bones. But, even among skaters, he's not a household name. To change this, he's spent the last few months filming a video part—basically a highlight reel of a skater's most impressive tricks, set to music (Jagger is hoping that the licensing fee for Parliament's "Flashlight" isn't too expensive)—which he believes will show people that his skating stands on its own. "I have about two minutes of footage right now, I just need to film another minute and a half." He says he plans to submit it to Thrasher, the magazine-turned-website so influential it's known as the "skate bible." He feels confident they'll accept it. (Thrasher owner Tony Vitello told me that they've expressed interest in distributing a video part but nothing is set in stone. "He's obviously a good skater," he says, but their involvement "would most likely start towards the end of the project.")

"Me and my brother both have career goals that we want to accomplish. We're not playing heehaw with the fuck-around gang."

Most days, he and his friends skate at Poods for a few hours, break for lunch, then head out to spots around town filming tricks. This goes on until it gets dark, unless they're filming with lights, in which case they can stay out all night. (High-level skateboarders spend an inordinate amount of time on schoolyards and grocery store loading docks.), His crew can fluctuate, from his brother Jett and other locals to fellow Plan B riders like Chris Joslin and Trevor McCLung, and SK8 Mafia's Wes Kremer. San Diego is something of a skate mecca, so he's managed to make a big impression on legends like Danny Way, who says, "Jagger has one of the most diverse skill sets and is one of the future legends of this next generation of young rippers."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

There's a foundational paradox in skate culture: It's an industry that runs on advertising—the major websites and magazines are basically trade publications, and anything critical about brands is extremely rare—while priding itself on being anti-establishment. Jagger has the commercial side down, but, with his Nickelodeon show, he's anything but counter-culture. Jagger has heard his share of criticism, but says he doesn't care. "[Jagger Eaton's Mega Life] was one of the coolest experiences of my life and I don't really give a shit what anybody says about it. I would never want to take it back. I had so much fun doing it. I got to meet so many cool people. It was just completely worth it." Despite its underdog mentality, skateboarding has long been a dominant force in pop culture. It shapes everything from entertainment (Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Rob Dyrdek's empire, the stylings of Spike Jonze and Harmony Korine) to fashion (skateboarders, once responsible for the tight jeans resurgence, are to blame for the half-decade-long high-waters with Vans Old Skools trend). It would almost be weirder if a super-talented 16-year-old skater didn't have his own Nickelodeon show.

One might think Jagger's contest wins would silence the commenters, but skateboarders are probably even more suspicious of the X Games than of Nickelodeon. Traditional sports (and some purists even bristle at the thought of skating as a "sport") revolve around winning, but success in skateboarding has largely been about getting enough children to buy shoes with your name on them. Being cool is more important than being the best—among skaters, the word style is as common as it is vague—which is part of why so many look down on contests. Jagger knows he has to prove he's more than just a good contest skater, because skating in a contest is fundamentally different from skating in the street, and street skating is what dominates coverage on the skateboarding internet. Contests require an automaton-like ability to manage a series of tricks in a row without falling, so skaters default to things they know they can do. On the street, a skater has infinite chances, not ninety-second runs; it's about pushing yourself rather than beating others. This is why Jagger feels like he has to show his worth with a video.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Watching him tell our photographer which lens and angle will work best for a given shot, it's clear Jagger possesses a level of professionalism unknown to most teens, let alone teen skaters. He has a pretty solid idea of how to bring his plans to fruition, which is good, because he has a lot of plans. Right now, these include filming a street part with skateboarding's foremost cinematographer Ty Evans, turning pro before he's 18, and, most pressingly, getting his driver's license. Three years from now, skateboarding will make its Olympic debut. When I asked Jagger what he thinks of the possibility of skating in the Olympics, he tells me that "I would love to compete for my country." It's true that the name "Jagger Eaton" seems almost designed to appear on a chyron, but he'll be competing against dozens of the world's best skateboarders for just a handful of slots on Team USA. Plus, even the qualifying events for the games are years away. When you're 16, anything seems possible and everything can change in just a few months. Right now, he says, "I just have to prove I can hang in the streets."

