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maxwell-grant · 3 years ago

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Excuse Me what is pulp and why is it importan?

Good question! And probably one I should have answered sooner. Time to put on the historian hat for this one.

"Pulp" is a term used mainly to describe forms of storytelling that sprang out or were dominant in 20th century cheap all-fiction American magazines from the 1900s to the 1950s. The pulp magazine began in 1896, when Frank Munsey's Argosy magazine, in order to cut costs, dropped the non-fiction articles and photographs and switched from glossy paper to the much less expensive wood pulp paper, hence the name. The pulp magazines would mainly take off as a distinct market and format in 1904, when Street & Smith learned that Popular Magazine, despite being marketed towards boys, was being consumed by men of all ages, so they increased page count and started putting popular authors on the issues.

It was specifically the 1905 reprint of H.Rider Haggard's Ayesha that not only put Street & Smith on the map as rivals to Argosy, but also inspired other companies to start publishing in the pulp format. Pulps encompassed literally everything that the authors felt like publishing. Westerns, romance, horror, sci-fi, railroad stories, war stories, war aviation stories. Zeppelins had a short-lived subgenre. Celebrities got their own magazines, it was really any genre or format they could pull off, anything they could get away with.

Nowadays, although they came quite late in it's history, the American pulps are most famous for it's "hero pulps", characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage that are viewed as a formative influence on comic book superheroes. The pulp magazines in America lasted until the 1950s, when cumulative factors such as paper shortages, diminishing audience returns and the closing of it's biggest publishers led to it dying off, although in the decades since there's always been publishers calling their magazines pulp. That's the American pulp history.

But pulps are a phenomenon that spans the entire world and has a much bigger history to it, because pulps have become synonymous with cheap fiction magazines and those have a much bigger history. In America, before the pulps, you had the dime novels, the direct predecessors of the pulps, as well as the novelettes. England had it's penny dreadfuls and story papers, and continued publishing pulp-format magazines past the American 1950s, and that's how we got Elric of Melniboné. France and Russia arguably got to it first with it's 1800s coulporters, chapbooks and particularly the feuilletons which lasted all the way to the 20th century and created characters such as Arsene Lupin, Fantomas and The Phantom of the Opera. The Germans published pulp under the name hefteromane. Japan also published pulp magazines both original as well as imported, and the current "light-novel" phenomenon started off as an equivalent of pulp magazines (it's even on the Wikipedia page). China has wuxia, Brazil has cordel, Italy has gialli. There were Indian, Persian, Ethiopian, Canadian, Australian pulps and much more. Look anywhere in the world and you'll find examples of "pulp" happening again and again, under different circumstances and time periods.

Even if we stick to American fiction, it's impossible to state that all pulp heroes must come from the 1900s-1950s pulp magazines, because that forces us to exclude some of the most popular pulp heroes like Indiana Jones, Green Hornet, Rocketeer and The Phantom. Pulp may have once been a term meant to refer to pulp magazines exclusively, but it's morphed and lost structure and it's become the closest thing we have to a general umbrella term that allows us to try and consolidate these under a shared history. It's a lot, as you can see, and it's why several pulp historians that broaden their scope outside of 1930s American fiction have adopted Roland Barthes's definition of pulp as "A Metaphor With No Brakes In It", which is still the closest thing to a true working definition we have.

Why is it important? You tell me. I don't like to stake claims about stuff being "important", everyone's got their own priorities in life. Surely a lot of people would scoff at the idea of old populist fiction published in what was functionally equivalent to toilet paper having any sort of "importance". On the other hand, some people definitely want to talk big about the pulps as a cultural bedrock of fiction, something that's baked into the lifeblood of all fiction as we currently know it. Which it is, mind you, but I don't like to talk about pulp fiction's value being derived mainly from merely the things it inspired.

There is definitely a historical importance to be had in cataloguing them. According to the US's foremost pulp researcher Jess Nevins, 38% of all American pulps no longer exist, and 14% of all American pulps survive in less than five copies. Many libraries have very scant, if any, records on them, many collectors are hard to locate and are uncooperative when it comes to sharing information and letting outsiders view their collections. A lot of them are bound up in legal complications that prevents them from taking off in the public domain, and a lot of them ARE public domain but are completely inacessible as research material. And that's the American pulps, foreign pulps have fared far worse in posterity, with records inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the language or locations, many existing merely in mentions on decades-old records, and hundreds if not thousands of them being completely gone beyond recovery or recall.

Gone, dead, wasted, destroyed. They can't be found in barbershops or warehouse or bookstores, not even in antique stores. Hundreds, thousands of characters, stories and creators, gone. Time and posterity have crushed them to dust, forgotten and ignored by their successors. Unfettered by pretenses of respectability that repressed their glossier counterparts, in packages meant to be destroyed after reading, proudly announcing itself as trash. Things that should have never even lasted as long as they did have died many times now. It's heroes peripherical shapeshifters, nearly all of whom seem dead, quite dead, as dead as fictional characters can possibly be.

But they do not die forever. Many of them have, maybe most of them have, but many of them linger on.

"The strange red flickering of 1930’s fiction seems distant now. You hold in your hand the product of a time too remote to recall, and feel a slow stir of wonder. The smell of pulp pages, an illustration, an advertisement, these fragile things mark the slow hammering of time and display what it has done. About you are today’s machines, today’s shadows.

Outside the window, leaves hang against the sky, as did leaves during the 1930’s. The sound of voices are no different then than now. You hold the magazine and feel something quite delicate slipping past. These solid forms surrounding you are all insubstantial. Time’s hammer will also pass across them, leaving little enough behind." - Spider, by Robert Sampson

Many of the things people call dead are just things that have been sleeping for a while or haven't had the chance to be born. Pulp fiction is dead on the page, inert, unless your imagination breathes live to it, and every now and then, one way or another, these characters dig themselves out of dustbins. Maybe it's a brief revival, maybe it's a successful reboot. Maybe they find publishers, or maybe the public domain allows them to find new life. Maybe new creators do interesting things with them, and maybe, just maybe, they live again because some won't shut up about them online. Some curious impulse led you to me, did it not?

We all have our Frankensteins to obsess over, and these are some of mine. As someone who's lived a life perpetually restless over pursuit of knowledge, pulp has lured me like a moth to flame, because I literally never run out of things to discover within it, I never run out of possibilities. As the years pass and the public domain starts being more and more open to the public, more and more narrative real state is brought forth for writers and artists and creators to play around.

Pulp is the dark matter of fiction, the uncatalogued depths of the ocean, the darkest recesses of space. It's the box of your grandfather's belongings, the treasure you find in an attic, a body part sticking out from an old playground. It's the things that don't work, don't succeed, the things that don't fit, that are out of place. That shouldn't live and succeed, and did so anyway. The things that slither in the cracks, the shadows behind the curtain.

Aren't you interested in peering on what's behind the curtain?

The exquisite workmanship of the head, of a pre-pyramidal age, and the hieroglyphics, symbols of a language that was forgotten when Rome was young–these, Kane sensed, were additions as modern to the antiquity of the staff itself as would be English words carved on the stone monoliths of Stonehenge.

As for the cat-head–looking at it sometimes Kane had a peculiar feeling of alteration; a faint sensing that once the pommel of the staff was carved with a different design. The dust-ancient Egyptian who had carved the head of Bast had merely altered the original figure, and what that figure had been, Kane had never tried to guess.

