#incidentally i am a sculptor

[lillikoifish]

Theres 3 types of artists in this world. No more, no less. There are painters, sculptors, and draftsmen (not drawers, you dont put a lego set inside someone who likes to use pencils).

Now here’s where it gets interesting: you can be a sculptor, but never pick up a chisel. This is the part thats hardest for people to understand: the only difference between artists is how they use their tools to solve the problem, the problem being their artwork. You can be someone who hates oil paint and loves pen and ink, but still be a painter, it’s completely possible and natural.

What’s the difference, you might ask, ok I’ll explain. A sculptor is someone who creates volume, that is to say, they make stuff that’s three dimensional. Now if you are only using 2-D space, paper, how can you be a sculptor? By using line and shape and color and light to emphasize the form you’re trying to create. “But don’t all artists do that?” Yes! But a sculptor finds that making forms is more important than other things, and would emphasize it more than a painter would.

A painter layers light and color and texture, and creates harmony through this. If you find yourself thinking in layers? You might just be a painter. It’s very much the most common way of making art, and very easy to explain to the layperson. Start with white, add all the red, add all the green, eventually you have a christmas tree, see? Meanwhile a sculptor would see the strength of the tree and the shadow is casts first, and the color and contrast would come after. Where does your mind go when you have to solve this problem? That’s what we’re trying to answer here.

The final type is the rarest, and also the hardest to describe, but I’ll try. Draftsmen care about contrast, the difference between two planes, the difference between shadow and light. You see a bottle and want to draw the bottle, you make an outline to show where the bottle is, and where it’s not. It’s not just making the bottle come towards the viewer, it’s about showing that the bottle is NOT part of the table it sits on. This line cannot be confused with this other line, it is very clear what you are putting there.

Now perhaps you think, after reading this, that maybe you don’t fit in. Or maybe multiple descriptions suited you, and you’re not sure how you’d define yourself. Well the good news is that ultimately it doesnt matter, its just a fun way to describe your process when you make your artwork, and can help you point to other artists who share your disposition. If you want to be all three, I say dare to think different! However if you truly want to key into what makes you strong in art, or what makes your favorite artists strong, this can be a good first step to figuring that out. Good luck and happy arting :)

[flawseer]

Not sure if you’re taking requests but can you please draw Orca? The murder mystery (the murder mystery sister) if you’ve already drawn her I’d love a link!

I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm taking "requests" as such, since offering that can be a rather precarious slope on the internet. What I am certainly open to though is suggestions! If it's something that intrigues me at the time, or I was already planning to do and just haven't gotten around to yet, I may give it a shot.

Incidentally, drawing Orca was something I already wanted to do at some point in the future, so...

Orca

I imagine Orca was very similar to Tsunami in looks and physique; both would be fairly large and well-built. Strong. Swift. Good at fighting. Orca might have had the edge in raw physical strength (as a sculptor she would be accustomed to moving large stone blocks around) while Tsunami has better reflexes and instincts.

They're still very similar though; if you were able to put them next to each other at the same age, they'd likely be difficult to tell apart (if one wasn't green and their markings weren't different). I picture Orca with two prominent and large luminous patches over her eyes, which is where she got her name from.

If she had lived, she might have had a potentially interesting dynamic with Tsunami. But in terms of causes of death, there are certainly worse ways to go than decking Coral in the snout.

[swanmaids]

If we just pretend the context doesn't matter, I wrote this "Glorfindel meets Elrond for the first time" as part of a larger (incidentally, non-Feanorian Erestor) story but you might like this scene:

--------------------------------

Glorfindel was roused - not having realized he had drifted off in the chair - by Elrond’s soft voice across from him. A glance out the window told him night had fallen but not how long since he had dozed, though the stiffness in his neck hinted that it must have been hours.

“I remember so little of my father,” Elrond said, not looking at Glorfindel. Not looking, it seemed, at anything at all. He still bore the heaviness of the news he had conveyed to the families of the fallen, wearing them like a shadow over his fair features.

“Most of what I tell myself I remember is what our mother would tell us, stories of him after she had tucked us in.” Elrond’s voice grew softer, his thoughts turning to long ago, to a place now long lost beneath the waves. “Those few years we had… he was so often at sea, always searching…” He dropped his head and sighed. “He believed so strongly.”

“Tuor had remarkable faith,” Glorfindel replied softly. “Moreso than even some Eldar. I wish his message had been heeded sooner.”

Elrond was silent for a moment, then said, “I suppose it would be futile to ask if you know his fate?”

Glorfindel could only offer a sorrowful smile.

Elrond gave a resigned shrug, having long ago accepted it was beyond his ken. “One of the few things that I do remember clearly: my father holding us, one in each arm, at the sea’s edge. He promised that he would find our grandfather some day, telling us stories of Ulmo and how he had guided Tuor to the Hidden City.

“He spoke of you once,” Elrond said, at last looking at Glorfindel. “You know, I always imagined you would be taller.”

Glorfindel gave a good humored huff and smiled. “Oh?”

“I suppose to a seven-year-old boy you would seem to be a giant.” Elrond could not help a small laugh at his own expense. “The statues did not help, either. Not that I expected you to be made of marble, of course. They simply cannot capture the soul of a person, however skilled the sculptor.”

“You never saw Nerdanel’s work,” Glorfindel said softly, nostalgia tugging at his memories. Then he confessed, “You are not what I imagined, either.”

“No?”

Glorfindel shook his head, then gave a bit more heartfelt smile. “It is of no great importance. I am honored to meet Eärendil’s son. I heard of you, of course. Mostly from Círdan and Gil-galad. But I am glad to know you myself, now.”

Oh, this is lovely, thank you for sharing! I love that image of Earendil looking out to sea holding the twins. And Glorfindel is so kind 🥹

[cathornaccessory]

I totally spaced today. Rough day, worrying about the weather this weekend with a market. I need to chill and let what us going to happen, happen.

While I was worrying, I managed to stock up for the market that may or may not happen. I have lots of gemstone bracelets ready, both, sold out favorites and new styles not available online yet.

The newest additions are Italian marble with snake charms (the snakes have little amber stones at their heads) and dolomite with all seeing eyes.

Marble is the stone of potential. Just as a sculptor sees a great work of art in a block of stone marble, it reminds us of our untapped potential and all its possibilities. Incidentally, the marble is paired with amber in the snake charm. Amber is often used to represent bravery and self-confidence, two traits that can be helpful when exploring new possibilities. Maybe it is good, I am wearing one right now.

Then there is the all-seeing eye with dolomite, also known as Ching Hai "jade." Dolomite is the stone of comfort and ease, not unlike true jade. Both are believed to bring balance in times of stress and nurture a sense of calm.

[nemo-in-wonderland]

Hello Hello everyone!

So, today i was in a "studious" mood, and because i truly truly want to get better at painting and at drawing the human figurw, i decided to catch two birds with one stone, and study both human anatomy AND painting, plus trying to understand how values work on an artwork.

I still have so much to learn, so much to UNLEARN, and so much to discover yet, and I can only hope that by putting my best effort into what I do, I will someday manage to be able to portray precisely what I have in my mind with efficiency and with precision!

(also forgive me for having to put that WIP sign like that, but Tumblr freaks out at the sight of a nipple, so you can imagine if it actually saw the vangene).

And for this, I chose my darling, beautiful Colette as my muse and model and, incidentally, this is also something entirely pertinent to her story!

Let me tell you why.

You see, the way I depicted her here is actually how I envisioned Arno seeing her, like TRULY seeing her for the first time, their first encounter, if you will.

Arno was, after all, a good friend with Mathias and butted head more often than not with Antoine, but during the events of Unity, he never truly had the chance to know Colette the same he knew her siblings, so they were acquaintances more than anything else.

Colette would often pose for a painter and a sculptor, a dear friend of Antoine and Mathias, both as a way to help her family and because she actually enjoyed it.

One day, Mathias asked Arno to run a errands for him and pick up a portrait for him, since he couldn't and Antoine was busy on a mission with Claude (my own version of Axeman).

So, once Arno arrives at the artist's studio, this is what he finds in from of himself: Colette just placidly stretching after having to stand still for so many hours while the artist was working on catching her beauty, serene as only someone who knows their place in their world and their own strengths can be.

For Arno, after all he had gone through during the events of Unity, after losing Elise, it felt as if he had been touched by the warmth of the sun for the first time after a long winter.

I like to think that it wasn't love what he felt, but rather curiosity as to what made that woman so placid, so calm, so serene, even amidst everything, even after all her and her family had gone through. And entranced as a moth is to the fire, he felt the want to know her more, to discover the secret as to why she radiates so much serenity in hope to be able to bask into that peace, at least for a little while.

So there you have it, a little piece of my own personal lore for Unity, for you all. :)

I am actually truly happy with how this is turning out, and I am happy to have had the chance to share a little more about my Colette. I truly need to talk more about her and her siblings. I adore them so much, but I don't share nearly enough about them.

Anyway, I hope you will like this. <3

--Nemo

[aellynera]

Frayed Wires (Nathan Bateman x Reader)

FRAYED WIRES (Nathan Bateman x Reader)

(so i decided i may turn the drunk texts thing into a series? i decided at least to do one with Nathan because...well...it’s Nathan. the poem he quotes is Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was incidentally married to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (or: The Modern Prometheus) which is also kind of appropriate for Nathan and anyway i sat down today and this happened.)

Word Count: 2122(ish)

Summary: All you want to do is sleep. All Nathan wants to do is talk.

Warnings: Language, naturally.

(Nathan’s texts are in bold. Your texts are in bold and italic.)

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

You reached blindly for your phone as it rattled on the bedside table. You had no idea what time it was but you did know it was the middle of the night, your phone should not be going off, and you had gotten entirely too little sleep. Like, maybe two hours worth. You were so tired and groggy that you made the mistake of checking your messages before you actually even thought about what you were doing.

Do you ever think about the meaning of life?

I mean like really think about it.

Why we’re here, why the sky is green and the grass is blue?

No wait that’s not right.

You sighed and buried your face in the pillow. It was 3:27 in the morning and Nathan was texting you. Which was just odd anyway, since he knew where your room was and it was much more his style to just walk in and start a random conversation with you in person. 

He was probably drunk.

And now he could see that you had read the messages, so you were going to have to reply, or he really would show up at your door. Technically it was his door, it was his house, you just worked for him and stayed there, but the point was you were not in the mood to deal with him at all right now, and most decidedly not in the flesh.

You rolled your eyes before sending him a reply. You really should just ignore it, but...you were annoyed. Nathan was annoying. And it was now 3:30 in the morning and you were going to push a few buttons. Figuratively AND literally! your sleep-deprived brain cheered.

And things like why is water wet and air is invisible?

YES exactly see that’s why I want you.

I’m sorry?

Your brain. I want to pick you up. Your brain I mean. Pick your brain.

You just want me for my brain, huh?

You have a very nice brain.

Yep, Nathan was definitely drunk.

Not that him being drunk was anything out of the ordinary. But a few hours ago, when you were both in the lab testing some of his most recent ideas about the AI code, he had seemed...normal? Well, normal for Nathan anyway. He wasn’t irritated, he wasn’t condescending, he was actually (you honestly could not believe you were even thinking this) pleasant to be around.

