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mattdeeryradio-blog · 14 days ago

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To the Beat of a Different Drum MAWSB 9 MSD

According to Petru Moiseev, the author of the article The Specific Treatment of Percussion Instruments in Jazz Music from the 1950s, the style of hard-bop was created on the east-coast jazz scene (Moiseev, 2024). This type of jazz style was popularized by Philadelphian Philly Joe Jones, and Pennsylvanian/jazz legend Art Blakely (Moiseev, 2024). According to researcher/author David Rosenthal, what hard bop was, was an evolution of bebop Jazz that was informed by such artists as Lee Morgan and John Coltrane (Panetta, 1993). The music of hardbop, at least according to Rosenthal, was influenced by the harsh ghettos that the artists inhabited at the time, which resulted in more “sinister” and “darker” moods within its song structure and genre (Panetta, 1993). Rosenthal states that once these artists got popular, and could afford living in middle-class suburbs, that is when the genre started to die out in the 1960s (Panetta, 1993). Continuing on the themes of playing by ear and being self-taught from my previous blog, Philly Joe Jones, not to be confused with Count Basie’s accompanist Jo Jones, was largely self-taught (Gale, 2016). To not lead to confusion, Joe Jones took the moniker from his hometown to separate himself from the other Jo Jones (Gale, 2016). The drumming styles of these then up and coming percussionists would give way to modern jazz. This perhaps can be noted that both Pennsylvania and Philadelphia held a strong influence in the evolution of jazz.

The knowledge of the genre of both bebop and hardbop jazz, how they culminated both on the east coast and Philadelphia as a whole, will inform my project. It is a epiphany that Philadelphia, and the artists that it fostered, were directly responsible for what we know as modern jazz today. It is eye-opening on how the Philadelphian neighborhoods influenced the moods and stylistic choices of playing within these artists. I guess one could surmise that the environment at the time, as well as the artists emotional resonance within their confines, could shape musically what they were feeling, and vice versa. I have seen this before with Detroit, Michigan shaping the sounds of Motor-city rock and roll with Bob Seger, MC5, The Stooges, Alice Cooper, and Ted Nugent, with its rough and tumble blue collar atmosphere at the time. I guess a guess a similar gestation occurred, albeit in a different form of music, in the 1950’s within Philadelphia’s sleepy ghettos. Perhaps a sense of pain, mixed with melancholia shaped the sounds of what we know now as hardbop and modern Philadelphian Jazz. Though I assume jazz-fusion has now been the new kid on the block, as far as where jazz is headed. I think these feelings will always be felt.

I was not able to get feedback from classmates this past Tuesday, as I had problems with my project. I did get feedback from Professor Zaylea, and while the cheap Amazon Headphone microphone did not seem to be the best, the Blue Snowball mic seemed to do a better job than expected. I also took away that maybe a podcast could be possible, in that I saw David Nevil’s podcast performance for initial media. David had great phrasing, used an Audio Technica mic, and produced some great results. David is blessed with a great voice tonality and phrasing. In order to step my game up. I might have to work on my voice tonality, and phrasing. Since David and I are doing different subject matter, as well as presenting in different formats, something needs to be considered. I may have to figure out the appropriateness of presentation regarding to subject matter, and how to exactly shape a voice and persona when it comes to the subject of Philly Jazz, and or a reflection/biography on an up-and-coming Philadelphian Jazz artist. It also might be wise to practice at home some read throughs, but then eventually find a set to produce some good results with the podcast going forth. That being said, it seems achievable and possible to produce good results from within my apartment.

Works Cited

Jazz: Modern Jazz, Be-Bop, Hard Bop, West Coast, Vols. 1-6. (1995). Notes, 51(3), 865. https://link-gale-com.libproxy.temple.edu/apps/doc/A34393566/AONE?u=temple_main&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=ca006928

Moiseev, P. (2024). The specifics of percussion instruments treatment in the jazz music from the 1950s. Studiul Artelor Şi Culturologie: Istorie, Teorie, Practică, 2(45), 41–44. https://doi.org/10.55383/amtap.2023.2.07

Shibboleth Authentication Request. (2024). Temple.edu. https://go-gale-com.libproxy.temple.edu/ps/i.do?p=BIC&u=temple_main&id=GALE%7CK1606006694&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon

#podcast #jazz #jazzmusic #project #temple university #jazz history #philadelphia #philly #soundcloud

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mi5016janiru2024 · 2 months ago

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How Comic Books affected the Animation Industry

The history of comic books has significantly influenced the animation industry, leaving a lasting impact on the styles, techniques, and narratives that are now commonly seen in animated films and TV shows.

Early Foundations and Influence

Comic books and animation share a common origin in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily driven by technological advances in film and printing. Pioneers like Winsor McCay, known for his comic strip Little Nemo, ventured into animation with his short film adaptations. His work demonstrated how comic-style storytelling could be translated into motion, inspiring future animators to explore the medium more deeply.

Inspired by his son's flick-books, he spent four years and produced four thousand individual drawings in making his first animated cartoon 'Little Nemo', completing it in 1911.

Narrative Techniques and Character Development

The Golden Age of Animation (1928-1969) saw a rise in the adaptation of comic book characters into animated formats, establishing animation as a viable medium for long-form storytelling. During this period, animated shorts and TV series featuring characters like Superman and Batman emerged, bringing the narrative richness of comic books to the screen. These adaptations not only popularized the characters but also influenced animation to adopt storytelling, a concept borrowed from comic books

Visual Style and Artistic Techniques

The influence of comic book art on animation is evident in the strong use of lines, exaggerated expressions, and dynamic poses, which became staples in animated cartoons. Animation techniques, such as those used by pioneers like Emile Cohl and J. Stuart Blackton, relied heavily on the visual storytelling principles established in comic books. The transition from static comic panels to animated sequences helped shape the visual language of animation, emphasizing the movement and expression that are key in both forms

Impact on Modern Animation

In the modern era, comic books continue to influence animation significantly, especially with the rise of superhero-themed animations. Shows like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse have successfully merged comic book aesthetics with cutting-edge animation techniques, creating a hybrid style that celebrates both mediums. This blending of traditional comic visuals with digital animation showcases the ongoing interplay between comics and animation

Conclusion

The relationship between comic books and animation is one of mutual inspiration. Comic books have provided animation with a rich source of content, narrative structure, and stylistic choices that have shaped the evolution of animated films and television. This interplay has resulted in some of the most iconic characters and stories in pop culture, demonstrating the power of these visual storytelling mediums.

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betweentheracks · 4 years ago

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Are you willing to speculate about Yizhan? If not kindly ignore this ask. I'm just wondering from your perspective which of the "sharing clothes" pics on the internet is more likely to be actual personal choice between those two, if any?

Hello! Sorry for the delay in getting to this, been rather chaotic on my end of things as I adjust to being home from the hospital and establishing a new routine to manage my health from now on. I’ve been thinking on this ask for a while and how I wanted to approach it and think I have finally settled on a proper way to tackle it.

First, I am not unwilling to speculate on yizhan given that I am very keen on the developments of both their careers and their perceived relationship, whatever it may be. However, I will only be comfortable discussing them from the POV of my role as a stylist and fashion worker/enthusiast. I don’t want this blog to become another rumor mill or become a look-to for “proof” of things in regards to their relationship. There is no true way to prove whether they do in fact share clothes, gift each other accessories, or purposefully “match” their looks. To do so I would have to be their personal styling manager and, dream of exactly that as I may, I am merely a fan with the eyes of someone that works in the field and can therefore only offer my own thoughts and opinions on these so-called candies hidden through their styling choices.

To avoid any further chafing like my post about the DS2 jeans created I will only speak to what I know firsthand of the operations of the Asian fashion circuit and styling industry. I can provide insight into how their trends rise and fall on a cycle, how they often use fashion and style as a means to express not only their cultures but sometimes reflect the current climate of the entertainment world, and of how China specifically all but corners the market on underground fashion and streetstyle. This would then be laid over the context of, let’s say, Wang Yibo and Xiao Zhan’s evolution of style throughout their career and highlight the key features of how their looks tend to be tailored with a subtle nuance of their status combined with their country’s current trends. You can expect a post at a later time (after some thorough investigating and proper sourcing) which will look into exactly all of this and touch specifically on the best known looks they’ve been styled in with a breakdown on how those styles were framed, layered together, and then finally restyled to give emphasis to each of their unique features and overall image promotion.

I will also provide my insights on which features are almost surely items they themselves chose, brought in, or otherwise requested be included. These are mostly accessory pieces that, to my trained eyes, do not fit or flow with the overall intended aesthetic and yet have been properly enmeshed by the style as if to blend them into the final result. My own experience lends many points of reference for artists that have comfort items they refuse to part with that I have had to later find ways to make appear to be a legitimate choice which neither clashes with nor belongs to the finished look. This extends to this ask in that this is why my answer on what my perspective on yizhan “sharing clothes” will be short.

So, what is my perspective on them sharing clothes? It isn’t outside the realm of possibility, nor is it anything I can verify from my lack of personal interaction with them or any of the rumored articles of clothes. What I am willing to comment on is that celebrities and idols, no matter where they are located, overlap in a style and fashion sense both in public spaces and platforms and also in their private lives. It’s not uncommon to buy a brand or even exact style of something and later see that someone else has it as well, and from what I have seen I can say with some degree of certainty that Yibo and Zhan have similar tastes, though still incredibly diverse.

I will later make a post speculating on which brands they each frequent and, by extent, share preference for as well the alleged gifts of accessories they are often seen to be wearing which are widely talked about. I think less of the clothing they are rumored or thought to share and lean more into the idea of them having exchanged items which would be easier to wear under the watchful gaze of public interest and also the inherently personal or intimate nature of giving someone a necklace, ring, bracelet, or set of earrings. It is also much easier to talk a stylist into making an allowance for such items since they are small and can be properly incorporated into an ensemble, or even tucked away into a pocket or beneath the high neckline of a good shirt. As I said, many artists tend to have comfort items or good luck charms or any matter of small in size items that they are hesitant to leave behind when making public appearances. Artists are still people beneath the veneer we stylists mask them in and sometimes need that little bit of themselves to take with them and be grounding in the face of media being in their personal space and making assessments of the them that is being presented.

Apologies for the overall evasive answer, but this ask really did get me thinking and rather than leaving it to sit and idle in my box and make the person asking wait until who knows when, I chose to do it this way. The ask itself is the inspiration for why I want to make the posts I mentioned - it really tripped my thinking on all of this and the fashion enthusiast in me is frothing at the mouth with the prospect of real time breakdowns to expose the amount of work that went into some of your favorite yizhan ensembles. The accessories thing also sparked from a similar desire to be as thorough as possible before I give any careless answers.

You all are very dedicated and passionate and deserve to be treated with a sense of professional courtesy in that I can give you a glimpse into understanding the styles that rendered you speechless or blew you away. Likewise, I think the only responsible way to handle any of the candies that are trademarks of BJYX fandom would be to offer you a different type of breakdown that would adhere to why certain things that you tend to perceive as candy is given context of why some things, to me, look out of place and could truly be a personal touch. This would both exonerate me from having confirm or deny topics I have no means of knowing about while offering a gratifying alternative analysis that stands neutral.

Thanks for the question! I will surely be back with more and also to let everyone know more about these posts as I get nearer to establishing them!

#racks asks #yizhan #bjyx #style #wang yibo #xiao zhan

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eddycurrents · 5 years ago

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For the past few years, you could argue that the X-Men franchise has been working on trying to rediscover its identity. Since reality reasserted itself coming out of the Secret Wars event, they’ve been in a kind of flux. The initial relaunch set up the mutants in opposition to the ascendant Inhumans. When that was brought to a head, Marvel’s merry mutants then redefined themselves in part through nostalgic “back to basics”. In the past year and a bit, the mutants through a series of endings in “Disassembled” and Uncanny X-Men, while the Age of X-Man event traumatized them in a loveless utopia. It’s been an interesting ride.

You don’t really need to know any of that, or anything at all of recent or past history of the X-Men, in order to jump into House of X #1. This hits the reset button on the franchise and, while I expect that the past will inform some elements, it can largely be enjoyed coming in blind.

This is arguably the largest, most dramatic change to the X-Men since Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Tim Townsend, Brian Haberlin, and Comicraft took over back in New X-Men #114. Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, Marte Gracia, Clayton Cowles, and Tom Muller kick off a new era that is firmly built on a science fiction grounding. It frames the mutant identity in a new understanding and begins a new conflict with the rest of humanity as human governments and organizations react to the new status quo.

Without going into any details in this section, I can say that House of X #1 takes many of the common themes and elements of decades of X-Men stories and gives them a new spin, both familiar and strange at the same time. All of it is brought beautifully to life through astounding artwork from Larraz and Gracia, taking it to a completely different level. It’s brought together nicely through the design work of Muller, implementing a number of text pieces yielding further information, making it decidedly feel like a Hickman comic.

The digital edition on Comixology is also another instance of having “Director’s Cut” material, including Hickman’s redacted script for the issue, a wide array of the variant covers, and process pages of line art and coloured pages.

It’s a bold new era starting point for the X-Men and I’m excited to see what else is in store.

There will be spoilers below this image. If you do not want to be spoiled on House of X #1, do not read further.

SPOILER WARNING: Below I’ll be discussing the events, themes, and possibility of what’s going on in House of X #1 and beyond. There are HEAVY SPOILERS beyond this point. If you haven’t read the issue yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. You’ve been warned.

PREAMBLE | First Impressions

I had high expectations for House of X #1.