Skater Jagger Eaton is Already a Star, But Can He Hang in the Streets? published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[amtushinfosolutionspage]

Skater Jagger Eaton is Already a Star, But Can He Hang in the Streets?

Encinitas Skate Plaza looks like a parody of Southern California. It’s the kind of place where a boombox is always playing early 2000s Offspring singles, where shirtless dads are forever weaving through crowds of shirtless teens, and where, at any given moment, a helmeted eight-year-old stands on the brink and prepares, for the first time, to drop herself down the cement walls of a never-functional pool that’s twice as deep as she is tall.

Poods, as locals refer to the park, is a 13,000-square-foot slab of grey and orange concrete planes and waves and ledges, pierced by flatbars and stairways to nowhere, and surrounded by a parking lot, a soccer field, and a few palm trees that don’t provide any shade. Show up most days around noon and there’s a decent chance you’ll notice one skateboarder, Jagger Eaton, standing out slightly from the rest. It’s not that he’s doing bigger tricks, necessarily, nor anything especially complicated. And it’s not that he literally stands out—he just hit 5’7”.

There’s just something almost effortless about the way he cruises around the park. There’s an ease in the way he pops his board out of a ramp, the smile as he bails, the pat on the back he gives to check on the well-being of whoever he just slammed into at the bottom of an eight-stair rail. When Jagger does a run of tricks through the park, other skaters stop whatever they’re doing, watch, and ask their friends if they saw that.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Though he still has to, as he puts it, “finesse” his way into R-rated movies, Jagger has already taken the top spot at many of the major contests open to amateur skateboarders; this year alone he’s won the Phx Am and two gold medals at the X Games, in Amateur Street and Amateur Park. But as the website Quartersnacks often notes, we’re in the “everyone is good” era of skateboarding: “Anyone (well, anyone who’s good) can nollie flip a fourteen-stair nowadays or switch crook a gnarly rail, but it will be the behind the scenes videos that help us decide where our allegiances with various athletes stand.” Jagger might have more contest wins, but there are dozens of other kids who are just as eager to make a name for themselves, who can do (most of) the same tricks and who would like to go pro in his place. For now what really separates Jagger from other 16-year-old skate phenoms—and, presumably, the reason VICE Sports sent me to San Diego to talk to him—is that he is also a TV star.

Jagger Eaton’s Mega Life was a Rob Dyrdek-produced reality show that premiered on Nickelodeon late last year. During the show’s 20 episodes, Jagger, family, and friends travel around the country partaking in “mega” adventures—outdoor activities like shark diving, jousting, heli-boarding, and playing beach volleyball with the U.S. women’s beach volleyball team. The show gets its name from the mega ramp (also the subject of episode 17), an approximately 60-foot skate jump that Jagger has been riding since he was a child. It was on this ramp, when he was 11, that he captured his first major headlines by becoming the youngest-ever X Games competitor. While even Jagger will admit that there are times when he cringes to hear his younger voice—”I’m like, how do people even watch these videos?”—the show is more entertaining than you’d expect a Nickelodeon reality show to be. He possesses a boundless enthusiasm—evident in the way he uses G-rated swears like “gosh” and “heck” to intensify the “unreal”-ness of an activity—that makes me wish I could recapture that pre-cynical YA worldview wherein it’s possible to be passionate about things like ziplining.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Since Mega Life ended, Jagger and his brother Jett, 18, have moved from their hometown of Mesa, Arizona, to Encinitas, a suburb in the North County section of San Diego that’s been an epicenter of the skateboarding world since the ’80s. When I met him at Poods, he was setting up a new board (he goes through one every three or four days, about the same rate as shoes) and eating a plastic cup of Fruity Pebbles. With his sunspots and striped Stussy shirt, he looked like a quintessential California teen—Zonie or not.