You had been working for Nathan as his personal assistant for a few months. It was a promotion for sure over being a code slinger in a cubicle, but sometimes you honestly wondered what made you say yes to this bizarre existence. It was a beautiful house, beautiful scenery, interesting and highly intellectual conversations...when Nathan was sober.

There was also something you could never quite put your finger on. Something that was shifting as the weeks went on and you spent more time working alongside Nathan in the lab. As you spent evenings eating sushi and steaks and whatever else you were in the mood for that night (most nights, he actually let you choose the menu, you realized.) As you took afternoon walks around the estate, just taking in the scenery. As you debated various philosophies and ideas and theories and tried your damndest to prove Nathan wasn’t always right about everything. He almost seemed like he appreciated it all, but he would never say anything.

And you weren’t about to open that can of worms. Especially when he wasn’t sober.

How drunk are you right now?

On a scale of shitfaced to really fucking blitzed I would say I’m feeling no pain.

Jesus Christ. Well that was obvious. It was obvious just from the fact that he was texting you. Nathan was so uptight about security and data leaks and wiretapping and signals being hijacked (he’d admitted to doing it himself, so he did have a point) but had decided, after much insistence from you, that rigging the cell phones to only work inside the compound was an acceptable idea. It was so vast, you’d said, and what if something happened and one of you was all the way across the house or down in the lab, how were you supposed to let the other person know? It made sense at the time.

Now you were vaguely regretting it.

You could count on one hand the number of times you’d actually considered your boss to be pleasant to be around, and you still had your thumb left over just in case you needed to add to that tally.

At least personality wise. He was definitely pleasant to look at. Very pleasant.

You coughed and cleared your throat. That was not a line of thought to travel right now. The proper course of action was to get him to stop texting you.

A few minutes passed in glorious silence. Maybe a new, shiny thought had occurred to him and he was madly writing it down on a Post-It note. Maybe he just got bored and went to get a new drink. Maybe he’d finally just passed out and---

What are you thinking about?

Dammit. How to make you shut up, your brain snapped back. How to get you to let me sleep. How good your arms and shoulders look in that tank top after you’ve been hitting that punching back and you’re flushed and sweaty and…. Oh no. No no no. Stop it right now, brain.

Nathan hated to beat around the bush. Straightforward was the best policy with him, right?

How to get you to shut up and let me sleep.

Wonderful, glorious silence for exactly forty-six seconds.

Bro...that’s...so not cool.

Okay, this was getting ridiculous. Why were you participating in this? Why was he? You narrowed your eyes and looked toward a corner of your room. You hoped he could see you glaring into the camera that you knew was there and that he was watching while he was texting you. If not, you were sure he would watch it in the actual morning and you hoped the look was withering enough to make him think twice. Probably not. Because this was Nathan Bateman.

Your incredibly narcissistic, incredibly intelligent, incredibly attractive...stop it brain.

But he was pushing your buttons right back. Neither of you could ever really back away from an exchange like this..

I’m not your “bro”, Nathan. Please knock this shit off.

Dude, it’s a figure of speech.

I’m not your dude, either. Please just stop talking.

What’s wrong with dude. Dude is a gender neutral term, anyone can be a dude. Guys are dudes, chicks are dudes, dudes are dudes

Yeah, well, you’re kind of being an asshole, dude.

Dude. Chill.

Turning my phone off now.

No, wait, don’t. I’m sorry. I’ll stop.

Now that was...unexpected. Nathan Bateman just apologized to you? For being a drunk asshole in the middle of the night? Your eyes narrowed again. Suspicious.

You’ll stop texting me so I can go back to sleep?

No not that. I’ll stop calling you dude.

Oh for the love of...you closed your eyes and briefly considered the merits of hurling your phone at the surveillance camera.

Nathan, seriously, can we please just leave this until the morning?

A whole minute of wonderful, glorious, blessed silence this time. You couldn’t believe he might be considering this.

You were right.

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away

If a brain cramp was an actual thing, yours would most certainly be doing it now. You could barely even process it. He was drunk as hell and he was quoting poetry to you? You supposed you probably shouldn’t be entirely surprised, he’d quoted Oppenheimer once in a worse stupor (which you could only quantify because he had actually passed out that time.)

Are you fucking serious right now.

What.

Are you fucking quoting Ozymandias to me right now?

I am.

You couldn’t get the color of the sky right earlier, and now you’re just flawlessly quoting philosophical Romantic poetry at me?

I am.

You are not a normal person, Nathan Bateman.

What is normal anyway, besides really fucking boring? Who wants to be normal?

I would like to be somewhat normal, at least between the hours of midnight and 8am.

See, I knew there was a reason I liked you.

That was the second time he said that, you noted. You found it hard to believe. Nathan liked his work, his routine, his own brain. He liked talking about his work and how smart he was. Other than telling you that you were doing a great job, he barely handed out a single compliment, and if he somehow accidentally did, it was so backhanded you weren’t sure you could actually define it as one.

You mean you like my brain.

Well, yeah, your brain is fucking amazing. It has to be if you work with me.

I work for you, Nathan, not with you. But thanks?

No, no, see, that’s where you’re wrong. You work with me. We’re like partners. None of that employer employee bullshit.

Oooookay now I am one thousand percent sure you are completely piss drunk.

I am but that doesn’t make it any less true.

You could almost hear him saying those words in your head. You could see the way his eyebrows went up, the intensity in his eyes, the way he held his finger up to make the point.

The thought made your brain go slightly fuzzy, and not from exhaustion. Because now you were wide awake. Damn him.

Okay, Nathan, I’ll bite. What do I have to do to get you to stop doing this right now?

There was a pause before he answered, and you swore you’d heard a phone alert that wasn’t your own. It sounded like it was coming from...oh no, he wasn’t…

Getting tired of typing. Can I come talk to you for a while?

Are you outside my door right now?!

You heard the phone chime very clearly this time. He was, definitely.

I am.

You sighed, deeply. So deeply.

Is that really a good idea?

I think it’s a great idea.

Nathan, being serious here.

You could have sworn you heard him sigh from the other side of the door. He could have just come inside. It was his house, his keycard worked on all the doors.

But the door didn’t open.

So am I. Please can I come in? My mind just won’t shut off and I really am fucking drunk but talking to you is helping but tired of typing shit out, I’d rather say it to you.

I wanna see you. And tell you how sexy your brain is.

And that I like you for more than your brain.

And you knew in that instant there really was only one way to get him to shut up. And it was to just let him talk. It made sense, in an oddly Nathan kind of way. What’s the worst that could happen, really? He’d come in, you’d talk, he’d eventually pass out, maybe you could get a couple more hours of sleep, and then in the morning you’d either talk about it on a very deep cerebral level or you’d just pretend it had never happened at all. 

A press to the door release button on the side of the table and the latch let go. The door opened, revealing Nathan standing on the other side. Still wearing what he’d been wearing in the lab earlier that night, black lounge pants and that tight white henley he seemed to love so much. The corner of his mouth turned up in the most miniscule of smiles, but it was there.

You were about to toss your phone back onto the bedside table, when the text alert went off again. You shot an exasperated look in his direction, but gamely checked the message.

Did you mean what you said before? About biting?

You glanced up at Nathan and saw that the sliver of a smile had taken over most of his face and his eyebrows had raised to emphasize his question.

You didn’t say anything. You didn’t text him back. You just nodded your head to the empty spot next to you in your bed.

You had a feeling you weren’t going to get any sleep tonight after all.

~end~

taglist: @anetteaneta​ @rosemarysbaby13​ @darksideofclarke​ @girlwiththemostcake​ 

(taglist is open, let me know if you’d like to be tagged for future fics)

[letterboxd]

Pride: 25 Queer Films To Love.

Dating Amber writer and director David Freyne introduces our London correspondent Ella Kemp to 25 of his favorite LGBTQIA films.

A coming-out, coming-of-age film, David Freyne’s Dating Amber follows “baby gays” Eddie (Fionn O’Shea) and Amber (Lola Petticrew), who act as each other’s beards in order to stop speculation about their sexualities. Released on Amazon Prime Video in the UK for Pride month, it’s winning praise from Letterboxd members as a “charming” and “gentle” comedy-drama “full of loveliness that extends beyond the Irish accents”.

Lola Petticrew and Fionn O’Shea as Amber and Eddie in ‘Dating Amber’.

As the number of films by and about the gay and trans community expands, we asked Freyne if he could narrow down a list of ten favorites for us. The answer was no—instead, we got 25!

“There are so many extraordinary queer films beyond this list, but all of these films just really affected me when I saw them. Some were the first time I saw queerness on screen, while I deeply identified with others. And, as a filmmaker, each of them makes me braver to fight to tell stories that aren't always easy to get made.

“They are in no particular order because I don’t want to bump into Barry Jenkins (which is obviously going to happen) and have to explain that he is number five on that list (that he will definitely read) for no specific reason. It’s just a technicality.”

David Freyne’s 25 Favorite LGBTQIA+ Films

My Summer of Love (2004) Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski

Paweł Pawlikowski’s film feels like a dream that sweeps you up along with it, helped along by incredible early performances from Natalie Press and Emily Blunt. The hypnotic use of Goldfrapp's ‘Lovely Head’ is probably my favorite use of a song in any film ever. Their drug-fuelled dancing was a massive inspiration for Eddie and Amber’s baby steps into Dublin’s gay scene in Dating Amber.

Weekend (2011) Directed by Andrew Haigh

I never fail to cry buckets at the end of this heartbreaking gem. It’s small in the best sense of the word. Two people fall in love over one intimate weekend. Their gayness is both incidental and totally fundamental. It’s so delicate and moving. Andrew Haigh is a master.

But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) Directed by Jamie Babbit

Jamie Babbit’s debut is a brilliant, campy comedy about a cheerleader sent to a conversion therapy camp. I love it for all the reasons many critics (at the time) disliked it. It is subversive, quirky and defiantly upbeat. And it stars Natasha Lyonne and Clea Duvall. Enough said.

Paris is Burning (1990) Directed by Jennie Livingston

I’m not saying anything new when I say that Paris is Burning is necessary viewing. It’s a hilarious, moving and eye-opening look at the (mostly) Black trans women in New York’s ball scene. It is a glimpse into the lives of these extraordinary people who risked everything to live authentically, for themselves and each other. And at a time when our trans family is so under attack, it is vital to see such iconic figures from our community. You’ve probably seen it. Re-watch it. Also those end notes will make you cry.

Happy Together (1997) Directed by Wong Kar-wai

As with all Wong Kar-wai’s work, it is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. It’s a tough watch, a portrait of a toxic, failing relationship. But it looks beautiful. They’re miserable and co-dependent. It’s abusive and awful. But it’s great. It really is a great film. I’m not selling this one well. Just watch it.

Moonlight (2016) Directed by Barry Jenkins

Definitely worth watching after Happy Together. Not just because it will make you feel better, but because Barry Jenkins has noted it as a big influence. Also, Moonlight is a masterpiece. You know that, of course. Side note: I realize I’ll never be able to create a hand-job scene as powerful and tender as Jenkins did here, but, in Dating Amber, I made three comedy hand-jobs. Take that Jenkins!

God’s Own Country (2017) Directed by Francis Lee

You can feel Francis Lee in every frame of this film. It’s personal filmmaking at its very best, with wonderful performances from Josh O’Connor and Alec Secăreanu. And it has the most beautifully romantic ending that you only realize we lack for LGBTQ characters when you see it laid out so wonderfully. When we were trying to finance Dating Amber and people suggested it was too Irish, I’d just reference God’s Own Country, which is so defiantly Yorkshire, and they’d shut up. Also, Secăreanu’s jumper with a thumb hole is my style icon. Bring on Ammonite!