Jonathan Hickman is easily one of my favourite writers currently working in comics. He’s full of mad ideas that you look at and wonder why no one has implemented them in quite the same arrangement before. He’s great at execution and construction for the long game. While each story usually works on a micro individual story-arc/issue level, they also build a large tapestry that tells an even larger tale. One merely needs to look at his previous outing for Marvel telling one grand story that began in Dark Reign: Fantastic Four (with elements you could say were seeded even in Secret Warriors) and ended in Secret Wars. It was wonderful.

Pepe Larraz has been wowing me with his art since Uncanny Avengers. There’s a fluidity of motion and design that evokes the spirit of Alan Davis, Neal Adams, and Bryan Hitch, while adding what feels like an even more gargantuan attention to detail and sense of design. He elevated that even further with stellar showings on Avengers: No Surrender and Extermination. He’s easily become one of Marvel’s premiere artists to me.

When you combine Hickman and Larraz, and couple it with a marketing machine hyping this as the next big thing in the X-Men evolution, expectations were huge.

House of X #1 exceeded those expectations.

This first issue feels like a sea change for the X-Men, in terms of the team’s status quo and in the approach to storytelling. This is a science fiction story with heavy political leanings. With Xavier pushing the lead, Marvel’s mutants have staked a claim on a new mutant nation on Krakoa, with tendrils through Earth and beyond.

And it’s breathtaking. The artwork from Larraz and Marte Gracia is beautiful. The landscapes and vistas, the designs for the characters, the page layouts, and more, this is a visually stunning book. Larraz has truly outdone himself with the line art, but it’s taken even higher by the sheer beauty in Gracia’s colours. It’s very rich, emphasizing the beauty and wonder of this new world being birthed into existence.

There’s also an interesting choice here in Clayton Cowles’ letters, it’s mixed case. These days it’s not necessarily as unusual not to be in ALL CAPS, but it is different from what we’ve seen in Uncanny X-Men as of late and helps to foster that idea of this being something different. Similarly the text pages scattered throughout from Hickman and Muller that give this the stylistic feel of a Hickman comic and enriches the depth of this new world with more information.

ONE | X Nation

The idea of a mutant nation isn’t a new one. Magneto broached it before and attempted a kind of compound with Asteroid M. Genosha was set up as a mutant paradise for a while. The fallen remnants of Asteroid M served as the X-Men’s home repurposed as Utopia. A corner of Limbo was briefly carved out as a haven for mutants. There was that enclave with Xorn. And Jean Grey kind of set up mutantkind as an amorphous nation within nations given central home in Atlantis during X-Men Red.

More often than not the nation merely serves as a backdrop for the X-Men’s interactions in the rest of the world. I mean, when mutants had their own homeland in Utopia, more stories took place in San Francisco even before the schism that drove half of them off to the Jean Grey School of Higher Learning in New York.

What’s presented in House of X #1 feels different.

Ostensibly, the new mutant nation is headquartered on Krakoa itself, but the implication is that it’s so much broader. The X-Men have seeded Krakoa flowers all over the Earth, on the Moon, and Mars and have grown what feel like embassies and external outposts of the fledgling mutant nation. And it’s the fact that these outposts are within other nations, with the potential of moving a superpowered army unseen and seemingly instantaneously, that has the government representatives met this issue nervous.

While it is a home and a haven for mutantkind, it’s also actively being treated as a political entity. Similar to how Jean argued her case for mutantkind in X-Men: Red, we’ve got ambassadors of sorts checking in with Magneto and two of the Stepford Cuckoos. There are some intrigue elements that sync up with other aspects of the story, but the fact that it’s being used as a tour, a show of force, and an ultimate in order to broker a deal recognizing Krakoa as a nation is an interesting development. It takes it from a place of superheroes playacting at being politicians to actually being politicians. Abrupt as it may be to have Magneto as the face of the operation.

But that’s part of the genius of this play. Like with Magneto siding with Scott upon the founding of Utopia, Xavier and Krakoa is a further fulfillment of Magneto’s dream. A mutant homeland with mutants in control. Every previous time this has happened it’s come to ruin, but it’s always fun while it lasts.

Also, it’s an impressive show of power to have Magneto as the liaison to the rest of humanity. Where Kitty Pryde or Jean Grey would likely be more diplomatic, that isn’t the intent here. Sending out not only one of the most powerful mutants as your face, but also someone who has been in direct conflict with humanity over the years, pushing a mutant independence angle, is a statement that the new mutant nation isn’t something to be trifled with.

TWO | Who are these X-Men?

With the release of titles, creative teams, and team line-ups for the forthcoming “Dawn of X” reboot following House of X and Powers of X, there have been a lot of questions about what’s going on. Characters who have died during recent issues of Uncanny X-Men are alive and well. Characters who were in different configurations and statuses seem to have been changed to more familiar versions and attitudes. So it raises the question for House of X, who are these X-Men?

This first issue doesn’t answer that. I don’t know if we’re going to get an explicit answer that, but I think we’re given a clue on the very first page.

A key element in this first issue is the utilization of the mutant island Krakoa, both as a new home for the X-Men and as refined and adapted through application as portals, habitats, and medications. But in the opening scene, we see a central tree essentially acting as a birthing matrix overseen by Xavier.

The first born being Jean and Scott, I’d guess, then maybe that’s Bobby on the second page with some others. It’s possible that the one guy is even Gabriel Summers. It could be that they’re being rejuvenated, refreshed, and refined through healing properties heretofore unrevealed of Krakoa, but it may be more sinister. There’s a reaching, a yearning towards Xavier that makes me suspect. Are they the characters that we know? Or are they something else? I don’t even know if that’s a question we’re supposed to be asking.

Other than Magneto working front and centre with the team, they’re also working with a number of other traditional villains/antagonists like Sabretooth, Mystique, and Toad. All three have had their dalliances back and forth between the sides of good and evil, but it’s interesting to see them in the fold here. One the one hand, it reinforces the idea that this initiative of Xavier’s is for all mutants and that they’ve come together. But it also raises the question further, how?

I think it’s worth noting that every X-Men character we see fully interacting in the real world has been a villain at one point. Cyclops included, since the last time the world at large saw him before his resurrection he was “Mutant Terrorist Most Wanted #1″.

With characters seemingly back from the dead, characters changed to different versions, characters rejuvenated and healed as it appears that both Cyclops and Banshee are, characters who’ve previously been at one another’s throats, there’s a lingering doubt of how Xavier achieved this. There’s also a happy Wolverine playing with kids, so just think on that for a bit.

THREE | Master of Puppets

Professor Charles Xavier died (again, but who’s keeping track?) during Avengers vs. X-Men back in 2012. Then was brought back in Astonishing X-Men, first as a disembodied psyche caught in the Shadow King’s web and then through the personality sacrifice of Fantomex, inhabiting his body. He referred to himself as “X”, as something new, despite repeatedly claiming that he is the one, true Charles Xavier. His actions, both in his initial appearances and in the subsequent Astonishing X-Men Annual wherein he reunited with the remaining original five X-Men (Cyclops was dead at this point), could be considered manipulative, possibly even evil, callous, and villainous. We’ve not seen him again until now.

With the uncertainty of the origins of the wide cast of characters on the team, whether or not they really are our X-Men we know and love, doubt is cast on Charles Xavier as well. And it’s not just because we only see part of his face. Larraz’s design for Xavier’s new large, portable Cerebro deliberately distances us from him. It’s alien and off-putting, and I believe that’s the idea. I’m unsure whether or not this was the intention, but it also evokes the memory of another villain that Hickman enjoyed using, The Maker. The visual similarities and implication of another hero turned villain can’t be missed.

Consistent with that idea is the portrayal of Jean here. From a real life perspective, there’s an argument that all of the X-Men in House of X and beyond are taking on the costumes and behaviours of their most popular incarnations. In that regard, it would kind of make more sense that Jean would be in a more Phoenix-inspired get up or something similar to her blue and yellow outfit from the ‘90s.

Instead, we get Marvel Girl. Which seems odd to me. It’s not only regressive, but it represents a time period that in-canon Jean supposedly hates. It was, however, a time where Xavier’s somewhat lustful intentions towards his student were more apparent (creepy and disturbing as they are). It further reinforces that maybe not everything is on the level with what’s going on.

FOUR | A New Religion

Religious symbolism and outright textual substance are rife throughout this issue. From the beginning of Xavier acting as a kind of god to the newly reborn mutants beneath a Tree of Life through to Magneto’s proclamation at the end of the story, this first issue is planting the seeds of a new mythology for mutantkind. It’s something that sets them apart from the rest of the superheroes on Earth, giving them an explicit framing as the overseers of the world, but with it, there’s a tie back to how this new nation feels different.

There’s a definitive feeling from House of X #1 of building an entire society. Religion as an aspect of that, both real and implied, but we also get a new language of Krakoan (the glyphs we’ve seen before and again in this issue) and the idea of a broader organizational structure to Krakoa. It’s not just a school any more.

FIVE | Dangerous Beauty

There’s an interesting dichotomy set up in this first issue as well between the mutants and humanity. Of nature versus technology. It’s one we’ve seen before in mutants being the natural evolution of mankind coming into conflict with the sentinels constructed in order to prolong mankind’s grip on power. It tends to lead to the kind of nightmare scenarios of post-apocalyptic futures as we see in Days of Future Past.

Krakoa is an inspired choice for the catalyst of mutant change in the world, delving into some of what was explored in Wolverine and the X-Men, but going steps even further. Creating pharmaceuticals, creating properties similar to Man-Thing’s ability to transport throughout the world, and the various habitats. It’s like the Weapon Plus application of The World in that everything is grown, organic, nature-based objects all ostensibly pieces of the greater Krakoa entity. I wonder if this gives Xavier and the X-Men effective “eyes” all over the world?

It’s also important to recall how dangerous Krakoa has been throughout X-Men history, acting as an antagonist that kickstarted the all-new, all-different era in Giant Size X-Men #1, built out even in Deadly Genesis with the lost team, and the problems had at the Jean Grey School with the baby Krakoa.

And then there’s the flip side.

Orchis is a new organization introduced here comprised of a number of former agents of Marvel’s intelligence community, good and bad, ranging from SHIELD to AIM. And we’re brought aboard the Forge. There’s a fearful symmetry to it, a station close to the Sun building machines to counteract whatever it is that Xavier is ultimately doing. At the Forge’s heart what appears to be a new kind of Master Mold sentinel, decked out in some of the same colour schemes that we recently saw with the golden sentinels of ONE in Uncanny X-Men.

I can only imagine that this is going to wind up well.

We’re shown a face that we’ve not seen for a while (outside of solicitation covers), since I thought she was an “ordinary” human again, in Karima Shapandar. It’s kind of sad, though, as her Omega Sentinel protocols seem to have been reactivated.

SIX | We Can Be Heroes

The presence of the X-Men within the broader Marvel Universe framework can be problematic at times. It’s one of the reasons why they’ve often been shuffled off to parts unknown, set up as a rag tag band of fugitives, and limited in number to the point where they’re culturally, socially, and politically insignificant. Because the heart of mutant existence within the Marvel Universe is one of intolerance.

Mutants are feared and hated, hunted down, enslaved, or executed. While it works extremely well as an analogy for real life racial and sexual bigotry and prejudices, it takes on a different level of problem in the face of a world filled with superheroes. For superpowered people who aren’t mutants, you wonder about a couple of things, such as why the general populace even makes a difference and why non-mutant heroes don’t seem to care about mutant prejudice.

That latter one has been approached a few times previously, as recently as this latest volume of Uncanny X-Men, and it always seems strange. It’s like the question that you see raised in Swamp Thing and Marvelman and later The Authority of the realistic application of near limitless god-like powers as a force for change; if you’ve got these powers, why don’t you do something to change the world’s ills?

It really undercuts the heroism of teams like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, because it eliminates them as defenders of a universal justice, but merely teams that fight for the status quo. And so eventually the X-Men get shuffled off to Chandilar.

I think it’s great that House of X #1 goes straight for that jugular. Cyclops’ confrontation with the Fantastic Four beautifully displays his integration and friendliness towards the other heroes, that he’s happy for Ben’s wedding, but still at odds with them when it comes to overall mutant rights. Including those of Sabretooth, who admittedly just robbed a place and probably killed a few dozen people. So, it’s not like the Fantastic Four are in the wrong in trying to apprehend Sabretooth, but it’s reinforcing bits of the laws of the state versus possible ethical or moral concerns.

This scene also reminds us that mutants are everywhere. They can be anyone within society, anyone’s husband, wife, mother, father, friend, daughter, family, neighbour...anyone’s son, including Franklin Richards, son to Reed and Sue. It helps underline that compassion, understanding, and fighting for what’s morally right is something that really should be at the forefront here. And that Cyclops and the rest of Xavier’s new nation of Krakoa are making it known that they’re not going to accept the intolerance any more.

It’s also interesting the incorporation of the broader Marvel Universe as a catalyst for this confrontation in that Sabretooth, Mystique, and Toad were stealing information from Damage Control. It’s a neat bit of the shared universe and presents something potentially nefarious about Damage Control appropriating broken Stark and Richards tech. Though, we are left wondering, what did they steal?

SEVEN | Nothing As It Seems

One of the central themes we’re presented with in the ambassadors’ tour through Krakoa as led by Magneto is that nothing is quite as it seems. It’s even mentioned explicitly through the dialogue when the ambassadors are discussing the deal as lain out by Xavier. Worrying about the drugs, but even more about the amnesty. The terms of the amnesty aren’t actually stated here, but the gist seems to be that all mutants, criminal or otherwise, need to be set free (and presumably allowed passage to one of the gateways to Krakoa), if the country is to take part in the life-saving drug aspect.