“I wouldn’t say my life is the typical 16-year-old life,” Jagger admits. “I mean I’m living out in Cali by myself. I took my GED so I basically dropped out and graduated. I’m stoked where I’m at.” There was a time when having a TV show meant someone was definitely a celebrity, but, thanks to the internet’s destruction of what was left of the monoculture, it’s easier than ever to be huge in some circles and totally unknown in others. When I ask Jagger if he feels like he’s famous, he seems to have a pretty accurate gauge on things. “I get recognized at skateparks and sometimes at, like, grocery stores, but mostly I just focus on what I need to do. I never think of myself like I’m some sort of celebrity. [Having the show] was super cool and I’m stoked to have a following off it, but I don’t think I’m famous at all. I hang out with my family and my friends.”

When I follow up with a similar, slightly more pointed question—”You’re a 16-year-old living a state away from your parents, with 163,000 Instagram followers, many of whom are girls posting emojis about how cute they think you are. You never get into trouble?”—Jagger tells me that, “Me and my brother both have career goals that we want to accomplish. We’re not playing heehaw with the fuck-around gang.” And, partially because skateboarding has been his entire life since he was five and partially because he tells me he says he spends time listening to self-help audiobooks like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I believe him. Though, when pressed, he admits to sending the occasional DM. “It’s always important to make new friends,” he laughs, but adds, “I don’t ever let it get to my head. I’m just stoked to have some fans and some people who like me.”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Jagger has more contest wins and TV appearances than the average 16-year-old skater, and he’s sponsored by core brands like Plan B, Independent, and Bones. But, even among skaters, he’s not a household name. To change this, he’s spent the last few months filming a video part—basically a highlight reel of a skater’s most impressive tricks, set to music (Jagger is hoping that the licensing fee for Parliament’s “Flashlight” isn’t too expensive)—which he believes will show people that his skating stands on its own. “I have about two minutes of footage right now, I just need to film another minute and a half.” He says he plans to submit it to Thrasher, the magazine-turned-website so influential it’s known as the “skate bible.” He feels confident they’ll accept it. (Thrasher owner Tony Vitello told me that they’ve expressed interest in distributing a video part but nothing is set in stone. “He’s obviously a good skater,” he says, but their involvement “would most likely start towards the end of the project.”)

“Me and my brother both have career goals that we want to accomplish. We’re not playing heehaw with the fuck-around gang.”

Most days, he and his friends skate at Poods for a few hours, break for lunch, then head out to spots around town filming tricks. This goes on until it gets dark, unless they’re filming with lights, in which case they can stay out all night. (High-level skateboarders spend an inordinate amount of time on schoolyards and grocery store loading docks.), His crew can fluctuate, from his brother Jett and other locals to fellow Plan B riders like Chris Joslin and Trevor McCLung, and SK8 Mafia’s Wes Kremer. San Diego is something of a skate mecca, so he’s managed to make a big impression on legends like Danny Way, who says, “Jagger has one of the most diverse skill sets and is one of the future legends of this next generation of young rippers.”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

There’s a foundational paradox in skate culture: It’s an industry that runs on advertising—the major websites and magazines are basically trade publications, and anything critical about brands is extremely rare—while priding itself on being anti-establishment. Jagger has the commercial side down, but, with his Nickelodeon show, he’s anything but counter-culture. Jagger has heard his share of criticism, but says he doesn’t care. “[Jagger Eaton’s Mega Life] was one of the coolest experiences of my life and I don’t really give a shit what anybody says about it. I would never want to take it back. I had so much fun doing it. I got to meet so many cool people. It was just completely worth it.” Despite its underdog mentality, skateboarding has long been a dominant force in pop culture. It shapes everything from entertainment (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Rob Dyrdek’s empire, the stylings of Spike Jonze and Harmony Korine) to fashion (skateboarders, once responsible for the tight jeans resurgence, are to blame for the half-decade-long high-waters with Vans Old Skools trend). It would almost be weirder if a super-talented 16-year-old skater didn’t have his own Nickelodeon show.