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) Directed by Marielle Heller

Marielle Heller is such a brilliant filmmaker. This film is based on the memoir by Lee Israel who forged letters by famous people to sell. It’s a genre piece that feels like it could have been made in the 70s. But what I love about it the most is that it is a rare example of a film that centers the friendship between a lesbian and a gay man. Why do films usually treat us like we exist in totally separate worlds? Anyway, it’s a joyous watch.

Tangerine (2015) Directed by Sean Baker

I’m obsessed with tightly plotted films and Tangerine doesn’t waste a frame. It’s 88 minutes of pure wit, charm and entertainment in line with the best of old-school Hollywood. You instantly forget that Baker’s film is shot on an iPhone and just get swept up in the extraordinary performances of Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez. It’s such a mystery they don’t work more. (Reader: it’s not a mystery. It’s because they are Black trans women, and the industry is shit.)

Portrait of a Lady On Fire (2019) Directed by Céline Sciamma

We all bow at the alter of Céline Sciamma. This film is perfection. The sparse-but-powerful use of music, exquisite photography and extraordinary performances that burn beneath the stillness. The final shots of Adèle Haenel will feed your soul for a year. (Side note: face masks have never looked so stylish.)

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) Directed by John Schlesinger

This was John Schlesinger’s follow up to his best-known film, Midnight Cowboy. A middle-aged gay doctor (Peter Finch), and a divorced woman (Glenda Jackson), are both in an open love triangle with a younger, bisexual sculptor (Murray Head). It’s quite low-key and far tamer now than when it was released, but it’s a beautiful film and Schlesinger’s most personal. He was one of the few openly gay directors of his time. And Jackson’s performance steals it.

Far From Heaven (2002) Directed by Todd Haynes

Todd Haynes’ stunning film will make you immediately go out and discover all of Douglas Sirk’s glorious technicolor melodramas. Julianne Moore’s performance as a wife who discovers her husband is gay will break you. Dennis Quaid is also terrific as her closeted husband.

The Watermelon Woman (1996) Directed by Cheryl Dunye

Cheryl Dunye’s low-budget debut is a seminal queer film. A video store worker and documentarian (played by Dunye) starts a new relationship while becoming obsessed with ‘the watermelon woman’, a Black actress forgotten by history. It’s lo-fi, funny and a, far too rare, film about race and sexuality.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) Directed by Stephen Frears

It may have been the first time I saw gay characters on screen and, at the time, it petrified me. But what an amazing film about love, acceptance and the power to change. Fun fact: Daniel Day-Lewis spent a year as a tumble dryer in preparation for his role.

Beautiful Thing (1996) Directed by Hettie MacDonald

Hettie MacDonald’s coming-of-age film is so lovely, honest and tender. James Harvey adapted it from his own play of the same name. The soundtrack is almost entirely The Mamas and the Papas. I am surprised some cigar-smoking West-End mogul hasn’t attempted a musical adaptation. Or maybe they have, I don’t know.

Pride (2014) Directed by Matthew Warchus

Such a purely entertaining film while being urgent, political and deeply moving. Beresford’s script is a masterclass in plotting and if you don’t cry at the end then you are dead inside. Sorry but that’s just science. Also it has the most emotional postscript coda since, well, Paris is Burning.

Love is Strange (2014) Directed by Ira Sachs

Ira Sachs is one of my favorite current filmmakers and criminally underrated. I mean, he’s appreciated, but he needs to be lauded. Love is Strange is such a charming and quietly devastating love story about an older gay couple who lose their apartment and have to couch surf with relatives. It’s one of the most effective films in dealing with the rental crisis in big cities, something he does equally brilliantly in the follow-up, Little Men.

A Fantastic Woman (2017) Directed by Sebastián Lelio

Sebastián Lelio’s film is a beautiful story about one trans woman’s grief after the unexpected death of her older partner. But what makes this film so spectacular is the captivating performance by Daniela Vega. We need to see more of her on screen.

BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017) Directed by Robin Campillo

It’s a film about the AIDS activism of Act Up in 1990s Paris. What makes this so incredible is how joyous it is. Strobe-doused dance scenes punctuate this film that will make you want to take to the streets and fight for your rights.

The Queen of Ireland (2015) Directed by Conor Horgan

This documentary by Conor Horgan follows Ireland’s most famous drag queen, Panti Bliss (aka Rory O’Neill). It’s about his life, a legal battle (a bunch of homophobes sued Rory for calling them homophobes on national TV) and the staging of a show in his hometown. Central to all this is Ireland’s historic vote on marriage equality, something that Panti was a powerful figure in. If you want to laugh and have your heart soar in seeing confirmation of how a once painfully conservative country moved to love and equality, watch this.

The Kids Are All Right (2010) Directed by Lisa Cholodenko

Lisa Cholodenko’s feature is a warm, witty and realistic look at a lesbian couple and their children. Every performance is pitch perfect. I can’t believe it’s a decade old and that we have had so few similar films since.

Booksmart (2019) Directed by Olivia Wilde

We need more joyous films with queer leads and Olivia Wilde’s debut is just that. Set over one night of belated partying, we follow best friends Molly and Amy (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever), one of whom happens to be a lesbian. It is just so much fun to watch.

All About My Mother (1999) Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

I mean this list could just be an Almodóvar filmography, but All About My Mother just happened to be the first of his I saw and it blew my little gay mind. It’s simply about love in its truest sense. Almodóvar said it best with his dedication, “To all actresses who have played actresses. To all women who act. To men who act and become women. To all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.”

Female Trouble (1974) Directed by John Waters

You can’t have a queer film list without John Waters, and this 1974 classic is my favorite of his. It follows Dawn Davenport (played by the legendary Divine) from teen delinquent to the electric chair. It’s hilarious, irreverent and distasteful in the ways only Waters can be.

Saint Maud (2019) Directed by Rose Glass

Rose Glass’s debut film isn’t out yet and so technically shouldn’t be on the list. But I saw at a festival last year and loved it, so there. It’s a horror film about a private nurse (rising star Morfydd Clark) who tries to save the soul of her deviant and lesbian patient (the always-brilliant Jennifer Ehle). It’s eerie, stylish and the sort of debut all us filmmakers wish we had. Shut up, you’re jealous!

Related content

MundoF’s Opening the Vault: a chronological history of queer interest and LGBTQ+ cinema.

Leonora’s list of Films by Transgender Writers and Directors.

Out of the Closets and Into the Cinemas!: meeting queer folks in dark rooms.

New Queer Cinema

Queer Films Everyone Must See

Queer, Black, 21st Century: A Pride 2020 List

Autostraddle’s Top 200 Lesbian, Bisexual & Queer Movies of All Time

Brianna’s list of LGBT+ Animation

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#6yrsago Austin Grossman's YOU: brilliant novel plumbs the heroic and mystical depths of gaming and simulation

YOU is the second novel from Austin Grossman, whose 2008 debut Soon I Will be Invincible marked him out as a talent to watch. Now, with his second novel, he confirms his status as a major talent.

You is the story of Russell, who tries to leave behind his nerdy, computer-game-programming high-school life to get a law degree, but by the end of the 90s, he's dropped out and come to work at Black Arts, a game studio founded by three of his school buddies -- the three who stayed true to their nerdy roots. Black Arts is famous for its brilliant simulation engine, which was written by Simon, Russell's old school buddy, who has just died under mysterious circumstances, leaving the company he founded in uncertain shape.

Russell's story weaves in the fascinating fictional canon of the Black Arts games, his history as a teenager encountering the first generation of PCs, and the white-hot fever of a game studio whose existence depends on shipping a game to beat all the other games ever made. As  a piece of fiction about life in a high-tech company, You ranks with Microserfs for its portrayal of the romance and heroism of wresting life from endless lines of code, and with JPOD for its pitiless depiction of the alienation and loneliness of a life inside a machine.

But Grossman isn't just chronicling the rise and fall of a company, or of a character, or even an industry. Rather, he uses YOU as a tool to prise open the mystical center of what art is, what games are, what fun is, and how they all mix together. Some of YOU reads as pure poetry, others like a fascinating treatise on the unplumbed depths of the ludic urge, and taken as a whole, it is a novel that both uplifts and entertains, and reframes the world we live in and the things we do in it. It is easily one of the best books I've read this year.

Incidentally, Austin Grossman comes from quite an exceptional family. His identical twin brother is Lev Grossman (author of the fantastic novel The Magicians), while his sister, Bathsheba Grossman, is a justly renowned sculptor who produces 3D printed mathematical solids. I am pleased to say I have many works from all three siblings in my office.

YOU

https://boingboing.net/2013/04/16/austin-grossmans-you-brilli.html

[shahrilariff1]

LOOK AT THE BIGGEST HINDU TEMPLE IN LONDON

One sunny Sunday, in Brent's Borough, I marvelled in Neasden Temple –'s sight the greatest temple outside India and so co incidentally, London that was found within our darling.Fun fact one, this building was stated twice in the World’s Guinness Document and won Spot Award's UK Pride after a nationwide poll.Fun fact two, the marble, limestone as well as other materials used-to build the forehead were hand -created in India before being constructed in London. Finances were collected fully from worshippers along with the full architecture was built using standard techniques. More variety of this task? Over 3000 volunteers, a huge £12 million as well as a lot more than 1500 sculptors. No question why it had been highlighted within the list of Eight Most Iconic Houses and Landmarks within the town.Pictures above display simply an angle with this masterpiece.

In the temple itself, you'll be able to encounter a conventional Hindu prayer service and see an event.Sneakers bags and cameras aren't allowed inside so there’s more reason behind one to visit by yourself!I found its way to period for the Arti ceremony at the Maha-Mandap, first floor of the temple. Monks garbed in saffron robes performed the wedding with candlelights and audio prayer. Pious worshippers of ages and several visitors sat gently, under and surrounded by intricate carvings photos and shrines. The chanting noise resonated throughout the lounge and I can smell the incense sticks' smell. None of my feelings were ready to experience such religious occasion. It was aweinspiring like they promised.I had been advised the visit won’t be complete with out a vegetarian lunch at Shayona down the street. I am not individually a supporter of vegetarian foods, (can’t handle a chicken-less curry) but this time around, I give it a naan out-of ten!Chaat – a blanket of savoury, crispy snacks along with yoghurt, chickpeas, potato and tamarind sauce. It’s a novel that is very taste a blend of lovely, to get a beginning that I truly loved.

Shayona gives quite a array of northern-indian food, different from the South Indian food that I was to having in Malaysia accustomed. The over-buying and belly- circumstance that is bursting, all ticked as of this dinner.Another one that is truly intriguing will be the Panipuri below – rows of puffed bread filled with spices, boiled potato and chickpeas obtained using a shot of great water. Allin a mouthful.I seriously hope this isn’t also terrible of the display.Likewise had some naan, the special rice.The lunch concluded having a notice that was special from my big glass of white falooda, that was a mix of rose syrup, vermicelli tapioca pearls.A spontaneously Wednesday that is cultural like this will beat a sluggish morning in Hyde Park and people really crowded avenues in Central London. So let’s maintain more with this coming.At the front end of Shayona a pastry shop is selling a great deal of colourful sweets if this isn’t enough for you.This trip to Neasden quit me a bit giddy with excitement – a definite indicator of my homesickness. (Ah… my frequent trip to the banana leaf grain look in Kuala Lumpur)

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 2

In the second instalment of a two part HOT TAKE (read part one here) on The 1975′s latest LP, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Scott Morrison ponders the tricksterish art of writing about music, before riffing on the history of the album as form, questions around genre, nostalgia and a sense of the contemporary, not to mention that saxophone solo and why Stravinsky would love this album.