Now, there’s an in-story payoff to the ambassadors statement, in that they’re all plants of one form or another, working for different organizations in order to gain information or surveillance on one thing or another and in Magneto’s ulterior motive for gathering them, but it feeds back into that tingling suspicion from the first page.

Something feels off. Something feels wrong. But that could well be the point. The seeds of doubt may well be planted intentionally for Xavier’s plan and the appearances of the characters. It could well be that we’re supposed to think that something hinky is going on, just to keep us in suspense. And that everything we’re seeing, everything we’re being told, really is the truth.

CONCLUSION | A More Perfect Union

As I said previously, House of X #1 exceeded my expectations.

Hickman, Larraz, Gracia, Cowles, and Muller came together to produce what is one of the most exciting and intriguing first issues that I’ve read in a very long time. Every single element from dialogue to line art, colour to letters, to cover to design gels into one massive stroke of storytelling. Every single thing within the comic adds another layer to immerse yourself into this brave new world of mutant merriment.

This is an incredible start to this new era and I am very excited to see what comes next week in Powers of X #1. Especially in how it relates back to House of X #1. These issues are apparently meant to be paired, but how exactly remains to be seen. I find that interesting, since PoX is apparently set in a different time frame.

d. emerson eddy is not an island.

#Examinations #X-Men #House of X #1 #Jonathan Hickman #Pepe Larraz

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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years ago

Video

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SELENA GOMEZ - LOSE YOU TO LOVE ME

[6.17]

We like it like a lose song, maybe...

Alex Clifton: I'm fascinated by songs where singers air their grievances and fans all know which specific people they are calling out. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with Taylor Swift's music way back in the day; I love a good gossip. Over the past eight years, I've worried about Selena with relation to Justin Bieber constantly. Not my relationship, I know, but he seemed like an immature asswipe when Selena could do much better. She's avoided discussing Bieber in much of her previous music. Even the songs that were definitely about him ("Love Will Remember," "The Heart Wants What It Wants") were written in abstract terms so you'd only really know the subject if you spent time following the Selena/Justin drama. Cut to "Lose You to Love Me," where she goes for the kill: "in two months you replaced us," a clear reference to Justin suddenly moving onto his now-wife Hailey. Such a vulnerable and specific track is a strong statement from Selena, who in the past two years has stayed relatively out of the public eye and is now ready to share parts of her story. There's no red scarf here, not that level of minutiae, but frankly she doesn't need it when much of her toxic and turbulent relationship with Bieber played out in the tabloids. And god it's so cathartic. It's an acknowledgement of hurt and anger but a phoenix move for Selena; she's rising from the debris stronger than before, and she wants you to know it. I'm so pleased for her. In the immortal words of her friend Taylor, "she lost him but she found herself and somehow that was everything." [8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A decade into her career as one of the world's most popular artists, it's worth noting that Selena Gomez's ascent to fame was improbable. She didn't have the most powerful voice, dance skills, or even a number one hit -- but especially early in her career, she was able to leverage her very public personal life to fuel interest in her music: a Disney fan base, a feud with Demi Lovato which the media loved to cover, membership in Taylor Swift's entourage, and, of course, most significantly, an infamous on-and-off-again relationship. But over the past four years, Selena has developed an effective signature vocal style -- hushed, controlled whispers which burst into moments of pop brilliance -- which makes it clear that her music is more than capable of standing on her own. So it's all the more frustrating then, that after seeing how stellar her music can be removed from celebrity context, that the first song we get off her long awaited third solo album is yet another song about Justin Bieber. But while I initially rejected "Lose You to Love Me" as a regression into formulaic pop balladry, there's a surprising amount of depth. The song sounds like genuine healing, coming from an artist singing her truth. Her voice is soft but powerful, emotive but not overwrought, reflective but not nostalgic. A line like "now the chapter is closed and done" could land cliché and hollow, but Selena sings it like someone who finally took a breath of fresh air for the first time in years. This is all to say: if we have to listen to this one last song about Justin Bieber, at least it's the first genuinely compelling one, and a step in seeing her evolution as an artist and celebrity. [7]

Leah Isobel: When Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake broke up, he got to project his messy breakup feelings outward; he produced imagery about spying on her doppelganger and fantasizing about her death. But for Selena -- Timberlake's 2010s tabloid counterpart -- unrepentant sleaze is a much riskier proposition, at least on the charts. Instead, she sublimates her anger, returning to the baby-voiced Julia Michaels wheelhouse. The mass of vocal effects on the chorus is surprisingly effective, but for an artist who was briefly one of the more progressive voices on Top 40 radio, this defanged "Everytime" is a little disappointing. [4]

Katherine St Asaph: Piano ballads are to music what Joseph Campbell is to narratives. Not a song but a beat on a storyboard -- barely a storyboard, even, but tabloid kerfuffle. [1]

Michael Hong: Selena Gomez's career has long mirrored Demi Lovato's, from child acting stints on Barney & Friends to the release of their fifth studio albums within a week of each other in 2015. Here she goes for something similar to Lovato's "Sober," released last year as a sort of song-as-a-statement -- though Gomez's statement is more uplifting than heartbreaking. "Sober" was a rare instance where Lovato never pushed her voice too far, with its statement made more effective by the events that followed; her confession came across as authentically personal as it unfolded in real-time. "Lose You to Love Me," like "Sober," is stripped down to its bare bones for a more intimate feeling, but here, it's questionable whether the quiet dynamic is one of Gomez's stylistic choices or a symptom of her limited vocal range. There are interesting touches, like the echo-chamber effect on her voice for the line "in two months, you replaced us," which makes the following lines about being broken all the more devastating. But there are also moments like the choir vocals on the final chorus that are predictably overwrought. While "Lose You to Love Me" is a delicately gorgeous and uplifting track, its statement is diminished by how tiresome the Gomez-Bieber narrative feels. We're no longer watching her relationship end in the present, but instead seeing Selena Gomez finally claim closure on a relationship that has long since run its course (at least in the public eye). More interesting is the single released the following day, which features the offbeat personality she's carved out for herself over the past few years and is equally effective at demonstrating that Selena Gomez has moved on. [6]

Alfred Soto: In a tradition of self-reflexive love songs, she tells us she'll sing the chorus off-key (it sounds okay to me). Maybe this line represents one of Selena Gomez's contributions. If I see Julia Michaels, I think of phony uplift, of which the chorus has hints. Then Gomez counters with a slightly hoarse, un-melodramatic dropping of the line, "You promised the world and I fell for it. A performance with grandness in its bones, and it almost succeeds. [6]

Stephen Eisermann: I'm a sucker for big, cathartic choruses, but the verses really let me down here. Between Selena's weird vocal, the melodramatic strings, and the unintentionally funny lyrics (I'm not convinced that the whole singing off-key line isn't a bit that she's delivering with a wink), it's really hard to take the track seriously. But when that big booming chorus hits, backing vocals and all, you can almost feel Selena letting go of everything Bieber did to her. And that, that's lovely. It's also why the other track released after this is so much better. [5]

Joshua Copperman: A song that's perfectly in tune with 2019-type sad music yet unafraid to be huge. It doesn't have the stakes of "Praying" or the bounce of "It Ain't Me," but that's not a problem. The gang vocals that plagued so much of mid-to-late 2010s pop -- including Selena Gomez's own music -- blossom into a full choir, beautifully contrasting with her usual hushiness. It should be Real Music-y --even the lyrics are less playful and twee than Michaels and Tranter usually go, barring the "killing me softly" shoehorn and obvious title -- but because of how thin Gomez's voice sounds, it's not. (The most Michaels-y touch is the backing vocals going "to love, to love" instead of "to love me, love me" like I'd thought, as in "I needed to lose you to love again at all.") The pop most beloved non-mainstream artists are producing is proudly campy, and that's great! Gomez seems to be headed in that direction too with "Look at Her Now," but this unexpected pivot to pathos inexplicably works thanks to the strategic arrangement and lyricism. [9]

Kayla Beardslee: It's fascinatingly difficult to determine where Julia Michaels' style ends and Selena Gomez's begins, and the whispered melodies and "Issues" violins here don't help. Although Gomez's voice can sometimes be aggressively pleasant, she digs in enough to communicate real emotion here, and the choir backing vocals are surprisingly powerful. The song makes a poignant, if heavy-handed, statement about maturing and finding your identity, amplified by this being her comeback single: Ariana has "thank u, next," Miley has "Slide Away," and now Selena has "Lose You to Love Me." [7]

Jackie Powell: While Julia Michaels has commented that Selena Gomez is indeed a songwriter, I still don't believe that's the proper term to describe her contributions to music. Gomez is a storyteller first and foremost. That's the term: storyteller. Sometimes those can be interpreted as synonymous or givens of each other, but let's remember that Gomez has been telling stories since she was seven years old. Her art is most successful when she's in control of her narrative and knows exactly what story she's about to tell. When she has the opportunity to perform her stories, she goes all out and sells it exactly as someone who's been on stage since childhood can. That may sound like something Ariana Grande has done in the past year or so with "thank u, next," since both "Lose You to Love Me" and that highlight some of the most dramatic breakups in pop culture. But as Tatiana Cirisano pointed out for Billboard, Gomez's approach is the contrapositive to Grande's. Both cuts are relatable and have a commitment to empowerment and autonomy, but Gomez makes her track a moment without a teen movie pastiche. Her choice to emphasize and crescendo on the lyrics "In two months you replaced us" and "Made me think I deserved it" speak loudly. This track is all about its dynamics in its minimalistic glory. Imagine Gomez was performing a monologue. That's the type of choice a storyteller makes. Justin Tranter and Michaels provide the melody and the nuts and bolts, but the concept is clearly all Gomez. The backing vocals in each chorus from Tranter and Michaels are symbolic of what they've meant to Gomez over the years. They've been by her side every step of the way and have lifted her up. That's beautiful. What's also beautiful is if I ever wanted to learn more about Justin Bieber, the lyrics "Sang off-key in my chorus / 'Cause it wasn't yours" tell me all I need to know. [8]

Josh Buck: The Selena Gomez x Julia Michaels joints never miss. [6]

Abdullah Siddiqui: Selena Gomez's discography in the last four years has largely consisted of stylistic meandering and incomplete ideas. She hasn't quite been able to settle on a sound or a narrative. This feels like she's starting from scratch. It's a pretty solid place to start. [7]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Selena Gomez #pop #music #music review #writing

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cinemameta · 4 years ago

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La Nouvelle Vague: Rebels with a Cause

Over the course of its lifetime, cinema has undergone various degrees of evolution in technique, style and theory. From its starting years as a silent, black-and-white medium of spectacle to becoming a vehicle of social commentary, different eras populate the history of the art form— one of which is La Nouvelle Vague or the French New Wave, an art movement widely known for its stylistic experimentation and upending of conventional ideals. But to further understand why and how French New Wave came to be would require examining the previous generation of films and cultural subtexts, tracing its origins and development through the years, identifying essential intentions and theories borne out of its inception, and assessing its legacy since its passing.

Given that French New Wave’s creation was necessitated mainly as a response to the prevailing trends of the previous era, it is important to investigate the overall landscape before its arrival. Prior to French New Wave, mainstream films were heavily tied to the studio system restricting filmmaking within the walls of production houses. Not only in space, it limited films in terms of overall aesthetic— actions remained in stationary shots, artificial set designs mimicked the environment of theatre productions, plots had to be revisited to accommodate the rigid structures. Dominance of big studios also provided a challenge for aspiring directors during the period in the form of preference towards established filmmakers and their mastered craft (Grant, 2007). With such restrictions, a choice between technique and experimentation became a recurring dilemma and more often than not, prevailing trends pointed to the former.

Even a bigger motivator for the movement was the cultural climate of its belonged era. The question on whether Germany’s occupation of France could have been mitigated if not avoided lingered over the heads of the elite. Such proximity to the war and failure in avoiding its arrival brought upon the whole of French society an air of simmering political unrest continuously stifled by the public’s eagerness to regain normalcy. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before France started to incur financial recovery. Unfortunately, the rush towards economic stability meant a surge in capitalistic tendencies. Thus, consumerism made its expected return with little to no restraint forcing mainstream cinema to cater to the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie and their demands for movies steeped in romanticism and comedy. Coupled with growing materialistic attitude, television’s entry into the picture presented a shift on media consumption wherein it was no longer expected of the public to go out in search of entertainment, instead entertainment was supposed to find them (Crisp, 1993). With this, French cinema underwent a deep reevaluation regarding its place in France’s postwar cultural scene specifically whether it belonged in the upper echelons of “highbrow art” or was better off in the business of the bourgeoisie.

Integral to the establishment of the movement were the precursory dialogues among intellectuals and cinephiles about the state French cinema, most of which centered on the impact of external forces enumerated above. Cahiers du Cinema, a monthly French publication focusing on film criticism and theory, became the place of assembly to most of the leading voices of French New Wave which included the likes of Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette and through their writings, established core intentions carried by the movement. Francois Godard, a notable writer for the magazine, embodied much of what the movement essentially stands for— that, in spite of the iconoclastic reputation that has come to be associated with it, so much about French New Wave is rooted in the belief of preserving cinema’s artistic value. Throughout his career as a filmmaker, Godard translated his love of moviemaking through frequent acts of homage— he made in-film references to other works he held in reverence, borrowed trademarks from respected filmmakers, centered character-driven conversations on cinema and at one point, even gave Jean Pierre-Melville a cameo role (Wiegand, 2012). What these constant meta-discussions regarding cinema revealed was not an effort to destroy its very language but rather an intention to interrogate its grammar and meaning towards a more democratic expression. Such belief in freeing films and their methods of creation from constraints brought by big studio houses and the rule of market became the driving force which helped spur French New Wave into action.