One might think Jagger’s contest wins would silence the commenters, but skateboarders are probably even more suspicious of the X Games than of Nickelodeon. Traditional sports (and some purists even bristle at the thought of skating as a “sport”) revolve around winning, but success in skateboarding has largely been about getting enough children to buy shoes with your name on them. Being cool is more important than being the best—among skaters, the word style is as common as it is vague—which is part of why so many look down on contests. Jagger knows he has to prove he’s more than just a good contest skater, because skating in a contest is fundamentally different from skating in the street, and street skating is what dominates coverage on the skateboarding internet. Contests require an automaton-like ability to manage a series of tricks in a row without falling, so skaters default to things they know they can do. On the street, a skater has infinite chances, not ninety-second runs; it’s about pushing yourself rather than beating others. This is why Jagger feels like he has to show his worth with a video.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Watching him tell our photographer which lens and angle will work best for a given shot, it’s clear Jagger possesses a level of professionalism unknown to most teens, let alone teen skaters. He has a pretty solid idea of how to bring his plans to fruition, which is good, because he has a lot of plans. Right now, these include filming a street part with skateboarding’s foremost cinematographer Ty Evans, turning pro before he’s 18, and, most pressingly, getting his driver’s license. Three years from now, skateboarding will make its Olympic debut. When I asked Jagger what he thinks of the possibility of skating in the Olympics, he tells me that “I would love to compete for my country.” It’s true that the name “Jagger Eaton” seems almost designed to appear on a chyron, but he’ll be competing against dozens of the world’s best skateboarders for just a handful of slots on Team USA. Plus, even the qualifying events for the games are years away. When you’re 16, anything seems possible and everything can change in just a few months. Right now, he says, “I just have to prove I can hang in the streets.”

Skater Jagger Eaton is Already a Star, But Can He Hang in the Streets? syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

[flauntpage]

Skater Jagger Eaton is Already a Star, But Can He Hang in the Streets?

Encinitas Skate Plaza looks like a parody of Southern California. It's the kind of place where a boombox is always playing early 2000s Offspring singles, where shirtless dads are forever weaving through crowds of shirtless teens, and where, at any given moment, a helmeted eight-year-old stands on the brink and prepares, for the first time, to drop herself down the cement walls of a never-functional pool that's twice as deep as she is tall.

Poods, as locals refer to the park, is a 13,000-square-foot slab of grey and orange concrete planes and waves and ledges, pierced by flatbars and stairways to nowhere, and surrounded by a parking lot, a soccer field, and a few palm trees that don't provide any shade. Show up most days around noon and there's a decent chance you'll notice one skateboarder, Jagger Eaton, standing out slightly from the rest. It's not that he's doing bigger tricks, necessarily, nor anything especially complicated. And it's not that he literally stands out—he just hit 5'7''.

There's just something almost effortless about the way he cruises around the park. There's an ease in the way he pops his board out of a ramp, the smile as he bails, the pat on the back he gives to check on the well-being of whoever he just slammed into at the bottom of an eight-stair rail. When Jagger does a run of tricks through the park, other skaters stop whatever they're doing, watch, and ask their friends if they saw that.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Though he still has to, as he puts it, "finesse" his way into R-rated movies, Jagger has already taken the top spot at many of the major contests open to amateur skateboarders; this year alone he's won the Phx Am and two gold medals at the X Games, in Amateur Street and Amateur Park. But as the website Quartersnacks often notes, we're in the "everyone is good" era of skateboarding: "Anyone (well, anyone who's good) can nollie flip a fourteen-stair nowadays or switch crook a gnarly rail, but it will be the behind the scenes videos that help us decide where our allegiances with various athletes stand." Jagger might have more contest wins, but there are dozens of other kids who are just as eager to make a name for themselves, who can do (most of) the same tricks and who would like to go pro in his place. For now what really separates Jagger from other 16-year-old skate phenoms—and, presumably, the reason VICE Sports sent me to San Diego to talk to him—is that he is also a TV star.