Dear Maria,

> How pleasant it feels to begin a review with a note to a friend.

> Shoutout/cc:/@FrankO’Hara – I always liked his idea to write a poem like it’s addressed to just one other person. It strikes me as interesting to begin a piece of criticism in the same way. So, this is the mode I will try to inhabit throughout.

> As I read your words, and pondered, and learned, I was caught in the twin state of delighting each time you hit upon something already identified in my own thoughts – some of which I will expand upon here - and equally delighted every time you wrote something I could or would not. Such is the joy of conversation.

> I suppose in this preamble between speakers, which keeps up the pretence of our characters conversing - which will, inevitably, lapse as the form of this review gives way to a longer, more oneiristic, probably, onanistic, possibly, enquiry into the album (an act impossible in real conversation, by the way, imagine, imagine someone actually speaking for this long, how boring and alienating that would be, and yet that is usually what criticism is). Anyway, before all that, to help set the scene, I should mention a few ‘real world’ details. All of which happened either online, of course, or in isolation, because that, as you mention, is the real world now, during the violent interlude of Covid-19.

> I was delighted – that word again, repetitions and patterns begin anew already – to be asked to write this review. Firstly, because, like you say, I am a fan of The 1975. But also, because I am a writer and I am a musician and I am trying just now to forge a new mode of writing about music, one that can be both analytical (technically, socially, historically) and expressive (personally, lyrically, emotionally). And, most of all because I have always been, at best, suspicious, and, at worst, dismissive, of album reviews.

> I wrote, in our Messenger chat, ‘I usually find music reviews unhelpful’, which makes me sound like a bit of a dick, really. But what I meant is, what I meant is.

> There’s a saying I think about a lot, as the aforementioned writer and musician who writes about music: ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ (Martin Mull, Frank Zappa, or Elvis Costello, or any of the other people that sharp quote is blurrily misattributed to.)

> Incidentally, I would love to see a dance about architecture. But sometimes I think the sentiment of the statement is true. Will writing about music always be missing the point? Will it, through words, ever really be able to get to the essentially wordless essence of music? But I am a writer. And I am a musician. And I like writing about music. (Incidentally, I like making music about writing less). Yet I do feel there is some truth to the saying, I guess. Twists and turns. Try again. Here is another way of saying what I am trying to say.

> Music reviews make me hate adjectives. And I love adjectives. But often commercial reviews – for dozens of reasons, many of them valid, most of them related to that capital prefix – become attempts to describe a sound, invariably an artist’s ‘new sound’, again related to that capital prefix. Often, the goal is to generate press, to entice people to listen – or not – and so feed the music industry and the market. And to describe these new sounds, adjectives are piled-up like car crashes. Trying to describe a sound at any great length is, I think, ultimately fated to fail. Adjectives, up to a point, can provide greater and ever-more strident clarity. But, after a certain point – that appears very quickly in most pop reviews - saturation point is reached, and the clarity disappears, and we are left very far away from the music we were originally trying to pile word upon word to reach. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, you might say, if you were into foreshadowing. Which I am (obviously).

> So, I suppose, to continue thinking out loud (in silence, at my keyboard) I am interested in writing around music. Not describing the sounds (‘Let sounds be themselves’, says John Cage, whispering in my memory’s ear), but I am interested in writing that can tease out some of the ideas in and around the music and extend them in new directions. That, I think, is a different and interesting kind of dance worth attempting.

> We understand a review, then, as this kind of dance: as a record of the reviewer’s experience of listening to a record, which will accept that it will largely take as its subject the listening, and not the record. Even better if it’s a dialogue between two. So, here’s what I think about the album.

*

> Ok, before I talk about the album, actually, I would like to talk about a book. I hope that’s alright. There is no objective correlation between the album and the book except the proximity in time in which I experienced them. Let’s get that out of the way at the very beginning. The book has nothing to do with the album. But it does have something to do with how I heard it.

> The book is called An Experiment with Time. I mentioned this to you once already over Zoom. It was written in 1927. My copy belonged to my grandfather, in fact, and his writing – and so his pen and then his hand and then his whole vanished being – appeared occasionally at marginal or pivotal points throughout the text. That was part of what I liked about it, I guess.

> The book – which I allowed Wikipedia to tell me only after I had pushed my way through it – is regarded as an imaginative curiosity, but one which science has never taken seriously. That’s fine for me, because I am far more familiar, fluid and fluent in the language and implications of the imagination that I am of science.

> The book, broadly in two halves, sets out in its first strange span experiences of premonitions in dreams. That will give you the idea of the kind of science book it is. The second half is an attempt at a logical, philosophical, and occasionally mathematical explanation of Time that can account for these premonitory fissures.

> It posits that, in addition to the three dimensions of space (height, breadth and depth, I suppose), that time is a fourth dimension in our universe. I’ve heard that said, but I never really got it before. I do now, and it is very beautiful, because it begins to make me imagine, how, like a sculptor, I can ply, fold and shape with this new dimension. You can imagine how this might be useful to a musician, music being an art that can only exist through time.

> Anyway, the book then goes on to posit that a fourth dimension in which something can be observed to travel (our consciousness), must necessarily imply an observer in a fifth dimension to observe that travel, and then one in a sixth dimension, and so on, ad inifitum, infinite regress, serial time.

> I confess this somewhat surpassed the boundaries of my metaphysics (and/or silently slipped over my head), but the image of the infinite regress has stayed with me, the clickanddrag of old Windows windows ossified and pulled to leave twisting, spiralling trails; the gold-tipped rhythm of tenement window embrasures, repeating, far off, clickanddragged up a hill (hints and twists of Escher), on my daily walks.

> Wikipedia later told me that an infinite regress is a shaky ground on which to base a philosophical proof. Again, this is fine for me: I am a bad philosopher, because I am not competitive, and so this does not bother me very much.

> The infinite regress is a beautiful image, with lots of possibility in it for further imaginings, and it entrances me. So, keep this idea of serial observers and the limitless extension it implies close, please (foreshadowing again, you’re welcome).

*

> I will switch now, briefly, too briefly, from critic to fanboy (I contain multitudes, etc.).  

> Notes on a Conditional Form as an album title made me smile a smile that was very close to a wince or wink. Classic Matty, was probably the thought that came next. You have already summarised dastardly, dear, endearing, calamitous Matty, so I will move on assuming that, Matty Healy, yeah, I know.

> Back to the critic. The conditional form, in this review has already been (drumroll, eyeroll) music reviews themselves. See part one.

> Now I would like to take the album as the form in question – not this album, but albums generally, as this album is an exploration of the album form. The Album, capitalised.

> Albums have become normalised. But let’s play dumb for a moment – one of the cleverest things we can do - and we’ll see that albums are anything but inevitable, especially in the boundless age of streaming.

> Before this, albums used to be defined as collections with physical bounds. The capacity of a CD; before that, a length of magnetic tape; before that, the edge of a vinyl, a shellac, a wax cylinder. That about takes us back to the start of recorded audio media, I think.

> After Edison’s initial, waxy curiosities, albums began - like most things we love and hate - as a product. The form of the album was a circle. The music was a line. The edge of the line was the end of time. Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, as a fun aside. And, as another, did you know that there’s a funny B-plot in all of this to do with Beethoven. (It’s always to do with fucking Beethoven.) Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became the arbitrary marker for the desired length of the CD. It had never before been possible to fit the symphony onto a single, uninterrupted piece of media. And so, the B-plot goes, this is why the standard CD holds the amount of time that it does.

> Anyway, regardless of who shaped them, physical recorded media have, since their staggered births, profoundly shaped culture. Pop songs, especially singles, are still 3 and a half minutes long because that was the maximum amount of time that could be squeezed onto a 78, in the shellac days. Time was short and simple then, seemingly.

> Notes on a Conditional Form is 81 minutes long. It had 8 singles leading up to it, released over a span of ten months. Clearly, physical boundaries and marketing timelines, are not being treated in the usual way. You could just release singles forever now. But the fact this ended up as an album shows some belief in the concept beyond the physical and, yes, the commercial. Let’s press on, look elsewhere.

> Since we’ve started talking about classical music – ok, since I started talking about classical music – I’d like to dwell there for a moment, because there are foreshadows of The Album, conceptually speaking (and this album specifically) several layers up, several parenthesis ago, criticism as serial digression, in classical music.

> Collecting songs as albums was a favourite pastime of the Romantics, early emos. @FranzSchubert, @ClaraSchumann, @JohannesBrahms – there’s another B-plot in that trio if you want to look it up, by the way. Also, Clara Schumann is overlooked, like all female composers, because the classical music world is deeply patriarchal. It’s important to say that whenever we can.

> Anyway, the Romantics did not develop the album as a physical form – the only available recording medium at that time was sheet music, which they did sell in a big way, actually. But really, they helped develop the album as a conceptual form. They collected a group of shorter songs to make a larger statement – Schubert especially. In the 19th century, this was known as a song cycle, a lovely phrase, that makes me think of cycling through meadows, which I have done more than usual recently, as part of my state-sanctioned exercises, though the meadow was in fact an overgrown golf course, and no less lovely for it.

> Schubert’s Die Winterreise is a classic example of the song cycle – and another example of the emo-Romantic - a cycle of poems set to music that take the listener on a journey over time. Sound familiar? Albums. Song cycles. Song spokes. Meadows. Grasses and wildflowers. Meandering journeys.

> Anyway, here we finally return to Notes on a Conditional Form. Collecting songs together allows for an exploration of ideas that can evolve or expand over time – a Brief Inquiry, you might say. Art as a tool of investigation. Process. And this album certainly does that. You already touched on some of the ideas in the album: the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, digital communication, social unrest, calls to action, my favourite lyric on that theme, while we’re here:

Wake up, wake up, wake up, we are appalling

And we need to stop just watching shit in bed

And I know it sounds boring and we like things that are funny

But we need to get this in our fucking heads-

> You explore these ideas well so I will not pursue them more for now. Thank you!

> The other effect of collecting songs – or anything together – is that it gives birth to form. (Gasp, he said the title of the movie!)

> Yes, collecting things together as an album is what creates the form in all senses of the word – physical, commercial, conceptual. Form, pure form, is not the things, or the arrangement of the things, but the relationship between the arranged things. Glimpsing this is like getting a delicious glimpse of time as a fourth dimension. As I may have already let slip, I am very interested in time. And so, I am naturally interested in musical forms, which can only be apprehended through time, with time, thanks to time – thank you, time. We don’t often say that.

*

> This is where I will, at last - god, imagine I had been speaking at you this whole time - this is where I will at last get into the main topic of this review. The remarkable form of this album.