A close scrutiny of the staff always aroused a disquieting and almost dizzy suggestion of abysses of eons, unprovocative to further speculation. - The Footfalls Within, by Robert E Howard, quoted by Stuart Hopen’s The Mythic American Culture

#replies tag #pulp heroes #pulp fiction #argosy #h rider haggard #ayesha #robert e howard #solomon kane

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katvondworld · 7 years ago

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Before there was Kylie Jenner, there was Kat Von D. Nearly a decade ago, the tattoo artist famous for a career in reality television and a string of tabloid-fodder relationships took her notoriety and turned it into a global beauty empire. Today, Kat Von D Beauty is one of Sephora’s most successful brands, with products that sell out in a matter of weeks and rack up tens of thousands of glowing reviews and live events that attract hundreds of fans.

Like Kylie, Kat has an instantly recognizable, highly-stylized aesthetic. It’s a combination of punk, goth, and good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll, featuring lots of black (and lately, head-to-toe red) outfits in faux leather and kooky avant-garde shapes. Jet-black hair, red lipstick, and predilection for mismatched eye makeup have become her signatures. But she doesn’t want an army of Kat clones.

“My biggest nightmare would be if somebody came to Sephora, saw my brand, and said, ‘Oh, I want to look like her, so I’ll buy this makeup,’” Kat Von D proclaimed to an audience of beauty world professionals at the WWD Beauty Summit this summer, her first-ever appearance at a major industry event. “I think that model may work for Kylie or whoever else bases their career on vanity or some kind of superficial thing. It’s quite a gamble because that can be very fleeting a lot of times.” Despite the similarities, Kat doesn’t appreciate Kylie comparisons.

After Kat’s session at the summit was over, she mingled a bit with the suit-wearing masses and then walked downstairs in towering platform shoes, gently guided by a member of her team. “I’m very impressed by Kat Von D!” a gray-haired man said admiringly to a younger woman standing beside him.

“She’s not bound by any rules,” the woman replied.

“I wanted to get a tattoo afterward,” he said.

Tattooing is where it all began for Kat, who was born Katherine von Drachenberg. The 35-year-old is a professional tattoo artist by trade and is known for her elaborate, life-like grayscale portraits. She’s tattooed a ton of musicians and celebrities, including Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, and Harry Styles. She’s inked everything from the Mona Lisa to images of beloved pets on people’s bodies. It’s still something she does when she’s home in LA, though she tries to “limit it to one a day,” whereas a normal workday in her previous life would have had her seeing five clients one after another. Kat has a years-long wait list and is no longer taking appointments, in order to catch up. She recently said in a YouTube video that she doesn’t charge for tattoos anymore, preferring to do it for art’s sake.

“I feel like my name works against me sometimes, you know? People think, ‘Kat Von D, oh it's somebody that was on TV or somebody that dated somebody.’”

Kat’s own body is covered with tattoos, which you can see in zoomed-in detail in her New York Times bestselling book High Voltage Tattoo. (She has published two other books since.) In it, she models in a bikini and describes the origin of each batch of ink. She’s perhaps best recognized for the spray of stars around her eyes, a motif which shows up frequently in her beauty products. At first, she only had one star on each temple. While Kat lore has long held that the Motley Crue song “Starry Eyes” inspired at least the first few stars, in her book she says she added to them because her ex-husband and fellow tattoo artist Oliver Peck once told her to stop tattooing her face. She even has stars tattooed on one eyelid. One of her best-selling products, a liquid eyeliner, is called Tattoo Liner.

Kat was born in Mexico; she’s fluent in Spanish and identifies as Latina. Her parents are from Argentina and her father’s family originally hails from Germany. Her father is a doctor and she grew up with a conservative background as a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, where her parents were missionaries. She credits her paternal grandmother with instilling in her a love of art and music. (Kat’s a classically trained pianist and has a huge portrait of Beethoven tattooed on her thigh.) She says her father used to catch her on the floor drawing underneath the pews at church.

Kat moved to Colton, California, when she was four years old with her parents, brother, and sister. Her parents divorced years later and her mother moved back to Mexico. At 14, Kat discovered punk rock and started dating a boy named James, who was two years older and had a mohawk and tattoos. She got her first tattoo, an old English “J,” on her ankle at that time. Expanding on her interest in drawing, she started experimenting with tattooing, practicing on her friends. By 16, she had dropped out of high school and moved to Georgia with James. After three months, she moved back to California without him and started looking for jobs in tattoo shops. She secured a position at a shop near a San Bernardino jailhouse before moving to LA, where she landed a new gig every year or so and built up her reputation as a tattoo artist.

Kat didn’t become a public figure until she was cast in Miami Ink, a TLC series which documented a group of tattoo artists, their work, and the usual reality-show conflict and drama. She moved to Miami for the show, going home to LA on weekends. Kat appeared on the series from 2005 to 2007, until Ami James, the owner of the 305 Ink tattoo shop featured on the show, unceremoniously fired her. She was then promptly offered a spinoff called LA Ink, which ran from 2007 to 2011. Prior to its debut, she opened her own shop, High Voltage Tattoo, located in West Hollywood. Fans began to focus on her love life and some of the notorious men in it, like Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx, Jesse James (best known for being Sandra Bullock’s ex and wearing Nazi uniforms), and Steve-O of Jackass fame. She became a bit of a gossip column mainstay.

“I feel like my name works against me sometimes, you know?” Kat says at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in June. She’s there for the relaunch of two perfumes, Saint and Sinner, which she’d previously released in 2009 as limited-edition products. “People think, ‘Kat Von D, oh it's somebody that was on TV or somebody that dated somebody.’ And to me as an artist, it's kind of soul crushing. It's like, oh wow, what about all my hard work and what I would love to be known for?"

Kat says she knew that people would initially focus on her brand because it belongs to “that tattoo chick.” She really wanted it to evolve to the point where the product got attention rather than the founder. It might finally be getting there. She tells a story about a young woman who approached her on an airplane and said, “Hey, aren’t you that makeup artist?” Kat corrected her, because she isn’t a makeup artist, but was happy that this fan knew her from her work in the beauty world and not from reality TV.

Kat still has her rabid tattoo fans, though. One late September afternoon at High Voltage, Ashton Williams, the shop’s merchandise manager, is wearing a T-shirt that reads, “Who the fuck is Kat Von D?,” an homage to the “Who the fuck is Mick Jagger?” shirt Keith Richards famously wore on a Rolling Stones tour in the ’70s. There are sweatshirts and tees hanging all over the shop, many featuring a red and yellow High Voltage logo, skull motif, and Kat’s name. But exactly how many people are coming in for Kat merch?

“Tons. We have tour buses that let out in front of the shop all the time. People are obsessed with her. It’s crazy,” says Williams. “We have everyone from grandmothers from England to punk rockers. Nothing surprises me anymore. Literally, you’ll have a grandmother coming in who’s 70-something years old getting tattooed and she’s like, ‘I never really liked tattoos until I saw Kat.’ We have the broadest mix of people.”

People line up at the front windows of the shop and peer in when Kat is in the shop tattooing. She tattoos in plain sight on one of the tables that’s set up in the open-plan shop. They also run around to the back parking lot, Williams says, which features a building-sized mural of Kat and the shop’s other artists, to try to catch her as she’s getting into her car.

The look of the shop — moody red tapestry wallpaper, dark wood, dripping candles, crucifixes, “heartagrams” (a pentagram with a heart shape at the top), paintings in heavy gilt frames — is cohesive with the design of the beauty brand. Kat Von D products come in black boxes featuring gothic lettering and Kat’s original artwork. Shiny black studded tubes house her lipsticks. Religious iconography appears in the packaging and is echoed in the shade names, like her limited edition Saint and Sinner palette, which looks like a stained-glass cathedral window and includes colors like Sacred Heart, Worship, and Vestment. Her brand is everything that so-called millennial beauty lines are not. There’s no soft pink, no sans serif — everything is full coverage and ultra-pigmented. To compare her to Emily Weiss, another brand founder with a reality TV background, Kat Von D is the aesthetic sinner to Glossier’s saint.