Jagger Eaton's Mega Life was a Rob Dyrdek-produced reality show that premiered on Nickelodeon late last year. During the show's 20 episodes, Jagger, family, and friends travel around the country partaking in "mega" adventures—outdoor activities like shark diving, jousting, heli-boarding, and playing beach volleyball with the U.S. women's beach volleyball team. The show gets its name from the mega ramp (also the subject of episode 17), an approximately 60-foot skate jump that Jagger has been riding since he was a child. It was on this ramp, when he was 11, that he captured his first major headlines by becoming the youngest-ever X Games competitor. While even Jagger will admit that there are times when he cringes to hear his younger voice—"I'm like, how do people even watch these videos?"—the show is more entertaining than you'd expect a Nickelodeon reality show to be. He possesses a boundless enthusiasm—evident in the way he uses G-rated swears like "gosh" and "heck" to intensify the "unreal"-ness of an activity—that makes me wish I could recapture that pre-cynical YA worldview wherein it's possible to be passionate about things like ziplining.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Since Mega Life ended, Jagger and his brother Jett, 18, have moved from their hometown of Mesa, Arizona, to Encinitas, a suburb in the North County section of San Diego that's been an epicenter of the skateboarding world since the '80s. When I met him at Poods, he was setting up a new board (he goes through one every three or four days, about the same rate as shoes) and eating a plastic cup of Fruity Pebbles. With his sunspots and striped Stussy shirt, he looked like a quintessential California teen—Zonie or not.

"I wouldn't say my life is the typical 16-year-old life," Jagger admits. "I mean I'm living out in Cali by myself. I took my GED so I basically dropped out and graduated. I'm stoked where I'm at." There was a time when having a TV show meant someone was definitely a celebrity, but, thanks to the internet's destruction of what was left of the monoculture, it's easier than ever to be huge in some circles and totally unknown in others. When I ask Jagger if he feels like he's famous, he seems to have a pretty accurate gauge on things. "I get recognized at skateparks and sometimes at, like, grocery stores, but mostly I just focus on what I need to do. I never think of myself like I'm some sort of celebrity. [Having the show] was super cool and I'm stoked to have a following off it, but I don't think I'm famous at all. I hang out with my family and my friends."

When I follow up with a similar, slightly more pointed question—"You're a 16-year-old living a state away from your parents, with 163,000 Instagram followers, many of whom are girls posting emojis about how cute they think you are. You never get into trouble?"—Jagger tells me that, "Me and my brother both have career goals that we want to accomplish. We're not playing heehaw with the fuck-around gang." And, partially because skateboarding has been his entire life since he was five and partially because he tells me he says he spends time listening to self-help audiobooks like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I believe him. Though, when pressed, he admits to sending the occasional DM. "It's always important to make new friends," he laughs, but adds, "I don't ever let it get to my head. I'm just stoked to have some fans and some people who like me."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Jagger has more contest wins and TV appearances than the average 16-year-old skater, and he's sponsored by core brands like Plan B, Independent, and Bones. But, even among skaters, he's not a household name. To change this, he's spent the last few months filming a video part—basically a highlight reel of a skater's most impressive tricks, set to music (Jagger is hoping that the licensing fee for Parliament's "Flashlight" isn't too expensive)—which he believes will show people that his skating stands on its own. "I have about two minutes of footage right now, I just need to film another minute and a half." He says he plans to submit it to Thrasher, the magazine-turned-website so influential it's known as the "skate bible." He feels confident they'll accept it. (Thrasher owner Tony Vitello told me that they've expressed interest in distributing a video part but nothing is set in stone. "He's obviously a good skater," he says, but their involvement "would most likely start towards the end of the project.")

"Me and my brother both have career goals that we want to accomplish. We're not playing heehaw with the fuck-around gang."