> Wait, sorry, one more thing before I do. A really quick one. As well as time, musical form also needs contrast. For sections to appear as distinct, and thus for us to clearly apprehend the difference between them, and thus get a glimpse of Form, they must contrast with one another, for how else would we apprehend change, notice borders, know we are somewhere else. (An interesting digression here is process music, which I love dearly, and which has an entirely different relationship with form. Look it up, if you like.)

> Anyway, for our purposes now, musical form requires contrast. This could be achieved in many ways: traditionally, it was done with different melodies or harmonies; but it could be done with volume, instrumentation, tempo, texture etc. etc.

> The main way that this album delineates its striking – and, to my mind, for what it’s worth, unique and new – form, how it creates its contrast, is using all of the above tricks, but, even more so, by contrasting styles/genres. This was immediately what struck me and thrilled me about this album, and it’s kind of funny – for me as the annoying writer, perhaps less so for you, the reader, I mean listener – that it’s taken me 2,534 words to mention it. This I think is the brilliance of this record. This is why we can call it not just contemporary, but new.

> The 1975 have always been shifting, but never like this. This album contains, sometimes literally right next to each other: punk, orchestral music, UK garage, Americana, shoegaze, folk, dancehall, 80s power ballads – and, of course, pop, whatever that means. Stravinsky became famous for sharp juxtapositions of distinct musical blocks. He would fucking love this.

> I messaged you, after my first listen, to say that the album reminded me of one of Sophia Coppola’s soundtracks. That was an instinctive, emotional response, but, having thought about it, I can now demonstrate the reason for the similarity. The stylistically varied end products are similar to one another because the methodology is similar: soundtracks select music practically to achieve emotional affects. Soundtrack albums use music as a tool to heighten ideas that lie elsewhere, in their case, in the filmed scenes they accompany. If you believe Matty Healy, this is also what The 1975 do. They use beauty, in whatever style or genre they find it:

‘Beauty is the sharpest tool that we have - if you want someone to pay attention, make it beautiful’.

> What do you make of that, @Keats? No, really, I would love to know.

> I think this is a remarkable musical strategy, that requires flexibility, knowledge and skill. That there is such a high level of all these things in the band is what allows it the strategy to be successful.

> I would like to pause here and consider the implications of this strategy on a personal, social and cultural level.

*

> Musical genre and personal identity have been as fused for as long as pop music has existed. This could be a trick of the market, or it could be a need of the individual psyche, or both. I think there is some truth in theory that in the increasingly widespread absence of God – by which I mean organised religion – people need to find both a guide for their metaphysics and morals, and a structure for their community, as these are some of the most effective tools we have discovered for constructing our Selves, making sense of our lives and the world. Art can provide the guide for many people. It also provides community. These communities, collections – albums? - of political, moral and aesthetic views, then become subcultures.

> Until very recently, subcultures were fixed. ‘Hardcore till I die’, ageing ravers, old punks. Interestingly one never really sees ageing emos. But that’s a subject for another essay.

> This, I think, is perhaps what is so striking here: musical genres are normally culminations (or roots, depending on how you look at it) of lived sub or counter cultures. These usually result from a fixed viewpoint about life and society, shared by the individuals that comprise them. The individuals identify with what the music says, how it is presented and how it looks as much – or perhaps even more - than how it sounds.

> Before now, it would have been shocking to imagine a band switching effortlessly from one style to another – this occasionally happens over the course of a career, between albums, but almost never in the same album itself - because it would feel like a betrayal, if we accept that bands and styles represent fixed ways of life and viewpoints and that neither lives nor viewpoints can change. Which, obviously they can. And which, obviously, they do, nowadays, with increasing speed, @Coronavirus.

> Matty’s appearance is a perfect demonstration of this. Minging Matty, Hearthrob Matty, Matty in vintage jeans, in a skirt, in a pinstripe suit. If we accept the old association of musical style/subculture and the clothing/uniform each produces, what would the ideal garb of a The 1975 listener be? A screen. A real, working search engine, fused with their body.

> Previously, the model was that bands had ‘influences’ which they ‘blended’ to create a ‘new’ sound. Here, The 1975 don’t really focus on blending sounds at the level of individual songs: the blend, boldly, happens at the level of the album. If the album is like a soundtrack, it is the soundtrack to the algorithmic age of effortless consumption of media.

> And I would like an examination of that idea to be the final track on this album. I mean, review. I mean conversation.

*

> The 1975 are inseparable from recorded media. Not just their own, but recorded media from the past. They are not able to invoke and inhabit this startling panoply of styles, to my knowledge, because they have studied in individual places or with masters of each craft or tradition – they are able to do it because they, like us, are able to consume recordings of these styles, and they, like us, have done so all their lives.

> When The 1975 invoke these styles, they are not evoking a tradition, or a way of doing things, or even seeing things. They are invoking personal memories of experiencing recordings, encountering media. We can take a look at a few examples of this.

> Let’s start with the classical stuff. The orchestral interludes do not sound like they are written by classical composers, or even composers of film soundtracks - the use of orchestration is different. It sounds, to my ear, like acoustic instruments playing what were originally MIDI parts. Which, I imagine, is what happened. That would usually be called bad orchestration. I am not interested in saying that. I am slightly interested in the effect of getting classical musicians, with their classical training, to play music written by people without classical training on a computer. What are the implications of writing for the flute as a soundfont, rather than a person, instrument or tradition?

> And what is the significance of placing an orchestra, playing instrumental compositions, on a pop record. These are not backing arrangements in an existing pop song, as we commonly encounter; nor are they classical arrangements of a pop song (see Hacienda Classical et al).

> These are standalone orchestral compositions on a record that also includes shoegaze, UK garage, two-step, Americana, punk. What, then, is the significance of this? The instruments, I believe, are being chosen less for their own sonic timbres, and more for their social or cultural timbres. I will try to explain this thought.

> Matty has often spoken about ‘Disneyfication’; he said he wanted ‘The Man Who Married a Robot / Love Theme’ on A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships to sound like a Disney movie. What does that mean? It means, I think, he wants it to sound like old movies, childhood, nostalgia. The orchestra is a sinecure for the ‘symphonic’, the cinematic, the dramatic; the orchestra is used like a banjo, which is, elsewhere on the album, used to conjure the exoticism of Americana as heard by someone listening to it in the UK, to paraphrase Matty’s words.  

> The stylistic references in the album are as much references to media as much as they are to music. Disney: orchestral sounds, likely filtered and wobbled through VHS cassettes. The orchestra, already made symbolic by its association with movies, made a double symbol, a reflection of a shadow, being invoked through the original sound not really for this sound but for our associations with it. The banjo invoked as both an instrument of yesteryear and over there. The music constructs frames of otherness to facilitate wistfulness, longing, memory.

> The chart success of ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’ is that it’s a modern bop that sounds like 80s bangers. Its artistic success is that it contrasts the feeling of halcyon safety created by its imitation of 80s bangers (experienced for millennials usually as triumphant climaxes in movies, jubilant moments on oldies stations), and rubs this up against some of the disturbing parts of the present: the angst of online relationships, nudity with people you don’t know and have not and may never meet. This is a simple but highly effective juxtaposition.

> ‘Bagsy Not In Net’ does this too: a quotidian, painful experience of childhood (not wanting to play in goal in a football game), expressed as a yearning and grand orchestral statement. This is true, too, of ‘Streaming’. This is pop music Pop Art: the contemporary quotidian expressed in the language of an old tradition and invested with the significance of an Art it simultaneously questions the power and validity of.

> And, to linger on ‘If You’re Too Shy’ for just a little longer, what is the meaning of a saxophone solo in pop music in 2020? It is symbolic: a shortcut, practically a meme. Saxophone solos exist in a present in contemporary jazz - they are a living history making new futures. But saxophone solos almost always only exist in pop music as ghosts (careless whispers) of the past. This particular sax solo is so euphoric to us less because of its musical content and more because of the emotions we have learned to associate with sax solos through other media.

> The final, most perfect example of this, of everything I have been getting at, really, is the UK garage references. These are themselves references to artists like The Streets, and Burial, who, themselves, were referencing the primary records of UK garage which they (The Streets and Burial) never experienced in clubs, but as recordings. And The 1975 experienced these recordings of recordings. Layers and layers of reference. And here, abruptly, we find ourselves back at the opening image of the infinite regress.

> At times, this album wants to express the present moment back at itself, and so prompt reflection and action. The fright of the zeitgeist. In this we can include Greta Thunberg, ‘People’, and the overtly socio-political statements on the album. I hope these tracks will be successful. In the future, they will take on the significance of historic artefacts: preserved truths from a vanished time, fixed and rich, like amber.

> But there are long swathes of the album, that do not have this intent, and which will, I believe, have a different longevity. These are the (often wordless) lyrical sections: the abstract, the vague, the instrumental sections – in all senses of the word. Records of the individual imagination listening to another individual imagination listening to another individual imagination. What will these tracks become in time, in Time?

> There is something ethereally delicious about the thought of people in the future coming across people in the past’s nostalgia of another past, now three links distant to their present, compoundly insubstantial, glittering, compelling. Fifth, sixth, seventh dimensions - serial nostalgias.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order.

~

Text: Scott Morrison

Published: 26/6/20

[evergloffpress]

Bottle of Blog: Lo & Behold the Scribbler’s Clog Arises

This particular entry is about nothing. Just writing for the sake of writing today. The ideas are not flowing fast and those that do do not interest me enough to expand on them. Never the less I am sticking to my writing everyday schedule. The movie Rocky is playing on the TV. The first Rocky was a love story. Every other Rocky film after that was more or less a Comic book movie. However, I love the Rocky movies. The tried and true underdog formula pays off in spades here as far as I am concerned. My cats are asleep on the sofa in the living room. They always turn in early. I have been getting up before 7 AM for the past few days. Being a night owl I tend to sleep in every morning. I'm up by 10 AM every day. I accompanied my cousin on some errands today in a bad part of town. The streets were beset with litter. The visual personification of the bad part of town with the cast of characters to go with it. Straight out of central casting. Though it is not fair to judge who these people are just by where they at and how they were dressed. I try not to use cliches or the same word over and over again when I write. Dragons Lair was an arcade video game from the 80s that I never had a chance to play. Saw all the action on a game show called Starcade that aired on KTLA channel 5. Snapped a picture of a porcelain sculptor depicting a litter of smiling white kittens when we went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch. Still just pressing keys. I am officially rambling here. No real narrative to speak of. Just writing. My mother was a cold and distant woman who never said she loved us. I want all these random observations to connect somehow. I suppose they all fall under the filing of whatever comes to mind. I can expand on all these incidental references I've made today. I wouldn't call this true writer's block. As I said before this blog entry is about nothing in particular. Maybe next time I'll write something interesting thus shattering any notion that a creative congestion took place. Something perhaps to make the angels roar with approval and the demons vigorously lament.

Oliver Evergloff

April-15th-2019

[beautysupply101]

Rawsome Beauty: Luck of the Draw or Within Reach of All?

Excerpted from the book "Your Right to Be Beautiful: How to Halt the Train of Aging and Meet the Most Beautiful You" by Tonya Zavasta.

All of my life, I wanted to be beautiful. In today's society, it is more acceptable to insist that you are "beautiful on the inside", unfortunately, those of us on the outside are not seeing your insides. Wanting to be beautiful is now criticized as being shallow. I'm sorry but I would rather be perceived as shallow than hypocritical because I find it impossible to believe than any women is content to be less than she can be.