Although Cahiers and its critics managed to develop a strong presence among film enthusiasts who echoed the same concern of liberating cinema, it was only after the publication of A Certain Tendency of French Cinema when French New Wave was propelled into the nation’s consciousness. The essay which voiced out grievances against popular cinema in uber-polemic writing became the unofficial manifesto of the movement. Francois Truffaut, the author of the essay, lambasted the prevalence of what he called “Tradition of Quality”, a tendency of French studio system to favor “…literary adaptation, which caused French films to become increasingly verbal and theatrical.” (Cook, 2016, p. 343). Moreover, he scorned the glorification of screenwriters over directors which he argued imposed rigid rules on filmmaking thereby diminishing the director’s vision for the film.

Out of the essay’s publication, politiques des auteurs or auteur theory was highlighted as a central argument in the push toward greater authority of directors over film productions. At its core, auteur theory championed the director as the principal creator of a film, above screenwriters and film producers, comparable to authors having full creative control of their literary works. Although not a new concept at the time, Truffaut’s use of auteur theory in the essay accompanied by his stark denunciation of the studio system facilitated auteurism’s transition from a mere form of critical theory to a practicable filmmaking approach. The effect of French New Wave and its promotion of auteur theory on contemporary French cinema was seen in the surge of films that employed location shooting and practical effects such as natural lighting and live sound— aspects of filmmaking directors were now able to dictate without third-party interference (Neupert, 2007). Such filmic language which puts emphasis on low-budget production and documentary style filmmaking afforded directors leeway in experimentation and would later dominate the film industry displacing studio houses from its norm status somewhere in the 60s (Crisp, 1993).

Further impact of the French New Wave was observed in the successes of its directors not only in the box office but also in film festival circuits. Such was the case of Truffaut’s directorial debut, The 400 Blows, in 1959 where he was awarded Best Director in Cannes Film Festival in spite of being banned as a critic from the same festival the year before. In years to come, French New Wave directors would go on to achieve varying degrees of recognition but more astounding about these achievements was the fact that most of these critics-turned-filmmakers were under the age of 30. In effect, the rise to prominence of these young directors lead to increased numbers of new talents being hired in the industry and more importantly, “…granted the young filmmakers an unconditional command over every facet of the creative process.” (Fournier-Lanzoni, 2002, p. 212).

Even worth investigating are the ramifications of French New Wave around its neighboring countries and across the Atlantic which began to adopt principles tied to it. For instance, familiar imprints can be recognized in successive New Waves and film movements most notably in American New Wave taking great inspiration from auteur theory and Dogme 95 whose strict obedience to bare-bones style of cinema invoked the realism of French New Wave. Arguably, a more long-lasting legacy left can be attributed to its use of radical filmmaking techniques. The utilization of jump cuts in many films from the era, particularly in Godard’s revolutionary Breathless, demonstrated innovative and playful approaches to continuity editing and storytelling (Sterritt, 2007). While deemed controversial at the time, jump cuts and long takes became staple trademarks in French New Wave films and would later flourish into a dignified form of creative expression employed in future works outside of the movement .

Perhaps the most apparent evidence of the movement’s influence is found in the longevity of careers of its pioneers post-French New Wave. Well into the 21st century, Cahiers directors sustained a prolific presence in the industry with Chabrol and Rohmer continuing to release films as late as 2007 before their retirement and subsequent passing. Godard, the last surviving member of the group, maintains an active career having recently released a film essay, The Image Book, in 2018 which competed and won a special prize in that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Future generations of filmmakers also remain indebted to French New Wave for paving the way to an environment more welcoming of young talent and more respectful of their creative vision. Directors being able to attach their names to their creations owe much of that privilege to the movement’s campaign for authorial role of filmmakers. Just by the mention of “Tarantino film” or “Fincher film”, one could expect a certain aesthetic or style unique only to those names— a custom made possible by auteur theory. In summary, the impact of French New Wave not only to filmmaking but also to the very industry it belongs to cements its place as a formative era in film history and while it had passed its peak many decades ago, the spirit of rebellion that energized lovers of movies into taking arms in defense of the art form continue to ripple in the whole of cinema.

Bibliography:

Cook, D. (2016). A history of narrative film (5th edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Crisp, C. (1993). The classic French cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Fournier-Lanzoni, R. (2002). French cinema: From its beginnings to the present. New York: Continuum.

Glenn, C. (2014). Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut: the influence of Hollywood, modernization and radical politics on their films and friendship. (Master’s thesis).Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina.

Grant, B. K. (2007). Schirmer encyclopedia of film (Vol. 2). Detroit: Schirmer Reference.

Grosoli, M. (2014). The politics and aesthetics of the "politique des auteurs". Film criticism, 39(1), 33-50. Retrieved August 7, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/24777962

Hillier, J. (1986). Cahiers du Cinéma: the 1950s: neo-realism, Hollywood, new wave. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Neupert, R. (2007). A history of the French new wave cinema. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Sterritt, D. (1999). The films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the invisible. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, K. & Bordwell, D. (2003). Film history: an introduction. (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Truffaut, F. (1976). A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema. In B. Nichols (Ed.). Movies and methods: an anthology (Vol. 1, pp. 224-236). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. (Original work published in Cahiers du cinema 31, 1954).

Wiegand, C. (2012). French new wave. Harpenden, Herts: Pocket Essentials. (Original work published 2005)

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abigailtamayo · 4 years ago

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Women’s Fashion Over Time

In its vast timeline, the history of fashion in art reveals a complex socio-economic system influenced by a culture of valuing individual collectives in a world of dynamic change. It is a unique system in that which its influences are found in close quarters; a grapevine of cultural impact showing people influencing people. The ensembles worn by subjects in various paintings and sculptures present us with a glimpse into the socio-economic conditions under which fashion became a commodification of social status and a symbol of societal and cultural value. As cultural events and new political climates rise, causing shifts in values and general rules of fashionable appearance tastes in fashion appears to change. Yet the relatively stable constant in notions towards fashion is a prescribed label of class, and therefore, your worth and position in society, associated with the clothing you wore. In a series of six costumes inspired by the Early Renaissance, the High Renaissance, the High Renaissance in Europe, Baroque art, Rococo to Neoclassicism, and Romanticism, I will break down the fashion trends of each period, focusing on iconic features of each fashion period and briefly explaining the cultural context of each garment.

The Early Renaissance

This costume is based on the ensemble worn by Giovanni Arnolfini’s wife in the painting Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife by early Renaissance painter Jan Van Eyck. A popular staple piece in early Renaissance fashion was the houppelande which was carried over from the fashion of the middle ages. In The Concise History of Costume and Fashion by James Laver, he describes the general appearance of the houppelande as a garment that fitted the shoulders and was loose below, with a belt at the waist; the houppelande is what will later be known as ‘gown’.[2] This replication of a typical houppelande has a high collar and extremely long sleeves, fur trimming and fur lining, and hanging tippets from the edge of the sleeve to the back of the gown. The gown itself is extremely long, ballooning outward from the waist. The houppelande could be made in a selection of fabrics such as wool, silk, and velvet[3], and were could be dyed a rich, vibrant colour as seen in Jan Van Eyck’s painting. Since the middle ages, the use of fur in fashion had become symbolic of wealth and importance and was oft worn by nobility.[4] Since fur was difficult to come by, it was an elitist luxury used in excess by middle and higher class people, establishing a social distinction between them and the lower-class through their clothing. As for the headdress, at this point, not much has changed since the middle ages in terms of style. However, the custom of covering mature and married women’s hair was becoming less strict, and we see more women revealing their hairstyle beneath their headdress.[5]

The High Renaissance

This High renaissance costume is based on the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. The During the High renaissance, many cultural trends such as the rise and spread of books, the expansion of trade and exploration, and the increase in power and wealth of national monarchies in France, England, and Spain influenced tastes in fashion and the dynamic changes fashion underwent, as well as the idea of the modern ‘trendsetter’.[6] The essential garment for the High Renaissance woman was the gown. Its general features were the bodice, a skirt, and sleeves. The complex ensemble of the gown during this period can be seen in da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The gown could be made from luxurious materials such as silk, velvet, and lace, worn with lavish jewelry, and decorated with intricate patterns of stitching and embroidery.[7] While the gown silhouette was common across social classes, the distinction lies within the materials used. Although the wealthy and powerful used expensive textiles for their gowns, the lower-class was still capable of emulating the gown with the materials they had access to such as wool and cotton.

The High Renaissance in Northern Europe

My iteration of Northern European High Renaissance fashion is based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s Portrait of Christina of Denmark. This portrait demonstrates the conservative side of fashion that was flourishing alongside a bold, vibrant movement that was challenging established trends. The model adorns a dark, velvet gown with a high collar; underneath we see a glimpse of the ruffs from her high collared undershirt. The ruffs were a common feature of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, typically characterized as an upright, stiff collar that ruffles around the neck; ruffs were commonly adorned by noblemen and noblewomen.[8] Now, Holbein’s Portrait of Christina of Denmark does not show the typical extravagant ruffled collar, which could have been a stylistic choice by Holbein to allow the fur lining and trim of the subject’s outer gown to stand out, and remain the statement feature representing her wealth in the painting. The large size of the outer gown appears to further imply how much fur the gown is made of.

Baroque Art

The Baroque artwork I’ve based this costume design on is Vermeer’s, Girl with a Pearl Earring. The Baroque period introduced innovations to the popular sixteenth-century gown. At the time Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring was composed, seventeenth-century fashion had already gone through several evolutions. Stomachers, which was either a v-shape or u-shape panel meant for decoration and structure, had become stiffer and flatter and elongated past the line of the waist.[9] Replacing the trend of using wired hoops, or farthingales, to give body to the skirt was the petticoat. The petticoat was a practical solution to the everyday issues of functionality women faced with farthingales. Petticoats made of cotton or wool were perfect for warmth, while more fashionable petticoats were made of taffeta, satin, linen, or a combination of starched fabrics.[10]

Rococo and Neoclassicism

This costume was inspired by Vigee Le Brun and her artistic style which can be described as being a mix of rococo colours with elements of the Neoclassic style. As a prolific French portrait painter, one of her prominent subjects for portraits was Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who despite her tumultuous life in the public eye, was a fashion icon. The genius in Le Brun’s craft lies in her vast knowledge of current fashion and her awareness of the power of appearance.

I based this costume on Vigee Le Brun’s, Self Portrait in a Straw Hat. In the painting, Le Brun is wearing a variation of the robe en chemise which emerged during the late eighteenth-century period as tastes in fashion moved away from the early period’s penchant for fuller-bodied skirts.[11] While its design echoes elements of early Rococo style, the robe en chemise was a gown made simple. These dresses were usually made of sheer, white cotton, with high waists and wrapped with a decorative satin sash; its slender silhouette was inspired by the fashion of ancient Greece and ancient Rome.[12] These dresses could also come in various colours, such as the rose-gold coloured dress Le Brun is wearing in her self-portrait. With its sheer material and low-cut neckline, the robe en chemise gained widespread attention because of its revealing nature; until this point, the gowns we’ve seen have been voluminous and covered much of the female body. Yet, this scandalous fashion found its way into the wardrobe of royalty, and most likely, the wardrobe of some upper-class women who wanted to be revered for wearing the latest fashion. This portrait of Marie Antoinette wearing a robe en chemise was painted by Le Brun.

Romanticism

Based on Delacroix’s, Liberty Leading the People, this costume is an iteration of the symbolic fashion of the woman in his painting. She is Liberty; she represents freedom, in an image that evokes a triumphant revolution as she leads people on the battlefield. The Romantic movement differed vastly from the current situation in early nineteenth-century France, which was characterized by social unrest and civil war between the bourgeoisie and the working class.[13] Romanticism was mostly a reaction to the modern realities brought on by the industrial revolution; the romantic movement in art reveals a desire to escape these modern realities, a theme which Delacroix’s painting emulates perfectly.

Liberty Leading the People encapsulates the transitional period between Neoclassicism and Romantic sensibilities.[14] There are neoclassical elements in Liberty’s appearance, but most prominent is her dress. The painting feels reminiscent of the time of unrest during the French Revolution, which Liberty embodies in her wearing a robe en chemise, referred to simply at this point as ‘a dress’. In general, dresses of any kind were lighter and much sheerer than garments from the eighteenth-century but the general features of the dress were kept the same: made from any selection of fabrics and usually white or light in colour, short sleeves, high waists and long, straight skirts.[15]

From this brief overview of women’s fashion over time, it is evident that notions towards dress and appearance, and how we tend to associate certain styles of fashion to specific groups of people and/or cultures have not changed. Although fashion continues to evolve, the same old fashion trends appear and disappear, then reappear; reinvented or inspiring a consequent fashion movement. There is a romantic sensibility in the way we often tend to return to past fashion trends. It begs the question if there will ever be a completely fresh fashion movement, or will our futile attempts remain the shells of historic innovations in fashion from the past. Nevertheless, as one of few primary resources for contemporary fashion designers, these artworks reveal the true impact of fashion and art as they continue to influence fashion and social cultures in our modern world.