Kat has always been a makeup person. She’s worn it since she was a kid and comparesbuying beauty products to “candy shopping.” Makeup has long been another artistic medium for her and she has said the process of applying it is therapeutic. She used to collect lipsticks, telling the LA Times that she’s tried every shade of red ever made, from CoverGirl to Chanel. Though it’s unclear whether or not she ever actively aspired to create her own makeup line, Kat did tell the paper, “I went through all my favorites and said, ‘If this was mine I'd add more purple, use a different finish.’” She has a tattoo on her abdomen that spells out “Hollywood” written in red lipstick, though it’s an homage to the New York Dolls’ logo rather than an ode to that particular beauty product.

Back in 2008, Kat got a call from a Sephora executive who told her people had been inundating sales associates with questions about the red lipstick “that tattoo girl” always wore on Miami Ink. So Sephora, which at the time was producing some of its own house brands, brought Kat up to its American headquarters in San Francisco for a meeting. She told the team there that she was bored (“so fucking bored,” actually) with things she saw in stores. The brand originally launched with four red lipsticks, which almost immediately sold out. This success led to an expanded line inspired by the inks and pigments Kat uses at High Voltage.

“My goal with the makeup line was to create something with a formulation you couldn't argue with. Whether you liked me or not, the product was good.”

“Let's create high-performance, bold, highly-pigmented, long-wear shit that no one else is really doing,” Kat says she suggested to the Sephora team. “I don't think any of us really knew that it could grow into something bigger. My goal with the makeup line was to create something with a formulation you couldn't argue with. Whether you liked me or not, the product was good.”

By all accounts, it is good. Kat Von D Beauty now has over 350 products including lipsticks, brushes, and eyeshadow and contour palettes. The brand sells the products on the Kat Von D Beauty website (international shipping has been available since September) and in stores in 34 countries, 18 of which debuted in the last 12 months. It’s almost exclusively sold at Sephora. In countries where there are no Sephora locations, like the UK and Ireland, it’s available at Debenhams. While brands like MAC, Make Up For Ever, and Urban Decay were already making richly pigmented products, Kat Von D was one of the earliest beauty brands to introduce matte liquid lipsticks, called the Everlasting Liquid Lipstick, back in 2013. Again, she did it long before Kylie introduced her Lip Kits, which, yes, feature longwear matte liquid lipstick.

Sephora does not share sales statistics, but at one point, Lolita Studded Kiss was apparently the retailer’s best-selling lipstick. The dusky rose color is now available in several formulations and is one of the brand’s signature shades. You can even buy a $104 “obsession” kit that includes the original Lolita Studded Kiss lipstick, an eyeshadow, three slightly different Lolita lip liners, and two versions of the shade in the Everlasting Liquid Lipstick formula. Kat originally named the shade after the Japanese street style movement, but later dedicated it to the actress Denise Richards’s daughter Lola, according to a Kendo representative. (The two met when Richards went to get her “Charlie” tattoo — inspired by ex-husband Charlie Sheen — covered up by Kat in 2008.) It is not named for Lolita, the titular underage object of lust in Vladimir Nabokov's controversial classic.

“The color Lolita is a perfect everyday color. I literally wear it every day,” says 15-year-old Samantha, who owns three $20 Lolita tubes. A friend gave her one as a birthday gift and her mom bought her another. “Then I just came to buy another one because it’s so perfect and I love it so much.”

Samantha’s friend, Valentina, also 15, adds solemnly, “It’s a holy grail.” (Holy grail, or HG, is a common designation in the makeup community, meaning it’s a product that works best for one person’s individual needs.)

Samantha and Valentina are at the Sephora at Hollywood and Highland, the same store where Kat herself shopped for red lipstick during her LA Ink days. It’s a bit messy and disheveled, much like the crowded, touristy neighborhood in which it resides. The Kat Von D Beauty section is in a highly trafficked area at the center of the store, with tester pans worn down to the bottom and caps missing from lipsticks.

Samantha first heard about Kat Von D Beauty on Instagram, where fans frequently tag its handle; the brand has 4 million followers and Kat’s personal account has 6.4 million. Kat launched the brand on Instagram herself back in 2015, after a marketing employee (who is no longer at Kendo) scoffed that it wasn’t worth it. The account gained a million followers in one month and Kat is still intimately involved with the imagery that’s posted there, though she now has a dedicated social team.

In January of this year, Kat Von D Beauty had its highest earned media value (or EMV) ever at $42.8 million, according to Tribe Dynamics. EMV is an indirect measure based on mentions and engagement, but it does have some correlation with actual market share and revenue. Since 2015, Kat Von D Beauty has shown up regularly on Tribe’s top ten EMV beauty list, along with social-media heavy hitters like Anastasia Beverly Hills and Too Faced.

“It’s a holy grail.”

“When we think about patterns of successful brands, the thing that they tend to do really well is make great products. The large majority of this content is organic and people aren't going to give you editorial content if they don't love your product,” says Tribe’s Brit McCorquodale. She notes that in the second quarter of this year, over 4,000 influencers were talking about the Kat Von D brand online, but the majority of them were micro-influencers, with under 100,000 followers. “The fact that Kat Von D has performed so well within the influencer community speaks really highly of the products that they're creating, which is something Kendo does very well across their brands.”

Ah yes, Kendo. While Kat provides the ideas and creativity and is the very public face of the brand, Kendo is the entity behind the scenes that quietly brings her visions to life. The company is also the reason that Sephora maintains exclusivity when it comes to Kat Von D Beauty. David Suliteanu, then-CEO of Sephora Americas, started Kendo as a “private label development arm for Sephora” in San Francisco in 2010. In 2014, Suliteanu became the CEO of Kendo, which split off from Sephora as a freestanding entity; it now identifies itself as a brand incubator and credits Kat Von D as being the “seed brand” that launched it.

The luxury conglomerate LVMH is the parent company of both Sephora and Kendo. Kendo owns lip brand Bite Beauty and skincare brand Ole Henriksen, both brands it acquired. It developed Marc Jacobs Beauty, Rihanna’s just-launched Fenty Beauty, and Kat Von D Beauty. It also developed the now-defunct Sephora nail brand Formula X (a rare failure for the company), as well as Elizabeth and James fragrances, the Olsen twins’ brand, which is now under the auspices of Butterfly Beauty.

Kendo does not like to share information about its inner workings nor give any insight into its product development process, although Nancy McGuire, the vice president of product development for Kat Von D Beauty and Ole Henriksen, does sometimes share sneak peeks of products on her Instagram page. Kendo declined to make anyone from the company available for interviews for this story. Instead, they sent email responses which included information taken verbatim from Kendo’s site and the review section of Sephora’s site. A representative did share that “Kat Von D Beauty is among the top-selling brands in all of our retailers, and our products consistently rank as top performers in each category.”

Social media definitely catapulted Kat Von D Beauty into the stratosphere, but its steady success happened in parallel with Sephora’s. It’s impossible to dissect the causality: Did Sephora help Kat Von D or did Kat Von D help Sephora? Yes and yes. Sephora, since it shares a corporate parent with Kat Von D Beauty, naturally seeks to heavily promote the brand, a situation non-LVMH brands are not too pleased about. And as Kat Von D Beauty becomes more ubiquitous on social media, there’s only one place a fan can walk in and try it: Sephora.