Personal initiative is a powerful force in achieving goals and attaining wealth. What about beauty? Are we desperately helpless here, or is there a way to bring it under personal control? I believe we have as much leverage in becoming beautiful as we have in accomplishing anything else we set our minds to. But we have not been looking in the right places for beauty.

The most inspiring books about becoming wealthy are written by people who have made it from rags to riches. However, advice on becoming beautiful often comes from those blessed with exceptional beauty to begin with. For a woman born beautiful to teach others how to become beautiful is like a sweepstakes winner teaching people how to earn a fortune through hard work. Is there a means for achieving beauty for those of us who are not big winners in the gene lottery?

Good news! It is biologically possible to look beautiful at any age. If you do not see yourself as beautiful, it is because your beauty is unclaimed. Your body has never been given a chance to reveal how it can look when provided with the best possible nourishment and care.

Some of our physical characteristics we cannot change--they are determined by our lineage, food choices our mothers made during pregnancy, and our environment. Oriental diagnosis has noted that small eyes are caused by consumption of cooked vegetables and animal products during pregnancy and early childhood. Large eyes, on the other hand, are caused by intake of raw vegetables, fruits, and fruit juices. Long eyelashes in a child indicate the intake of substantial amounts of liquids, raw vegetables, and fruits by the pregnant mother.

These things we cannot change. We can change much, however, by the consumption of a raw plant diet as an adult. This diet will make a difference in weight, complexion, and the texture of skin, hair, and nails. All of these traits and more are determined by our daily choices, with food being one of the most important--and one we have full control of.

Our bodies' natural ability to renew cells means that your body is capable of improving your looks. After all, we were designed to bloom continuously as old cells are replaced by new ones. The raw food diet makes the most of that rejuvenating ability. Rawsome beauty is not manufactured from the outside; it is cultivated from the inside by nutritionally charged food. The body responds with alacrity to an improved diet. As the body strengthens and heals your insides, you will see your beauty starting to surface on your face and re-structuring your body.

The artistic ability of your body will surprise you. It will seem as though a sculptor is chiseling your face and body. Fat deposits will disappear from the right spots. Everything bumpy or lumpy will be smoothed or straightened. Everything dull will be illuminated. The features will be refined until a lovely face surfaces, and the skin will be polished until it glows. By revealing and intensifying what is good, the raw food lifestyle will make the best of whatever goodness you have and will open every avenue for more. This lifestyle bestows upon you an identity of your own and makes you beautiful.

Only the body sustained on raw food demonstrates natural beauty or, shall we say, "rawsome beauty." The landscape of the body will change. Fat that has accumulated in pockets under the eyes and at the jaw will melt away. The lumpy potato look of one's face will give way to sleek, smooth contours. Pockets of fat and retained water will disappear. The surface of the skin will become soft and smooth yet firm and supple. Visible pores will diminish. Sallow, yellowish skin will turn into a porcelain-like complexion. The whites of the eyes, once red, will become bright with a bluish tinge.

The body becomes transformed and will unfold from the inside out. While your non-raw-eating peers discover new blemishes, blotches, and moles on a nearly daily basis, you will see your own skin irregularities gradually fade or disappear. Feeding your body raw food will make your eyes, once sunken in bulbous flesh, look larger and rounder by eliminating the surrounding puffiness and by firming the eyelids. Eyebrows that were beginning to form an awning over the eyes will regain their youthful arch. As natural collagen production improves, it will fill in the places where it is needed, as in hollow cheeks. It will not just patch your face, but it will improve every one of your 3,000 square inches of skin.

Raw food eating will clarify and refine your features and bring delicacy to your face. This diet will give the impression of high cheekbones. In fact, it will give the effect of a cheek implant, by providing a subtle contour to the cheek area. The blurred chin-to-neck curve will become sharper and more pronounced. Broad jaws and square jowls will slowly give way to a more desirable oval shape. Sagging cheeks will gradually become tauter and tighter. Incidentally, an oval-shaped face, high cheekbones, thin jaws, and large eyes are universally considered to be the major characteristics of a beautiful face.

As the cleansing is completed, you will see how you were meant to look. You will become satisfied, even fascinated, with your appearance. When you look your very best, you look perfect, in a sense that you are as close to the divine image for yourself as you could ever be. You accept yourself completely. Natural beauty is above conformity; it doesn't demand to be accepted by the dictates of the beauty norm.

People who have been on the raw food lifestyle for several years begin to have an emerging radiance. The glow is hard to fake because it is basically internal. It comes from an abundance of clear pink, almost transparent, cells that light up the face. Only superior blood circulation can bring this transfiguring glow. Several years on the raw diet will give you a translucent radiance.

There are beautiful people who are not on the diet, but even they have never been as beautiful as they could be because they have not been cleansed of all toxins. Our frustration with our looks is a subconscious reaction to our innate knowledge that we have not achieved our best look. The Rawsome Diet gives us confidence that we look the way we were meant to look when we are at our most beautiful.

The best proof that raw plant eating is optimal for the body is that it makes you beautiful. Slim face, slender waist, and clear skin with smooth coloration--these subtle changes will convince you that the raw plant diet is the best for good health and graceful beauty. No woman knows her true beauty until she cleanses her body completely of all waste.

I like to study each woman's face. I see not just how she does look, but how much better she could look. What I now see is just how far her looks fall short of her potential. I see her beauty as it would be if her body had been cleansed from all toxins and excesses. On the Rawsome Diet, you will be stunned by how the Master Artist makes the most of your individual features and brings balance to the face. Texture, hues, and shape will be re-arranged into a harmonious whole. Perfection and imperfection will be joined into a unique personal beauty.

But our imagination is limited. The perfect face is an invention of our culture. It shows human preference in particular time and place, and it is severely limited in its variety. While eye bags, puffiness, and sallow skin make faces look similarly unattractive, the variety of beauty versions, supplied by God Himself, is endless.

When your peer group is going through a stage where they think: "I am losing my looks," you will be finding yours. At 47, I enjoy looking in the mirror, while in my youth and young adult life I detested my reflection. People who have not seen me for years often tell me that they hardly recognize me. Even my mother recently said I looked like a different person.

Adopting the raw food diet actually brings the beauty equation full circle. Finally, beauty is for everyone! We can drop the pretence. Ugly Ducklings of the world, this is your chance! It is forgivable to be born ugly, but there is no more excuse for staying ugly. Healthy foods create healthy organs. Strive to become beautiful on the inside--you will be beautiful on the outside.

The book is available at: http://www.beautifulonraw.com

This article may be freely reprinted as long as the entire article and byline are included.

Tonya Zavasta is the raw food lifestyle expert, the author of the books Beautiful On Raw: UnCooked Creations and Your Right to Be Beautiful: How to Halt the Train of Aging and Meet the Most Beautiful You, named a 2004 Health Book of the Year Award finalist by ForeWord Magazine. In these books Tonya makes a stand as an ambassador for plain looking women in their quest for physical beauty. Firmly believing that the roots of under-performing and under-achieving lie in feeling and looking less than your personal best, she is on a mission: she wants every woman to look and feel beautiful. To learn more about how you can reveal your Rawsome beauty, visit: http://www.beautifulonraw.com or call 866-STAY-RAW

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Tonya_Zavasta/9013

http://bit.ly/2CQt1I6

[micaramel]

Artist: Forrest Bess

Venue: Modern Art, London

Date: October 3 – December 1, 2018

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Modern Art, London

Press Release:

Modern Art is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of paintings by Forrest Bess in the United Kingdom.

Forrest Clemenger Bess was born in 1911 in Bay City, Texas, and for most of his adult years lived on a fishing camp in nearby Chinquapin Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. Frequently relegated to the peripheries of art history, both as a Texas native and a rarely understood queer man, Bess might nevertheless be re-located at the heart of American Modernism. Between 1949and 1967 he showed six times at Betty Parsons’ New York gallery, on the same walls that debuted Barnett Newman, Richard Tuttle, Ellsworth Kelly, and other focal figures of twentieth-century abstraction. Simultaneously he engaged in correspondence with sociologists, psychotherapists, art historians, and even NASA, to communicate a series of radical medico-mystical theories he had devised that were, he believed, of critical import to mankind.

Bess arrived at painting incidentally. Following a psychologically scarring gay bashing and subsequent nervous breakdown during his service in the camouflage division of the US military, he resumed earlier artistic endeavours on the advice of an army psychiatrist. A number of paintings executed up to the 1940s demonstrate an initial interest in van Gogh, and incorporate figures and landscapes observed on his travels in Mexico. During this period Bess was also commissioned to depict local Texan properties and household pets, and in doing so supplemented his small income as a bait fisherman.

Increasingly Bess was haunted by night-time visions, which he began to record in a book by his bedside. From 1946 onwards he painted principally according to these visions, rendering tense internal conflicts on sex, gender, and sexuality as obscure, oneiric forms, ones that often eluded even the artist himself. He wrote, “the canvases I paint are statements – each one is a statement of what I don’t know. I am only a conduit through which they pass and there are times I suffer because I don’t know.”

During the 1950s, Bess divided his time between fishing, painting, and the compilation of a ‘thesis’ centred on a proposition for the unification of the male and female sexes within a biologically male body. Bess’s ideas were inspired by numerous sources, including the traditions of Aboriginal tribespeople, Egyptian, Greek, and Chinese art, and the writings of Havelock Ellis. Around 1955, his own writings distilled in an operation he performed on his perineum, during which he created an orifice intended to receive a penis. Bess’s motivations – the prospect, he claimed, of everlasting life – were likely spurred by an emergent discourse on transsexuality that was catalysed in 1952 by the public disclosure of Christine Jorgensen’s sex reassignment surgery, the first such operation reported in America. In 1954, Bess had declared hermaphroditism “the perfect state of man”.

Several years later Bess made unrealised plans to expand into sculpture and moving image, developing an idea for a film based on a vision of Dionysus. He continued to paint until 1974 and, following a period of mental decline, died in 1977.

Included here are eighteen of the ‘visionary’ paintings for which Bess has come to be known. Among them are important examples from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, many of which have rarely been exhibited previously. Part-indecipherable and part-diagrammatic, these singular works remain isolated cases of unbridled colouration and intimate personal code in the history of twentieth-century abstraction.

Forrest Bess has been included in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2018); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1989); and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1951); among many others. In 2012, sculptor Robert Gober curated a room of Bess’s paintings at the Whitney Biennial, realising the artist’s previously overlooked desire to exhibit his ‘thesis’ alongside his paintings. In 2013, the Menil Collection mounted a major solo exhibition ‘Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible’, which travelled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase; and University of California at Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley. Bess’s paintings are held by major museum collections including Dallas Museum of Art, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and The Phillips Collection.

Link: Forrest Bess at Modern Art

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2qZGlEn

[pamphletstoinspire]

Understanding The Bible - A Practical Guide To Each Book In The Bible - Part 32

Written by: PETER KREEFT

NINE

________

The First Systematic Christian Theology: Romans

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Romans “the most profound book in existence”. Godet called it “the cathedral of the Christian faith”. It is placed first among the epistles not only because it is the longest, but also because it is the greatest.

Romans was probably written shortly before Nero’s persecution began in A.D. 64. According to Tacitus, the Roman historian, Christians were already “an immense multitude” then.

Paul had not founded the Roman church, Peter had. But Paul came to Rome to appear before the emperor and to be martyred. Acts ends with his preaching the gospel from house arrest in Rome.