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Footnotes

[1] Ibid. 600.

[2] Laver, "The Concise History of Costume and Fashion: Laver, James, 1899-1975: Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming." Internet Archive. January 01, 1969. Accessed July 17, 2020. https://archive.org/details/concisehistoryof00lave/mode/2up, 64.

[3] Pendergast, Sara, Tom Pendergast, and Sarah Hermsen. Fashion, Costume and Culture: Clothing, Headwear, Body Decorations, and Footwear through the Ages. Vol. 3. Detroit: U.X.L, 2004, 450.

[4] Ibid. 624.

[5] Ibid. 488.

[6] Ibid. 469.

[7] Ibid. 477.

[8] Ibid. 482-483.

[9] Ibid. 521; 525.

[10] Ibid. 523.

[11] Ibid. 570.

[12] Ibid. 570

[13] Hurley, Clare. "French Romantic Painter Eugène Delacroix at the Metropolitan Museum in New York." French Romantic Painter Eugène Delacroix at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. December 20, 2018. Accessed July 22, 2020. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/20/dela-d20.html.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Pendergast, Sara, Tom Pendergast, and Sarah Hermsen. Fashion, Costume and Culture: Clothing, Headwear, Body Decorations, and Footwear through the Ages. Vol. 3. Detroit: U.X.L, 2004, 622.

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Bibliography

Hurley, Clare. "French Romantic Painter Eugène Delacroix at the Metropolitan Museum in New York." French Romantic Painter Eugène Delacroix at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. December 20, 2018. Accessed July 22, 2020. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/20/dela-d20.html.

Laver, James. "The Concise History of Costume and Fashion: Laver, James, 1899-1975: Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming." Internet Archive. January 01, 1969. Accessed July 22, 2020. https://archive.org/details/concisehistoryof00lave/mode/2up.

Pendergast, Sara, Tom Pendergast, and Sarah Hermsen. Fashion, Costume and Culture: Clothing, Headwear, Body Decorations, and Footwear through the Ages. Vol. 3. Detroit: U.X.L, 2004.

#writing #writing:2020 #course:arthistory #final project #fashion #art history

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robotnik-mun · 7 years ago

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Robotnik Art Historia- Part One: The Early Days

Hey there folks! A while back, I made a post detailing the stylistic evolution of Archie Sonic artist icon Patrick Spaziante regarding his particular depiction of Robotnik. It went over a lot better than expected, and since that time I’ve been mulling over doing something of a sequel- and that time is now.

Initially intended to be a single massive post detailing the history of Robotnik’s artistic depiction in the Archie books, it became clear that the sheer number of artists who had drawn the doc could not be contained to one post, and so, this will be a five part series celebrating the sheer variety of styles that were used back in the day, while analyzing the little details each artist would add to distinguish THEIR Robotnik. Why? Because one of the things I did like about the old days, even though it meant a lot of inconsistency and quality issues, was the fact that there were so many different artists able to put their own spin on things. While the streamlining of the art since the time Flynn came on board has ultimately been for the best, a part of me misses the variety that was present in those days, and so, I made this Art Historia series in order to examine and celebrate that variety.

We open with the beginnings of the book- a bygone era wherein the tone of the book took more direction from the VERY goofy Adventures series, in a stark contrast to the Saturday Morning show it was intended to tie into. Many of the artists on this list would become the earliest regulars on the book, serving as trailblazers to those who would come after and becoming Sonic icons in their own right.

1. Scott Shaw!

Scott Shaw! (exclamation point intended) is noteworthy for being the very first artist to draw for the Archie Sonic series, illustrating the miniseries that would go on to become the Archie series proper, and as such, the very first to draw Robotnik. A veteran of Hanna Barbera and DC (where he created Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew), Scott Shaw had an affinity for the ‘Funny Animal’ style that was more than appropriate for Sonic in those very early days of the franchise, especially given the ‘gag-a-day’ nature of the book at that point. His depiction of Robotnik would be spot on for the SatAM design, though it would take the colorist a bit of time to remember that Robotnik has red-on-black eyes.

2. Dave Manak

In the earliest days of the book, Dave Manak served as the primary artist, and stayed on board for a veeery long time. Manak’s art direction was fitting enough given the heavy emphasis on comedy in those days, and his work seemed heavily derived from Scott Shaw’s own style. Such was the case for his Robotnik, who for the most part was rather show accurate... most of the time. Manak could be very inconsistent a lot of the time, often making Robotnik’s forehead and nose larger or smaller panel by panel. One noteworthy thing about Manak’s Robotnik was the mustache- he tended to draw it way, way longer than the show’s design, as shown here. Guy really liked the ‘stache, I guess.

Manak wasn’t the best of artists, but he wasn’t horrible either, and for what the book was during the time he was most prolific? He was as good a choice as any at the time.

3. Art Mawhinney

The Archie Sonic comic wasn’t Art Mawhinney’s first encounter with Sonic- prior to coming on board, he had served as a storyboard artist for SatAM as well as doing tie-in work for some of the Sonic books released at that time. Mawhinney’s style at the time was an easy fit for the book, with his storybook-esque style lending itself well to humorous and more serious stories- some of the most emotionally touching moments in the book were thanks to him, and his style played a big part in that. Unfortunately, Mawhinney would prove unable to adjust to the times and to Sonic’s post-Adventure design, and despite being one of the best regarded artists of the Pre-Adventure era, he simply no longer fit in after a certain point.

Mawhinney’s Robotnik was very well done, naturally, though due to his style had a soft, almost cuddly look to him- though make no mistake, Mawhinney could make him pull off the menace when needed. Interestingly, Mawhinney tended to draw Robotnik as having irises, a stylistic choice evocative of the AosTH incarnation of Robotnik.

4. Patrick Spaziante

Honestly, I’ve already said a lot about Spaz’s Robotnik. Heck, he’s the reason for this entire list! But, I may as well say a bit more. Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante (a nickname that would probably be a little less well received these days...) was probably the first true Sonic Comic superstar- his kinetic, anime-esque art style breathed a new life into the book. Getting his start as an interior artist, Spaz would truly cement his place in the Archie book for his work in the Mecha Madness and the iconic final fight between Robotnik and Sonic in Endgame, and for his dazzling cover art both in the Sonic series AND the Knuckles series, as well as being a conceptual artist for the book. He would persist as a Sonic cover artist for many years, and move on to do work for the Archie Megaman Comics and even work for SEGA themselves.

His Robotnik changed and evolved drastically over the course of the book- starting out as kind of squashed, puffy and cartoony, Spaz would gradually add greater detailing and dial back the tooniness of the design until concocting a truly menacing Robotnik... just in time for Robotnik to be killed off, of course. Ah well, bottom line? Spaz was one of the greats, and the book probably wouldn’t have gotten where it was without his work in those days.

5. Ken Penders

Hoo boy, you knew that sooner or later we’d be getting to this guy. We all know the story- Penders came on board as a writer at the behest of his friend Mike Kantevorich due to the fact that his son was a fan of the Sonic series, and would gradually steer the series away from the humor focus towards more plot focused, story driven work, and most famously would write the Knuckles series, with much of his work forming the basis for the Archie Sonic world... as well as being the origin of many of the quality problems the book would suffer from later down the road. In addition to being a writer, he also did artwork from time to time, much of it... well, catastrophic. Easily the least suited artist for the book’s early days, Penders was accustomed to drawing realistic humans and just could not adjust to the more cartoony style demanded by the book, and in all his time spent he working on Sonic he would never truly manage to really master the kind of style you’d expect for a Sonic book. This definitely showed through with his take on Robotnik, with his bulbose nose, oversized and oddly placed eyes and the weirdly 2-D looking mustache. Ironically, Penders only drew Robotnik a few times over his entire decade long career on the book.

Curiously, Penders had an odd tendency to draw Robotnik as having rectangle shaped pupils. Why he did this I have no idea, but I have a feeling that the fact that his ‘original villain’ Dr. Droid would demonstrate similarly square sclera down the road was meant to serve as foreshadowing to his nature as a counterpart/successor to the doc... yeeeeeah.

And so concludes our first installment! Join us tomorrow as we delve into the artists brought on board as the comic marched towards Endgame, an event that would change the comic forever!

#Sonic the Hedgehog #Archie #Robotnik Art Historia

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ericwollersberger · 5 years ago

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Image and Persona in Ambient and Instrumental Music

Since I’ve begun working on my new EP, I’ve been considering how I’m going to market it, whom to send it to, and how I should present myself in my bio. One thing I have been thinking about is that in the genre of music I make, there is far less of an emphasis on persona than there is in pop music. In his book, Music Production: For Producers, Composers, Engineers, and Students, Michael Zager says “without a story, labels are normally not interested in artists unless there are unusual circumstances surrounding their careers or an artist is extraordinarily gifted” (Zager, 2011). An expansion of this idea could be found in Matthew Wheelock Stahl’s essay “A Moment Like This: American Idol and Narratives of Meritocracy,” where he describes the performer’s “paradoxical relationship with the target audience: aspiring idols must demonstrate both specialness and ordinariness, distance and closeness, similarity and difference, particularly regarding social position.” Later, he discusses the success of the Spice girls, claiming their authenticity derived from their “weaving stories of their ordinariness into their music videos and feature film,” and by speaking “not for their audience but as their audience” in order to ostensibly assure their fans of their “possibility of being in possession of star quality and inherent talents” (Derno, 2004). The questions of how “authentic” someone is perceived as in the world of pop music is deeply rooted in social hierarchy and where the viewers see the artist and themselves, but for some reason I don’t see this happening much outside of the realm of popular music. By “popular music,” I here mean music with vocals and lyrics and some semblance of pop song structure. When we go outside of this realm, into music that is instrumental or where the vocals aren’t distinctly the focus of the music, it would appear that this is less of a concern. Here, I would like to explore why this is, what artists who make instrumental music have done to craft an image, and what I think it means for me and my practice.

When music has vocals and lyrics, many audiences feel like the person singing it should be somehow living the thematic material of the songs in order to make it “authentic.” Once the person who wrote a piece of music somehow becomes a character in it, they must live up to both the persona that they create for themselves and the one that the audience perceives and expects. As their careers progress, this persona is usually expected to evolve, but not so much that what originally made the artist appealing is lost. In popular music, it is common for fans to want to know details about the artist’s lives that their songs seem to suggest, and now, if an artist has a high enough profile, one can easily learn personal details such as an artist’s mental health, religious beliefs, current or previous spouses, or history of drug abuse. Knowing these details can often make fans feel as if the artist is somehow more genuine and the artist becomes humanized.

In the world of instrumental music, however, it would appear that this is far less often the case, because the “character” of the music isn’t expressed in as literal or direct way as it is in popular music. This is in a sense a space left blank by the artist. The vast majority of purveyors of instrumental music (at least in my area of practice) rely on either album artwork, videos, or the aesthetic of the music itself to create their image. The result is that often there can be a much less obvious trajectory or narrative arc in an artist’s discography. While there is usually experimentation and artistic evolution of some kind, an artist has less room to stray from their original aesthetic without alienating their audience. For example, William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops was made by recording the sounds of very old tape loops falling apart as he played them back, resulting in very long and repetitive pieces of process music that established him as one of the most popular artists in the ambient genre. Since this project, however, there haven’t been many extreme changes in approach for him, with most of his projects since relying on the sounds of analog tape loops, very long track lengths, and a somber, melancholic, elegiac mood to remain recognizable as Basinski pieces. Similarly, artists such as Gas, Pete Namlook, and Stars of the Lid have displayed a kind of uniformity not only in their musical, stylistic, and compositional choices, but also in their album artwork, which usually follows a distinct and established visual style they have cultivated. Despite their success within their niches, however, these artists do not have anything resembling a public persona that their music needs to adhere to in order to remain “convincing” to their audiences.

There are exceptions to this rule, most notably artists like Moby and Aphex Twin. Moby was in fact controversial for giving a face to a genre that had so long been made by seemingly anonymous artists who were by no means public figures. Many fans of ambient and techno music saw this as “selling out,” although Moby was already very popular before he started putting his face on his album covers. Fans were aware of his Christian, vegan, and teetotaling lifestyle, which he often talked about in his liner notes for albums such as Animal Rights and Everything Is Wrong, although his memoir Porcelain: A Memoir tells of his returning to heavy drinking after a failed relationship and recounts numerous episodes of alcohol-induced depravity that would go against this image (Moby, 1995; Moby, 1996; Moby, 2016). Aphex Twin, on the other hand, cultivated a dark, surreal, and grotesque image that would lead many fans to believe he was a heavy drug user due to the trippy, strange, and paranoid imagery he would associate with his music through his video collaborations with Merce Cunningham. However, he has claimed that he never makes music under the influence of drugs. “I’m never under the influence of drugs when I make music. When you’re tripping, you’re just fucked. You could never make it together to make a track. When I’m stoned, I go to bed” (Lester, 2001).

Outside of these two examples, however, it is rare for composers of instrumental music to have public personas. There are however, other ways for artists to cultivate a kind of “anti-image” that is hostile to the industry or to the world at large. Ambient house pioneers The KLF, for example, included a list of “facts?” (sic) along with copies of their albums sent to critics that included the statement “Ambient House does not come to you: you have to go to it” (Toop, 1995). They were hostile towards the industry that they were successful in, and expressed this in spectacular and iconic ways. When they were voted “Best British Group by the UK industry, they responded by dumping a dead sheep with the letters “KLF” at the awards ceremony. They even infiltrated the visual arts world, where they “nail[ed] 40,000 pounds onto a canvas and chain[ed] it to the railings of London’s Tate Gallery as an award for the worst British artist.” They later burned 1 million pounds in a boathouse on Jura and taped the whole thing, a powerful anti-commercial gesture that seemed to conclude their career (Pendergast, 2003).