Sephora is the number one global beauty retailer, and number two in the US after Ulta. In 2009, it had over 1,000 stores worldwide. Today it has 2,300. According to a recent New York Timesstory, Sephora has doubled its revenue since 2011; a Fung Global Retail & Tech research reportestimates the retailer made between $4.4 billion and $4.9 billion in the US last year alone. That’s a lot of potential Lolita sales. As people are turning away from department stores for beauty, they’re turning to specialty stores like Sephora instead. Sephora also has a reputation as a kingmaker, as Business of Fashion noted in 2013, and brands (especially indie brands) that sell there say they enjoy more perceived legitimacy from customers.

Kat Von D Beauty anticipated making about $2 million its first year and instead made an estimated $12 million.

According to WWD, Kat Von D Beauty anticipated making about $2 million its first year and instead made an estimated $12 million. That momentum has apparently not slowed. The brand’s success is the result of a combination of Sephora’s support and Kendo’s uncanny knack for releasing the right products at the right time, presumably thanks in part to access to Sephora customer sales data. Take the holographic Alchemist Palette, which Kat says took seven years to develop. It debuted (and sold out) right as the unicorn makeup craze was at its apex. Kat Von D Beauty’s success also hinges on Kat Von D the person’s enduring star power.

Since LA Ink ended in 2011, Kat has attended countless Sephora store openings and launches for her brand, traipsing the globe to places like Dubai, Australia, Spain, and the UK for photo ops with fans. From the beginning, she’s maintained a steady line of communication with her fans via Facebook and YouTube; in 2013, a Stylophane report named Kat Von D the most engaged beauty brand on Facebook and she still makes frequent appearances on the brand’s YouTube channel. She has stayed in the public eye in other ways too, releasing her third book in 2013, accompanied by a tour. She also showed up on the Grammys red carpet that year with then-boyfriend Deadmau5. Now, she continues to be most available to fans via her wildly popular personal Instagram and in real life at Kat Von D Beauty events.

Kat is undeniably charismatic in person. Her deep, raspy voice is mesmerizing. She is a hugger. She is beloved by people in her orbit, and they are fiercely loyal to her. Williams, the High Voltage merch manager, credits Kat with convincing him to move to LA, telling him he would “blossom.” Kevin Lewis, a tattoo artist who’s been at High Voltage since LA Ink was still shooting says, “One of the biggest things for me is that, for someone who has made so much for themselves, she’s so grounded. She’s not cocky. She’s not arrogant. She’s not a celebrity.”

Ashley Sherengo, the 24-year-old Kat plucked off Twitter to run the brand’s social media says of their first real-life meeting, “I didn’t expect for her to be so open and kind. I felt like we were just friends who had gone a long time without talking.” Even Amber Rose, who showed up at the Saint and Sinner party after having Kat on her podcast, gushes, “I’ve always been a huge fan and I just kind of took a chance and I went up to her and told her that I love her and she was so gracious and sweet to me.”

None are quite as loyal, though, as the group of four official Kat Von D Beauty makeup artists, dubbed the Artistry Collective.

In a nondescript conference room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, hours before the Saint and Sinner party, party greeters in black-and-white latex dresses get their makeup done and drag queens from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence cover their facial hair with purple glitter and put on their habits. Kat Von D makeup palettes are scattered everywhere. Steffanie Strazzere, whose taxi-cab-yellow hair, Barbie-pink lips, and aqua eyeshadow fit right into the colorful scene, is helping get everyone ready. She credits Kat with being her “fairy godmother of makeup.”

Kat hired Steffanie, along with Leah Carmichael, Tara Buenrostro, and Kelseyanna Fitzpatrick to be surrogates for her as the Kat Von D Beauty brand grows globally. She discovered all of them (except Leah, who she’s been friends with for years) on Instagram. As faces of the brand, they create content on YouTube and Instagram, do Kat’s makeup, represent the brand at stores and trainings, and help out with product testing. They’re all trained and talented makeup artists. The common thread between them is their artistic vision for what makeup should be, which is, well, uncommon. Kelseyanna, in particular, creates otherworldly, occasionally terrifying, looks.

“I get a lot of people sending messages thanking us for being ourselves and saying that it's pushed them to take more risks with their makeup,” Kelseyanna says. “Someone thanked me last night for doing ugly makeup, like, not caring about being pretty. That's the real stuff, and that really motivates me to keep creating.”

“Everybody's kinda like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And then they're like, ‘Oh. Kat and the Kittens.’"

Steffanie worked at MAC for more than a decade but left because of animal testing, since the brand sells in China. “From a work standpoint,” she says, “I feel really safe because I know Kat has the best interests of the brand, animals, and us in mind, so it’s a very safe place.”

Kat is an outspoken vegan, and her brand is vegan (meaning the products don’t contain any animal byproducts) and cruelty-free (meaning they aren’t tested on animals nor are they sold in mainland China, which requiresforeign brands to test on animals before they sell their products there). There’s a gray area when it comes to the cruelty-free designation, though. Kat Von D Beauty and all the other Kendo brands do not test on animals or sell in China. However, Kendo parent company LVMH owns beauty brands like Benefit, Givenchy, Make Up For Ever, and Fresh, which do sell in China. In the cruelty-free community, this is a point of contention that comes up whenever an indie brand that doesn’t test on animals sells to a large company. But it’s a big part of the brand’s identity and one, according to NPD Group beauty analyst Larissa Jensen, that is an asset. “The brand’s cruelty-free positioning,” she writes in an email, “enables it to connect with consumers on a value- and emotional-based level.”

Kat has tattooed Steffanie twice, once on each calf. One tattoo is an image of her fluffy white cat Baby Ghost and the other is a portrait of Lydia Deetz, Winona Ryder’s character from Beetlejuice. “I just feel so lucky,” she says. “My legs are the most valuable part of my body now.”

The foursome has become famous among makeup fans in their own right. They’ve each experienced huge jumps in followers on their Instagrams and fans regularly recognize them in real life. Tara carries around products to give out to people who come up and talk to her. She says that when the group and Kat are all together in the airport, it causes a lot of commotion: “It's just a sea of black and a ton of suitcases, and everybody's kinda like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And then they're like, ‘Oh. Kat and the Kittens.’"

“I feel like her bodyguard, a protective shield, constantly looking around and making sure she's okay,” Leah says. “People obviously recognize her, especially when she's decked out in a full red outfit. She'll never be the bad guy, she'll never say no, so I think that's where we have to step in sometimes. She's so kind and gracious with every single fan.”

Fans know that Kat handpicked the Collective, and Tara considers the group “a little extension” of her. Fans consider them the next best thing to Kat herself.

The Artistry Collective has garnered criticism, though. As one commenter noted on an early Instagram shot of the group of light-skinned artists, “would be cool to see more ethnic diversity represented in the artistry team!” Some fans thought Kat’s response seemed defensive. She replied in the comments: “Diversity? We have American, Canadian, Dutch, Mexican, Australian, and Argentinian? Not sure what is lacking in ‘diversity’ here. And as for true diversity, I have put together an artistry team that is diverse in each artist's approach to makeup. This group’s experience, talent and hard work in the beauty world speaks for itself and covers the entire spectrum of style and technique.”

When the commenter wrote back, “There are also amazing makeup artists with deeper skin tones out there too and it'd be awesome to see them included in the future,” Kat’s response was, “I'm sorry, but I don't judge or hire people based off of their skin tone. I don't care if you’re black white or neon green - I select my crew by what's on the inside…”

The reality is that beauty companies do need to consider skin tone, because makeup goes on skin.