Rome was, of course, the center of the entire world, the greatest city in the world in power and population, but already decadent with slavery, political corruption, and extremes of wealth and poverty. Into this cesspool, Paul drops the seed of the gospel, which was to conquer the world.

Romans is the only systematic theology in the Bible, except for Hebrews, which is not about Christianity as such but about Christianity and Judaism, like Romans 9 to 11. But Christianity is not a theory, a philosophy, but a story, “news”. The epistles interpret this “news”. They teach timeless truths, but truths about time: (1) the significance of the temporal events in the Gospels, especially Christ’s death, the event each Gospel lingers longest over; and (2) the outworking of these events in our lifetimes.

The main point of Romans, and of Christianity, and of life itself, is Christ. Romans presents Him as the Second Adam, the new man, and humanity’s second chance. He is “the righteousness of God”. This is the phrase Paul uses to identify his main theme at the beginning (1:16-17): “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ ” This is a two-verse summary of the entire book.

Romans is the book that sparked the Protestant Reformation when Luther discovered the doctrine of justification by faith in it. The Catholic Church teaches this doctrine too, of course. The Church cannot contradict the Bible. That would be like a house contradicting its foundation. Nor is there any contradiction between Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith (in Romans and Galatians) and James’ teaching that faith without works is dead (Jas 2:14-26). Luther thought there was, and he called James “an epistle of straw”. But even Romans includes James’ point. It ends with chapters 12 to 16 about the necessity of good works.

There is no book in the Bible in which it is more necessary to look at the outline. For Romans is an extended logical argument, especially chapters 1-8. The more you read, study, and think about it, the tighter and clearer it becomes. It is much better to do the detailed outlining yourself than to let any commentator do it for you. It may sound like dull “schoolwork”, but you will find it extremely rewarding and even exciting.

The unity of the argument centers around four key concepts: righteousness, faith, law, and sin. Paul uses each term over sixty times. The main outline is as follows:

Personal Introduction: 1:1-15

Main Theme: 1:16-17

I. Doctrine

  A. Christianity

    1. The problem, the bad news, sin: 1:18-3:20

    2. The solution, the good news, salvation: 3:21-8:39

  B. Judaism: 9-11

II. Practice: 12-15

Personal postscripts: 16

At each major transition point in Paul’s argument, there is a key “therefore” or “but”.

The major transition, from sin to salvation, in the passage of 3:20-21, is this: “For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law. . . . But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law” (emphasis mine).

Chapter 5 draws a corollary with another “therefore”: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Chapter 6 also begins with a “therefore”: “What shall we say then [therefore]? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!”

Finally, chapter 8, Paul’s great, triumphant conclusion, begins with the final “therefore”: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Each chapter expands upon its first verse, exploring a new step in the argument.

The first step is the problem, the “bad news” that we all have a mortal disease called sin, “the Jew first and also the Greek (Gentile)”. The good news is that all are offered salvation, “the Jew first and also the Greek. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

Gentiles may think they have an excuse because they do not have divine revelation, so Paul first shows that Gentiles are inexcusable and responsible for their sins because they too know God, by nature and conscience. This passage (1:18-31) lays the foundation for “natural (rational) theology”.

Jews may think they need no Savior because they do have revelation and are God’s chosen people. Paul replies that the Jewish law cannot save you if you disobey it, and all do (2:1-3:8).

This demolishes the answer most Catholics give to the most important question in the world: How are you going to get to Heaven? Most Catholic students I have polled think they will be saved because their obedience to some law is good enough, whether the Ten Commandments or the principles of pop psychology.

The good news makes no sense unless you believe the bad news first. A free operation is not good news if you don’t think you have a mortal disease. In a more realistic age, the main obstacle to believing in Christianity was the good news. It seemed like a fairy tale, too good to be true. Today the main obstacle is the bad news: people just don’t believe in sin, even though that’s the only Christian doctrine that can be proven simply by reading daily newspapers. When did you last hear anyone, even your priest, use “the s-word”?

Calling a person sinful is not to deny that his being remains good, any more than calling the statue of Venus de Milo a damaged work of art means denying that its sculptor created a masterpiece. Humanity is a good thing gone bad, the image of God in rebellion against God, God’s beloved in a state of divorce.

The transition from the bad news (1:18-3:20) to the good news (3:21 ff.) is objectively Jesus’ death and subjectively our faith. More exactly, Paul mentions three aspects of justification: by grace, by blood, and by faith. Its origin is grace (3:21-24), its means is Christ’s death (3:25-26), and our reception of it is by faith (3:27-31).

Paul distinguishes three steps in God’s plan for our salvation: (1) the Father’s plan and predestination, (2) our justification by the death of the Son, and (3) our sanctification now and glorification hereafter by the Spirit. Salvation, like God, is trinitarian.

Chapter 4 proves that even Abraham was justified by faith. It incidentally demolishes the common fallacy that Judaism is only a religion of law, justice, judgment, and fear, while Christianity invented grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love.

Chapter 5 explores the consequences of justification by faith, including peace with God (5:1), joy in suffering (5:3-8), and hope rather than fear toward God’s judgment (5:9-11).

Then comes the contrast between Adam and Christ (the Second Adam), as the historical basis for the two main points, original sin and salvation.

Chapter 6 answers the natural objection: Why not go ahead and sin if we’re saved by grace, not by law? The answer is that our identity is now bound up in Christ. We are new creatures, little Christs. We hate and avoid sin now not out of fear of punishment (the former motive), nor simply out of gratitude (Luther’s answer, but not Paul’s here), but because of who we are: Christ’s. The point in Romans 6:1-3 is the same as in 1 Corinthians 6:15.

If we are alive with Christ’s life, we are dead to Adam, sin, and the law. Chapter 7 explores this death. God gave us the law not to save us but to reveal our sinfulness, not as our operation but as our X-ray. Not law but Spirit saves us—that is, God the Holy Spirit, really present in the believer’s soul.

This salvation is completed by our sanctification. Jesus is called “Savior” not because He saves us only from punishment for sin but because He saves us from sin. The three trinitarian aspects of salvation are like the root, stem, and flower of a beautiful plant. But the flower is the fairest, and the consummation. It is fitting, then, that chapter 8 is the fairest, most joyful chapter in the Bible. Our sanctification in this life (8:1-17) and our glorification in the next (8:18-39) are the point of the whole divine plot. Tolkien calls this “happy ending” the “eucatastrophe”, the good catastrophe. “There is no tale ever told that men more wish to be true”, he says. But unlike lesser fairy tales, this one is!

The next three chapters in Romans show how Christianity views Judaism: their past election by God (chap. 9), their present rejection of God (chap. 10), and their future restoration by God (chap. 11).

The concluding practical, moral chapters include the seminal passage about the Christian and politics (13:1-7), love as the fulfillment of the law (13:10), the best passage in the Bible for the aging (13:11-12), the passage that delivered Saint Augustine (13:14; see Confessions 8,12), and the meaning of “life or death” (14:7-8), among other gems. Romans, quite literally, shows us the way to Heaven, the way to receive God’s greatest gift—eternal life with Him. Who could ask for anything more or settle for anything less?

[rebeccatraviswriting]

Jiri Ladocha: Transparent Opacity

Sheldon Rose Gallery, 11/30/17 – 18/01/18.

Text by Rebecca Travis

The sight of broken or cracked glass often invites a sensory reaction. When passing a shop front or car windshield with cracks rippling across its surface, it’s hard to not to imagine the sound of whatever impact caused spidery lines to radiate out from its shattered epicentre. There’s something paralysing too, about watching a glass object fall, slow-motion style, before it meets its inevitable demise. It is a material that comes with a cautionary warning - when whole it is fragile, to be handled with care; in fragments it is sharp, damaging, something to be wary of, perhaps swept away and quickly disposed.

Glass occupies a strange status between high and low value. We surround ourselves with it, in our architecture and interior designs both for function and decoration. It becomes vessels for all manner of things: beverages, flowers, cigarette ash. And yet, it still seems somewhat precious. Perhaps this is due to its alchemical journey between physical states, from mineral powder, to molten liquid, to brittle solid. It allows us to magnify and see more clearly, protects us from the elements, and refracts and reflects light, causing surprising spectral effects in the most banal of domestic spaces. It’s a material so fused with our daily lives that it’s easy not to think much about it at all.

Jiri Ladocha’s new series of sculptures and photographs puts glass - broken glass - front and center. By encouraging us to study this material closely, Ladocha at once tells us what we already know - demonstrating completely what it is at surface value and how it behaves – but also, by offering time to consider its many intricacies, he invites us to see beyond mere material and think of glass as something other. The longer we gaze at its varying textures, layers and scores, the more the lure of this unique material casts its spell.

As with much of Ladocha’s practice the glass sculptures, which are the origins of these prints, began following a fortunate accident - an ordering mix up leading to a surplus of glass sheeting. Unwilling to let this material go to waste, and seeing that one pane had already accumulated a crack, he began to work with it in his studio, breaking it down further, chipping away at its edges and layering it several strata deep to create uniquely interesting abstract compositions with an utterly beguiling quality of line.  A real departure, though, comes via this series of brand new scaled-up photographs. Double scanned and then enlarged to 40” x 40”, these images take the glass surface to a newly immersive and transformative level.

From the elemental, water-themed title of the first sculpture series, it is evident that Ladocha has already identified how these layers - revealing tonal varieties of the glass’ natural green hue - come to look more liquid than solid. In the photographs this effect is even more pronounced. Alongside producing this work, Ladocha spent much time at Georgian Bay, studying the play of light on water and in photographs such as Transparent Opacity #2 this fieldwork really shows. In this composition, quietly intersecting lines etched into the glass cast shadows and throw fine, ephemeral refractions of white onto layers beneath. The eye is drawn initially to a portal-like opening in the centre where the glass has been chipped away into an organic, negative form, the outline of a lakeshore perhaps, or an eddy in flowing water, with many more rippling movements revealed in the inner layers of the glass’ rough, bitten edges.

The enlargement of line in the photographs encourages a consideration of the actions taken to make such compositions, and, despite careful study, it often remains somewhat ambiguous as to whether the marks are the result of incidental accident or attentive process. As opposed to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s performative mirror smashings, Ladocha’s work inspires thoughts of an altogether more mindful treatment of material, the glass being nibbled away rather than bombastically shattered. Transparent Opacity #3 feels almost ‘drawn’ - like an aerial view of a crude map, with hairline cracks denoting paths and larger chips as contours or buildings. I am reminded of Robert Smithson’s Broken Glass Map (Atlantis) (1969) unashamedly beautiful and otherworldly in its aqua-hue, but brutally dangerous too, with shards held upright and glinting. Ladocha’s photographs offer a less confrontational, more meditative study. They are works that invite closer inspection, rather than keeping us at a distance.

These are, notably, the first photographic works in Ladocha’s oeuvre. When asked whether he otherwise considers himself primarily as a sculptor, he pauses before replying:

“I wouldn’t say I am a sculptor, but I am inclined to be three-dimensional.”