Other artists to create a kind of “anti-image” in the public eye are artists of the “isolationist” movement of the early 90s, whose aesthetic choices ranged from alienating and dark to downright anti-social, but who expressed their social commentary in subversive and uncompromising ways. Scanner, for example, used a scanner purchased from a London anarchist group to secretly record people’s phone conversations and work these sounds into his very low-key House and Techno inspired music, with the goal of exploring how late-twentieth-century technology had altered communication. Thomas Köner made bleak, icy, and epic soundscapes coupled with artwork that depicted melting polar ice caps that were both a “total retreat from the outside world” and a statement about humanity’s mistreatment of the environment (Pendergast, 2003).

In my own music, I have usually tried to maintain a certain uniformity in the style of the artwork. Since I have no public persona to speak of, I find this is probably the most effective way to cultivate my own “image” for the time being. I rarely put my name or the name of the album on the cover because I see my music as being consumed mostly in online settings, where the artist and album names are usually present alongside the artwork. I generally see the artwork as a general tone-setter or something to grab the eye of the listener. Until now, most of my artwork has been images or paintings of the sky that I have filtered in a way that suits the music on the album. For example, on an album that featured lo-fi tape loops, I had an image of a sunset that I put through a VHS filter. However, in recent years, I’ve started to feel like ambient artists using naturalistic imagery is a boring cliché and have started moving towards sources like other paintings available in the public domain or worked with visual artists to get something that fits the aesthetic of the music a little more specifically than just a suggestion of blankness for the listener to project themselves onto. For the project I am working on now I wanted to juxtapose an older looking painting, to point to the more harmonically traditional guitar arrangements, with an overtly digital-looking filter to mirror the glitchy manipulations I employ on the tracks. I want the painting to be of some kind of public space, like a train station, to mirror the themes of alienation in public spaces present in the song titles and the treatment of the vocals on the album. As for my artist bio, I think I may include descriptions of some of my projects from the past, as I have noticed this is something of a pattern in the genre that I work within. I find it interesting to know what styles of music an artist explored before they moved to ambient music, especially since it can shed light on what thematic material is present in a style of music that can be notoriously vague and difficult to interpret in those terms.

References

DERNO, M. & WASHBURNE, C.J. (eds.) (2004) Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate. London: Routledge.

LESTER, P. (2001) The Friday Interview: Aphex Twin. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/oct/05/artsfeatures3 [Accessed 7 December 2019]

MOBY (1995) Everything Is Wrong [CD] USA: Mute.

MOBY (1996) Animal Rights [CD] USA: Mute.

MOBY (2016) Porcelain: A Memoir. USA: Penguin Press.

PRENDERGAST, M. (2003) The Ambient Century. London: Bloomsbury.

TOOP, D. (1995) Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound, and Imaginary Worlds. London: Serpent’s Tail.

ZAGER, M. (2011) Music Production: For Producers, Composers, Arrangers, and Students. UK: Scarecrow Press.

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lemondice · 5 years ago

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Evolution of a Game: Mint Condition Comics

My first published game, Mint Condition Comics, is coming to now live on Kickstarter on Monday, November 11th, and I’m super excited about it! You can back it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/miguelthedesigner/mint-condition-comics-a-neat-game-about-comic-books

I thought today I would talk about how the game evolved, going through many stages to get to the (in my humble opinion) awesome light but thinky game it is today.

Stage 1: Idea

Some games evolve gradually out of existing concepts or thematic overviews, while others basically have a singular lightbulb moment. Mint Condition has evolved a lot, but the core idea sprung fully formed from my head while going for a lunchtime walk along the Chicago Riverwalk one sunny day in August 2018. A lot of games play with drafting as a mechanism, but those games tend to not support 2 player play (7 Wonders), not be good at 2 players (Sushi Go), or be good at 2 players in spite of their drafting rather than because of it (Seasons). However, the issue of drafting at low player counts has already been thought about at length in the Magic:the Gathering world, and one solution immediately popped to mind - Winston Draft, where there are 3 piles of facedown cards and you iterate through them, looking at each pile and then either taking it as your choice for the turn and replacing it, or moving to the next pile and adding another card to sweeten the pile you passed on. Winston Draft adapts drafting to a format that can work at 2-3 players and has a nice unknown tension to it. So the initial germ of an idea was “I’ll try and make a drafting game that works for a smaller player count by making Winston Drafting the primary drafting mechanism.”

Stage 2: Rough Prototype

And when I say rough, I mean rough. I’m very much a mechanic-first, theme-later designer, so my first prototype that I brought to my design group was a plastic bag full of cardboard scraps with single letters scribbled on them. At that stage, there were 4 or 5 types of letters - A, B, and C which scored you more the more of them you had (A being the highest scoring but the rarest), D which scored only for the player with the most (like Sushi Go’s Maki), and E which you kept between rounds and which would score a lot if you could collect several of them over the course of the game (the idea being that you could go for a long-term strategy hoarding E’s.) It wasn’t pretty, but it conveyed the core idea of the game, and generated enough enthusiasm that I continued to iterate on it.

Stage 2: Slightly-less Rough Prototype

The game next briefly went through a phase where the above letters were converted to ancient history things like gold/silver/bronze, and there was a fire tile that penalized the player with the least fire at the end of each round. There was also temporarily a mechanic where players could keep 1 or 2 cards from each round to the next, to give players more of an ability to focus on a long-term strategy. I pretty quickly transitioned over to record collecting as a theme, and upgraded my components to blank cards with permanent marker, also adding in a few bonus cards that messed with the draft in minor ways.

Stage 3: Comics!

Throughout this process, Miguel and Aaron from neat games were part of my design test group and were going through the process of publishing their first release as Neat Games, Too Many Poops. It was a light card-based game, much like my game Record Rampage, and so we discussed them publishing it after Too Many Poops finished. During this part of the process, based on potential customer feedback, we decided to retheme to comic books to have a more accessible theme, while the mechanics were also undergoing some minor tweaks, the biggest one being the addition of a market where players could trade up a few lower comics for a more valuable one, or trade a more valuable one for a few lower comics, giving more flexibility to players. Along with the transition to comics, a shift was made where instead of sets all being the same size but rarer sets being more valuable, sets varied in size, with a set with 6 elements being harder to complete than a set with 4 elements but worth more if you could get to 6, and the individual elements were given varying rarities along with a small point bonus simply for having the rarest elements, to add a little more inherent value to some items during the draft (Issue #1s and #2s, thematically enough)

Stage 4: Balance Overhaul

Around January 2019, I was getting some feedback about decisions being not quite interesting enough, and I was also noticing that the correct decision most of the time was to take the biggest pile, because the points from lots of little 1-2 size sets would add up quickly. Thus, I made the biggest balance change I had made in quite a while since early on in the process, sharply cutting the points for low #s of issues while raising the payoff for complete sets, removing inherent points from Issue #2s, and adding personal missions to complete for bonus points (like “Collect 2 or more sets of Superman” or “Have the fewest comics”) and personal 1-use special powers to add a little more spice. This temporarily broke the game, but ultimately got it to a much more satisfying place, moving it down the local maximum hill and towards the global maximum mountain. Starting at this point, art began to be commissioned for the game and all the other spinning wheels of development continued to turn.

Stage 5: Final Tweaks

The last 2 major changes to the game came in late spring/early summer 2019; one of which was converting personal missions to 2 separate sets of global goals - a comic chosen each round to award bonus points to whoever had the most of it, and a separate goal like having the fewest comics overall. Around this time, we faced a dilemna - many people who played the game wanted a trading mechanic, but we were all in agreement that a trading mechanic would slow down the game significantly and harm the balance (a lot of times in a game like this, a trading mechanic not only puts an enormous amount of focus on social and trading skills over any other skills, but also makes the draft incredibly uninteresting - if you know that someone will trade for any super-rare card, the best move is just to always take the rarest card(s) regardless of what your strategy is) However, we did want a little more player interaction in the game and a little more player agency over the results. We tried a ‘trade zone’ (you could put 1 comic in your trade zone on your turn, and any player on their turn could trade at even rarity for your trade zone), which solved the slow down problem but not the other problems, and added significant rules overhead, before stumbling upon a solution that worked out perfectly - allow players to trade directly with other players (whether or not that player agrees) but only for the same rarity and only for comics not part of any set. This way, there’s no negotiation, but it’s usually not a hostile move, as there’s rarely reason for a player to be attached to a loose comic that’s worth 0 points.

This final touch added the last little bit of interaction and control that the game needed, and all these changes were really a testament to the quality that our lengthy development process and our strong team of me + Miguel + Aaron added to the game design and balance. I think Mint Condition Comics started out with a very solid design and core idea but ended as an even better, much more satisfying game, with none of the design vision compromised.

Stage 6: Release

After early summer, there were a few small tweaks, but the remaining development time was largely dedicated to neat games hunting down artists to pull off the remarkable stylistic diversity and artistic quality that they wanted to bring to the illustrations on the different comic series. And now, here it is, live on a Kickstarter near you! Again, I’d encourage you to definitely take a look if you like comic books or just light card games that scale well to a wide variety of player counts: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/miguelthedesigner/mint-condition-comics-a-neat-game-about-comic-books

#game design #mintcondition

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splashprblog · 6 years ago

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Laurel Holloman debuts a series of new work in “Memory and Movement” taking place on American Independence Day in the heart of Paris.

When: Friday, July 5 to Sunday, July 14, 2019, Gallery Hours 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Where: Galerie Joseph, 7 Rue Froissart 75003, Paris

What: Memory and Movement present stunning new works from Laurel Holloman as well as several paintings from her series Color Forest, which premiered during the 2018 Milan Design Week.

For this exhibition, the theme of movement is beautifully expressed with swirling shapes flowing across each canvas and energetic brushstrokes whipping across rich shades of color.

Certain images are deliberately blurred so the viewer must sit with each piece a little longer to perceive its meaning. Many of the larger pieces are paintings within paintings where Holloman has left the first layer peeking through the next by either blurring the final layer or scraping back to the first layer underneath it all. Holloman purposely juxtaposes the technical memory of the paint with her own conscious and unconscious memory.

“I believe the task of preserving memory is difficult because the unconscious mind is constantly changing it. This is why it is so complicated, but yet so interesting to explore in paint. Memory is never finite. Never a complete truth. It can stay close, but is never a twin,” the artist muses.

“Memory is attached to an emotion, so I used a select life event when painting each work and I also wanted to technically see what the paint reveals in memory when it is layered a certain way.”

Co-produced by Little Monkey Productions (USA) and Claudine Gil Galerie (France), Memory and Movement is Holloman’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Joseph. Her first show at the gallery was in 2014 with The Fifth Element, a series that explored the elements of earth, air, fire, and water.

These forces still unite her recent works, which burst in hues ranging from fiery red and deep watery turquoise to lush greens and earthy tones. Whether blurred or sharp in focus, there is a constant theme of nature in Holloman’s palette. Her paintings take the viewer elsewhere to another world of extreme color, spirituality, and meditation.

About the artist, Laurel Holloman: Based in Los Angeles, Laurel Holloman is known for her vibrant use of color and larger-than-life paintings capable of capturing tumultuous emotions with a vivid movement that create a three-dimensional illusion.

“I feel my paintings have a secret language born out of science and my obsessiveness with why and how we are here. I paint through abstraction with subtle hints of elemental imagery; the sky, water, fire, earth, a bird flying, cells reproducing, or a celestial bed of stars. I am obsessed with metallics and textures and use playful brushstrokes that give the paintings a third dimension and explore emotion,” she reveals.

Night Bloom par La Danse Bleue | No filter. 48 by 48. Oil and resin and pigment powder.

Ever since her acclaimed debut in 2010 with her New York studio collection, TriBeCa, Holloman has firmly established her artistic presence both domestically and abroad.

In April 2012, Coeur Libre exhibited at the Pantheon Town Hall in Paris by invitation of the mayor. In this show, some 15 of Holloman’s works were on view. Juxtaposing the sensation of freedom with the weight of repression, Holloman was able to capture the dichotomy of opposing forces—a recurring through line in the artist’s oeuvre—by skillfully playing with multiple layers of color, texture, and movement.

This show was followed by Free Falling at The Ateneo Veneto and ran during the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale and was the first exhibition to contain large luminous murals. This exhibition was also the first collaboration between Holloman and Lea Mattarella, art history professor and art critic for La Repubblica, who curated the installation.

In spring 2013, All The World Inside featured 17 large-scale murals in three rooms at the Grand Palazzo Italia (Berlin). Also curated by Mattarella, this impressive collection furthered the artist’s visual and visceral discourse on universal elements and existentialism.

Holloman’s interest in “the how of life” is demonstrated in pieces such as Inevitable Fault Line and The Necessity of Affection, which ask how are we connected together—and can we thrive without connection?

In summer 2013, Holloman’s painting Swell was picked for the group show, Nell’Acqua Capisco, at the Venice Art Biennale where it was chosen for the official catalog.

In July 2014, The Fifth Element was held in Paris at Galerie Joseph where it was met with a public increasingly drawn to the poetic emotion of Holloman’s work. The 28 pieces visually reflect the four major tangible elements—Earth, Air, Water, Fire—while the mysterious “fifth element” is represented in the emotion of each painting.