Kat Von D Beauty has 32 foundation shades and its social media channels sometimes show swatches on different skin tones and repost pictures of women of color using the makeup. But Kat discounting her fans’ desire to see more people they relate to wearing her makeup is shortsighted on a community level, but on a business one too.

Take Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty — Kat Von D’s sister brand at Kendo, let’s not forget — which launched with 40 foundation shades and a public commitment to people of all skin tones. The darker tones sold out, and the media was pretty unanimous in its praise. Kendo’s CEO David Suliteanu has given very few interviews over the years, with the exception of one giddy quote to WWD about how Fenty Beauty would be a “beauty rocket ship that will appeal to a huge and diverse global audience.” He was right. The reality is that beauty companies do need to consider skin tone, because makeup goes on skin.

It should be obvious that Kat is as outspoken as Kendo is opaque, a quality for which she is unapologetic. As befits someone who is trying to sell a saint-and-sinner duality, Kat can be acerbic. “I've just never been afraid of speaking my mind,” she says. This has gotten her into trouble in the reality show of our modern times: social media. Since her brand has launched, she’s found herself embroiled in her fair share of controversies and she’s picked a few fights along the way. But it seems to be working. At the end of last year, L2 credited Kat Von D’s ever-growing digital IQ, a measure of how well a company utilizes technology, to “her uncensored personality and opinions, a successful cocktail no parent company should alter.”

In 2013, Sephora stopped selling a Kat Von D lipstick called “Celebutard” after receiving customer complaints. The most shocking thing might be that the name got past a marketing team in the first place. Kat allegedly tweeted that it was “just a fucking lipstick.” This seems to be one of the last times Sephora or Kendo publicly inserted itself into Kat’s kerfuffles, letting her fight her own fights.

Two years later, there was more outrage over a lipstick shade called “Underage Red,” which had been in the collection in some form since the very beginning. “To go back to the Underage Red or any of the controversial names that I've named some of my products,” Kat says, “it is laughable to me. There is the PC police out there and a lot of times those people just want to be heard in whatever way. I don't really coddle that. Initially, when I named that shade, it was inspired by a specific shade of red that I wore to a concert that I couldn't get into because I was underage.” She ended up writing a defiant Facebook post and Sephora did not pull the shade.

Then there was the great beauty beef of summer 2016, in which Kat called out Jeffree Star, a YouTube and Instagram beauty guru who also used to appear on LA Ink and who Kat had befriended after tattooing him frequently through the years. In a now-deleted Instagram post and then on YouTube, she accused him of bullying, racism, promoting drug use (Kat has been sober for 10 years), and not paying an artist he had used for his beauty line. The accusations of racism prompted some outlets to dig up an old TMZ allegation that, back in 2008, Kat had sent a headshot of herself to her Miami Ink boss Ami James that included a swastika and referred to him as a “Jewbag.” She vehemently denied sending it, calling it a forgery and noting that she had always been “an advocate for tolerance of all races, religions and ways of life.” TLC supported her. Jeffree responded with his own video, calling Kat a liar, and the beauty world buzzed about it for a few weeks.

Kat has also publicly called out other brands like MAC for years because they sell in China, and she targeted Nars on Instagram this summer by posting graphic photos of bloody rabbits after the brand announced it would start selling in the country. “That was just a personal heartbreak,” Kat says. “I'd been a huge fan of Nars for a really long time. It was disheartening. If you're going to choose money over compassion, then that comes with a price as well.”

“There is the PC police out there and a lot of times those people just want to be heard in whatever way. I don't really coddle that.”

She hasn’t been afraid to call out other brands for taking a bit too much inspiration from her products, either. In March, she went after lower-end UK brand Makeup Revolution for copyingher popular $48 Shade and Light Eye Contour palette, from the shades right down to the arrangement of the colors. Even the name was reminiscent of the Kat Von D Beauty product: Makeup Revolution called their iteration the Ultra Eye Contour Light & Shade Palette. She got some backlash from people who couldn’t afford her $50 palette. They perceived Kat as being unsupportive of cheaper brands. She says she can appreciate dupes, but explains, “I'm not for plagiarism and I think that there's a big difference.”

Kat’s biggest controversy to date, however, resulted in her becoming a target of the alt-right and Milo Yiannopoulos. Both Fox News and the Washington Post covered the scandal. It was all because of the Saint and Sinner perfume launch party.

The party was basically goth prom. The night included nuns in drag, pole dancers, a confessional booth, dry ice swirling on the bars, a Nine Inch Nails-heavy soundtrack, Amber Rose and her entourage, and tons and tons of people in extreme makeup with appliques stuck to their faces. The founders of other cruelty-free beauty brands, like Too Faced, Sugarpill, and Melt Cosmetics, were also in attendance. It took a bit of convincing, but Kat’s team allowed her to fulfill her vision and let her invite who she wanted to (rather than simply invite the standard beauty influencers with millions of followers).

“Kendo is really great, and I know that they're obviously putting a lot of marketing dollars into it so I want to respect that. But to them, they want the safe things,” Kat said before the party. “Influencers have a lot of followers. I don't think half of those influencers are on-brand. We don't repost them. I don't really relate to them. I'd rather pick people with smaller follower counts that I actually admire and that are cool and that are different, you know?”

So Kat won. “Of course I won. I will never back up something I don't believe in and they know that. And I think what helps them feel comfortable is that when I am excited about something, it has never failed. When I have doubts is usually when it gets scary.”

She also addressed the huge amount of marketing money that can get sucked into paying influencers. “I see it with other brands and how much gifting they do and the crazy events they throw for people to go on goddamn cruises and shit. To me, it’s just so insincere and fake. We don’t pay anybody,” she says. Then a pause. “I think there’s another influencer event happening right now with actual real, huge influencers. But none of those people were on our list anyway. Not to say that they're not great at what they do, but when you free yourself of all those things then you are left to be able to make cool shit.”

That other event turned out to be the launch of Kim Kardashian’s KKW Beauty line, which Kim had been teasing for weeks. She invited a few editors and some huge influencers to her actual home across the city in Bel Air. Kim’s outfits and the rooms in which she met her guests were all the same muted colors, once again highlighting the difference between Kat and the rest of the beauty world at this particular moment in time.

There was some drama behind the scenes at the Saint and Sinner party, though, which didn’t come to light until a month later. Kat Von D Beauty had run a contest challenging fans to submit their best saint/sinner makeup looks to win an all-expenses-paid trip to LA for the party. The brand announced the winner, Gypsy Freeman, on its Instagram. But then fans noticed the Trump “Make America Great Again” image Freeman had posted months earlier and started flooding the Kat Von D page with comments.

“Like, if you support Hitler I don't want you to wear my lipstick, to be honest, you know?”

In hindsight, Kat was probably alluding to this incident before the party when asked about politics: “I think everybody has the right to vote for whoever they want. To me, I definitely draw a line in the sand in real life. Like, we can't be friends if you support somebody who's anti-immigration, anti-climate change, anti-women.” When asked if people unfollow her for her stance, she said, “For sure, and I'm glad they do, in the sense that I'm not going to invest energy into converting somebody. You can't shake hands with a fist. People think that it's dumb business-wise, but I would feel the same way about Hitler. Like, if you support Hitler I don't want you to wear my lipstick, to be honest, you know?”

A month after the party, the Wichita Eagle broke the story that Kat had disqualified Freeman from the contest because she was a Trump supporter. The Kat Von D social team has wiped all evidence of the contest from the Facebook page. Freeman sent screenshots to the paper of a direct message conversation that she had with Kat. Freeman’s response to Kat was, “We would love to be there, of course, but I sincerely do understand if you decide to replace us with someone who supports the candidate you support.” The photographer who took the pictures of Freeman’s model did go to the party. Kat later insisted on Instagram, in a comment that appears to have since been deleted, that she did not disqualify her and that Freeman chose not to attend.