This may seem a curiously vague statement, but an inclination towards the three-dimensional is certainly apparent in Ladocha’s stretched canvases. They would appear as traditional supports for paintings but for various additions to the under-workings of the wooden stretcher, creating a sculptural armature over which the fabric is pulled taut and forcing elements of relief into its surface. In some instances this push for three-dimensionality is quite extreme, as in the silver-leafed works Quiet Gods, Thor and Quiet Gods, Friga. Here, the attraction of a gossamer sheen is interrupted by cylindrical outcrops as if some magnetic force has been applied to draw objects at speed to it from behind, leaving inverse craters from impact upon its otherwise smooth exterior. A further pair of works in this vein but painted with multiple layers of graphite power and medium are astonishingly matte and convey a weighty appearance similar to that of steel. They simultaneously have the feeling of being contemporary and deeply ancient, an artefact conjured from another place and time.

A quieter sculptural edge is leant to the quadriptych The Four Directions, with subtle interventions lightly lifting the edges of each of its painted or metal-leafed rectangles away from the flatness of the canvas plane. With its angelic white support and combination of purist primary colour with gold, white gold and silver leaf upon elegantly proportioned panels, this work hints at a Modernist play upon the traditional religious altarpiece. It is here that we see the influence of Ladocha’s birth city, Prague, one of the few European capitals left intact following the wars of the twentieth century, and therefore rich with lavish Baroque, Gothic and Renaissance architecture. Ladocha has lived in Toronto since 1968, but Prague is a place to which he often returns, both figuratively through his artworks and, more recently, in person. Gold and silver leafing has been employed by Ladocha for many years and is both a call-back to the opulent decoration found in many of Prague’s impressive interiors - particularly churches - and a means by which to imbue a sense of spirituality into what could otherwise be a purely formalist reading of his minimal compositions.

Ladocha’s practice may be seen as one of many contradictions. Simultaneously his works can feel coolly minimal and unabashedly decorative, reverentially serious and knowingly playful. He is unafraid to be seen in these different lights, and throughout his lengthy career, has often played against the grain of whatever is à la mode in favour of working to his own idiosyncratic beat. His influences are myriad, a sense of Slavic Romanticism blending with European and American strands of Modernism, Russian Expressionists and Art Nouveau, Dvořák and classical Jazz. The antonymic title for this exhibition Transparent Opacity in one sense acts as a descriptor of the physical qualities that are heightened and subverted in Ladocha’s process-driven works, but also touches upon his natural inclination to shift in style and artistic direction, every now and again rapidly changing course in ways that are never predictable and often surprising.

[markwatkinsconsumerguide]

Consumer Guide / No.50 / Artist Ros Burgin MRBS with Mark Watkins.

MW : You're a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. How does that work for you?

RB : I love it. When I first walked in to an event at 108 Old Brompton Road there was a palpable sense of being amongst my own kind of people namely sculptors. The RBS is an independent and artist led organisation that promotes high professional and creative standards among sculptors and members share skills and experience. It is committed to making the full range of contemporary practice accessible to all.

MW : What places and spaces do you source objects in order to create art?

RB :  Anywhere and everywhere. I notice particular things  that are part of everyday  life and they stand out because of their inherent qualities and characteristics. What ends up in my hands is usually down to curiosity  about the unfamiliar. The things that end up interesting me don’t always immediately suggest a piece of work. I will keep them around the house so they remain in sight and in mind until I get an idea for a piece of work.

MW : What makes an object potentially upscalable?

RB : Probably, the intent of the Artist governs whether to change the scale from life-size and almost anything is possible nowadays with advances in science, technology and materials. Perhaps the main limitation to realising larger pieces is the availability of a location and the necessary funds.

‘Stella V’ is an example of this. I received a commission from Amesbury , a local school with an age range of 5-13, to make a sculpture for their grounds. I worked with one year group and decided to focus on the part of the school day they spend in the playground and introduced them to the game of Jacks or 5 stones as it is universally known. We made multiple scaled models and scattered them outside to assess them collectively and chose a particular size that related in scale both to the location and the average height of the group.

MW : Tell me about 'Stays, Holds, Ties’ (2009)...

RB : ‘Stays, Holds, Ties ‘ literally reveals the shape of women at the beginning of the last century. Society changed the shape of women’s bodies imposing a desirable form and used the corset to achieve it. I combined it with the covers of romance novels because they are stories which end in marriage another way society proposed women’s lives should be lived and offered few alternative prospects. By revisiting this period and reviewing women’s history and the unenviable lot of previous generations in the light of contemporary society we can see how far we have come and consider how far we still have to go. I tend to find that the pace of change towards equality for women is excruciatingly slow. So I make pieces which comment and draw attention to issues surrounding equality and I am a founder member of the Women’s Equality Party. 

MW : Tell me about 'Skylines' (2015)...

RB : I am a member of the Fawcett Society who published a blog about my project for the installation ‘Skylines https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/Blog/female-pilots-flying-face-of-adversity which addresses very relevant issues of women in the workplace and their underrepresentation in certain professions. After 100 years of aeroplane flight women make up less than 5% of pilots and there are only 450 captains worldwide out of 130,000.This installation features the names of 301 female pilots who, I believe, are role models and an inspiration to others. As an artist I want to encourage dialogue and Skylines draws attention to the number of female pilots increasing the visibility of them as group of women in this workplace and by making them visible encouraging women into the profession …you have to see it to be it.

MW : Tell me about ‘Totally Thames’ (2016)...

RB : ‘Totally Thames’ is an annual celebration of the River Thames with a creative and diverse programme of events throughout September which is curated and managed by the Thames Festival Trust. I joined them as a partner for the first time in 2016 to launch another piece from my ongoing series of work called ‘Thames Drawings’, which all focus on a particular 42-mile stretch of the Tidal Thames flowing through Central London, from Teddington Lock in the west to the Thames Barrier in the east. “Thames Drawing #2” is a new map of the River made using names of boats that use the Thames woven into a continuous piece of text written in graphite on paper which exactly charts its twists and turns.

The exhibition was held at St Katherine Docks in Devon House which looks out onto Tower Bridge and they extended the show for 4 months. I made a second very similar drawing to exhibit along with Thames Drawing #3 – a gold leaf drawing and 2 other pieces, ‘Island’ and ‘Lifeline’, at Trinity Buoy Wharf in the Chainstore at an event organised by www.5x15stories.com commissioned a full sized print of the work to be made which is now on permanent display in Orchard Place at the entrance to the Wharf. It is 1m x 2.8m and looks great as an unbroken line of text. The print works really well anywhere between 50% - 100% of the original size. And the reduced scale is easier to place in a domestic setting.

MW : Away from your studio, what do you enjoy seeing / doing in and around Godalming, Surrey, where you live?

RB : I love getting out and exploring both towns and the countryside. We are never really far from a coastline on this island and I adore the sea so frequently head off to the shoreline wherever I go.

Sport is a regular thing for me, currently tennis and skiing - but I am about to focus more time on learning to surf.

MW : How aesthetically pleasing is your garden and what makes it so?

RB: I have a small garden, and a little borrowed landscape from my neighbours, and the Lammas Land edging the River Wey running through my hometown. It is south facing so I have planted and shaped a couple of olive trees, a fig and the local apple tree bramley to take advantage of the shadows they cast across the space as the sun moves from east to west. I enjoy a crisp shadow; mark making on a large scale with a light touch.

I have a friend who is a beekeeper, and so have come to learn more about bees’ patterns and needs. As a result, I have replanted my garden over the last few years with bee-friendly-plants and let them escape into the lawn, which now grows to full height for the spring and summer months. Incidentally, this brought an enormous variety of other insects, moths and butterflies into the space. They seem to fly at different heights and rather like pilots stick to their routes. Inadvertently, I created a habitat which suits all these different species.

MW : Earth, wind and fire. Discuss how these three elements are represented by design in your home and work spaces…

RB : Earth, wind and fire, powerful stuff. I have specifically played with fire and burnt materials to see what happens. I have a wood burner stove which allows me to sort of control the flames and burning time by choosing how much fuel, what matter to burn, and stopping the airflow to arrest the burning. I burnt animal and bird bones, saved from whatever I was eating, and they took on beautiful patinas and became fragile, reminiscent of porcelain sort of taking on the aspects of the plate from which they were eaten. They sounded quite different when strung up in the wind. I have learnt how to burn some pages of an open book and want to make a large piece like this. It will need to be done in the exhibition space and immediately covered with an acrylic case to preserve the delicate leaves. Fire will come up again in a future piece in Thames Drawings. I will be using wood from a burnt boat.

I engaged somewhat with air/wind through the Skylines work, by looking at and thinking about the marks made by pilots as they fly their planes to and from points on earth through the space above us. They are creating temporary traces and lines and these lines informed the shape of Skylines.

Earth comes into my work either as a fired substances, or, as a temporary vehicle for imprints and traces left by people and things such as bicycle tracks. The latter produced installations called Spin and Twist. I also carve stone now and again which is some of the oldest material I work with. There is a small piece on show until October at David Hartlands’ www.elementalsculpturepark.com near Cirencester along with a few installations of Spin.

MW : What was the last film you saw, and which one are you looking forward to seeing next?

RB : The last film was ‘Cloudstreet’ adapted from Tim Winton’s book of the same title. He wrote the script with Ellen Fontana and Matthew Saville directed it in Perth. It was shown as a mini-series and I was blown away by it. Not only a beautiful film but great observation through the language, pace and cinematography. I have now found many of his others books through the library and they have not disappointed. I look forward to catching up with this years film releases in the autumn when my current exhibition closes and daylight is shorter.

MW : Which TV programmes do you never miss, and why?

RB : I like series such as Spooks and heist movies, the twists in the plots appeal. I enjoy Scandinavian series too for many reasons not least they show women in roles other than decorative and victim and don’t flinch at showing women in positions of authority, lead roles and letting them keep their clothes on. I am now watching Montalbano set in Sicily and it helps keep my struggling Italian language in tune.

MW : What do you have ongoing, and planned for the rest of 2017, and beyond?

RB : My current exhibition is now open until 1st October and features ‘Thames Drawing 4’ which is a 4 meter long wall mounted sculpture made from wood salvaged from decommissioned boats that spent their lifetime on the Thames. The project is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and exhibited in partnership with Totally Thames 2017.

I worked with Mark Edwards MBE, a master boatbuilder and set up as an Artist in Residence (AIR) in one of his boathouses used by the Thames Wherry Trust. The AIR was open to the public to reveal and demystify an artist’s process. We adapted techniques specific to wooden boat building, and employed them to produce a piece of sculpture made from unique materials which pay tribute to their history. The work marks the points where the tributaries and ‘lost’ London rivers feed into the Thames . It was amazing working on the riverside and I documented the whole process which I will shortly publish as a blog. I am at the exhibition every Friday (12pm-6pm) and weekends (11am-6pm) in September for informal Q&A with the public. I share the space with ‘Working River’ a Thames Festival Trust project film and story boards about the remaining boatbuilders on the Thames.

For the rest of the year, I will be seeking permanent locations in buildings along the River for bespoke scaled commissions of my work in the Thames Drawings Series. There are additional pieces to be made from parts of wooden boats which suggested themselves during the AIR at Mark’s and he seems to have a bountiful supply of old boats to choose from.

A future project includes working with light in partnership with photographer Nick Joubinaux who is based at Trinity Buoy Wharf and photographed Thames Drawing 2 enabling it to be made into a print.

MW : Where can we find out more?

RB : www.rosburgin.co.uk current projects section of the website and via my newsletter if people send me their contact details I will add them to my mailing list.

© Mark Watkins / September 2017