Most days, he and his friends skate at Poods for a few hours, break for lunch, then head out to spots around town filming tricks. This goes on until it gets dark, unless they're filming with lights, in which case they can stay out all night. (High-level skateboarders spend an inordinate amount of time on schoolyards and grocery store loading docks.), His crew can fluctuate, from his brother Jett and other locals to fellow Plan B riders like Chris Joslin and Trevor McCLung, and SK8 Mafia's Wes Kremer. San Diego is something of a skate mecca, so he's managed to make a big impression on legends like Danny Way, who says, "Jagger has one of the most diverse skill sets and is one of the future legends of this next generation of young rippers."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

There's a foundational paradox in skate culture: It's an industry that runs on advertising—the major websites and magazines are basically trade publications, and anything critical about brands is extremely rare—while priding itself on being anti-establishment. Jagger has the commercial side down, but, with his Nickelodeon show, he's anything but counter-culture. Jagger has heard his share of criticism, but says he doesn't care. "[Jagger Eaton's Mega Life] was one of the coolest experiences of my life and I don't really give a shit what anybody says about it. I would never want to take it back. I had so much fun doing it. I got to meet so many cool people. It was just completely worth it." Despite its underdog mentality, skateboarding has long been a dominant force in pop culture. It shapes everything from entertainment (Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Rob Dyrdek's empire, the stylings of Spike Jonze and Harmony Korine) to fashion (skateboarders, once responsible for the tight jeans resurgence, are to blame for the half-decade-long high-waters with Vans Old Skools trend). It would almost be weirder if a super-talented 16-year-old skater didn't have his own Nickelodeon show.

One might think Jagger's contest wins would silence the commenters, but skateboarders are probably even more suspicious of the X Games than of Nickelodeon. Traditional sports (and some purists even bristle at the thought of skating as a "sport") revolve around winning, but success in skateboarding has largely been about getting enough children to buy shoes with your name on them. Being cool is more important than being the best—among skaters, the word style is as common as it is vague—which is part of why so many look down on contests. Jagger knows he has to prove he's more than just a good contest skater, because skating in a contest is fundamentally different from skating in the street, and street skating is what dominates coverage on the skateboarding internet. Contests require an automaton-like ability to manage a series of tricks in a row without falling, so skaters default to things they know they can do. On the street, a skater has infinite chances, not ninety-second runs; it's about pushing yourself rather than beating others. This is why Jagger feels like he has to show his worth with a video.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Watching him tell our photographer which lens and angle will work best for a given shot, it's clear Jagger possesses a level of professionalism unknown to most teens, let alone teen skaters. He has a pretty solid idea of how to bring his plans to fruition, which is good, because he has a lot of plans. Right now, these include filming a street part with skateboarding's foremost cinematographer Ty Evans, turning pro before he's 18, and, most pressingly, getting his driver's license. Three years from now, skateboarding will make its Olympic debut. When I asked Jagger what he thinks of the possibility of skating in the Olympics, he tells me that "I would love to compete for my country." It's true that the name "Jagger Eaton" seems almost designed to appear on a chyron, but he'll be competing against dozens of the world's best skateboarders for just a handful of slots on Team USA. Plus, even the qualifying events for the games are years away. When you're 16, anything seems possible and everything can change in just a few months. Right now, he says, "I just have to prove I can hang in the streets."

Skater Jagger Eaton is Already a Star, But Can He Hang in the Streets? published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

Skater Jagger Eaton is Already a Star, But Can He Hang in the Streets?

Encinitas Skate Plaza looks like a parody of Southern California. It's the kind of place where a boombox is always playing early 2000s Offspring singles, where shirtless dads are forever weaving through crowds of shirtless teens, and where, at any given moment, a helmeted eight-year-old stands on the brink and prepares, for the first time, to drop herself down the cement walls of a never-functional pool that's twice as deep as she is tall.

Poods, as locals refer to the park, is a 13,000-square-foot slab of grey and orange concrete planes and waves and ledges, pierced by flatbars and stairways to nowhere, and surrounded by a parking lot, a soccer field, and a few palm trees that don't provide any shade. Show up most days around noon and there's a decent chance you'll notice one skateboarder, Jagger Eaton, standing out slightly from the rest. It's not that he's doing bigger tricks, necessarily, nor anything especially complicated. And it's not that he literally stands out—he just hit 5'7''.