Places like The Donald subreddit picked up the story. “I talked to my team because there was a heightened sense of concern,” she says. “We were getting a lot of backlash on that, but I'm like, ’Yeah, fuck, I don't care if Fox News talks shit, fuck them.’ I'm very open about my stance on Trump and if you don't agree with me, that's totally up to you. It's a free country and I actually celebrate true democracy.”

Kat has a lot going on in the coming year. She’s going to launch a self-funded vegan shoe line called Von D Shoes which she says includes 28 different styles. One of the boots will feature a compartment that will fit a lipstick. The line is being produced in Italy using high-tech leather alternatives and with the help of Rebecca Mink, who has her own vegan shoe line. “I'm not interested in looking at cheap plastics,” says Kat. “We're looking at all these innovative, different leather substitutes that are made out of mushroom and pineapple and they're actually great for the environment and look equal to, if not better than leather.”

Kat is also releasing an album and planning a tour. Then, of course, there’s Kat Von D Beauty. She collaborated on an upcoming smudgy guyliner with her friend, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, and has created a palette dedicated to Divine, the late drag queen who frequently collaborated with filmmaker John Waters. Several times, Kat has mentioned wanting to open a store in LA, though nothing is technically in the works yet. She is also in the process of designing a collection for the brand’s tenth anniversary next year.

While Kat and her brand are now a known entity, it cannot be overstated how much of a trailblazer she really is. Reality stars have come and gone with flash-in-the-pan beauty launchesthroughout the years (see: Snooki and any number of Real Housewives and Basketball Wives cast members). But Kat has a unique and unreproducible authenticity, a quality that all beauty brands are now chasing, that is undeniable regardless of how you feel about her personal aesthetic or opinions. Her unabashed love of a full face of makeup and her brand’s use of ultra-pigmented products before it was popular outside of pro brands presaged the moment we’re in now: a moment where more is more when it comes to makeup. She’s also exhibit A for the argument that celebrities should have a strong controlling hand in their brands, as opposed to simply slapping a name on a product for a short-lived sales burst.

As Kat declared when detailing one of her many controversies, “If you don't like it, don't fucking buy it. This is my art and my message to give to the world.”

Cheryl Wischhover is a senior beauty reporter at Racked.

Editor: Julia Rubin Copy editor: Laura Bullard

source> https://www.racked.com/2017/12/12/16763338/kat-von-d-beauty-sephora

#kat von d #kat von d beauty

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whittlebaggett8 · 6 years ago

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Everything you need to know about the mind-bending ‘OA Part 2’ season finale, Defence Online

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Brit Marling as OA on Netflix’s first season of “The OA.”

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Netflix

Warning: Spoilers ahead for “The OA” season two finale.

Netflix’s series “The OA” continues to push the limits of conventional storytelling with a “Part II” finale that manages to be even more stunning that its first season’s polarizing conclusion. Co-creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij advance their story of inter-dimensional travel and a network of connected souls with a final scene leaving people with a lot of questions.

We’re here to help answer some of mysteries by walking you through the many narrative hints laid throughout earlier episodes of “The OA,” all of which help explain the surprising revelation of “Part II.”

Let’s get started.

‘Part II’ ends with the revelation of a new, meta dimension

On the final moments of “The OA Part II,” Karim Washington (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) reaches the Rose Window in the house. Previously on the seasons, various characters have said that the window is a “portal” to see the truth and that it will provide the seeker with an “overview” of our world.

Just as Karim is about to open the window, OA and Hap are confronting one another at the Treasure Island clinic.

Hap tells OA he is going to take her to another dimension one where she doesn’t hate him and where “everyone calls [her] OA” even though she doesn’t. Homer arrives to try and stop Hap, but Hap shoots him.

In order to save Homer, OA decides to go to the new dimension with Hap and she asks Homer to come and find her because she won’t know herself.

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Homer (played by Emory Cohen) only realizes who OA is at the very end of “Part II.”

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Nicola Goode/Netflix

Meanwhile, in another dimension, Steve, Buck, BBA, French, and Angie are doing the movements in the exact same space at the Treasure Island clinic. They are taking a leap of faith, trying to help OA the only way they know how.

As they finish performing the movements, OA ascends into the air.

Karim opens the Rose Window, and sees OA floating. But then a dove flies past Karim out of the window, and we see a ripple, as if the bird passed through an invisible barrier. That’s when OA drops, as if a harness holding her up has broken.

OA falls, and Karim’s view from the window changes. He’s now looking down at a production set, with props and stages recreating San Francisco and the set of what looks like “The OA,” the TV show. We see OA laying on the floor, her head bleeding as people begin to scream.

Hap is there, having successfully traveled to this new dimension. But he hears someone call OA “Brit,” and quickly catches on. He switches to a British accent, and identifies himself as “Jason Isaacs” while saying Brit is his husband.

As “Brit” leaves the set in an ambulance with “Jason” at her side, we see what looks like a different version of Steve (played by Patrick Gibson) run behind the vehicle and jump inside. He takes “Brit’s” hand, and looks at “Jason.”

“Hello, Hap,” Steve says.

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Steve successfully made it to this dimension, and is there to protect OA.

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Netflix

Does this mean everything in ‘The OA’ is fake?

Short answer: No. At least, we don’t think so.

Though at first first the finale seems jarring, as if “The OA” decided to break the fourth wall, the dimension shown to us is probably not meant to be the actual real world.

Brit Marling and Jason Issacs (who does have an accent in real life) are indeed the two actors who play OA and Hap on Netflix’s show. But Marling and Isaacs are not married in real life, nor has Marling ever worn her hair in that short, cropped blonde style. Also, that final set of scenes take place in England, and “The OA” is filmed in the United States.

But more importantly, the whole second season was building up to the revelation of this new dimension in which OA would be an actress playing the character of OA. This wasn’t a last-minute twist, but is instead meant to be a lead in to a possible “Part III.”

Breaking down the 3 main dimensions we know about

To get our bearings, it’s essential to first recap what happened throughout the first two seasons that led us here, and the different versions of reality shown so far.

We know OA, Hap, and Homer are bound by some greater force. In all of their dimensions, their lives interlink like a “cosmic family,” as Elodie explains to OA.

“You, Hap, and Homer belong within the same constellation,” Elodie says. “You’re traveling together.”

Not only are Hap, Homer, and OA connected, but in turn OA is now linked to Steve, Buck, BBA, French, Jesse, and Angie. Elodie says events in one dimension “echo” in nearby dimensions around it at the same time. We can map their connections across dimensions by looking at how their stories all connect.

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Hap meeting OA when she was Prairie Johnson on season one.

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Netflix

Dimension One: Michigan and North Dakota

Season one’s dimension was one in which OA and Homer were held captive by Hap in his North Dakotan house (the location of which he revealed on “Part II”) and forced to die again and again in his experiments. In this dimension, OA’s name of Nina Azarova was changed to Prairie Johnson by her adoptive parents.

Over the course of their many deaths, OA and Homer and the other prisoners were given a set of movements that would allow them to travel between dimensions. By proxy, Hap was shown the movements too. Realizing they had all five movements and would use them to escape, Hap took OA to a random road and left her there.

Hap then returned to his other four captors, and forced them all to do the movements and travel to a new dimension where they had alternate lives in San Francisco.