This show was followed in October 2014 by an invitation to the International Contemporary Art Biennale in Buenos Aires. Holloman’s work entitled The Reach was awarded First Prize of the Biennale in the paintings category and won the Banco Ciudad Award for the Best Work in all categories.

In November 2015 in London, the artist presented The Innocents, a stunningly intimate series featuring portraits of women and children. Showcasing the range of Holloman’s vision and talent, these works veer from the abstract and focus on the figurative immediacy of each subject to offer an emotional exploration of how life changes us as we age.

In summer 2016, the Jan van der Togt Museum in Amsterdam (Netherlands) invited the artist for a solo exhibition. In this show dealing with environmental issues, Holloman captures actual images of woods, plants, and animals in their damaged natural spaces.

Reminiscent of stained glass, Everglow is an installation of 12 back-panel LEDs that serve as a commentary on our current global warming crisis. Each piece is a combination of fire and ice, representing the inevitable melting we have witnessed in our farthest-reaching climates. As the artist declares, “We cannot deny at this moment we are dependent on nature for our survival. Put simply, science doesn’t lie.”

Also in this show, Painting in Reverse is an exploration in recycling and reusing materials. Originally created in 2014, the painting was never used and left unfinished in the studio. Instead of repainting the piece or throwing it away, it was de-framed and sanded over a four-month period to remove all the paint down to the primer. Each sanding session was photographed and certain sections were chosen to leave the remaining paint intact. The process was aimed at creating the look of old blue jeans. A pair you could never throw out.

In Fertile Ground, Holloman’s second London exhibition (Bankside Gallery, July 2017), the artist continued to explore her favorite themes of nature, including the world of flora—from the tight abstracted micro images of flowers to posed portraits of the different stages of blooming.

In Holloman’s words, “I have always been fascinated with flowers and the evolution that nature creates as they start to bloom, then open, and eventually deteriorate. The shapes, the turns, and the elegance of the petals, all interest me. Flowers have valleys and crevices close up, just like a landscape.”

In April 2018, Color Forest at the Luciana Matalon Foundation in Milan revealed several works referencing the style of large murals Holloman created for her solo shows All The World Inside and The Fifth Element, but with dimensions more suited to the spaces of the foundation.

The link between these works is not only the stylistic choice but also the theme: the “liminal space or threshold” that is the border between life and death. From this sentiment also comes a section entitled Memory Paintings, in which layers of paint are superimposed with patinas of gold and silver diluted in linseed oil, to which tiny amounts of pearlescent pigments and color are added. The result is iridescent works that—depending on the viewer’s point of view—represent “a sort of search of the imaginary that nevertheless fades too quickly.”

Returning to technical experimentation, Holloman created a series of paintings in which the color is mixed with a light resin, “a perfect combination of landscapes and to create light” as well as to create organic impressions, which reflect the artist’s curiosity for science.

Laurel Holloman earned her Bachelor of Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in performance art and visual art. She continued her studies at UCLA and the British American Drama Academy in London alternating between theatre and visual art.

Before she decided in 2010 to become a full-time painter and make a mark in the art world, Holloman had a successful 20-year acting career.

Her performances include the acclaimed 15-year-old Mick Kelly in the off-Broadway play The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a breakthrough role as a gay teen in Two Girls in Love, which played at the Sundance Film Festival, followed by several characters in independent films directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and Jean-Marc Vallée.

Holloman then turned to television with a recurring role in Angel and the lead in The L Word for which she won The Golden Satellite for the Best Actress in a Drama Series.

For more information, visit laurelholloman.net

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Solo Exhibitions:

2019: Memory and Movement, Galerie Joseph, Paris

2018: Color Forest (duo exhibition with sculptor Susi Kramer), Fondazione Luciana Matalon, Milan, Italy

2017: Fertile Ground, Bankside Gallery, London, UK

2016: Everglow, Museum Jan van der Togt, Amstelveen, NL

2015: The Innocents, Menier Gallery, London, UK

2014: The Fifth Element, Galerie Joseph, Paris, France

2013: All the World Inside, Palazzo Italia, Berlin, Germany

2012: Free Falling, Ateneo of Venice, Venice, Italy

2012: Coeur Libre, Pantheon Town Hall, Paris, France

Group Exhibitions:

2018: Museum of Art- Biennale Chianciano (Italy)

2018: Water for Life, International Art Exhibition, Niagara Falls History Museum, Canada

2014, 2016, 2018: The Contemporary Art Biennale of Argentina, Centro Borges Museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina

2017: Museo Ateneo de Madrid, A Collection Art from Spain and the Americas, Madrid, Spain

2014: Spectrum Miami, Contemporary Arts Selection, Miami, Florida

2014: The Opera Gallery, Monaco, France

2013: The Venice Biennale, Nell’Acqua Capisco, San Marco Piazza, Venice, Italy

Awards:

1st Place in Painting, Contemporary Art Biennale of Argentina, 2014

Banco Ciudad Award Best Overall, Contemporary Art Biennale of Argentina, 2014

5th Place in Painting, Florence Biennale, 2015

1st Place, The International Federation of Art Critics, Chianciano Biennale, 2018

Media Contact: Claire Arnaud-Aubour

👤[email protected]

📞 +Banco23) 877 – 8102

SpLAshPR Agency

1450 2nd Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401

“Coloring the world, one story at a time”

www.splashpragency.com

“Memory and Movement” — An Art Exhibition by Laurel Holloman Laurel Holloman debuts a series of new work in “Memory and Movement” taking place on American Independence Day in the heart of Paris.

#france #abstract #actors #ART #contemporary art #ENTERTAINMENT #exhibition #lifestyle #paris #series #television #USA

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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IN HER LATEST BOOK, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison writes “‘addiction’ has always been two things at once: a set of disrupted neurotransmitters and a series of stories we’ve told about disruption.” In many ways, The Recovering acts as its own sort of disruption of how those stories are told. Not only does Jamison bring together a variety of disparate perspectives on addiction and recovery — articulations that are often kept apart from each other — but she does so in a way that transgresses both the boundaries of genre and competing sensibilities about what makes a story worthwhile.

Anchored in the personal narrative of Jamison’s own experience with alcoholism and recovery, The Recovering places Jamison’s story in conversation with those of literary figures whose work — drenched in the mythos of “whiskey and ink” — inspired her, as well as those of ordinary strangers she encounters both in her reportage and in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the larger social history of how addiction was pathologized, criminalized, and racialized throughout the 20th century. As a patchwork of memoir, reportage, literary criticism, and cultural analysis, The Recovering also draws attention to how Jamison’s training as a creative writer, literary scholar, and AA member informs her story in ways that productively challenge how stories are differently constructed, interpreted, and valued in those contexts.

I spoke to Jamison about the various conceptual, stylistic, and discursive bridges she attempts to construct throughout the book, as well as what it was like to translate her story from the rooms of AA into a dissertation on narratives of addiction and, ultimately, into a work of popular nonfiction.

DENISE GROLLMUS: The Recovering draws its energy from the tension that exists between the competing narratives we tell about addiction. There’s your personal story, the stories told by and about literary figures, the cultural history of race and addiction, the stories you encounter in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, stories you collected from other rehabilitation institutions, the psychoanalytic discourse, the medical discourse. Your book gestures to how the discourse of addiction is as profuse and conflicted as the need it attempts to describe. How did you manage your way through that profusion and not get overwhelmed by it?

LESLIE JAMISON: The most honest answer is that pretty early on I had to completely surrender the fantasy or the delusion of comprehensiveness on many levels. Like on a very basic level, when I told anyone about my dissertation or about this book, they would immediately ask, “Are you writing about this book? Are you writing about this novel? Or this author? Are you writing about the opioid crisis?” When you bring up the subject of addiction, the subject moves in 10 thousand different directions, and almost always, my answer was going to be, “No, I’m not writing about that” or, “Oh! I left that out.” And the immediate impulse for me was to feel a sense of shame, in the same way as when someone asks, “Have you read this book?” and I haven’t, because some part of me feels like I should have read everything and have something to say about everything. At a certain point I just had to say: This is a book about addiction, it’s not the book about addiction, so there’s going to be a lot that it doesn’t cover.

That said, through revising different drafts, I definitely did bring in discourses that had been absent from earlier drafts. Like, in the earlier drafts, I didn’t discuss at all medical definitions of addiction, or what addiction looks like in the brain, or what a doctor might say about addiction. But early readers also really encourage me to think about how literary accounts of addiction looked next to how medical science tries to illuminate addiction, or to consider what a doctor would say about how a 12-step program tries to respond to addiction. The goal was to try and bring in those modes of understanding addiction, even in fleeting ways, just to see how they could be in conversation with each other.

How did you end up choosing the discourses and stories you did include alongside your own?

Some of it had to do with the question of who the important people and the important voices were to me as a reader and as a person trying to get sober, especially in terms of the authors and artists I included. So, to some extent, it is unapologetically subjective and arbitrary in the sense that these are voices that happened to matter to me. But that basic architecture of the book also evolved. At another stage, I started to feel incredibly claustrophobic about the book simply being my story engaging with the stories of creative people whose work had been important to me, which is what motivated the choice to bring in the larger social history and the racialized nature of how addiction has been understood and prosecuted. I also wanted the book to work structurally in a way that was somehow akin to a meeting, but I didn’t want the stories that were populating that meeting to simply be the stories of famous writers. So, I wanted to include the stories of ordinary strangers, but I also didn’t want to include the stories of people I had met through recovery in a very detailed biographical way. I knew that I needed fully developed stories of strangers and I needed them to be people I met and approached as a writer, where the contract was clear that I was talking to them about their lives, because I wanted to put their lives in a book and make sure that they were comfortable with that exchange. That emerged from my desire to create a chorus of strangers in a way that wasn’t just me relating to people through their archives, but also me relating to other human beings that I was encountering. That was what motivated the turn to the Seneca House stories.

One particular tension that really struck me was how the pathos of your personal story is so sharply juxtaposed with the reportage style of the social history that you tell about the racist evolution of the drug scare narrative in 20th-century America. Though these two threads and their competing styles become more integrated toward the end of the book, the way they initially sit next to and apart from each other highlights how race, class, and gender inform whose pain is made visible, what that pain is allowed to look like, and how that pain is treated with compassion or not.

The truth is I felt a tremendous amount of anxiety about how these various stories were going to integrate. A few years into writing the book, I realized that I needed to contend with how the ways I had been allowed, encouraged, and given the means by which to articulate my own pain lived alongside racialized, punitive responses to addiction throughout 20th-century America. I very much didn’t want to just feel that cognitive dissonance and then write a book that was about myself and some other white people whose work I had read. I wanted to somehow allow that cognitive dissonance to become the content of the book itself and to trouble the surface of the book. One of my most important teachers, Charlie D’Ambrosio, always used to tell me that the problem with an essay can become its subject. One of the ways that advice bore out for me in this book was taking the way I felt troubled by my privilege and the ways in which my privilege had inflected how I’d experienced and narrated my addiction and make it a problem that didn’t simply haunt the margins of this book, but could be something the book was wrestling with explicitly.

For so long we’ve lived in a narrative landscape in which a certain type of drinking story is told over here, like in a memoir, and a certain kind of story is told over here, like in a discussion about policy or the opioid crisis. I just wanted to bring those very different stories together. I also wanted to address how that same sort of discomfort also lives in meetings, where people from incredibly different backgrounds are coming together under the belief that they can somehow gain something from listening to each other’s stories, even though those stories are often marked by vastly different levels of privilege and vastly different ways in which people have been allowed to express their pain or have their pain witnessed. So, the way in which I would feel uncomfortable in meetings about why anyone would want to hear what I have to say when people in this room have been through so much more, that same anxiety became part of the writing of the book itself.

Aside from the tensions between these different stories, you also touch on the tensions between the competing ways you were trained to be a reader and writer in different institutions, from the MFA program at Iowa and the PhD program at Yale, to the storytelling practices in the program of AA. As someone who is also in recovery and is also working on an academic project about narratives of addiction, I very much related to your description of straddling the huge rift between academia and recovery, largely because of how reading practices in the academy are so heavily dominated by the hermeneutics of suspicion, while the approach in AA is so inherently and necessarily reparative. A lot of literary scholarship reads the narratives that addicts tell about themselves as one Foucauldian nightmare after another, which is so antithetical to the way we interpret our stories in a space like AA. How did you bridge that divide while working on the iteration of The Recovering that was your dissertation? And how did that inform the current iteration?

That all really resonates, especially since I was basically trained as a close reader and didn’t particularly come from any theoretical background, so by the time I arrived at my PhD program, I was sort of like an idiot savant. I didn’t know anything about theory, and I hadn’t really spent time thinking about textual history as a way of coming at literature. It was sort of an embarrassment to me how much I didn’t know, but also a revelation to start spending time in archives and to realize how much I loved both investigating textual production in a very concrete and visceral way. I also became fascinated by the conversation between texts and institutions, and between texts and the larger contexts they came from. That fascination played out in the dissertation, where each chapter was a conversation between a literary text and then some sort of institution or set of institutional texts.

My advisors also ended up being a wonderful set of counterweights for me, because each one of them had a certain kind of suspicion that they brought to the table. For [Caleb Smith], one of my advisors, Foucault shapes a lot of how he thinks about the world and about texts. He does a lot of research and writing about prisons, and the way that prison has shaped the American imagination, so he’s pretty suspicious of institutions, and he was like this godsend for me. Where I’m predisposed to affirm or find something constitutive or saving, his whole approach to something like AA is filled with suspicion about what sort of behavior or narrative is being coerced by this social pressure. Far from feeling like these more suspicious modes of thinking or reading were obstacles, I felt like I was getting tremendous amounts of useful pressure to clarify and interrogate what I was thinking, so there was something so great about the process of incubating a lot of ideas and certainly conducting a lot of archival research under the auspices of my dissertation.