There's just something almost effortless about the way he cruises around the park. There's an ease in the way he pops his board out of a ramp, the smile as he bails, the pat on the back he gives to check on the well-being of whoever he just slammed into at the bottom of an eight-stair rail. When Jagger does a run of tricks through the park, other skaters stop whatever they're doing, watch, and ask their friends if they saw that.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Though he still has to, as he puts it, "finesse" his way into R-rated movies, Jagger has already taken the top spot at many of the major contests open to amateur skateboarders; this year alone he's won the Phx Am and two gold medals at the X Games, in Amateur Street and Amateur Park. But as the website Quartersnacks often notes, we're in the "everyone is good" era of skateboarding: "Anyone (well, anyone who's good) can nollie flip a fourteen-stair nowadays or switch crook a gnarly rail, but it will be the behind the scenes videos that help us decide where our allegiances with various athletes stand." Jagger might have more contest wins, but there are dozens of other kids who are just as eager to make a name for themselves, who can do (most of) the same tricks and who would like to go pro in his place. For now what really separates Jagger from other 16-year-old skate phenoms—and, presumably, the reason VICE Sports sent me to San Diego to talk to him—is that he is also a TV star.

Jagger Eaton's Mega Life was a Rob Dyrdek-produced reality show that premiered on Nickelodeon late last year. During the show's 20 episodes, Jagger, family, and friends travel around the country partaking in "mega" adventures—outdoor activities like shark diving, jousting, heli-boarding, and playing beach volleyball with the U.S. women's beach volleyball team. The show gets its name from the mega ramp (also the subject of episode 17), an approximately 60-foot skate jump that Jagger has been riding since he was a child. It was on this ramp, when he was 11, that he captured his first major headlines by becoming the youngest-ever X Games competitor. While even Jagger will admit that there are times when he cringes to hear his younger voice—"I'm like, how do people even watch these videos?"—the show is more entertaining than you'd expect a Nickelodeon reality show to be. He possesses a boundless enthusiasm—evident in the way he uses G-rated swears like "gosh" and "heck" to intensify the "unreal"-ness of an activity—that makes me wish I could recapture that pre-cynical YA worldview wherein it's possible to be passionate about things like ziplining.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Since Mega Life ended, Jagger and his brother Jett, 18, have moved from their hometown of Mesa, Arizona, to Encinitas, a suburb in the North County section of San Diego that's been an epicenter of the skateboarding world since the '80s. When I met him at Poods, he was setting up a new board (he goes through one every three or four days, about the same rate as shoes) and eating a plastic cup of Fruity Pebbles. With his sunspots and striped Stussy shirt, he looked like a quintessential California teen—Zonie or not.

"I wouldn't say my life is the typical 16-year-old life," Jagger admits. "I mean I'm living out in Cali by myself. I took my GED so I basically dropped out and graduated. I'm stoked where I'm at." There was a time when having a TV show meant someone was definitely a celebrity, but, thanks to the internet's destruction of what was left of the monoculture, it's easier than ever to be huge in some circles and totally unknown in others. When I ask Jagger if he feels like he's famous, he seems to have a pretty accurate gauge on things. "I get recognized at skateparks and sometimes at, like, grocery stores, but mostly I just focus on what I need to do. I never think of myself like I'm some sort of celebrity. [Having the show] was super cool and I'm stoked to have a following off it, but I don't think I'm famous at all. I hang out with my family and my friends."

When I follow up with a similar, slightly more pointed question—"You're a 16-year-old living a state away from your parents, with 163,000 Instagram followers, many of whom are girls posting emojis about how cute they think you are. You never get into trouble?"—Jagger tells me that, "Me and my brother both have career goals that we want to accomplish. We're not playing heehaw with the fuck-around gang." And, partially because skateboarding has been his entire life since he was five and partially because he tells me he says he spends time listening to self-help audiobooks like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I believe him. Though, when pressed, he admits to sending the occasional DM. "It's always important to make new friends," he laughs, but adds, "I don't ever let it get to my head. I'm just stoked to have some fans and some people who like me."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Jagger has more contest wins and TV appearances than the average 16-year-old skater, and he's sponsored by core brands like Plan B, Independent, and Bones. But, even among skaters, he's not a household name. To change this, he's spent the last few months filming a video part—basically a highlight reel of a skater's most impressive tricks, set to music (Jagger is hoping that the licensing fee for Parliament's "Flashlight" isn't too expensive)—which he believes will show people that his skating stands on its own. "I have about two minutes of footage right now, I just need to film another minute and a half." He says he plans to submit it to Thrasher, the magazine-turned-website so influential it's known as the "skate bible." He feels confident they'll accept it. (Thrasher owner Tony Vitello told me that they've expressed interest in distributing a video part but nothing is set in stone. "He's obviously a good skater," he says, but their involvement "would most likely start towards the end of the project.")