Left behind, OA formulated a plan to get back to Homer (with whom she had fallen in love). She gathered five people: Buck, French, Steven, Jesse, and BBA. These characters are also known by fans as the Crestwood Five. They learned the movements, and by the end of season one they would perform the movements and help OA travel to the same San Francisco dimension where Hap had taken Homer.

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The Crestwood Five performed the movements when a school shooter arrived on their campus.

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Netflix

Dimension Two: San Francisco

In the San Francisco dimension, OA arrives into Nina Azarova’s body. Nina never had a Near Death Experience (NDE) as a child, and therefore was never blinded. But she is a wealthy writer and “medium” who can communicate with nature and trees.

Nina was working with Dr. Hunter Aloysius Percy, who in this dimension is not the NDE-obsessed Hap from season one but a renowned psychiatrist.

Hap traveled into Dr. Percy’s body, just as OA travels into Nina’s body.

In this dimension, Hap is continuing Dr. Percy’s work of experimenting with the house Nina owns in Nob Hill. He discovers that the house “awakens” a literal seed inside of people’s brains. Hap has been keeping these people in a pool inside his lab, where the seeds bloom into a garden.

More than once on the show, “a garden of forking paths” has been used by Hap as a metaphor for the existence of multiple dimensions. This metaphor became literal in the San Francisco dimension. Hap says he’s been making an inter-dimensional map of all possible universes.

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OA enters Nina Azarova’s body in Dimension Two.

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Nicola Goode/Netflix

Dimension Three: London

One of those possible destinations on the map Hap makes is the London dimension we see at the end of “Part II.” We know it’s London because of the uniforms worn by the medics seen in the ambulance.

In this dimension, Hap and OA and Homer and Buck are all apparently characters played by actors in a TV production. Those actors share the same names with the real cast of Netflix’s “The OA.”

How the new “meta” dimension was foreshadowed throughout season two

The existence of this alternate “Brit Marling” character in another dimension was teased from the very first episode of season two. When Karim meets Fola (played by Zendaya) on the first episode, she tells him that the game goes “in real life” at a certain point.

That is what happened to Michelle (played by Ian Alexander) in the San Francisco dimension. She made it to the Rose Window in the house, and we believe she was transported into “Ian’s” body in the London dimension.

We also saw a glimpse of Dimension Three when Old Night suffocated the OA and sent her to a new NDE on the fourth episode.

“In the future, you don’t know who you are,” Old Night told OA. “You forget your true nature. I want to send you there, to the moment you can show yourself your true face, your pure being, and reawaken to your mission.”

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Old Night is the octopus Nina Azarova would communicate with as a performance.

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Netflix

She then had a flash of a scene on an airplane, and the aspect ratio for the episode changed (the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen get slightly wider). The resolution quality also changes, and becomes slightly more granular. In this NDE, OA walked through an airplane and came up behind a woman with cropped blonde hair.

Though OA (and the audience) couldn’t have known at the time, she was looking at herself in Dimension Three, where “Brit” the actress plays OA. This is what Old Night meant when he said OA would “forget her true nature.”

We know it’s the same dimension because the aspect ratio and resolution quality match those final scenes of “Part II.” The aspect-ratio difference is most clear as the episode cuts from “Ian” (Michelle/Buck) to Karim, as seen in the GIF below:

Another clue about this dimension came from Scott’s NDE.

As Hap explained on the finale, Dimension Three was the place where Scott’s NDE’s happened. We heard a description of this on the seventh episode of “Part II,” but again there wasn’t the proper context for us to understand it at the time.

“Lights were everywhere,” Scott told Homer. “We were in a warehouse. I saw OA. It was her, and not her … Hap didn’t call her OA. He called her Brin, or something. He said something to her and she laughed and kissed him like they were a couple. There were cameras in the air above them. Hap called out to someone but his voice was different. He spoke with a British accent.”

The finale twist was also set up by Elodie when she came to OA with her message/guidance. After explaining to OA that she was in a perpetual Echo where Hap was bonded to her, OA asked how to break out of that pattern.

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Elodie is a mysterious “traveler” who helps both OA and Hap.

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Netflix

“To leave an echo is very dangerous,” Elodie said. “You could find yourself inside a life completely unrecognizable to you. You would shatter yourself. Not to mention you and Homer might not even know each other in a dimension outside an echo. You need Hap.”

That “completely unrecognizable life” turned out to be one in which OA was an actress playing OA in a fictional production, therefore creating a psychological barrier between OA’s consciousness and “Brit.”

What this tells us about what could happen on ‘Part III’

If a season three happens, the main narrative would likely be focused on OA trying to integrate with “Brit” the actress. In order to do that she needs help from the Crestwood Five.

We only saw Steve collapse in the courtyard after doing the movements and then reappear in Dimension Three, but it’s possibly the others traveled there, too. OA told Homer to come and find her, so he might be somewhere in Dimension Three as well.

Our best guess is that the Crestwood Five will be the ones who help Homer and OA remember themselves and break away from Hap once more.

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“Jason Isaacs”/Hap on the finale of season two.

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Netflix

Remember episode five of “Part II,” when OA found herself underground among the tree roots, and they spoke to her?

“The one who seeks to own you is going to make a powerful discovery,” the trees told OA. “He will use it to destroy your faith in yourself, so that you will need him to survive. The only way to recover is to form a tribe.”

“I’m alone,” OA said. “I can do it alone.”

“No, child. No tree survives alone in the forest,” they replied. “When one tree falls ill, we all send food. For if one tree dies, the canopy is broken. Then all suffer the weather and pestilence that flood in. You will not survive on your own.”

The trees told OA “they were already coming” for her, likely referring to the Crestwood Five. That’s why they wound up at the Treasure Island clinic, and why we believe they all traveled to Dimension Three in London. It would make sense if they help her rediscover her identity and “recover,” just as the trees said.

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Netflix representatives referred to this as “tree internet” in a press email.

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Netflix

Last but not least, the airplane scene would likely be very important.

As we noted earlier, Old Night told OA he was sending her to “the moment you can show yourself your true face, your pure being, and reawaken to your mission.”

It’s very likely that on a third season (if Netflix renews the series), we’d see this moment play out again from the perspective of “Brit,” just like Homer’s first season NDE came to pass on the second season inside the Treasure Island clinic.

The pilot speaking over the PA system on the plane had a British accent. This, paired with the London location of the third dimension, makes it very likely that this flight took off from London’s Heathrow airport.

Guess what that connects to? BA411: The flight code Karim finds to solve one of the puzzle levels on the first episode of “Part II.”

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BA411 is the code for a real flight that took off in 2016.

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Netflix

As a cursory Google search reveals, BA411 was a British Airways flight logged in 2016 that went from Belgium to London.

Most of the events of “The OA” have taken place in 2016, the same year that this real-life flight took off and landed.

Given what we now know about the “echo” in dimensions, and how Karim’s houseboat was part of the TV set shown in the London dimension, it’s likely there is a version of Karim in that new setting. Other characters may also echo too.

When “Brit” falls to the ground, a woman comes to her side. That woman is credited as “line producer,” played by Jane Wall. We’re pretty sure Wall appeared earlier in the episode as the doula helping Mo (Karim’s hacker friend) in labor, though representatives for Netflix did not immediately return INSIDER’s request for confirmation.

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Jane Wall as the “line producer,” as listed in the credits.

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Netflix

Clearly “The OA Part II” has raised more questions than it answered, but fans cannot say they came away with unsatisfying resolutions to the mysteries of season one. We know now that OA didn’t buy those Amazon books and make up her story in Dimension One, and have a much clearer understanding of the rules of interdimensional travel.

Where the story takes us next, only Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij can know for certain. What we do know is that there’s a potential five-season plan for the series, and many fans are along for the unpredictable and transcendent ride.

The post Everything you need to know about the mind-bending ‘OA Part 2’ season finale, Defence Online appeared first on Defence Online.

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chocolate-brownies · 7 years ago

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When the respected physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard extolled the rejuvenating properties of mashed-up puppy and guinea pig testicles before Paris’s Société de Biologie in 1889—describing how injections of the liquefied gonads allowed him to perform experiments for hours on end while standing, lift 100 pounds with ease, and expel a jet of urine 25% farther than he could before—he was not the first scientist who claimed to have discovered a way to turn back the biological calendar. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC), for instance, recounted the king’s search for eternal life (it turns out to be a thorny marine plant, but he doesn’t manage to hang on to it). And the “recipe for transforming an old man into a youth” can be found in an Egyptian medical text from 2500 BC. I’ll save you the trouble: It’s a fruit-infused mudpack for the face.

Nor, of course, was Brown-Séquard’s the last such discovery. A few decades after his death at age 76 (oh, well) in 1894, other fountain-of- youth fads swept Europe and America. Implants of goat testicles into men’s scrota became all the rage in the 1920s, and the “Steinach operation,” basically a one-side vasectomy, promised to increase vigor, reduce fatigue, and slow aging. Among the recipients was poet William Butler Yeats. I leave to your imagination why these early efforts focused on men and their reproductive organs and ask a different question: Why are some people obsessed with extending life span?

For obsessed is what many are. In the last few years anti-aging research has been attracting buckets of public and private funding, the United Kingdom’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics pointed out in a report released in January 2018. Tech billionaires have been sinking money into what is variously called life extension, the end of aging, a search for immortality, or, as longtime biology-of-aging scientist Cynthia Kenyon put it more modestly to The Guardian, a way to “have a healthy life and then turn out the lights.”

That describes the goal of some in the anti-aging world. Health spanners want to discover genetic tweaks, medications, and other interventions that will give people a healthier life and, in particular, a healthier late-in-life life—by postponing or eliminating disease, decrepitude, and dementia—followed by a quick and painless death. In 2016 the US National Academy of Medicine launched a “Grand Challenge for Healthy Longevity,” which will award at least $25 million for breakthroughs in increasing health span. That, however, wouldn’t necessarily extend life span, or not more by than a few years.

Even if we conquered all disease, cellular aging baked into our DNA and made inevitable by the laws of thermodynamics would eventually “turn out the lights.” That’s where other anti-aging warriors come in. Immortalists like PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel talk about living forever. The credo of most immortalists, though, is better summed up by British researcher Aubrey de Grey, whose TED talk on conquering biological aging has been viewed some 3.5 million times: The first humans who will live to 1,000, he argues, are alive right now. Dr. Joon Yun, who runs the Palo Alto Investors healthcare hedge fund, has said, “Thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can’t defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever.” He didn’t say “end death,” but eliminating aging and overturning entropy would probably get us at least to de Grey’s 1,000-year-olds.

Dr. Joon Yun, who runs the Palo Alto Investors healthcare hedge fund, has said, “Thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can’t defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever.”

Thanks to both health spanners and immortalists, “We are seeing huge market demand for aging research,” funded primarily by private investors, according to neuroscientist Terrie Moffitt of Duke University, who contributed to the Nuffield Council’s report.

The investment is driven, in part, by legitimate advances in understanding the biology of aging. Although there is no consensus about its precise cellular or genetic causes, scientists have made significant strides in identifying key components of aging, such as the shortening of telomeres (stretches of DNA at the ends of chromosomes) and the activation or suppression of different genes.

They are also identifying ways to target the drivers of aging. A clinical trial of metformin, a diabetes drug, is expected to start this year: The drug boosts the activity of an enzyme called AMPK, which not only lowers blood sugar (hence diabetes) but seems to also prevent diseases of aging. Other studies are examining the super-low calorie regimen called dietary restriction, which can extend healthy life span in a range of animals and slow biological aging in people. Here, the focus is on finding molecules that mimic the molecular effects of an 800-calorie-a-day regimen (which few of us can manage, even if eternal life beckoned). In a similar vein, the craze for resveratrol, a compound in red wine, peaked a decade ago once studies began showing that people who took resveratrol pills didn’t live longer or healthier. Nevertheless, research continues, buoyed by the fact that the compound affects the activity of aging-related enzymes called sirtuins.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page spent a reported $1 billion to launch the bio-technology company Calico, whose mission is to slow or stop cellular aging and thus “enable people to lead longer and healthier lives.” Unity Biotechnology, which also seeks to thwart aging, has drawn investments of at least $116 million from Thiel and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Some people are so optimistic that scientists will eventually vanquish aging and possibly death—although perhaps not soon enough for them personally— that 150 people have paid to preserve either their heads ($80,000) or their entire bodies ($200,000) in liquid nitrogen at the Scottsdale, Arizona, facility of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, including de Grey and the futurist Ray Kurzweil. The obsession of tech billionaires with defeating aging even became a plot point in the HBO series Silicon Valley, with one particularly odious executive hiring a strapping youth to give him regular infusions of young blood.

Elysium Health, cofounded in 2014 by MIT biologist Leonard Guarente to extend health span and slow biological aging, raised $20 million in 2016 alone, valuing the private company at just north of $150 million. Although Guarente, who discovered how sirtuins affect aging, is sometimes portrayed as an immortalist, he views his anti-aging research “as a branch of medicine,” he said. “I hope that what comes out of it is a way to improve our health… To think that we can program immortality is ludicrous.”

Why do tech billionaires believe otherwise? “There is a kind of hubris there, the hubris of powerful men,” said Julian Hughes, professor of Old Age Psychiatry at England’s University of Bristol and a coauthor of the Nuffield Council report. That hubris nurtures a belief that they are too powerful and too important to die. Philosopher David Archard of Queen’s University Belfast, chair of the Nuffield Council, said he wouldn’t be surprised if “the denizens of Silicon Valley take themselves seriously enough to believe their immortality or delayed death is in humanity’s best interests.”

Yet many people face the prospect of their demise with equanimity. “A lot of people think death will be a release and even welcome it,” said Hughes. “Their spouse has died, their friends have died; they’ve had enough, really.”

The realization that drives those who accept the inevitability of death can also kick in well before one has “had enough.” Most people agree that death as such “is bad because it deprives us, finally and irrevocably, of what gives value to life,” including pleasure, happiness, friendship, knowledge, and love, Archard said. “On that view, the longer you live—with infinite extension of life as best of all—the more of these goods or constituent pleasures you can enjoy. If one more day of life is preferable, then surely an infinite number of further days is optimal?”

But an enduring strand in philosophy answers, surely not. What gives our activities, work, and relationships meaning and purpose and value “is that they are pursued with a finite life,” Archard said. “An immortal existence would run out of purpose.”

Craze or crazy?: Young blood

One of the anti-aging schemes sprouting up in Silicon Valley harvests the blood of teenagers, extracts the plasma, and injects it into older clients.

The Monterey, California, start-up Ambrosia charges $8,000 for plasma transfusions, 1.5 liters at a time, over the course of two days. Founder Jesse Karmazin, MD, is conducting trials on his patients and claims to have demonstrated improved sleep and reductions in proteins associated with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease—although mainstream scientists have criticized the trials for lacking a control group and drawing its cohort only from those who can afford the steep fee.

This article appeared in the June 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

Mindfulness: The Antidote to Anti-Aging

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https://www.mindful.org/mindfulness-the-antidote-to-anti-aging/

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