But at a certain point, I also knew that I wasn’t invested in the text of the dissertation. I knew I didn’t want to become a scholar or publish a monograph. I knew I wanted to write this crazy, hyper book, and I wanted one of its strands to be literary criticism and archival research. My dissertation was really a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. I wanted to use all of that research, but I wanted to rearticulate it in what felt to me was a more natural writing voice, rather than an academic writing voice. I wanted to use that work to sustain and feed this bigger, more nebulous project that I felt more committed to.

There was no part of your personal narrative in your dissertation, then?

Not at all. My dissertation was definitely pretty far on a continuum in terms of what the Yale English Department was willing to tolerate. To write something that was verging into personal narrative would have been beyond its upper limits, I think. And by the time I submitted my dissertation, I knew that it would feed this other book, so I didn’t feel any need or desire to put my personal narrative into the dissertation, because I was already sculpting this other book, where I knew it would have a place.

In the book, you express an anxiety about writing “another” addiction memoir, or even worse, you say, a work that would be described as “not just another addiction memoir.” And even though you do describe it as a chorus or “an anthology held together by earnestness,” the personal narrative really anchors the book. What were the stakes of including your personal narrative? Why not write a cultural history of addiction based in the stories of others? What was generative or crucial about including yourself despite your apprehension?

It’s an important question. For me, some of it has do with how my own creative desires are connected to narrative and specificity and the sort of creative writing I’ve always wanted to do. For years, I just wanted to be a fiction writer and I only wrote fiction, and I was so drawn to the idea of bringing a reader along on a story and making that story as lushly habitable as possible, to have it full of the granularity and viscerality of lived experience. And that’s always how I wrote. My writing was always full of sensory details and small moments of observation. That kind of granularity was always the kind of writing that was exciting for me to do. In nonfiction, there are lots of ways to access that sort of granularity, and certainly reporting, if you are taking notes and doing your job right, you can collect that specificity. But I felt that my own story was the story I had the best access to on a really crude level. That’s not to say that we have perfect access to our own lives, because I think self-delusion and imperfect self-knowledge are real, and we’re always questing to understand our own lives, rather than existing in some a priori state of understanding our own lives. But I was excited by the idea of anchoring the book with a spine of personal narrative, because I did want the book to have the momentum of a good yarn, of a narrative that was unfolding where you wanted to know what happened next, where you had all that specificity and the mess and grit of life, and my life was the life that felt the most readily available to use to anchor it and be that spine.

The choice to place that story so centrally among the other research also seems to speak to how the addict was also once the expert of her own experience. Like in the 1820s, before the consolidation of the medical field, Thomas De Quincey was being invited to speak at medical conferences, and his personal account of opium addiction wasn’t just an object to be studied, but it was accepted as a rigorous study of addiction in and of itself. And then, less than 20 years later, doctors start dismissing his accounts as little more than the unscientific, literary musings of a junkie. The addict becomes someone to study, not someone who can do the studying.

I hadn’t known that about De Quincey, but it really resonates with something that became really interesting to me, which was tracking [the founder of AA] Bill Wilson’s story as he told it in different contexts and what he chose to accentuate depending on what audience he was speaking to — like what he put in his autobiography or his story in the Big Book versus what he chose to include when he published his story in the New England Journal of Medicine. He definitely toned down “the great clean wind of a mountain top” rhetoric to present himself in a way that spoke to authority. And the fact that the New England Journal of Medicine was publishing his story said something about what they considered an authority or a voice worth representing. But he also felt like he had to skew his story in a particular way to make it credible in that context. And I also think there’s a pretty inherent traction and siren call to hearing the story of a particular individual. That’s not to say there aren’t all kinds of things that are compelling about stories on larger scales or social stories or the larger story of how Americans have understood addiction in completely schizophrenic ways throughout the 20th century. But there’s something about returning to the scale of the individual life that speaks to something pretty basic about human curiosity and what people are compelled by, enchanted by, and captivated by. It also speaks to how the logic of an AA meeting works. A meeting is a room full of experts on their own lives who are simultaneously being taught that they aren’t fully experts on their lives.

But in the rooms of AA, expertise is often collaboratively constructed. Nobody has all the answers. Instead, you come to a discussion meeting, for example, and you say, “I’m having this problem,” and then 20 other people offer their own iteration and approach and by the end of the meeting, the group conscience, or the chorus, as you call it, becomes the expert, really.

Yup, yup, yup. and I think that’s part of the reparative work I was trying to do with clichés in the book. I was trying to suggest that, for the super self-conscious, hyper self-aware person, part of what the cliché can do is disrupt that sense of expertise. Or to suggest that perhaps this simpler explanation that feels far too interchangeable to apply to you actually has something to teach you about your own life that you might not already understand.

I’m intrigued by what happens when the stories we tell in the rooms of AA become literary memoirs and AA clichés are embedded in literary language, which is supposed to be evacuated of cliché. Part of me revels in the transgression, while the other part of me — the part also trained in an MFA program — wants to scream: “lazy writing!” That move, which you see in works like Mary Karr’s Lit, for example, challenges aesthetic value in generative ways. What are some of your favorite AA clichés?

One of the things I think is lovely about how expansive the AA network is that I’m never quite sure what is an AA cliché or just a cliché. I always love the one, “sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem,” because it is such a useful antidote to my natural impulse to solve a problem by thinking about it hard enough or thinking about it intelligently enough. This idea that maybe the answer to the problem was getting coffee with a stranger, instead of analyzing my own life ad nauseam, was so useful. I also like “feelings aren’t facts,” although I also speak about them endlessly. And “one day at a time” is basic, but the number of times I’ve had to invoke it to help me through the moment is infinite. Then, there’s this one, I don’t know exactly how it was formulated, but this one man always used to say it at meetings: “Things don’t always get better, but they always get different.”

Denise Grollmus is a writer, teacher, and literary scholar based in Seattle. She is currently working on a PhD at the University of Washington, exploring how narratives of addiction use religious discourses and concepts in order to complicate medical and popular models of addiction.

The post “An Anthology Held Together by Earnestness”: A Conversation with Leslie Jamison appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2rbNxwT

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betweentheracks · 4 years ago

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My question is regarding styling for promotional work in the US - I see so many female stars who are in a different outfit, with full hair and makeup, for their interviews, sometimes with multiple changes per day. And then, there is their male costar slouching along in jeans and a rumpled shirt for a whole days worth of appearances. Is there a contractual requirement placed on female stars or is this just an industry norm? Thank you in advance for any insight you can offer!

Ah, look at you go Greyface! Taking a real stab right into the black heart of the style industry. How bold and perceptive of you! 🤭

The simple and direct answer is, this is a double standard.

The more complex path that still leads to same resulting answer is very worth traversing though and is filled with the peaks and plummets of the fashion industry's history. So, naturally, we'll walk this way together and take a look.

Buckle up, rack mates, this ride is a doozy.

The following is my insight and perception as a professional stylist and is subjective to my position and role.

It is a well and widely known fact of fashion and beauty that at the heart of all the glitz and glamorous there is a horrible ugliness beneath. It is treated as an unseen slight or even a "secret" we shouldn't talk much about. It is as old as fashion itself and has only been worsened over time and with the evolution of marketable style and beauty standards. Women are more promotional than men = women are more desirous than men = women are the pitch and men plunder fame by proxy.

Sex sells. Point of fact; type face bold print. This is the truth of fashion and entertainment and is a marketing strategy at this point.

Specifically, however, it isn't that "sex" sells but rather which sex sells. As in which gender is the apparent and clear choice to use as a promotional feature and living advertisement. The answer is, as it has been for ages now, women. Feminine features are fair and pleasing to behold. They can be dressed up and toned down; styled into an ideal of wanting and craving. Women can be influential to both male and female audiences by beckoning men's gazes to the treats she has for them (treats being whatever it is she is being used to stage and sell) while sitting loftily as an iconic standard of beauty for women to reach for and in turn take up anything to help achieve this ideal (meaning they'll buy whatever is being promoted in their wish to be like the woman on the package).

This strategy and double standard extends well beyond the immediate scope of fashion or upselling the brands of luxury labels. It is also very present in the entertainment industry as a means to promote films, television, and other media. You'll see an actress working the promo circuit or doing interviews dressed to the nines even in casual and laid back styles and then you'll blink and she's done up entirely different but no less coifed and glamorous. Meanwhile her male counterparts and costars are parading about in very understated styles or even sloppy attire, sometimes dressed out in high quality suits but still not quite up to snuff. The efforts of stylists clearly more aimed towards maintaining the woman first and the man second, if at all.

The second and less often discussed pigeon hole that fuels this sexist standard is money. Femme fashion, while typically more expensive, is still unquestionably more versatile than menswear. This is because fashion profits more off female consumption and interest than male and thus caters to that market with more variety and visibility. Wardrobe budgets for filming are skewed with more money funneled into the styling of an actress or female celebrity with a limit on how much is spent on the men. This is symbiotic with the pricing of menswear being less than womenswear but altogether more durable in its make.

It's frustrating and awful and I am ever so glad and thankful that it is slowly having attention called upon it by those within the industry. As modern style continues to evolve and dilute the boundaries between gender stereotypes and typecasting, this double standard becomes more and more frail. Many voices have started gathering in outrage over such rampant and asinine misogyny. Men have come forward to demand that they are as equally marketable and appealing, women have put their foot down and refused to be sexualized or sensationalized. There is the rising trend of androgyny and transgender recognition. Each step is in the right direction and in pursuit of an equal playing ground where women and men can each be glammed up and used as a standard for beauty or poised as a pinnacle of style.

I work extensively with male clients to this effect. I not only enjoy gender neutral styles but have clients that have made it clear they like the glamor of femme styles and want their image to be a balance of masculine and feminine. My oldest client wears heels and likes glittering eye makeup and has often made a case to be allowed to wear skirts or dresses, while my only female artist prefers more of an asymmetrical blending of menswear with feminine accents and likes her footwear to be the type that she, in her words, "can kick ass and stay looking class" while wearing.

There's an uptick in the emergence of queer brands and LGBTQ+ labels in the US with ideals/ethics steeped in the goal of gender neutrality and equality. With them comes the new hope for fashion's future where gender lines are not drawn and women are not the golden rule of promotional value for their supposed sexy/cute/inviting stereotype.

I hope to see men as a campaign centerpiece for lingerie, make up, and other needlessly gendered interests and women in ads for suits and leisure activities such as fishing or mudding and the other inherently male coded interests. I hope to see all gender typecasts and molds fall away entirely with people simply promoting things they enjoy. To see a full cast given the same amount of primping and stylized effort when making the rounds to talk up their projects.

Progress is slow but the world of fashion hinges upon welcoming change and being influenced by current climates and trends just as much as it influences outwardly. One of these days this double standard will be stripped out and the industry will again be revolutionized or it will become obsolete.

Beauty is beauty; people are people; style is style. Promotional/marketable viability cannot stay relevant against the might of such simple truths. The coming years will see the divide between gender being filled as designers and labels fight to remain prominent empires of fashion, and from there other interrelated industries will have no choice by to comply lest they find themselves stripped bare ass naked and lacking affiliations.

This post went and became a sort of tangent, whoops. I'll rest my rambling here and call it good. I intend to make a full post detailing the reshaping of fashion in the height of today's evolving inclusivity of gender roles and norms and the correlation of how fashion has long since been steps ahead in this movement. This ask happens to be a good sounding place for what some of that content will look like.

Fashion and style was never intended to give distinction between the masculine and feminine nor to place significance on gender. Segregation in fashion was initially between wealth and status; a determination of class in way way back when clothing first became an expression. Originally, fashion had no actual gender associations and men and women all worse similar styles of robes that would now be considered dresses. Class and wealth gave way, buckling to the thought of using one's showy status to promote goods to be traded and this was the birth of marketing women as a means of interest. Ever since it has been an internal struggle between ethics of material misuse of rights (sexism) versus capital relevancy (turning profits via brand visibility). A number of fashion houses are guilty of going with the flow and hoping the fortune and reputation made along the way could either cushion the blowback of systemic misogyny one day being aired out or could be used to steadily alter the trajectory of style's evolution.

Consider fashion as a tightrope act being performed between the politics of brand recognition and the conceptual idealism of expression. One small and out of sync step will result in a dire fall with no way of knowing if there is a safety net to pardon a brand or label from plunging into obscurity. This is why the fashion industry prefers taking time to plan careful steps forward and seldom rushes out. Fashion keeps pace while also staying baby steps ahead to change the course of current societal trends, even willing to sometimes relinquish any ground it has in effort to remain on the wire at all. It's a precarious give and take.

Three paragraphs later, truly, I yield to the length of this post and am done. I can’t guarantee this was even close to what you wanted to know and for that I am sorry. I get swept up by the passion I have for the inner workings of the business and lose myself (and my train of thought so if this doesn’t make a lick of sense, that would be why lol). Still, I do hope some of this sheds a little light on the matter.

#racks asks #style #fashion #style discourse #please this post is so out of pocket and i am still unsatisfied #oh to be a pro stylist in the fashion realm during societal shifts #it's like all the runway lights are set to strobe and with every luminous glimpse of genderless style there's a follow up of pitch black

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