"Me and my brother both have career goals that we want to accomplish. We're not playing heehaw with the fuck-around gang."

Most days, he and his friends skate at Poods for a few hours, break for lunch, then head out to spots around town filming tricks. This goes on until it gets dark, unless they're filming with lights, in which case they can stay out all night. (High-level skateboarders spend an inordinate amount of time on schoolyards and grocery store loading docks.), His crew can fluctuate, from his brother Jett and other locals to fellow Plan B riders like Chris Joslin and Trevor McCLung, and SK8 Mafia's Wes Kremer. San Diego is something of a skate mecca, so he's managed to make a big impression on legends like Danny Way, who says, "Jagger has one of the most diverse skill sets and is one of the future legends of this next generation of young rippers."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

There's a foundational paradox in skate culture: It's an industry that runs on advertising—the major websites and magazines are basically trade publications, and anything critical about brands is extremely rare—while priding itself on being anti-establishment. Jagger has the commercial side down, but, with his Nickelodeon show, he's anything but counter-culture. Jagger has heard his share of criticism, but says he doesn't care. "[Jagger Eaton's Mega Life] was one of the coolest experiences of my life and I don't really give a shit what anybody says about it. I would never want to take it back. I had so much fun doing it. I got to meet so many cool people. It was just completely worth it." Despite its underdog mentality, skateboarding has long been a dominant force in pop culture. It shapes everything from entertainment (Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Rob Dyrdek's empire, the stylings of Spike Jonze and Harmony Korine) to fashion (skateboarders, once responsible for the tight jeans resurgence, are to blame for the half-decade-long high-waters with Vans Old Skools trend). It would almost be weirder if a super-talented 16-year-old skater didn't have his own Nickelodeon show.

One might think Jagger's contest wins would silence the commenters, but skateboarders are probably even more suspicious of the X Games than of Nickelodeon. Traditional sports (and some purists even bristle at the thought of skating as a "sport") revolve around winning, but success in skateboarding has largely been about getting enough children to buy shoes with your name on them. Being cool is more important than being the best—among skaters, the word style is as common as it is vague—which is part of why so many look down on contests. Jagger knows he has to prove he's more than just a good contest skater, because skating in a contest is fundamentally different from skating in the street, and street skating is what dominates coverage on the skateboarding internet. Contests require an automaton-like ability to manage a series of tricks in a row without falling, so skaters default to things they know they can do. On the street, a skater has infinite chances, not ninety-second runs; it's about pushing yourself rather than beating others. This is why Jagger feels like he has to show his worth with a video.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Watching him tell our photographer which lens and angle will work best for a given shot, it's clear Jagger possesses a level of professionalism unknown to most teens, let alone teen skaters. He has a pretty solid idea of how to bring his plans to fruition, which is good, because he has a lot of plans. Right now, these include filming a street part with skateboarding's foremost cinematographer Ty Evans, turning pro before he's 18, and, most pressingly, getting his driver's license. Three years from now, skateboarding will make its Olympic debut. When I asked Jagger what he thinks of the possibility of skating in the Olympics, he tells me that "I would love to compete for my country." It's true that the name "Jagger Eaton" seems almost designed to appear on a chyron, but he'll be competing against dozens of the world's best skateboarders for just a handful of slots on Team USA. Plus, even the qualifying events for the games are years away. When you're 16, anything seems possible and everything can change in just a few months. Right now, he says, "I just have to prove I can hang in the streets."

Skater Jagger Eaton is Already a Star, But Can He Hang in the Streets? published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv