#only for one of the most famous institutions in the comic industry to have hands looking like that on the cover

[homoeroticgrappling]

[lokiondisneyplus]

For his entire tenure as an Avenger, Anthony Mackie had never been the first name on the call sheet.

In a galaxy of stars populated by Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson, the actor was aware of his place in the on-set pecking order, but would never miss an opportunity to make his presence felt.

“Number six on the call sheet has arrived!” Mackie would routinely shout on films like “Captain America: Civil War” and the box office-busting “Infinity Saga” sequels, according to Marvel chief creative officer Kevin Feige.

It exemplifies the sort of winning tone that the 42-year-old actor has brought to his superhero character the Falcon, aka Sam Wilson, for six movies from the top-earning studio — wry and collegial humor, with the potential to turn explosive at any moment. Both Mackie and his character are set to burn brighter than ever when the Disney Plus series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” lands on March 18.

On that call sheet, “Anthony is No. 1,” Feige is happy to report, “but it still says ‘No. 6.’ He kept it because he didn’t want it to go to his head.” The series is essentially a two-hander with his friend and longtime co-star Sebastian Stan, the titular soldier. All six episodes were produced and directed by Emmy winner Kari Skogland (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Loudest Voice”). The series, for which combined Super Bowl TV spot and trailer viewership earned a record-breaking 125 million views this year, is reported to have cost $150 million in total.

For Mackie, though, the show comes at a critical time for both his career and for representation in the MCU. Sam Wilson is graduating from handy wingman (Falcon literally gets his job done with the use of mechanical wings), having been handed the Captain America shield by Evans in the last “Avengers” film. While it’s unclear if he will formally don the superhero’s star-spangled uniform moving forward (as the character did in a 2015 comic series), global fandoms and the overall industry are still reeling from the loss of Chadwick Boseman, who portrayed Marvel’s Black Panther to culture-defining effect. With this new story, Mackie will become the most visible African American hero in the franchise. And when asked whether he’ll be taking the mantle of one of its most iconic characters, he doesn’t exactly say no.

“I was really surprised and affected by the idea of possibly getting the shield and becoming Captain America. I’ve been in this business a long time, and I did it the way they said you’re supposed to do it. I didn’t go to L.A. and say, ‘Make me famous.’ I went to theater school, did Off Broadway, did indie movies and worked my way through the ranks. It took a long time for this shit to manifest itself the way it has, and I’m extremely happy about that,” Mackie says.

Feige says that, especially with the advent of Disney Plus and the freedom afforded long-form storytelling, the moment was right to give the Falcon his due.

“Suddenly, what had been a classic passing of the torch from one hero to another at the end of ‘Endgame’ became an opening up of our potential to tell an entire story about that. What does it really mean for somebody to step into those shoes, and not just somebody but a Black man in the present day?” says Feige.

Like many comic book heroes, Mackie has an origin story marked by tragedy at a young age — specifically around the loss of a parental figure. The New Orleans native is the youngest of six children from a tight-knit middle-class family, whose trajectory was spun into chaos when his mother was stricken with a terminal illness.

“It was unexpected and very untimely. I was 15 when she was diagnosed with cancer, and a few months later, she was gone. She passed the day before my ninth-grade graduation,” Mackie recalls. “If my mom wouldn’t have passed away when I was so young, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

Mackie had already gravitated toward the performing arts before the loss of his mother, having enrolled at the pre-professional school New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Like many young people grappling with trauma, Mackie says he began to act out. A core group of teachers helped get him out of trouble. Ray Vrazel, still an instructor at the school, personally drove the student to a Houston-based audition for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he was accepted for his senior year of high school.

“Everything I did, I did for my mama. The idea of leaving home at 17 to go away to school would have never been an option if she was still around. She was my best friend. Losing her gave me a kind of strength, and a desire to succeed,” Mackie says.

Succeed he did. Spending that formative year as a minor on a college campus helped Mackie find his “tribe,” a misfit crew of artists and performers, which propelled him to acceptance at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School in 1997. There he was part of the breakthrough class of students of color to be chosen for the notoriously selective drama program, which Mackie says was liberating given the institution’s track record.

“Our year was a huge transition. There were hardly any Asian people in the drama program, maybe one or two Black people and hardly any Black women. In our class, we had three black women, two black men, one Native American, one Asian female, out of 20 people. Ever since then, the classes have been wildly diverse,” says Mackie, whose fellow students included stage and film star Tracie Thoms and actor Lee Pace.

Following his training, Mackie launched a staggeringly versatile career. He has played Tupac Shakur and Martin Luther King Jr. to similar acclaim, a juicehead bodybuilder in “Pain & Gain” and a homeless gay teen in the Sundance player “Brother to Brother.” He has exhibited remarkable staying power in an industry that often pigeonholes actors and has a pockmarked soul when it comes to inclusion.

“I was drawn to Anthony because of his electrifying ability to combine intensity with sensitivity, courage with compassion, and all of it comes across as inevitable, as if it could be no other way,” says Kathryn Bigelow, who directed him in the 2009 best picture Oscar winner “The Hurt Locker.”

Samuel L. Jackson, whom Mackie calls a mentor and has played alongside in several films, says he has “an innate quality that first and foremost makes everyone want to cast him.” On a recent idle Netflix search, Jackson came across Mackie’s latest sci-fi film, “Outside the Wire,” and it triggered a memory of sitting in the audience for his performance in the 2010 Broadway production of Martin McDonagh’s play “A Behanding in Spokane.”

“Watching him onstage, I thought, he’s a very adroit actor capable of putting on many hats. He’s fearless and will try to be anybody. Then, on my TV, he’s playing a nanobyte soldier or some shit,” Jackson says.

Though always humble about getting the next job, pre-Marvel Mackie was rarely offered pole position.

“There were certain pegs. My first was ‘8 Mile.’ It was a monumental step at the beginning of my career,” Mackie says of the 2002 Curtis Hanson film that elevated rapper Eminem to multi-hyphenate stardom.

“After that it was ‘Half Nelson.’ It blew up Ryan Gosling, so I was there to ride the wave. Then ‘The Hurt Locker,’ and it blew up Jeremy Renner. It was the joke for a long time — if you’re a white dude and you want to get nominated for an Oscar, play opposite me. I bring the business for white dudes,” says Mackie.

He remembers the sensation “Hurt Locker” caused during its awards season. It was a moment he thought would change everything as he stood on the stage of the Dolby Theatre with the cast and filmmakers, having just sipped from George Clooney’s flask while Halle Berry radiated a few rows away.

“I thought I would be able to move forward in my career and not have to jostle and position myself for work. To get into rooms with certain people. I thought my work would speak for itself. I didn’t feel a huge shift,” he says, “but I 100% think that ‘The Hurt Locker’ is the reason I got ‘Captain America.’”

He’s referring to “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” the 2014 Marvel film that was the first to be directed by Joe and Anthony Russo (the current title holders for the highest-grossing film of all time with “Avenges: Endgame”). Mackie says that blockbuster not only gave him his largest platform to date but changed expectations of superhero movies forever.

“It was the first of the espionage, Jason Bourne-esque action movies at Marvel. After that, the movies shifted and had different themes and were more in touch with the world we live in, more grounded,” he says.

Bolstered by the words of another mentor, Morgan Freeman, Mackie feels no bitterness about his path.

“We did ‘Million Dollar Baby’ together, and when we were shooting this movie, I got offered a play. When you do Off Broadway, it’s $425 a week. In New York, that’s really $75 per week. I got a movie offer at the same time, and it was buckets of money. Three Home Depot buckets of money were going to be dropped off at my door,” Mackie says. “The script was awful; the whole thing was slimy. I went to Morgan’s trailer and asked him what he would do. He took a second and said, ‘Do the play. When Hollywood wants you, they’ll come get you. And when they come get you, they’ll pay for it.’ That blew my mind, and I left him that day with such a massive amount of confidence. He’s been a huge influence on me.”

He used the currency of that first Russo Brothers film and five subsequent ones to do what many creators and performers in Hollywood have done in recent years to help balance the scales of profit and representation in content: make things on his own.

Last year, Mackie produced and starred in “The Banker” — what would be Apple Studios’ first foray into original streaming film distribution and the awards landscape — through his banner Make It With Gravy. The film follows the true story of America’s first Black bankers and the white frontman they deployed to acquire the institution, all while supporting Black-owned businesses and communities in the process. A late-breaking scandal over sexual misconduct accusations involving the real-life family members of the film’s subjects delayed the release, overshooting awards-season deadlines and entangling the fledgling producer.

“It was a good lesson, and gave me a new perspective on the world around us. It’s very important to me that the women by my side are treated equally. It was a valuable lesson learned. I was very humbled by my sisters, for once not being mean to me,” he says.

Mackie is in development on the film “Signal Hill,” about the early days of lawyer Johnnie Cochran and the theater he brought to courtrooms long before the O.J. Simpson trial, and is hoping to secure the life story of civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin as a vehicle for his directorial debut. Raising four sons of his own now, Mackie wants his off-screen work to make them well-rounded men.

“Look at Robin Williams,” he says. “He used to be crass and funny, and then he had kids, and he started doing all these family-friendly movies. Same thing with Eddie Murphy. I’m trying to curate my children’s experience with the things that I’ll be producing, rather than starring in. That’s what is most important. They know my job is my job; they know who I am. I’ve given up the idea of them ever thinking that I’m cool,” he says.

Jokes about the call sheet are among many of Mackie’s filming quirks. Jackson says that sets are often littered with hidden cigar stubs, to be fired up between takes or after long days. Bigelow says his rapport with crew has led to nights where the “clock was ticking but it was impossible to regain composure enough to shoot.” But according to Evans, no Mackie-ism is more famous than the phrase he bellows whenever his directors cut a scene: “Cut the check!”

Evans says this “will be forever associated with Mackie. I find myself saying it on sets all the time. I love it. But I’ll never be able to say it as well as him.”

As the man handing Mackie his armor, Evan says the Falcon’s “role within the Marvel universe has answered the call to action time and time again. He’s proven his courage, loyalty and reliability over multiple films. Sam has given so much, and he’s also lost a lot too. He believes in something bigger than himself, and that type of humility is necessary to carry the shield.”

The question of Sam Wilson’s humanity will be explored at length in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” what Mackie calls a deeper showcase for both himself and Stan and their characters. It was a prospect that at first confused and frightened him.

“I didn’t think we could do on the television what we’d been doing on the big screen. I didn’t want to be the face of the first Marvel franchise to fail. Like, ‘See? We cast the Black dude, and now this shit is awful.’ That was a huge fear of mine, and also a huge responsibility with playing a Marvel character,” Mackie says.

He was quickly assuaged by the level of depth in the scripts from head writer Malcolm Spellman (“Empire,” “Truth Be Told”), especially when it came to the nuances of Wilson — a Black American man with no powers beyond his badass wings.

“Sam Wilson as played by Mackie is different than a Thor or a Black Panther, because he’s not from another planet or a king from another country,” Feige says. “He’s an African American man. He’s got experience in the military and doing grief counseling with soldiers who have PTSD. But where did he grow up? Who is his family? Mackie was excited to dig into it as this man, this Black man in particular, in the Marvel version of the world outside our window.”

Mackie celebrates Sam’s relatability in a universe full of mythological gods and lab-made enforcers. “I’m basically the eyes and ears of the audience, if you were put in that position where you could go out and fight alongside superheroes. It adds a really nice quality to him, that he’s a regular guy who can go out there and do special things,” Mackie says.

While bound by standard Marvel-grade secrecy, the actor confirms there have been no discussions of a second season for “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” As the majority of domestic movie theaters remain closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, he is equally unaware of the theatrical prospects for his Falcon character — or the Captain he may become by the end of this Disney Plus run. For now, he’s content to take up the mantle left by Boseman, a quietly understood pact of responsibility to Marvel-loving kids the world over.

“For Chad and I, [representation] was never a conversation that needed to be had because of our backgrounds. There was a hinted-at understanding between the two of us, because we’re both from humble beginnings in the South; we have very similar backgrounds. We knew what the game was. We knew going into it,” he says.

Outside comic book movies, Mackie is not done searching as a performer. There is a particular genre he would very much like to cut him a check.

“My team gets mad at me for saying this, but I would love to do a cheesy old-school ‘When Harry Met Sally’-type of project,” he says. “One of those movies where I’m working outside and have to take my shirt off because it’s too hot. I want a romantic comedy. I want to do every movie written for Matthew McConaughey that he passed on.”

[placedupon]

Marvel Movies are Military Propaganda

Since 2005, the United States Department of Defense has been involved in the production of over 800 movies and over 1,000 TV shows. These films include Mission Impossible, James Bond, and the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Just a handful of the television shows paid for and associated with the Department of Defense are Master Chef, Grays Anatomy, American Idol, and the X-Factor.

This is hardly the first time the US government has lended their money and ideology to famous US films. In the book “National Security Cinema” by Tom Secker and Mathew Alfrod, they detail how “Birth of a Nation” was one of the first US military associated movies.

“One of the earliest examples of Hollywood-military cooperation was when the Home Guard provided tanks for the infamous feature film Birth of a Nation (1915), in which Black slaves revolt against their masters, before the Ku Klux Klan ride in on horseback to save the day. This was severe race hate propaganda, which came with government backing.”

(screenshot from Birth of a Nation)

Every single major American war, from World War two to the Vietnam war to the Afghanistan war, almost every US film that depicts it has been in cooperation with the United States military. Even films and shows not explicitly involved with the US military, such as NCIS, Hawaii Five-O, have accepted money from the US military, and in exchange, the military has gotten control over their scripts, allowing the US military to depict themselves how they wish.

Music Videos have also been funded and associated with the US military. Katy Perry’s music video for Part of Me, Cher’s If I could Turn Back Time, and Mariah Carey’s I Still Believe are only a few examples.

Over $20 million dollars were paid to major US networks to put “war on drugs” plots in the scripts of major TV series. Beverly Hills 90210, Chicago Hope, the Drew Carey Show, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. [x]

As explained by Dr. Mathew Alford, of the University of Bath, the scale and depth of these messages are terrifying. “What I suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major, secretive pressures that rewrite scripts — and we find they’re all on the side of the national security state. Systematically scrubbed from the screen is an unsavory century of military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated culture.”

(image from Captain Marvel, a film with some of the most explicit ties to the US air force)

But what is the effect of this? How does the US governments involvement in cinema and media affect how US citizens view the world? It’s an effective white washing of the Unite State’s involvement in world politics, as well as within the countries borders.

"Democrat-aligned voters’ opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA).

Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party, it works closely to support and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American aggression throughout the world.” [x]

More info:

Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon bullies movie producers into showing the U.S. military in the best possible light.

Is ‘Captain Marvel’ Military Propaganda?

If Torture is Wrong, What About 24?: Torture and the Hollywood Effect 

That one scene in 'Iron Man' that captures the irony of the US military's role in comic book movies

[theparanormalperiodical]

Halloween (1978) - Based On A True Story

It’s the tagline that haunts the horror film industry: Based on a True Story.

Typically, it roughly translates to “a door moved several feet so shit this is a haunted hizzle ma dudes”. Or, it represents some of the most iconic moments in paranormal phenomena.

It was Halloween (1978) that surprisingly slotted itself into the second category of films.

Halloween is famous for several reasons, indeed, it’s one of the most celebrated horror films to have graced your not-so-legal streaming site. 

It’s a cult movie for slasher fans, and it’s name has centred it as a must-watch during this season. And it’s all because it echoes out those eerie vibes of urban legends, but snaps us back to the chilling reality of pyscho-killers when we need it most.

It even started the slasher film craze that would tumble one corpse-domino into the following decades.

And it’s based on a true story.

Which, ya know, that’s fine, this is so fine, this is great.

So, it got me thinking: what was this true story? And are there any other similar stories that we need to know about come Halloween night?

Unfortunately, there are.

There are so many.

Today’s post is going to take us back to the story that inspired the Halloween series, the similar stories that bulked up the shocking reality of the 11-film saga, and the urban legends that still echo out these themes.

So, whether you’re carving a pumpkin, or piecing together your costume with a hot glue gun, settle in.

Let’s get spooky!

First, let’s recap the Halloween saga.

And lord, she’s a saga.

Across 11 movies we witness one plotline: this bloke, Michael Myres, stalks Laurie Strode.

No, he is not the lovable voice behind shrek.

And no, ‘shaggable’ is not used as a comical easter egg mid-murder in these movies.

But despite this basic plotline, normally a dash of back story is chucked into the occasional prequel-sequel-who’s-a-what’s-now to shake things up and drag it across 11 films.

Take the backstory of Laurie Strode - she’s his estranged sister, a connection which is dragged down to her daughter, Jamie. This is the central line that the series dances around.

It’s a bit like American Horror Story - you know when every season has a different setting?

There’s been a college massacre; there’s been a hospital of horrors. There’s been more reboots then Britney Spear’s career!

But pushing aside the mess of writers chipping in a line for each screenplay, and wiping off the fake blood coating the legacy of films, one thing is for sure:

We centre on a psycho-killer who defies all psychological analysis.

Michael Myers is pure evil.

That’s the point. 

It’s the true fear that I think we all have - it’s this unrelenting force that’s out to get you and will not stop, will not sympathise, will not suffer nor scar.

And so we arrive at the true story behind this phenomenon of a franchise.

Unless you’ve been stuck under a rock for, what, 40 years - no seriously, I did maths and everything - then you will be oblivious to the Halloween saga.

But for everyone else, there is only one image that pops into the head when it comes to these films - and it’s Michael Myers in his white mask, and cloaked in a blue jumpsuit.

#OOTD

And he is based on a true story.

The OG director and co-writer of the OG film - John Carpenter - was approached with the premise of a film many moons ago.

And let’s be honest: it’s more basic than I am.

The whole idea was that this psycho-killer slits bitches up on All Hallows’ Eve. Simple, right?

Well it was Carpenter that added the twist on Myers that sent this flick head-first into film history.

Carpenter was reminded of an encounter he had at University whilst visiting a mental institution. He came across a boy, maybe 12 or 13 years old.

And he had this look.

He had this look that he could only describe as emotionless, as pure evil - and this probably inspired this quote from the film from Myers’ psychoanalyst:

"This blank, pale emotionless face. Blackest eyes. The devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized what was living behind that boys’ eyes was purely and simply evil."

Oh, you thought it stopped there?

Oh, my little ghoul.

No, it continues.

Myers is believed to be complete and utter evil. And this is based on the historical root of Halloween.

Samhain is the celtic celebration behind the best day of the whole entire year. And in basic terms, it is the conflict between summer and winter, or, between good and evil.

Sound familiar?

Okay fine, every horror film - no, scratch that - every goddamn film is about the fight between good and evil.

But it’s Halloween that brings this up. Halloween drags it up from the depths of hell and puts a white face mask on it.

However, legend has it that there is another real life story that directly influenced it: and that’s the murders committed by Stanley Steirs.

Take yourself back to 1920. 

On Halloween night, Stiers went on a killing spree, going so far as to murder his own family.

Carpenter - nor, anyone affiliated with this cult series - makes mention of Stiers. But it’s safe to say that the sheer volume of murders that happen to fall (or purposefully striking) on Halloween is nothing short of inspiration.

The film might stick to the big screen, but the reality is never too far from the cinema doors.

It’s here that we turn to these real life events.

I’ve found five major events of murders, assaults and kidnapping that have collided with Halloween, mirroring the images on the big screen.

(Yeah, it wasn’t a positive google search experience.)

And none of them fall short of the actual movie inspiring this post.

We start in 1975, a mere 3 years before the original film hit the cinemas.

It was the morning of Halloween when Martha Moxeley was found beneath a tree in her backyard. She was dead, murdered via a beating with a golf club. 

It was 25 years later that Michael Skakel - then, a 15 year old body - was arrested and convicted for her murder. This story gained attention not for the gruesome circumstances of Martha’s death, but because of the sheltered, and famous life he had lived.

He was the nephew of Robert F Kennedy’s widow, and had spent him life swanning around the elite circles.

His alibi? Well, it’s just as disturbing as her death. 

He claims that the reason his DNA was on her body was because he was masturbating underneath the tree she was found under on the same day.

These themes aren’t so unheard of in Halloween - indeed, the opening scene features the uncomfortable sex scene of Michael’s sister and her boyfriend before he stabs her to death, completing his first kill.

We then jump forward a few decades, and dive headfirst into arguably the decade of the most Halloween related murders. Indeed, given the stretch of slasher films before this decades that were spiked by the movie inspiring this post, the film itself could have figured as an ambition for these murders.

And it starts in 2002.

Chris Jenkins - a student at the University of Minnesota - was last seen alive at a bar on Halloween night. Four months later, his body - still clad in appropriate Halloween get-up - was found in the Mississippi River.

This is not the first halloween-related catastrophe to be witnessed in this river. 

Obviously someone falling into a river on a infamous night of parties and revelry can be seen as either an accident, or a suicide. But it was 4 years later that the death was reclassified as a homicide.

Even though someone did confess to the police that they witnessed a murder, it is still shrouded in a mystery fit for an urban legend.

Particularly as it is rumoured to be a victim of the Smiley Face Murders.

Basically, 40 male college students in the US died of drowning around the same time, and graffiti of smiley faces was found around the sites of the murder.

The murderer was never found.

Next, we turn to a similarly urban-legend like story: the murder of Leslie Mazzara and Adriane Insogna.

It was 31st October 2004, and three roommates - including those that were murdered - were enjoying Halloween night. Having handed out Halloween candy all evening, Lauren Meanza awoke to the sounds of a scuffle at 1am.

She fled the house in fear, and turned around to see someone climb out of one of their windows.

She ran back inside, only to be greeted by the corpses of her roommates.

Nearly 1500 people became persons of interest, but it was when Eric Copple - who was apart of this pool - refused to cooperate by handing over DNA, suspicions were roused.

A year later, he confessed to the murders.

No motive was given, but he was engaged to a friend of one of the victims, creating a peculiar link that must’ve inspired the events of that fateful night.

6 years later, an Ohio teen encountered a similar situation.

He returned from a church service to the bodies of his murdered family, including his new stepfather, William Liske.

The killer behind the murders was found to be Liske’s son from a previous marriage who had a history of violence and schizophrenia.

2009 too witnessed a grotesque event.

3 teenage girls were held at gunpoint and abducted following an evening of trick-o-treating, and were sexually assaulted in a wood. Luckily, one of the girls was able to use her phone to call for help, causing the kidnapper to flee.

When he was eventually arrested in 2012, it followed a string of previous sexual assaults that have occurred since the late 90s.

Our final murder takes us to Halloween night, 2011.

Taylor Van Diest was believed to have just left a Halloween party when she was beaten to death near railway tracks.

The story only gets ever-more terrifying considering she texted her boyfriend shortly before the attack to tell him that that someone was following her.

The police eventually found DNA of the killer underneath her fingernails, leading them to the culprit.

Traumatised? Me too.

But these tales don’t end with finished cases, and they certainly don’t end with the credits of the films they inspire.

They come back to haunt us in the urban legends set on Halloween.

Clearly, halloween-inspired murders make the most iconic urban legend concept. It’s the scariest time of year, and what’s scarier than, well, murder?

One of these legends sticks to this theme, closely mirroring the film in question.

It’s affectionately known as the 1962 Idaho Massacre. The story goes a man in a black mask attended a Halloween party in - you guessed it - Idaho.

He proceeded to lock all the doors, and then murder each and every attendee of the party. Well, he is believed to have killed 7 before escaping.

He was never found. But it is still claimed that his mask was found by the FBI in 1969.

The murder train continues with the most noughties urban legend ever.

In 2008, an email chain warned people that a gang was to hold an initiation on Halloween night.

And the task that needed to be completed?

The murder of 31 women, each death a day of the month.

And in true urban legend fashion, 140 women were to be killed in another version of the email, and so the list of variants continues.

Our next tale of terror sticks to a more classic halloween story - that of the haunted house:

Well, this house either exists in Pennsylvania, Detroit, or Chicago; regardless, this is a typical and twisted tale often encountered with urban legends.

The story goes that a haunted house with 13 floors exists. I mean, fuck that’s a tall house, how did they get that signed off?

But the legal repercussions are not the frightening feature of the story.

The challenge is to make it to the top floor alive. If they do, they win some cash. If they don’t… well they're dead, so there's that.

Legend has it that no one ever made it to the top floor.

It also doesn’t exist, but anyway.

What about the campus massacres of halloween night?

Every year, from 1960 to 1998, psychics would make the same prediction for Halloween night. No points for guessing what the prediction was…

Next is the rumoured threat to animals.

Satanists have always been supposedly murdering black cats on Halloween for decades. Or maybe it’s witches capturing them for ceremonies? Or maybe its National Kill a Pit Bull Day, the all-American hoax that cropped up in 2012?

Either way: no one is safe. Not even ya doggo.

Our final urban legends prey on children, and infer that they will either be drugged, poisoned, or stabbed on some sort of sharp implement.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

These are the most prevalent legends, especially since trick-o-treating and dressing up are children’s activities, even if we all like to partake - child or not.

Some real life cases have even informed the fears that candy has been spiked with poisons, such as the case of the poisoned Pixy Stix.

It was Ronald O’Bryan who spiked his son’s candy with cyanide with the ambition of receiving a hefty insurance cash payment.

There have even been rumours of temporary tattoos being laced with LSD!

The original icon for this was a blue star, but this eventually included other unsuspecting images such as Mickey Mouse.

Cause nothin’ says drugs like Disney.

Now we turn to pointy things.

Commonly needles and razors blades are rumoured to be concealed among halloween treats handed out to kids. This was even proven in 2000, when a man was charged with concealing needles in chocolate bars.

Not convinced by razor blades? What about drugs being smuggled across borders, or handed out to children?

Fact is, these urban legends could go on forever.

They twist, they turn, they come back around full circle, and they pack up shop to move to different parts of the world.

And when we finally think we are safe from the myths and legends that haunt halloween…

Tragedy strikes.

Fact is, Halloween isn’t just based on the demeanor of one psychotic teen. 

It’s based on stories that happen year upon year, reminding us that urban legends are never too far from the truth. 

[planetofsillyhats]

A Guide to 40k Naming Conventions

General Notes on Angels, Elves, and Aliens

Our modern, western sense of what an otherworldly entity’s name should sound like--and, thus, the typical 40k fluff writer’s idea of same--draws primarily from a handful of major sources.

First is the body of supernatural fiction written in the 16th and 17th centuries by Christian mystics. The most famous of these texts is the Lesser Key of Solomon, which contains the infamous Ars Goetia--a list of demonic names that has been so ruthlessly plundered by novels, movies, comics, video games, and tabletop RPGs that it’s almost impossible to find a name on it that you don’t already recognize from somewhere else. All of these texts are, themselves, informed by the Bible--specifically, by the Greek and Hebrew transliterations of the many, many local deities that competed with Yahweh in the character’s early incarnations, and were subsequently retconned into being demonic (and thus, formerly angelic) entities. Another mystical name to know is John Dee--a contemporary of Shakespeare who claimed to communicate with angels, and learned from them a vaguely semitic conlang called Enochian, which formed the basis for many subsequent demonic and angelic names.

The second major influence on how the supernatural sounds is, of course, Tolkien--his legendarium, and the several constructed languages it was built around, are nowhere near as old, but their sheer depth and ubiquity has led them to inform our sense of the fantastic ever since they were published. It helps that Tolkien (a language nerd of incredible dedication) deliberately designed the various Elvish languages to be pleasing to the Anglophone ear, and constructed the Black Speech of Mordor to sound especially abrasive and unpleasant to same.

Both of these cultural touchstones, of course, are in turn rooted in the structure of English itself--which, simply by being familiar to its speakers, also establishes a set of linguistic elements that come across to us as unfamiliar. You can see this both in the way we parse certain other languages--like Latin and Hebrew, which each carry cultural connotations that color anything we read or hear in them--and how we try to make words and sounds that feel fundamentally ‘other.’ This is why the cliched evil space lord always has a name like Zorblax or Glorbitron or something equally silly; all those Xs and Zs and -or sounds stick out to us as obviously not-from-around-here, both because they show up so rarely in English and because they’ve been so heavily used in other, earlier “outsider” names. In short, they are the Space Noises--learn to love them.

Space Marines

The Astartes are a ridiculously diverse bunch--culturally, at least--and a full accounting of the naming conventions of every major chapter would be a paper in itself. A few trends, however, do stick out across the vast sea of pauldrons that makes up the face of 40k.

Firstly, they tend to default to a slightly generic Greco-Roman theme, with little regard for correct Latin conjugation or (in some cases) the actual established naming practices of a chapter.

Canon: Lucius; Gaius; Titus; Vitus; Julius; Marius; Cornelius; Galba; Otho; Vitellius; Vespasian; Erasmus; Odenathus; Pertinax.

Original: There aren’t any. They’re all taken. Every single one.

Secondly, Black Library loves their Goetia; since space marines are angels of death, and lists of demons are by definition lists of angels, the writers of 40k have given themselves carte blanche to sprinkle Hebrew and Enochian (or just Hebrew- and Enochian-sounding) names across the galaxy.

Canon: Azrael; Asmodai; Belial; Mephiston; Astorath.

Original: Also all taken by one franchise or another, but a few more obscure names, like Focalor and Paimon, haven’t been used for Astartes. Yet.

Thirdly, a few chapters, like the Salamanders, draw on a sort of implicit language (an “implang,” as I’ve started calling it just now and nobody can stop me) for their names; not a fully developed conlang, but a set of phonemes and syntactic conventions unique to that chapter, which evokes a shared culture without laying out the specifics of how their language or society works.

Canon: Tu’shan; He’stan; K’gosi.

Original: Nar’tesh, 3rd Company Lieutenant and famous ASMRtist.

Chaos Space Marines

Traitor Astartes sometimes follow the same general pattern as their loyalist cousins--but they rely more on Greek and Hebrew for their inspiration, use a good deal more Space Noises, and are much more likely to dip into a legion-specific implang.

Word Bearers, in particular, mix Mesopotamian and north African influences with their own Colchisian conventions to create characters that people raised in a Christian milieu can identify as baby-eating diabolists just by reading their names.

Canon: Eliphas; Sor Bakphal; Ankh-Heloth; Marduk.

Original: Tal Berath; Usor-Kehelit; Kor Lugash.

Iron Warriors love imposing sounds that evoke statuary, sieges, and lumbering prehistory, and mix a little German in for extra industrial dehumanization.

Canon: Berossus; Barban Falk; Promodon; Volk.

Original: Tallisk; Cullus Rieg; Idric Therion.

Night Lords have a particularly developed implang, thanks largely to Aaron Dembski-Bowden--there are no concrete rules, but Nostraman names and speech are very evocative of who they are and where their screwed-up childhoods happened, combining soft and harsh syllables to eerie effect. Also, bats. Batsbatsbatsbatsbats.

Canon: Jago Sevatarion; Kellenkir; Uzas; Gendor Skraivok.

Original: Mithrak; Delekiir Surmod; Tadarias.

Chaos Daemons

By the time the actual otherworldly entities of this setting got to the big pile of public domain names, the Astartes had already made off with almost every resource traditionally used for malevolent spirits and the like--so the servants of the Ruinous Powers have had to make do with bespoke names furnished for them by GW's finest edgelords. In general, this means a wild grab bag of Space Noises and more apostrophes than an Austronesian phone book--but certain trends do emerge among the followers of the different Chaos Gods. Supposedly, daemonic names are often tied to their patron deity’s sacred number, but this is rarely adhered to in the fluff.

Khornate Daemons tend to have names that sound like synonyms for anger or types of wounds, like “wrath” or “scar” or “gore.” As the daemons most likely to look and act like Balrogs, they’re also the most likely to have names that sound like Morgoth came up with them. When all else fails, just fall back on the dumbest edgy nineties bullshit you can come up with.

Canon: Skarbrand; Ka’bandha; Hakk’an’graah; An’ggrath; Doombreed.

Original: Rath’gor; Bludskar the Irritated; Skullgoroth Bloodmassacre (Blood Lord of the Skulltaking Goremurderers of Violenceheim).

Slaaneshi Daemons are soft, sensuous, and sibilant, evoking corrupting luxury and puritan sexual terror. They’re ostensibly sexually ambiguous, but they tend to come off as feminine, because only women can be evil and sexy at the same time--at least, before the watershed.

Canon: Luxuria(!); Mistress of Spite; N’Kari; Lushcrix Lashtongue; Kyriss.

Original: Sulatari; Ivress; Scivia the Weirdly Wholesome (secret identity of @jetblackraider).

Nurglite Daemons evoke medical terminology and bodily effluvia, and are the only breed of daemons whose names are even more extra than Khorne’s.

Canon: Epidemius; Horticulous Slimux; Rotigus; Scabeiathrax the Bloated; Maggotgurgle fucking Pukeslime I swear to god that is actually a real character.

Original: Count Thergothon (Lord of the Chronic Court and certified tax attorney); Phagovile the Viscuous; Gribbulous Taintsac (Founder of the Gribbulous Taintsac Institute for Excessive Medical Horror, and head of the accreditation board for Death Guard Plague Surgeons).

Tzeentchian Daemons often have Egyptian-sounding names--or, at least, Egyptian as transliterated into Greek, which is the way most people know the Ancient Egyptian language. They also have the highest letter-to-apostrophe ratio of any Daemon breed.

Canon: Kairos Fateweaver; K'tzis'trix'a'tzar; Aetaos'rau'keres; Shim'dre'lex'kazar.

Original: Azoth Flickerflame; Kheper’atos; Ix’il’kak’iz’it’xyk’ik’ak’it’l’zy’xyx the Unpronounceable (holds the current record for most planets destroyed by failed summoning attempts).

Aeldari

The original name of this faction was lifted directly from Lord of the Rings--in fact, one of the most iconic themes in the movie soundtrack is literally called "The Host of the Eldar." Accordingly, the majority of the sounds and conventions that go into an eldar name come from the Tolkien legendarium (and the many other fantasy worlds that have sprung up around it), with the occasional angelic or Space Noise element--but there’s also a good dash of both Vedic and European pagan (or at least, reconstructed Romantic-era neopagan) mythology mixed into their lore, and allusions to such sometimes pop up in their names as well. In particular, it’s normal for Craftworlds to be named after either goddesses we stopped praying to or holidays we stopped celebrating.

Canon: Eldrad Ulthran; Taldeer; Yriel; Mauryon; Craftworld Biel-tan; Craftworld Os’tara.

Original: Gilthoniex (ranger of Ulthwe who died of shame after being tricked into starring in Drukhari cuckold porn); Athembra (Iyanden Farseer who follows Tyranids around and narrates their behavior in a posh British accent). 

Drukhari

The Dark Eldar are a modern take on the Fair Folk--both directly by way of being decadent evil elves, and by the more roundabout route of being alien abductors with a thing for weirdly sexy science-torture--and their lexicon reflects this by replacing the Quenya- and Sindarin- inspired sounds of the Craftworlds with lots of fey, witchy imagery (largely derived from Celtic culture) and a more sibilant, angular set of Space Noises. They also help themselves to a bit of Sanskrit and Enochian--but with a demonic slant where their cousins might have a hint of the angelic.

Canon: Asdrubael Vect; Lelith Hesperax; Kheradruakh the Decapitator; Arhra.

Original: High Excruciator Ekritar (rose to become Archon of the Kabal of the Ludicrous Edge thanks to a body of spectacularly depraved PornWeb videos);  Rinatha Heartrend (Prima Succubus of the Cult of the Severed String, the Dark City’s foremost NTR specialists); 

Necrons

Necrons are Egyptian space robots. That’s really all there is to it.

Okay, so there’s a little more to it. Necrons draw on Egyptian themes--but like Tzeentch Daemons, it’s Egypt as parsed through Classical Greece. The heyday of Egypt occurred during the misty prehistory of Greek civilization--Pharaohs like Thutmose III and Amenhotep III knew of, and traded with, the Mukinu (Mycenaeans) on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean, but serious diplomatic contact was fairly limited. By the time the Greeks started writing anything down about the Egyptians, it was the 5th century BC, and Egypt’s sun had set. Greeks like Herodotus knew it primarily as a fading power--a helpless subject of one empire after another, fought over by foreign kings in the shadow of crumbling pyramids that nobody even remembered how to build.

Because our idea of Egypt was, for centuries, mostly informed by Greek sources, a lot of people and places have been transliterated from Egyptian to Greek--so gods whose original names were closer to User, Sutih, and Heru became popularly known as Osiris, Seth, and Horus, respectively. This slight detachment between the pop cultural image of Ancient Egypt and their actual spoken language is why Necron names can sound as much Greek as Egyptian--and sometimes, they roam even further into the Balkans and start rummaging through the Baltic and Slavic language families for spare phonemes. They also tend to be studded with Space Noises of a particularly electronic nature.

Canon: Szarekh; Imotekh; Anathrosis; Trazyn; Varagon Drakvir

Original: Nefertronus; Inenoth; Tombworld Per-Ma’akh

Orks

Like the space elves, the space orcs draw heavily on Tolkien--but they eat the hot dog from the other end, with names rooted in the Black Speech and a penchant for vaguely problematic thuggery. Orks, like Uruk, are horrible brutes who exist mostly to die in vast, anonymous hordes at the hands of a protagonist.

Unlike Uruk, Orks are funny.

Yes, I’ve read The Beast Arises. Yes, I remember the dead civilians in Space Marine. The occasional serious outing is simply the exception that proves the rule: Orks are as much British football hooligans as they are the hosts of Mordor, and every time they take center stage, it’s as shamelessly wacky comic relief that's equal parts mad science and Mad Max. Orks are the demented lovechild of Wile E. Coyote and the Mythbusters, and I love them dearly for it.

To make an Orkish name, start with either a few Mordor-ish syllables or a descriptive sobriquet, and record yourself shouting it while (timing is very important here) you’re drunk enough to fight a mailbox, but sober enough to walk away when you lose. Orks have lots of hard G and K sounds and long vowels, giving you all sorts of opportunities to shout at people and hit them over the head--and if you’re not doing either of those things, you’z not speakin’ Ork proppa, ya git.

Canon: Nozgrot; Snagga-Snagga, Wazdakka Gutsmek, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka.

Original: Killdoza (voted Best Cuddler in the Calixis Sector fifty years running, but mostly because only gretchin are smart enough to actually spell 'Calixis Sector'); Goffmawg (once stole an ultraberry pie from Marneus Calgar's windowsill); Lugnutz Boomkrasha (semi-mythical mekboy active during the Great Crusade, said to still be hurtling through interstellar space, clinging desperately to a planet-cracking warhead aimed in the general direction of Segmentum Solar).

Tau

The Tau ostensibly have their own codified naming scheme--but before that was laid down, they inevitably developed a handful of characters with silly alien-ized versions of famous Asian names. Modern Tau names are usually assembled from long sequences of one-syllable words, in imitation of the modular logograms used in Chinese and Japanese writing. Unfortunately, as it’s currently implemented, it’s kind of shallow, and there isn’t much room for different names--as evidenced by the number of Tau referred to as “Kais” in various media, some of whom are different people and some of whom aren’t.

It’s sad, honestly. There’s so much potential here, and they don’t even scratch the surface--even without leaving the Sino-Japanese Sphere of Generic Asian-ness, there’s all sorts of fascinating, lyrical things you could do with a naming scheme like this, but there’s, like, six Tau books and everyone in them is either a noble space-samurai or an inscrutable space-mandarin, so they’re all one syllable apart.

Canon: El’Myamoto, El’Hassai, Shas'la T'au Kais, Shas'O Kais, Shas'O Vior'la O’Shovah Kais Mont'yr, Aun’Va, Aun’Vre, Aun’Shi.

Original: Por’La Xiu (minor Water caste diplomat and star of the first human-Tau interspecies erotica recorded under the official auspices of the Tau’va), Fio’El Tra Buo’ren (Senior Earth Caste programming director, responsible for developing the endearing behavior subroutines now installed on all frontline drones to prevent frivolous use of the savior protocols), Kor’O Da’he Li’Lian Sou (Revered fleet strategist, architect of some of the greatest space battles of the Second Sphere of Expansion, died in his bed without ever meeting a gue’la).

[nomanwalksalone]

BOBSON DUGNUTT, OR, IN A NAME

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans

I have to hand it to my friend Hari Sakka, a member of long standing of the Pairov Institute, for reminding me of the ridiculous list of baseball player names made up in an attempt to sound American for a 1990s Japanese video game.  Among them, Willie Dustice, Sleve McDichael (which itself sounds like one of the nine billion names of Dave Ryder) and Bobson Dugnutt. Of course, this sort of cultural identity theft – the sort of appropriation that involves a dubious pose of identity, generally for the purpose of confirming fetishist stereotypes, generally works in the opposite direction – more recent examples include a Marvel Comics editor-in-chief whose secret Japanese pen name signed stories about ninjas (and was touted as an example of representation).  All of this in pursuit of what Sakka would term the tang of authenticity, or sounding to outsiders like you have the right provenance.

For all of the silly made-up Western names that we can use as an excuse for what the newspapers might call racially-tinged humor, sometimes reality needs no assistance, as the above list (in appropriate video game format) of proper Savile Row tailors’ names from over the decades shows. No invention is needed to encounter the splendidly dirty-sounding Lovegrove, Brown & Silcock, so much more interesting of a name than the sham names created by certain companies seeking to give themselves ersatz history and heritage. Because as all of the foregoing suggests, a name has power, the power to suggest belonging, and to exclude others: a mere name conjures up identity, culture, and in the case of the name Savile Row itself, craft and carefully cultivated cachet.

“Savile Row” suggests authenticity, so much so that various tailors brand themselves as the first tailors on Savile Row, or (thanks to their address), Number One on Savile Row, while others have delighted in the press dubbing them, for example, the first tailors on Savile Row since Tommy Nutter, the 1970s arrival who became famous for wild designs and patterns. As my list, none of them known even to iGents, suggests, there have been dozens of tailors in Savile Row over the years – cutters and salespeople came and went all the time, opening up shopfronts, even in a basement, in the neighborhood, or laying claim to Savile Row by meeting customers by appointment at Number 12 Savile Row, which happened to be the address of a major cloth merchant which as a courtesy would let tailors see and fit customers there. And  - when it comes to tailoring terroir -- Savile Row itself is not just the rather poky street of that name, but the entire neighborhood of mazelike side streets west of Regent Street that at one time burst with tailors. Tailors and waspish commentators made barbed distinctions between suits made by tailors in that West London neighborhood and those made by tailors in the downtown business district (the City), who were somewhat cheaper, even though they ostensibly made for a banking clientele that before the Big Bang must have been comprised of the well-off, relatively well-bred men who otherwise could have been customers of the Row.

What gave that name its halo of jealously guarded cachet was the primacy of cut and customer.  The men who made fashions, men of wealth and power and fame, once patronized it and had their whimsical orders made real in a symbiosis with the tailors and cutters there, makers who because of their prestigious addresses and clientele could charge what they liked and were expected to make the highest quality.  The rise of the cult of the designer, whose elevation floats on lucrative licenses, who sells widely available expensive, factory-made, ready-to-wear, caught those tailors off guard.  Even the largest was tiny compared to a famous designer, who no longer made their money on the couture creations of an atelier, but on items produced in their name by eyewear conglomerates or huge cosmetic firms.  Like women’s couture, classically made custom men’s clothing is not scalable.  A famous name, like those of certain famous couturiers, extendable to all sorts of other items. However, unlike their address –most of the firms, like those of the list above, are not famous enough to trade on widely sold licensed goods bearing their name.  And in recent years, some of the most successful designers, themselves benefiting from the associations conjured up by their Italian names, attacked Savile Row, and by extension all of the little-known firms associated with it, for being rooted in the past.  This attack registered because the name these tailors trade on is rooted in romantic ideas of a certain past, and associations with a certain lack of commercialism, like these somewhat odd-sounding names.  Their very clumsiness made them ring true.

Because that was what was in the name: intimations of long, dreary years spent in apprenticeship by dour men who concealed the accents they’d grown up with when they spoke to you; patterns scrupulously drafted by hand after the taking of elaborate measurements and special codes barked out to describe the embarrassing contours of your body; multiple fittings on laboriously constructed bastes involving all sorts of materials from flax to horsehair, followed by teardowns, tiny adjustments to angle or hem; sweaty pressing and shaping in back rooms using steam and irons patented in the Industrial Revolution; and emerging from the address as if from some sort of overcast chrysalis the beautiful covering promised to be an extension of self, the purest interpretation of customer dream.

And yet today that name, too, may be becoming a chrysalis, if not a husk, as those that dwell within it find themselves compromised by rising rents and a shortage of personnel who are both trained and talented. The men who set fashions may no longer patronize custom tailors, let alone those of Savile Row, and certainly not exclusively. Remaining custom tailors around the world trade on what Savile Row had come to mean: custom tailoring at its apex. Ages of myopic nostalgia for the closeness of the laborer with the product of his labor, like the 1980s and the Noughties, prolonged Savile Row’s lease on life, but couldn’t hold its rents down.  Physical address now matters less than ethos.  Latter-day Bobson Dugnutts in their made-up glory walk the Earth.  So it is that today my favorite Savile Row tailor is not based in Savile Row, but in the north of England: Steed, itself named for the Avenger, and all he stood for in playful, elegant, hard-drinking appeal. Like a handful of other tailors, the principals remain committed to the idea that the Savile Row name once meant: quality, and reputation staked on each order, no matter how large or small.  Admixed with the affability and dash that the idea of John Steed conveys, it’s a cocktail that the Avenger himself might imbibe as a pick-me-up, if only we can think of a wonky enough name.

[warholiana]

The Times (London, England)

By Roger Lewis

Huge claims are made for Andy Warhol in this massive book. He is, says Blake Gopnik, "the most important and influential artist of the 20th century", who knocked Picasso off his throne. "Andy will go down in history," one of Warhol's teachers asserts, as being "in the same league as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth, Toulouse-Lautrec and Goya as a social critic". To which the only intelligent response is a derisive: pig's bottom!

Warhol, surely, was a tiny overinflated talent, very much a product of Fifties and Sixties pop culture, whose sole insight was that lowly illustration had potential as fine art, that the transitory could be creative. Warhol believed that the "brash materialist objects on which America is built"-- such as Brillo pad boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell's soup cans, movie star posters and comic books -- had as much right to be displayed in galleries as on trash telly commercials or as props in the colourful films of Jerry Lewis.

But how did anyone think this was new? The Dadaists had been playing games with found objects, and painting moustaches on the Mona Lisa, for years. Toulouse-Lautrec's cabaret posters had long been recognised as genuine art -- and what about Alphonse Mucha, whom Gopnik does not mention? The Czech's fin-desiecle advertisements for soap or lavender water anticipate Warhol's love of packaging, his love of Fifth Avenue shopping sprees.

The Warhols, or Warholas, and before that the Varcholas, originated in modernday Slovakia, on the edge of the Carpathians. His parents emigrated to industrial Pittsburgh, where according to Warhol, "the smog would turn a white shirt black by the end of the day". Warhol was born there in 1928; as a child he was sickly -- he suffered from Sydenham's chorea (then known as St Vitus Dance), which caused twitching and bedwetting, obsessive compulsive behaviour and bad skin.

He wasn't much interested in sports -- "everybody knows that I'm a queen" -- and preferred drawing flowers and butterflies. Warhol enjoyed art class, developing, said a teacher, "a decorative quality that was very becoming". It is true he retained "a childlike directness" -- there was never anything complicated or subtle about his work. Everything is very flat.

Warhol proceeded to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in his home city, where he did a degree in pictorial design. His earliest jobs were decorating window displays for department stores, and producing campy ink drawings for catalogues and magazines. When he moved to Manhattan in 1949, he instantly received many a lucrative commission from Conde Nast and the Hearst corporation. Warhol decorated deluxe brochures, record sleeves, and even designed a bookplate for Audrey Hepburn.

Gopnik, an American art critic, follows Warhol every step of the way, from cockroach-infested cold-water walk-ups in Greenwich Village to his later Park Avenue mansions, where the rooms, crammed with antiques, were kept locked and unvisited. He was never alone, however.

Warhol's mother came to visit, to do the laundry, and remained for 20 years. She never ceased looking for a "nice girl" for him to marry.

A large part of the Warhol mystique was his personal manner, which overcame his looks. "Andy was one of the plainest boys I've ever seen in my life," said an art dealer from the mid-Fifties, "a pimply faced adolescent with a deformed, bulbous nose that was always inflamed." Yet despite this unprepossessing head topped by a silver wig -- he got his toupee in the early Fifties to cover his thinning hair -- he became an indispensable celebrity, owing more to Quentin Crisp than Henri Matisse. He cultivated a creepy, vampiric manner -- Richard Burton called him "a horror film gentleman" -- and affected to be blank and moronic, speaking in monosyllables.

Underneath the "surface diffidence", however, Gopnik assures us that Warhol was widely read and knowledgeable, well versed in everyone from Cocteau to Fred Astaire. Although he drifted in and out of lots of parties, never raising his eyes, a friend said: "There's nothing he hasn't observed." Gopnik calls him "the world's greatest sponge", sucking up experiences and influences -- and giving nothing back.

What's peculiar is that instead of repulsing people, they were fascinated. When he expanded his studio, and named it the Factory, the place was as thronged as a royal court -- even if Warhol's courtiers were chiefly drifters and no-hopers, "drag queens and queers, street hustlers and rough trade, drug dealers and psychiatric basket-cases".

Warhol found sex (his words) "messy and distasteful". Yet he may not have been as asexual as he sometimes pretended. He underwent surgery for anal warts and took a course of penicillin for venereal disease. Warhol, though, preferred to spend hours on the phone, calling friends to get lurid details of their sex lives. A voyeur, he observed the emotions of others while experiencing none of his own.

This sounds very dead, and deadening. Yet that is the effect of his art too. His famous screen prints, where he would use rubber squeegees to slop paint around photographic stencils, were of electric chairs, car crashes and deceased celebrities, such as Marilyn or JFK -- "chaos pulled from the media". Jackie Onassis is the tragic widow. Elizabeth Taylor joined the club because of her myriad near-fatal illnesses. Everything is depicted in violet pink, orange, poison-apple green and magenta. In the 2,700 images Warhol made of Mao, the Chairman looks embalmed.

In 1968 the Grim Reaper nearly polished off the artist himself. Valerie Solanas, "a troubled hanger-on" at the Factory, shot Warhol at point-blank range, annoyed that he had misplaced the typescript of her play Up Your Ass. Luckily, at the hospital, Warhol ended up in the hands of a highly trained surgeon who knew all about bullets. But Warhol's innards were wrecked (he had a "monumental hernia" and his addiction to Valium caused constipation so bad that he needed daily enemas), contributing to the gall bladder trouble that killed him in 1987, at the age of 58, the organ having become gangrenous.

The effect of the shooting was to drive up the value of Warhol's work, and by now there was a team of assistants churning out print runs of 2,500 -- multiple repeat images of Elvis or Shirley Temple, cans and bottle tops. It was as if Warhol was insisting on the virtue of monotony and banality, with pictures that were, his dealer said, "blank, blunt, bleak, stark".

When we are informed, by Gopnik, that "Warhol always talked about his love of boredom", it is fair to say there's no surprise there: the soporific effect of his prints of stamps or banknotes; his films about someone sleeping or the Empire State Building doing nothing; his fondness for tape recording inane chatter and for taking blurry Polaroids at Studio 54 -- with Warhol, form and content were as one.

Towards the end, he dumped his riff-raff followers and sought the company of minor European royalty and the Shah of Iran, desperate to secure portrait commissions. He collected Czech folk art, decorated eggs, carpets, vintage store signs, carved carousel horses, Slavonic church icons. He packed ticket stubs, receipts and Christmas cards into 609 boxes, which he called Time Capsules, the more ephemeral the better. He surrounded himself with the bric-a-brac of his own mausoleum.

Screen prints, priced at $800 originally, now fetch $105 million at auction. The estate, its headquarters in Pittsburgh, is worth billions. Although I always liked the exquisite drawings of perfume bottles or shoes, the laces and filigree and bits of gold leaf, Warhol destroyed his archives of early commercial art. He wanted to be remembered only for his society portraits, which are tawdry. Much like this appallingly bloated book, with its naff prose: "licking his lips at the prospect", "muddied the waters", "dipped a tentative toe", "to add injury to insult", "spent a pretty penny".

Asked why she shot Warhol, Solanas said: "He's a piece of garbage." His work mostly was. Up Your Ass was finally staged in 2000.

A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik Allen Lane, 930pp; PS35

[blarefilmsaz-blog]

History of Tucson Film Production

History of Tucson Film Production

The history of Tucson film production is incredibly rich. Most of the classic and most successful Westerns were shot completely or partially in Tucson. However, it did take a bit for those train robbing scenes to find their way to Tucson. In the early 1920s, major film companies wanted to secure places in USA cities. This is the time when they started getting funding from financial institutions; thus, they began to expand into different cities in the USA. Most movie companies moved to New York City and Hollywood. Other producers decided to settle in Tucson, Arizona. They wanted to take advantage of the weather of the area and the diverse scenery that would be used for video production. One of them was a desert area 11 miles east of Tucson, which became known as Old Tucson Studios. Old Tucson Studios Columbia Studios decided to build a replica of the 1860’s Tucson for the film Arizona (1940). Built in 1939 for $150,000, it was the first western studio set that brought these types of films to life. It set a new standard for how they were shot. The film was directed by Wesly Ruggles and starred Jean Arthur, William Holden, and Warren William. Ironically, after the success of the film, Old Town Studios went forgotten. It was not used again until a new trend of western movies started about 5 years later. Between 1945 to 1959, over 30 movies were shot there. Those include titles such as The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), Winchester ’73 (1950), Broken Arrow (1950), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). The Western Movie Golden Age Then, in the year 1959, an entrepreneur by the name of Robert Shelton leased the property from Pima County and restored the aging facility of Old Tucson Studios. He reopened it as a film studio and theme park in 1960. He did a great job with the big Hollywood stars of the day; “The Duke” John Wayne was like a permanent fixture in Old Tucson in the ’60s. It started with Rio Bravo (1959), followed by McLintock! (1963), El Dorado (1966), and topped off the decade with Rio Lobo (1970). Other big names followed, like Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall, Ronald Reagan, and Paul Newman. In addition to revolutionizing video production, Old Tucson Studios brought tourism to Tucson. The park added tours, rides, and shows to entertain visitors. Many film production companies in Tucson would go to this theme park for gunfights. Thus, the fans who wanted to capture a glimpse of their favorite stars came in flocks. Off The Big Screen The next way forward came from television. Tucson also served as the ideal location for shooting scenes for TV series; Gunsmoke (1955-1975) shot scenes there. Bonanza (1955-1975) also shot plenty of scenes in Tucson. It wasn’t until NBC’s The High Chaparral (1967-1971) that Tucson got its first regular television series, which was mostly shot in Old Tucson Studios. The studio served as the location of a town called Mankato (Minnesota) in Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983), while Petrocelli (1974-1976) also shot a lot of content inside the studio. However, it used the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court, the Tucson Mountains, and other areas inside the city of Tucson. Father Murphy (1981-1983) was entirely in and around the area of Old Tucson Studios. The Young Riders (1989-1992) was the most recent regular TV series shot at the studio. Action-Packed Films The ’70s saw the more big-budget Western motion pictures, such as Clint Eastwood’s Joe Kid (1972) and Kirt Douglas’ Posse (1975). However, you finally started seeing more non-Western films produced, like the Action Adventure movie Moonfire (1972) and the Science-Fiction Horror film Night of the Lepus (1972). The biggest blockbuster of the decade Tucson had was the Action film Death Wish (1974) starring Charles Bronson. Tucson’s Death Wish scenes include Bear Down Gym at the University of Arizona, Tucson International Airport, Tucson Mountain Park Shooting Range, and, of course, Old Tucson Studios. Not a Place for Just Westerns The move to use Tucson as a great movie location, aside from for Westerns, continued during the 1980s. The best evidence for this is the college cult classic Revenge of the Nerds (1984). Revenge of the Nerds used the University of Arizona and areas around the campus, the Quaker meeting house on Fifth Avenue, and the Scottish Rite Temple downtown. Stir Crazy (1980), a Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder comedy, was the first out the gate in the ’80s. Stir Crazy was shot mostly all over Tucson, but also included the Florence, Arizona prison and parts of New York, Texas, and California. The Cannonball Run (1981) and The Cannonball Run 2 (1983) both had scenes shot in the Tucson area.

Westerns Coming back Strong

There were still plenty of Westerns shot in Tucson in the 1980s and 1990s; Young Guns (1988) and Young Guns 2 (1990) for example. Both of these movies had scenes shot at Old Tucson Studios. Surprisingly, it was an Action/Comedy that helped to gave Old Tucson Studios’ most recognized building a facelift. Before the filming of Three Amigos (1986), the famous mission set was given a new facade. The mission is in many of the Three Amigo scenes, but, for many, the most memorable scene in front of that mission was the ugly slaughtering of the wedding party in Tombstone (1993). Tombstone was the most iconic Western movie of the 1990s and a box office hit. The ’90s was also the home to the sexiest gunfighter ever (according to too many male Western movie fans), Ellen, played by Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead (1995). Now, The Quick and the Dead may not have been a mega box office like Tombstone, but it was a joy to watch. Sadly, you’ll never see another Western with all of those original Old Tucson Studio elements. A Fiery End to Old Tucson Studios On April 24, 1995, a large fire broke out inside Old Tucson Studios. About 40-percent of Old Town was burnt to the ground. Some of its most famous wooden structures, which were the magic that brought the Wild West to life, were completely lost. Three-quarters of the wooden buildings were destroyed or damaged, one-of-a-kind artifacts melted, and costumes were completely incinerated. The primary suspect was an individual who was looking for a job at the studios but was not hired. However, not enough evidence could be collected to be able to convict the suspect of the arson. The Rebuild A reconstruction project was started and, after 20 months, Old Tucson Studios reopened on January 2, 1997. Those looking to see the studio completely restored were disappointed. Although new buildings went up, they were smaller and not intended to resemble the originals. The film business took a dive and, while Wild Wild West (1999) shot some scenes there, most of the production was in California. Many of the visitors that came after the fire describe Old Town Studios as a tourist trap. Here is a link to Old Tucson Studios before it was burnt down. A Better Build In 2011, The Heritage Square Project took root. It was an attempt to bring back Old Tucson Studios’ magic and allure. The area took up a 5,000 square foot spread and was built to scale, including 12 quality movie sets and three new street lines. Tucson Film Production - Today Today, Old Tucson Studios a great place to visit. You can watch a mini-play in front of the mission and there are saloon musicals like the Folklorico Dance and Original Can-Can. You can also grab a cold beer at one of the handfuls of watering holes and reminisce. That being said, movie-making at the Old Town Studios is just about dead; smaller independent filmmakers are the only ones producing films at Old Tucson Studios since the completion of The Heritage Square Project. Perhaps Western movies are taking the same direction as Jazz and Rock-n-Roll. They’re just not hip. Maybe Old Town Studios needs a superhero? Comic book movies seem to be doing pretty well in the box office these days, but whatever it needs, Old Town Studios is not getting it. As the movies being made in Old Town Studios declines, so too does Tucson’s film industry. Tucson Film Production - Outlook It has been a remarkable run. You can currently find 442 TV shows and movie titles on IMDB that list Old Tucson – 201 S. Kinney Road, Tucson, Arizona, the USA as a filming location. That number will continue to grow as long as Old Tucson Studios doesn't turn into a water park. For now, it seems like Hollywood has forgotten Old Tucson. It’s happened before, so it’s no surprise it’s happened again. The good news is that there’ll always be babies that’ll grow up wanting to be cowboys. And, just like vinyl records came back, so too will the big production motion picture companies be back. Blare Films Arizona and others in the industry will be here to provide support. Fun Fact Old Tucson Studios was not the only set to be built in Tucson for a Western film. In 1951, a move set just outside the Tucson’s city limits was built for a Glenn Ford movie. The movie itself was never completed. A few years later, the site was rebuilt into an outdoor shopping mall, theater, and restaurant complex called Trail Dust Town. It’s still in use today. This article is written by Blare Films Arizona a Tucson Film Production Company Read the full article

[catherinehathart-blog]

20 Artists Who Failed Miserably Before They Succeeded Big

As Winston Churchill once wisely said, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Anyone who has achieved anything great or has changed the world in some way has made a choice to embrace failure as a stepping - stone to accomplish his or her goals. Successful artists understand that every failure brings them one step closer to achieving their goals. Here is a list of 21 performing and visual artists who failed miserably before they succeeded big.

Charles Schultz

Before he created the beloved series, Peanuts (featuring Snoopy and Charlie Brown), cartoon artist, Charles Schultz was rejected by his high school yearbook. Rather than wallowing in self-pity, Schultz used that failure as motivation to create the comic series he became famous for. Today, the revenue from Peanuts has generated over $1 billion a year. Schultz’s high school actually went on to put a statue of Snoopy in the main office.

Walt Disney

The man who gave us Mickey Mouse and Disney World started his career as the artist nobody wanted to hire. His first animation company went bankrupt. A news editor fired him because he believed he lacked imagination. After this setback, Walt Disney decided to form Disney Brothers Studio with his brother Roy. Disney Brothers Studio later became called the Walt Disney Company. In 1928, five years after creating the Walt Disney Company, Disney created Mickey Mouse. The rest is history.

Jim Carrey

Jim Carrey made his standup debut at a comedy club called Yuk Yuk’s, which he completely bombed. After 11 years of trying to become an actor Carrey finally got his break in 1990 when he was cast on the show, In Living Color. In 1994, he got his biggest break yet to star in Ace Ventura. It was that role that helped to catapult him into stardom.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga is one of the best-selling artists of all time. She has 6 Grammy awards under her belt and 13 MTV Video Music Awards. Before accomplishing all of that, Lady Gaga was dropped by Def Jam records after only 3 months of signing on with them. Def Jam Records believed that her over the top style of dress and music would not appeal to the masses. Lady Gaga stuck to her guns and it clearly worked in her favor.

Fred Astaire

Born in 1899, in Omaha, Nebraska, Fred Astaire is another famous failure. Astaire was supposedly rejected during a Hollywood screen test. He was told that he “Can’t act. Slighty bald. Dances a little.” He kept working at his dancing and acting and was finally able to create a successful career from it.

Beyoncé

You know you’re big when you are known as the queen. But even Queen Bey experienced her fair share of initial failures before she hit it big. Before she was Queen Bey, 12-year-old Beyoncé was a member of the group Girls Tyme. The group appeared on a 1993 episode of the talent show, Star Search, and lost. A group called Skeleton Crew beat out girls Tyme and clearly Beyoncé never forgot the loss. You can actually see a snippet of that loss in her music video for “Flawless.”

In a 2013 interview, Beyoncé called the loss “a really defining moment in my life as a child.” She went on to say, “At that time, you don’t realize that you could work super hard and give everything you have—and lose.” She added: “You’re never too good to lose; you’re never too big to lose.” She didn’t allow that setback to define her and today Beyoncé has 22 Grammys to her name and is worth $355 million.

Shawn Carter aka Jay-Z

It would be a disservice to talk about Queen Bey, without also mentioning the Jigga Man himself. Although Jay-Z is considered to be one of the most successful rappers of all time, his early life was characterized by an unstable family life and a string of failures that led to him dealing drugs. Because no record label wanted to sign him, Jay-Z started selling CDs out of the trunk of his car. After every major label had turned him down, he decided to found his own label called Roc-A-Fella Records.

Charlie Chaplin

Born into poverty in 1889, Charlie Chaplin’s father abandoned the family, leaving his mother to care for the family alone. Throughout his childhood, Chaplin was forced to go to a workhouse, an institution in the UK where the indigent worked in exchange for room and board. During this time, Chaplin participated in stage plays. Eventually, Chaplin made his way to Hollywood, California where he was continuously turned away and snubbed, only later to become the greatest silent-film actor to have ever lived.

Sylvester Stallone

After moving to New York City in the 1970’s to pursue an acting career, Sylvester Stallone seemed to experience nothing but rejection and failure. People would tell him that he couldn’t act, that he talked funny, and even that he walked strangely.

Stallone was rejected at least 1,500 times by everyone that he met in the film industry. He would sit for hours on end in offices just to wait to the see the person who would ultimately reject him again. Stallone ended up homeless. He lived and slept in the bus station for three weeks while trying to save money for an apartment.

After writing the script for Rocky, he was offered more than $300,000 if he agreed not to star in the film. He refused time and again. Rocky Balboa is now the pride and joy of Philadelphia and even has a famous statue that is a major tourist attraction. You know you’ve hit it big when a major U.S. city wants to build a commemorative statue of a fictional character you created and starred as!

Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley has sold over 1 billion records worldwide; however, his rise to the top was rife with failures. When Elvis was 18-years old, he recorded a demo with Sun Records, but nothing came of it. A year later, in 1954, he recorded another demo, which also floundered. That same year, Presley auditioned for the Songfellows quartet, but was rejected. When his father asked him what had happened, Presley stated, “They told me I couldn’t sing.”

Through a friend, Elvis eventually met Eddie Bond who helped him to find a gig as a vocalist in a professional band. They arranged some recordings, but nothing came of it until months later when Presley performed Arthur Crudup’s blues number, “That’s All Right.” That performance got the attention of a professional DJ, which jumpstarted the career of the “King Of Rock And Roll.”

George Lucas

George Lucas is the creative genius behind the Star Wars franchise and the Raiders Of The Lost Ark. But his feature film directorial debut in 1971, THX 1138, lost more money than it cost to make. Undeterred, Lucas’ next film, American Graffiti, was a huge success. Even still, his newly gained clout wasn’t enough to persuade two different studios of the viability of his next project, Star Wars. Eventually, 20th Century Fox approved the script. When it was released, Star Wars went on to become the highest grossing film of all time.

Jerry Seinfeld

After graduating from Queens College in 1976, Jerry Seinfeld tried his hand at standup during an open-mic night in New York City where he froze on stage and forgot his jokes. He was then booed off the stage but he didn’t let that stop him.

Over the next three years Seinfeld honed his standup skills. This eventually led to an appearance on an HBO Special for Rodney Dangerfield, and afterwards, to a role on the sitcom, Benson. In 1988, Seinfeld created the semi-fictional series about his life with co-creator Larry David called Seinfeld. By 2002, TV Guide ranked it as the greatest show of all time.

Harrison Ford

When Harrison Ford headed to Los Angeles to establish a career in voice-overs, he failed to secure any jobs, but he stayed in the area. After two years of working odd jobs and small-time gigs, Ford landed his first role as a bellhop in the 1964 movie, Dead Heat on a Merry-Go Round. However, studio executives were rough on Ford, telling him that “he would never make it in this business.”

But Harrison Ford refused to give up. 9 years later in 1973, Ford landed his breakthrough role in George Lucas’s film, American Graffiti. Because of that role, and his relationship with Lucas, Harrison Ford was able to build a highly successful acting career. George Lucas later cast Ford in Star Wars and the Indiana Jones series.

Kerry Washington

Before being catapulted to stardom with her lead role on hit drama, Scandal, Kerry Washington was fired from a pilot she filmed after it was picked up. In an interview, Kerry mentioned that, “Before Scandal, the only other two pilots I’d ever done were shows that got picked up, but I got fired,” Washington said at the Hollywood Reporter‘s Emmy Roundtable, “They recast my character on both shows.” That would certainly be a tough pill to swallow once, let alone twice. But Washington proved that tenacity and perseverance can help you to overcome any failure.

Madonna

After dropping out of the University Michigan School of Music in order to pursue a career as an artist, Madonna started working at Dunkin’ Donuts in Times Square. That job was hilariously short-lived because she was fired on her first day after squirting jelly on a customer.

With only $35 in her pocket when arriving in New York City, Madonna searched for other work. She took random jobs, primarily as a backup dancer for modern dance troupes. One night, when she was returning home after a rehearsal, she was even robbed by two men at knifepoint. Needless to say this discouraged Madonna, but it did not deter her.

She landed small singing parts and performed with bands such as the Breakfast Club. Eventually she caught the eye of Sire Records founder, Seymour Stein. In 1982, at the age of 24-years old, she debuted her single, “Everybody,” followed by, “Burning Up,” both which became huge club hits. Since then Madonna has become one of the world’s wealthiest music artists with a net worth of $800 million.

Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg is, without a doubt, one of the most successful American filmmakers in history. Nonetheless, he was rejected from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema Arts, not once, but twice. He finally went on to graduate from Cal State University in Long Beach. Spielberg eventually received an honorary degree from the film school that rejected him and is now worth $2.7 billion.

The Beatles

The Beatles were rejected by numerous record labels including Decca Records, which said, “guitar groups are on the way out” and “the Beatles have no future in show business.” Five months after that rejection, The Beatles signed with George Martin from Parlophone and released their first in a string of hits later that year entitled, “Love Me Do.” Since then, The Beatles have sold more singles in the UK than anyone else, and have moved more units in the US (more than 177 million) than any other group.

Jon Hamm

Following his move to Los Angeles, Jon Hamm couldn’t land a single gig. He was so unsuccessful in finding acting work that his talent agency fired him. Hamm began working as a waiter and had contemplated giving up entirely on the acting business, considering himself to be a major failure at the time.

During the time he had been considering quitting acting for a more stable career, Jon found work on Mel Gibson’s movie, We Were Soldiers. It was after getting this role that he decided to stick it out in show business.

Good thing he did because he eventually landed the role of a lifetime with 2007’s Mad Men, turning him, not only into a famous actor, but a cultural icon. When he was cast as Don Draper, Hamm stated that he was at “the bottom of everyone’s list.” Hamm’s story shows that keeping hope alive can lead to amazing results.

Katy Perry

In 1999, at the age of 15, Katy Perry dropped out of high school after completing her GED in order to pursue a music career full time. She signed with Red Hill Records and debuted a gospel album called, Katy Hudson in 2001. After the album only sold 200 copies, Red Hill Records closed its doors just a few months later.

When she was 20-years old, Perry signed with another label called Java to work on a solo record, but her record was shelved. Afterwards, Perry signed with Columbia Records, and recorded new music over the next two years. But before the record was completed, she was dropped from that label as well.

Katy Perry’s big break finally came in 2007 when she signed with Capitol Records. In 2008, she released the would-be-hit song, “I Kissed a Girl.” What seemed like an overnight success at the time actually took nine years to accomplish.

Vincent Van Gogh

For most of his life, Vincent Van Gogh believed himself to be a failure. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. Despite that, he kept painting and finished over 800 pieces. Now everyone wants to buy them and his most expensive painting is valued at $142.7 million.

Luckily for the artists of today, you probably wouldn’t need to die before becoming recognized for your work.

[bryanharryrombough]

by Lindsay Nixon

In September 2016, I was asked to present on a student panel at the second annual “Building Reconciliation” conference at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. It was your usual suit-and-tie, fancy NDNs-only affair. Branding with feathers and images of happy, traditionally dressed First Nations people draped every corner of the university gym where the conference was held. Of course, these images consisted solely of First Nations peoples in regalia. Notably absent was any semblance of Inuit representation. The catering, over two days, no doubt cost thousands of dollars. There was the usual mess of useless conference swag, such as pens and notepads bearing the conference’s logo, strewn across the tables and stuffed into cheap tote bags handed out at registration—tote bags that likely ended up in trash cans, destined for landfills. And trash waste from the conference was just one small addition to its overall carbon footprint, which also included the moral, environmental and financial cost of supporting the crude-oil industry to fly in conference participants.

There was the usual fancy NDN drama too: a kind of drama that reminded me the Indigenous community present was one ultimately disconnected from the most marginalized among us. OG capitalist NDN daddy Phil Fontaine showed up hours late, the day’s agenda was delayed and the student panel was cut short. There was a rumour that Wab Kinew got paid thousands of dollars to speak. The students were paid $150 and, even then, I wasn’t paid for more than a year. When I was eventually paid, it was taxed, taking a rather large chunk of an already small honorarium. I was too exhausted from the process to follow up. Before being paid, I was accused of lying—all the students got paid the day of, the administrator argued, without even bothering to look into my request. Cool…cool…cool, cool, cool. I’m used to people in the prairies presuming I’m a lying, begging NDN, and other forms of colonial affect naturalized in the structures of those hallowed marble halls we call the academy and art gallery. But being presumed a lying, begging NDN by reconciliation conference administrators, well, that’s a whole new level of comic absurdity that so frequently mars Kafkaesque Canadian institutional attempts at this thing so lovingly called reconciliation.

But art institutional reconciliation is exactly what I want to discuss here. Because, for however many tens of thousands of dollars were dumped into that conference, a conference supposedly meant to strategize pathways to institutional reconciliation between universities and Indigenous communities, there were so many Indigenous peoples not present that day as speakers—noticeably, Inuit. The erasure of Inuit is widely overlooked in Indigenous thought (industries that sustain the dissemination of Indigenous knowledge and truth such as publishing, academia and not-for-profits). Inuit are often missing from Indigenous art, academic departments and other Indigenous institutions, as academic and curator Heather Igloliorte has prolifically argued. A predominate focus on relationship-building between universities and reserve communities—relationship-building that excludes Inuit—that best mirrors respectable institutional politics, and a politics of resurgence and nationalism within the Indigenous art canon in Canada and Indigenous studies departments, make Inuit seldom present at the table of reconciliation discussions. Ironic considering that they were one of the communities most pressed for testimony when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began interviewing residential school survivors.

Overwhelmed, and forever an ever-sick, ever-bad NDN, I ducked out of the event a few times to smoke weed with my dirtbag Métis friends. A bad city-NDN coping mechanism, sure, but that was, that is, my medicine—how I survive spaces of institutional reconciliation. Universities have always been a weird space for me. I come from a prairie city-town: small, quaint, classless, unassuming and, yes, a little basic and naive, perhaps. Even Edmonton was the big city for me. And these slick-talking institutional NDNs—holay. I didn’t know I was a classless NDN until the fancy institutional NDNs told me so. But, you know what, we prairie city-town Natives know how to kin up, how to really show up for family in the city in the same ways others performatively show up for community only through land-based forms of activism—the loudest, sexiest form of Indigenous resistance those institutions and institutional NDNs so love. I’ve always felt a little too city-poor, too loud, too brown, too fucked up, for these spaces of reconciliation. I ducked out right before my panel, and I’m not ashamed to say so. To say that Indigenous people who choose supposedly dark medicines to alleviate that pain of colonialism are somehow lesser than, to sweep their stories under the bearskin rug, is the same manifestation of shame and upward racial and class mobility they infected our parents and grandparents with in residential schools.

When I returned to the conference, and it was finally my turn to speak, I looked out into the crowd and saw some of the most respected tribal leaders in Alberta alongside high-earning Indigenous celebrities and academics. But I saw the students too. This was during the first year of my master’s, where my funding was barely enough to cover my tuition and it came from a personal grant, generously awarded to me by the only Indigenous professor in the department (and one of the only Indigenous professors at the university, at that). I would later find out that virtually everyone else in my completely non-Indigenous cohort had received departmental entrance scholarships. I rolled up to the conference with around $300 in my bank account. I mean, I had just used the food bank at my school only a few weeks before, during a delay in getting my first payout from that grant and after quitting my job to start grad school. Having heard my other Indigenous peers’ stories about living in poverty while attending university, I knew many of the other students in the audience were likely in the same position as I was. And here we were, discussing reconciliation among those perhaps most disconnected from what a healing community would entail. I remember feeling angry.

“Annie Pootoogook is arguably one of the most famous Inuk artists in Canada,” I said to the crowd. “She won many prizes and was shown in national galleries, yet still lived in the street economies of Ottawa.” I paused. “Recently, her body was found in the Rideau River.” Following Pootoogook’s death, a forensic officer from the Ottawa Police made derogatory comments about her on a public Facebook post, igniting national outrage about racist Canadian institutions that have a negative impact on the dignity and lives of Inuit. News articles circulated with images of Pootoogook in the streets of Ottawa creating her drawings. These images perpetuated the white saviour mythos that follows Pootoogook’s work—a narrative that settlers project on many urban Inuit, as if to say, Look at all Pootoogook has overcome! She has been street-involved and, despite it all, possesses this beautiful, creative universe within her mind. Of course, the white saviour gaze is dehumanizing and exploitative. It’s not concerned with oh, say, organizing for the livelihood, secure housing or continued well-being of street-involved Inuit in Ottawa, including Pootoogook. The white saviour gaze is only concerned with creating a romanticized vision of Inuit artists, one they may discursively exploit and circulate forevermore, to serve their agenda of psychic conquest. Thus spoke the pseudo-logic that is white liberalism.

My friend, with whom I had taken my medicine break, projected an image of Annie Pootoogook’s Sobey Awards (2006) on a screen behind me as I spoke. I remember tearing up knowing there were so many Inuit and street-involved people like Pootoogook missing from the table that day. I had questions: What is reconciliation? Reconciliation to whom? Who is benefiting from all the money spent on the conference? Who does institutional reconciliation support, if not Indigenous students and other peoples most vulnerable within our communities?

These are the stories we don’t tell about Inuit art, about reconciliation, even among First Nations and Métis peoples, whom I’ve found can be ignorant about the divides between Inuit and other Indigenous communities. Because they are too dangerous to tell: the stories of exploited communities voyeuristically propped up to serve industries dominated by white people and a few good (nationalist) NDNs. Inuit have experienced exploitation by art industries since James Houston implemented the first Inuit art co-op with the intention of exploiting Inuit makers and artists for a burgeoning art industry dominated by the desires of settler collectors. Houston even handed out instructional pamphlets describing what artists should make to serve the curiosity of a voyeuristic and othering white Canadian viewer. Pootoogook loved her co-op. She talked about the co-op with warmth and generosity in an interview before her death. Many Inuit still view their co-op as supportive to Inuit makers and artists in the north of Canada. It’s important to talk about co-ops without erasing the agency and truths of Inuit who still value the system. But there is a difference between recognizing settler industry–led exploitation and erasing agency. I would argue that it’s not Inuit who are profiting most from the co-op system. This is best represented by an industry standard of not giving artists resale fees on works of sold art, a practice that overwhelmingly disadvantages Inuit working in the co-op system: only the collector and perhaps the private galleries holding the work profit, as artist and curator Kablusiak has stated.

I see the same industry cultures that formed within the co-op model in the National Gallery’s destructive history of curating a specific “look” to the Inuit art collected, and discarding anything that didn’t fit this image. And it’s not just galleries that sustain an exploitive environment toward Inuit in Canadian art industries: publications, dealers, collectors, not-for-profits and more all aid in promoting an industry standard that denies resale rights to Inuit artists. When an Inuit art figure or institution is silent about the exploitative nature of the Inuit art industry, trust that their silence is driven by self-protection. Trust that it is silent complicity. This is the legacy of Inuit art in Canada, as told through the work of Annie Pootoogook. This is the legacy we, as Canadians, as non-Inuit Indigenous peoples, must contend with. And, with Isuma representing Canada at the Venice Biennale this year, it feels important to ask if Inuit art is being jettisoned onto the international stage as a continued form of white liberal voyeurism: positioned as Canada’s pretty distractions to Trudeau’s anti-Indigenous liberal policies, meant to represent the supposedly kind and diverse histories of Canada. Is this what Inuit art is, Canada? Your pretty distraction that hides, and continues, centuries of violent colonial policies and trauma?

Back at the conference, I was still trying to get my words out. My voice was shaking. But I wanted to push forward and honour Pootoogook’s legacy and, perhaps, to implicate the Inuit art industry in Canada in Pootoogook’s death. Even if what I was about to say was dangerous. I was emotional, feeling unsafe in an environment I was told I should feel safe in, and, well, a little bit high. I never met Pootoogook but I missed her, like I miss all kin who left us too soon because of the impact of colonialism on their bodies and lives. I continued to speak about my own perceptions of Pootoogook’s life and legacy, posing a rhetorical experiment about this thing we were all there to talk about: institutional reconciliation.

“The art world was a community that well-exploited Annie…then, in turn, probably walked past her in the streets in Ottawa,” I told the crowd. I wondered how it was possible that one of the highest-grossing Inuit artists in Canada, in one of Canada’s most profitable arts industries, which contributed 87.2 million dollars to Canada’s GDP in 2015 alone, died street-involved and in poverty. Who is profiting off the Inuit art industry, if not Inuit artists themselves? Pointing to the projection of Sobey Awards, I continued, “What does institutional reconciliation in the arts mean if people like Annie can’t even access so-called reconciliatory efforts because of bureaucratic and institutional barriers? To me, reconciliatory efforts in the arts seem to be little more than lip service right now.” This was an industry utterly fascinated with the propagation of her image, of what she represented to the Inuit art industry and Canada. In Sobey Awards, she depicted Canadian publics as crowding her, viewing her through literal lenses of othering and voyeuristic pleasure. Where was the Inuit art industry when she was living street-involved in Ottawa? I believe this is an industry that cherry-picked the parts of Pootoogook’s life and work that they could exploit, without offering enough support to survive the realities they saw her living every day, in Ottawa, where they centralized the operations of the same industry that functioned to exploit her. What grounds the Inuit art industry, if not ethical and responsible relationship building with Inuit artists themselves?

Some might say that we shouldn’t talk about Pootoogook as street-involved, or about the violent way she died. Some would say that talking about Pootoogook’s life and death on the streets of Ottawa is a dishonour to her legacy and memory. But this kind of judgment, which degrades people who use substances and drink, is merely a holdover of colonial Catholicism masked as “tradition.” City-kid coping mechanisms, just like Kablusiak depicts with their soapstone sculptures. Working as a community street-outreach worker in Montreal, I met many street-involved Inuit deserving of dignity and respect. There is no dishonour in being Inuit and street-involved in a world that functions to eliminate Inuit life to make way for a colonial order. Thinking about the mind-boggling figures that went into putting on the reconciliation conference, and thinking about when I was an outreach worker and the small funds we had to stretch to support as many people as we could—to prevent the deaths of street-involved Indigenous peoples who are never present or represented in (performative) spaces of reconciliation—I would argue that the dishonour lies in industry alone. And, in the case of Pootoogook’s profound work, legacy and life, the dishonour certainly lies in the Inuit art industry.

“I implore all administrators in this room to stop caring only when we die, or when there is a flashy conference about the Indigenous topic du jour. You need to start caring now,” I finished.

This is the skewed legacy we, the next generation, inherit. How do we reconcile performative attempts to make the Inuit art industry more ethical with the fact that Inuit continue to experience economic and social disparity because of that very industry? Confronting dangerous truths means confronting an art industry, and all the actors within it, that has long been exploitative of Inuit. For “SPACETIME” editors asinnajaq and Kablusiak, Inuit futures are ensuring that all their kin’s truths are heard, and that any industry profiting from Inuit art is responsible to Inuit communities.

[csprousedaily]

Cole Sprouse Opens Up About Growing Up in the Public Eye.

Cole Sprouse once left his Disney mouse ears behind for a cap and gown, but he's recently pulled on another famous hat—or, should we say, crown beanie? Sprouse returned to the small screen this year as the lovably brooding Jughead Jones on Riverdale, the CW's twisted take on the beloved Archie comics.

If you haven't heard of the Gossip Girl–meets–Twin Peaks hit, you're probably the only one. Since its premiere in January, it's become a cult favorite. If he were any other member of the cast, Sprouse might be overwhelmed with the fame and recognition. But he's been here before.

We talked to the 24-year-old about life as a child star with his twin brother, Dylan, weird fan interactions, feminism, and those divisive Riverdale ships.

A lot of the Disney cohort went on to major acting careers and projects right away—what made you choose to go to college and take a different route?

I think regardless of success, all those kids were dealing with a similar dilemma when it came to their maturity and their publicity and fame, and how they were viewed in the public eye. Some people choose sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll to come to terms with it. Some people find religion. [College] seemed like the most productive way to prove to people we were coming into ourselves. I was finding out my identity and growing by going to an institution where I could evolve and become more adept at understanding why I was thinking certain things, and how society viewed me.

Acting requires a great amount of empathy for real lived human experiences. I hadn't lived any real human experiences outside of homeschool and being in a sound stage, and there was really no other option. I couldn't continue to live in a bubble and hope to be an empathic actor. It doesn't work. I was really sick of the entertainment industry and wanted to step away. Dylan and I were nonstop—we were being recognized and it was overbearing, and I figured it would be nice to let that dissolve. I didn't know if I was going to return, and then this project sort of crept up.

Are you enjoying it now that you're back?

Yeah, it's fulfilling, and I think that's the only currency I am looking for right now. As long as it stays fulfilling, I will continue doing it, but the second it stops being fulfilling I'll leave.

What does your brother think of 'Riverdale'?

He supports the show…. I don't know if he enjoys it. This kind of programming has never really been our flavor of choice. I don't really want him to watch anything I do and I don't really watch anything he'll do. We have a very easy time separating work and play and I wouldn't really care less if he watched or if he enjoyed it. I don't really have an easy time watching myself, so I guess I sort of imprint that upon my friends and family.

Originally, you you argued to keep Jughead asexual and aromantic, as he is in the comics. What did those conversations sound like?

When we got the parts, the creative team sat down with the actors and asked how they saw each character. I had argued for a super faithful representation of Jughead as he lives in the comics, which inherently was also me arguing for the aromantic, asexual Jughead. But [they] are two very different versions of the same character in two very different universes.

It's very strange to me how much attention this [has received]. I am an actor. I have an idea of what I see for the character and I can express that idea and that opinion, but ultimately it is out of my hands. If this were a different kind of programming or it were my show, it would probably look a little bit different, but the commercial success of Riverdale and how people are talking and liking it shows that we've gone in a direction that makes a lot of sense and works.

It's one of those things that needs representation but has not been properly represented. It's something I still fight for and it's something I fought for about the second season, but ultimately it's not in my court. I guess we will see where the narrative takes us.

On a lighter note, once and for all, because the internet can't agree, is the Jughead/Betty ship called Jetty or Bughead?

[Laughs] I think it's Bughead. It's the single strangest name for a coupling ever, but it works.

There seem to be two main Riverdale fan ships: Bughead and Beronica (Betty/Veronica). Which one are you behind?

I actually really ship Betty and Archie. When I would read the Archie comics when I was younger I was rooting for Betty and Archie way over any alternative. [I think I would have seen] that long-lived, childlike romance from two people knowing each other since youth as probably quite romantic. I am a sucker for that childhood romance narrative.

I know our fans take very specific camps with who they ship and who they want and all those camps are at huge war with one another. Riverdale is about to ignite into flames considering how the camps are at war with each other. I try not to involve myself too much.

I am sorry I just brought you into it.

[Laughs] Well, the question we get all the time as a cast is, 'Are you a Betty or Veronica person?' I don't like that. I think it's hard and it also puts the cast members against one another in a strange and competitive way that makes me a little uncomfortable. So most of our cast don't even answer it.

How did your fan-catcher Instagram account @Camera_Duels get started? Are you ever going to bring it back?

I was younger and just about to go to college, and very discontented with the way people were treating me in the public sphere. Sometimes you can read someone's aura and actions—they're shifting and fidgeting, and they're fumbling for the phone. It's a dehumanizing, very obvious kind of thing.

I would always be dissatisfied that people wouldn't just ask, because I always say yes. So @camera_duels was born. It was a way of coping or trying to turn it around in my favor and give me more agency in a situation. I felt sort of like a man behind a glass wall. It ended up really helping me, so much that I stopped. I found the whole thing not to really disturb me anymore.

I am sure with Riverdale increasing ever so slowly in prestige, it will only increase in intensity and I'll bring it back. But I think it deserves something a little bit more now. I've been thinking about getting a film camera with a quick auto focus and a nice flash to make it into something that could be found in a gallery space, which I think would be more enjoyable to me.

You recently subtweeted yourself, over a comment you made as an 11-year-old, where you said you like girls who don't wear too much makeup. Do you consider yourself a feminist?

There is no question I consider myself a feminist, but I also think the term 'feminist' has become a topical thing to say without backing it up with any real action. My satirical tweet about my old opinion doesn't solidify me as a figure within a conversation that's so much greater than my straight, white male opinion. My Twitter is a joke toilet and I filter all these old, cringe-y parts of my brother and my childhood through that, in an attempt to flush it down the drain forever. When you grow older, you unpack the way masculinity teaches you to view women.

Going back to the question of whether I am a feminist or not: Yes. I think the core of that question is do you support equality for women, and of course. It's funny that it even becomes a touchy or sensitive thing for people to announce formally, it's kind of fucking ludicrous. There is not a question in my mind. There are, of course, places and spheres where I wish I would have done more to make those actions back up the title, but I think that's something that as I grow and I age and I get a little more agency within my society, I'll always try and work towards that.

[sbmcdigitalmarketing-blog]

Leadership is the challenge to be something more than average At the outset, there was humor and there was giggling. Also, it was great. In any case, at that point, work turned out to be suffocating genuine. Up to this point. There's a whole part of sociology that reviews the mental and physiological impacts of diversion and chuckling on the mind and the insusceptible framework—it's called glottology. Revelations in this field have exhibited that cleverness, chuckling and fun discharge physical and intellectual strain, which can prompt perceptual adaptability—a required segment of imagination, ideation, and critical thinking. So to get the most out of advancement procedures, for example, plan considering, genuinely inventive pioneers likewise need to ace the social elements of… [wait for the punch line}… humor! However, in the realm of authority, humor has commonly been pigeonholed as a sign of individual identities and in this manner an unconstrained and non-replicable action. Substantially less consideration has been given to the possibility that cleverness may be gained, learned and supported. We have seen that gifted pioneers, those we call "Stand-Up Strategists", comprehend the utility of silliness to support development. In the expressions of IDEO author Dave Kelly: "In the event that you go into a culture and there's a bundle of stiffs going around, I can ensure they're not prone to design anything." Obviously, diversion can be very emotional and what one individual finds funny someone else may not – so knowing your crowd is principal. It is along these lines not astonishing that business pioneers who score high in the viable utilization of cleverness as an apparatus to support development additionally tend to score high in enthusiastic knowledge. Imaginative pioneers likewise have natural energy about the four funniness styles, and see how these styles can be sustained – or once in a while abridged – in others. The initial three styles by and large produce positive feelings, while the fourth is all the more ordinarily connected with negative feelings and in this way has the most restricted application as to empowering subjective adaptability: Feeling of Fun includes a pioneer anticipating a lively, positive, fun-loving vibe, and having a by and large clever standpoint. It additionally includes the capacity to welcome the cleverness and perkiness of others. Self-expostulating humor is the demonstration of a pioneer to chuckle at him/herself through self-belittlement, over the top humility or making light of possessing accomplishments. The object is to decrease control separately. Social amusingness is tied in with boosting human communication and is utilized by a pioneer to upgrade connections. It ordinarily includes jokes or stories shared as an apparatus to decrease relational pressure, increment amiability and advance receptiveness. Solid amusingness regularly involves mockery or criticism and is utilized by a pioneer as a put-down, as an instrument for various leveled control, as a flag of predominance or to urge adjustment to amass social standards. With his Grouch Marx mustache and peculiar identity, IDEO's Kelly is famous for his feeling of fun. Any guest to an IDEO office promptly acknowledges the significance of levity in the association's way of life – without a doubt, having a comical inclination is a key basis for enrollment into the firm. Senior pioneers – including Kelly himself – are some of the time self-deploring, social conduct that decreases pecking order and power-remove and guarantees that thought originate from all positions. In any case, while self-expostulating cleverness can lessen social separation and influence pioneers to appear to be more cooperative, participative and open to their representatives, pioneers shouldn't try too hard. Studies have demonstrated that clever self-feedback works considerably less well as an apparatus to draw in with associates and bosses, and can even lessen one's believability with subordinates – if utilized exorbitantly. Social amusingness is drilled as a component of the IDEO configuration thinking process that "supports wild thoughts" to flourish. Indeed, even the most ludicrous points of view are grasped, and individuals are urged to "concede judgment". Colleagues straightforwardly ridicule disappointments identified with the ideation procedure in a way that sustains their group, inventive information. Positive funniness can likewise be used to decrease the weight of pressure-related to due dates – not to influence targets or difficulties to vanish, but rather to enhance resolve and increment solidarity of reason. IDEO grasps the understanding that people with a high comical inclination tend to encounter less worry than people with a low comical inclination, even in circumstances where both face comparable difficulties. So Project Leaders are recognized not on a premise of rank, but rather for their reputation of organizing constructive social associations between individuals – of which humor is a basic part. The fun and cleverness filled work culture at organizations, for example, IDEO is notable, yet endeavors can begin at the group or departmental level in any association – even those not eminent for having a ton of fun grasping corporate societies. Lilli Marten Christ is an enthusiastic improvement chief who works for German car firm Daimler AG in China and opens every one of her weeks after week group gatherings with a joke or a conundrum. She has discovered it a helpful approach for decreasing progression, boosting transparency and expanding dissimilar reasoning. With regards to boosting development, the mind-boggling spotlight ought to be on styles of diversion that produce positive feelings. Similarly, as there are rules for the outline thinking process at IDEO, there are implicit decides about the silliness that is satisfactory – cynicism, scorn, sexist and supremacist humor are considered totally improper. Wrong cleverness can smother individuals' innovative trust in any association – also adding to decreased spirit, non-appearance, the rise of broken inner rivalry, and even organization level reputational harm. Be that as it may, from a glottological perspective, advancement is one of only a handful couple of territories of business in which solid funniness, for example, mockery can conceivably pay profits – inasmuch as its training is restricted to conditions in which individuals definitely know, trust and like each other. Research has demonstrated that getting wry remarks and different types of solid silliness from confided in colleagues can animate imagination without impelling clash. Pixar Animation Studios comprehends the intensity of such solid companion input. It has made what it calls its 'Mind Trust', comprising of a gathering of exceedingly expert chiefs. At the point when a chief and maker feel needing help, they gather the gathering and demonstrate the present form of a film in advance. This is trailed by a red hot discourse that can last up to two hours, opening provocative recommendations and helpful feedback. The sessions are much of the time punctuated by giggling, yet no one pulls any punches to be neighborly. This works since every one of the members have come to trust and regard each other – however, the administration still effectively conservatives to guarantee that no red-lines are crossed. In these connections, solid diversion is never utilized as a put-down, as an apparatus for various leveled control, or as a flag of predominance. Revelations in the field of glottology likewise clarify why organizations, for example, IDEO, Google and Lego are putting resources into making perky and fun workspaces. IDEO workplaces are intended to empower fun and opportunity of articulation, with representatives regularly planning their own work-spaces. Elon Musk, prime supporter of Tesla Inc. has considered taking cheer at his auto plants to another level, with a plan to introduce a completely working exciting ride to carry representatives around the Tesla industrial facility in Fremont. Today, we remain at the cliff of another time. Future-molding business pioneers are re-finding the intensity of funniness as an essential driver of authoritative achievement. "Stand-Up Strategists" are pioneers who comprehend the utility of cleverness to help inventiveness and advancement. The joke is on the individuals who neglect to grab the intensity of cleverness in controlling their association's progressing significance. Author: SBMC School of human resources +91-9781027900 | +91-9878967677 SCF – 44, 3rd Floor, Phase 3B2, Mohali, Punjab http://sbmc.co.in/sbmc/ http://www.shreebalajieducation.com/ Best HR training institute in India 2.   online Hr Training in India 3.     Online HR Generalist Training in India 4.     Best institute for HR training in India 5.     Join HR training in Chandigarh 6.     Human Resource Management training 7.     Global HR training institute 8.     Global HR Certification 9.   HR training center 10.     HR training institute near me 11.     HR training center near me 12.       HR training institute near me 13.      HR training center near me 14.      Human resource jobs 15.    HR jobs 16.    HR practical courses 17. 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[katrinratto]

Logo Design Trends 2019: Your Ultimate Guide to Navigate The Biggest and Hottest Trends

�� A logo is the visual centerpiece of a company’s brand identity.

As we explained in The Small Business Guide to Creating a Perfect Logo:

At its most basic, a logo is a small, symbolic piece of artwork that represents a business. But, we’ve dug a bit deeper than that. When you set aside all the design trends and fancy fonts, at its core, a logo must:

1- Embody your brand.

2- Be instantly recognizable.

3- Be versatile.

4- Be timeless.

Everything else is optional.

In fact, I’ll go one step further. Every design choice in your logo should exist only to serve and strengthen the four items listed above. And, if you meet these four requirements, many other commonly cited logo must-haves, like simplicity and memorability, naturally follow.

You should avoid trendy logos that get in the way of accomplishing those design goals.

The truth is that not all modern logos are created alike.

A well-designed logo will help boost awareness and can improve your marketing and bottom line.

A poorly designed logo, or one that has outgrown your brand, can tarnish your brand.

That’s why companies like Uber, Weight Watchers, Unilever, and Dunkin’ Donuts periodically rebrand.

Social media optimized logos, simplistic letter play, swooshy people, pixellated designs, and bright colors were popular logo design trends in 2018.

What will be trendy and hot in 2019?

Whether you’re looking for a logo design for a new business or considering a rebrand, your contemporary logo design should feel fresh and relevant for a long time, and not dated a year from now.

17 modern logo design trends and styles in 2019

Responsive design logos

Perspective-play logos

Bright colors

Negative space

Simple typography

Illustration replacing letters

Playful designs

Detailed vintage

Monochrome hipster

Cut typography

Gradients

80’s and 90’s influence

Minimalist text

Geometric shapes

Bubble letters

Hand drawn logos

Metallic designs

1. Responsive design logos

It’s important to have a versatile logo.

Whether you print your logo on marketing brochures, outdoor billboards, product packaging, on your website, on a business card, or as an icon on a smartphone, you want your logo to be flexible and usable in different situations.

This is called responsive design.

Watch the short video below to see how responsive design works when logos are resized, and be sure to ask your designer to consider responsive design when creating your logo.

2. Perspective-play logos

Playing with perspective is a great way to challenge the norms of traditional logo design.

Businesses looking to create a splash should consider logos that play visual games.

Distortion, fragmentation, warping, and visual breaks are all interesting ways to break the mold in an engaging way.

Logo design by noi_bgt

Logo design by galanggumilar

You can even alter the kerning or overemphasize certain elements to highlight specific qualities of your logo in an unexpected way.

Clever, tricky, and surprising, logos that play with perspective will provide a definite change of pace in 2019.

One way to be sure this style works for you is to ask your graphic designer to show you some mock-ups with your logo on items.

Many graphic designers are now providing mocked-up visuals of their logo designs on a t-shirt, business cards, stationery, web design, infographic, or wall signage in addition to their beautifully rendered design.

Mockups can be a great inspiration. These supplemental materials not only help clients see what the logo might look like in practice, but they can also be used to help influence a brand identity.

3. Bright colors

Color has a deep impact on how we see the world.

Because it is psychologically powerful, color is often used to persuade or influence people:

According to a study examining the effect of color on sales, 92.6% of people surveyed by the CCI: Institute for Color Research said that color was the most important factor when purchasing products.

Another study showed that people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or thing within 90 seconds. That judgment was influenced, in 62%-90% of examples, by color alone.

Colors – especially bright colors – continue to take center stage when it comes to modern logo trends and we expect this will continue throughout 2019.

Logo design by sobur85

  Logo design by glamaz0n

Bright red conjures up feelings of power and risk-taking, and electric yellow highlights adventure, enthusiasm, and youthful energy.

Bright colors are easily used by any number of businesses.

Make sure you choose the right shade and don’t be afraid to amp up the vibrance in 2019.

Want to learn more about the importance of color in logo design? We recommend you read:

How 21 Brands Use Color to Influence Customers

How Color Influences What People Buy

Small Business Branding: What Color Says About Your Business

4. Negative space

What’s simple, but complex at the same time?

Logos that use negative space in creative ways are an interesting way to explore simplicity.

This trend continues strong into 2019, and for good reason.

Logos that use negative space have been around for a long time, and some of the most famous ones have become iconic.

The FedEx logo is perhaps the most celebrated negative space logo. The arrow between the “E” and “x” is clever and underscores that FedEx is about moving objects from one place to another.

Using negative space to hide a shape, image, or text in a logo can add an element of surprise and sophistication.

Logo design by Jet

  Logo design by marhizza21

The added layer of complexity can elevate a simple design into something memorable and striking.

It’s a powerful technique that rewards the viewer and can help create word-of-mouth buzz as people share their discovery with others.

If your brand needs something to be simple and complex at the same time, try using negative space in a new or novel way.

It’s one place when we can have our cake and eat it, too.

5. Simple typography

Simple design is hardly a new trend.

With clean lines and memorable presentation, it’s easy to understand the draw of simple logo design.

Established brands with more complicated logos are taking stock of their brand identity and re-evaluating how they can bring a fresh perspective to their aesthetic.

Simplifying an existing logo is an easy way for businesses to build on their foundations – ironically, by stripping them down to their visual cores.

Some logos (including the crowdspring logo) are made up entirely of text – these are called lettermarks, logotypes, or wordmarks.

Simple typography can be very effective and memorable.

But not any font will do. You can’t just plop your business name under your logo mark in a serif or sans serif font like Helvetica, Times New Roman or Comic Sans (please don’t!) and call it a day. Often, you must get creative with the type treatments to personalize the design.

We’ve seen brands like Uber undergo redesigns recently, whether to strip down overly ornamental logos or to move away from tarnished reputations.

Whatever the reason, simple typography can give your existing logo a contemporary, modern facelift or create a contemporary new brand.

6. Illustration replacing letters

In a world where emoji are increasingly replacing text-based conversation, it’s no surprise that logos are adopting a similar concept into their designs.

In 2019, we’ll see more logo designs incorporate illustration as part of the design.

A company that adopts this strategy should be careful that the illustration doesn’t make the name unreadable. After all, it’s impossible to create awareness and build loyalty if people don’t understand your logo.

And be sure that this style works with your brand. A traditional, staid institution would look out of place with an affable llama in place of an “h”.

A forward-thinking, tech-based business should incorporate imagery that feels modern and cutting edge.

Logo design by VGBDESIGN

  Logo design by sodik20

  Logo design by kps

In 2019, logos that are designed with illustrations substituting letters are likely to be founding increasing numbers. They are appealing to a variety of businesses for their versatility and memorability.

7. Playful designs

Comic Sans walks into a bar.

The bartender says, “We don’t serve your type here!”

Playfulness in design, much like a good joke, is engaging, fun, and unquestionably memorable.

Businesses are rightly focused on getting a logo that has long-term staying power. However, lasting design doesn’t have to mean boring design.

Having playful visuals that offer unexpected, clever designs can have a major impact on customers.

  Logo design by kayagraphics

  Logo design by surip

Logo design by newziner

In 2019, you can expect to see designers playing with metaphors, puns, and innovative concepts in their logo designs. These logos make everyone take a second look at a product, and add a fun element into a business’ persona.

8. Detailed vintage

Sleek, minimal designs have had a strong grip on trending logo designs in recent years.

It might seem surprising, then, that 2019 brings exceptionally detailed, beautifully crafted logo designs.

Brands that want to create an aura of vintage sophistication and authenticity are looking toward intricate, detailed illustrations to represent their artisan, handcrafted, top-shelf products.

Having a detailed looking logo conveys the craftwork evident in a marketplace focused on offering similarly detailed products.

Logo design by Seaside

  Logo design by miamiman

The food and beverage industries are especially drawn to the lux, detailed design work trend, and for good reason.

Wine, spirits, and other artisan treats all naturally fit this logo trend.

Any natural, organic, house-made products and businesses can benefit greatly from a super detailed, vintage influenced logo.

These works of art are sure to be appearing on our screens and lining wine racks in 2019.

9. Monochrome hipster

How many hipsters does it take to design a logo?

It’s a really obscure number. You’ve probably never heard of it.

Crossing arrows, handwritten typefaces, and richly detailed design work all define the visual makeup of a hipster logo.

These logos are largely monochrome, choosing to focus on lines and typefaces rather than bold color choices to make an impact.

The vibe-heavy logos lean in on individuality, culture, diverse backgrounds, and any element that contributes to a carefully constructed impression of authenticity.

Logo design by estefano1

Logo design by third

  Logo design by Ana_Osijek

The hipsters still hold heavy influence on logo trends, and in 2019, you can expect to see this continue.

10. Cut typography

Typography plays a huge role in logo design.

The font you choose has a powerful impact on how your brand (and your company) is perceived, as we’ve discussed before:

Typography is an effective way to convey more than just the words involved in written communication. It showcases personality by visually representing the tenor and tone of what it is you’re talking about. You may find that your purpose is best met by using a font with a vibrant personality throughout your website or using an amalgamation of sans and serif typefaces.

In 2018 we saw companies invest time and money to create custom fonts for their brands: Netflix debuted Netflix Sans, Uber got their Move on, and Airbnb poured themselves a bowl full of Cereal.

We’ll continue to see this trend grown in 2019 as companies reject available serif or sans serif fonts and create their own.

For companies that didn’t have the budget (or interest) in creating their own custom typeface, another type-based trend is gaining popularity.

Called “Cut”, this trend sees brands taking type and literally cutting part of it away, leaving behind something new.

Logo design by subur

  Logo design by Bingo

  The venerable news site Slate used this to great effect with their major rebrand.

It’s a simple but effective technique that reshapes how type is used in logo and brand design.

If you want a look that’s straightforward but with flair, think about what you can cut.

You might find that less really is more.

Be sure your graphic designer understands this.

11. Gradients

Gradient design has become a top modern logo design trend in the last few years. Even Firefox is getting on board with their latest logo update.

“This year has seen a growing trend towards the use of gradients within logo design,” says brand identity designer Helen Baker.

Instagram kicked off the gradient frenzy when they updated their logo two years ago and adopted the simple, but striking, trend.

While initially derided, Instagram’s update wound up prompting an onslaught of gradient-using designs – from web design, to print design, and in 2019, logo design.

Logo design by artStudioDesign

Colorful, attractive, and striking, gradient logos use color in a way that appeals to, well, everyone.

You know you love them, too.

But be sure that you select complementary colors that can bleed into each other seamlessly. Don’t choose colors randomly.

12. 80s and 90s

“What’s old is new again” is a trend we see every year (except for bug puffy hair from the 1980’s, thankfully).

Which decade gets the spotlight changes based on what’s hot in other areas of pop culture, and for 2019, it’s a mix.

In 2018, the 80s were on-trend, and this continues into 2019 with one change: This time, the 90s are along for the ride.

The pastel shades of the 80s are joined this year by bolder colors that defined the decade of Lisa Frank, the Spice Girls, and Mary-Kate and Ashley.

Logo designers mine the past for colors, typefaces, and styles and then add a unique twist, bringing a modern feel to something brimming with nostalgia.

If you want to anchor your logo design in something wistful, take a look at brands inspired by the 80s and 90s. They’re like, totally rad.

13. Minimalist text

Minimalism still holds center court in 2019.

The need to use logos on a variety of platforms and interfaces makes this trend an appealing one, and it’s easy to understand the staying power minimalism has had in recent years.

Text-based logos with minimal typography and the occasional supporting graphic allow businesses a great deal of flexibility. Whether geometric, colorful, monochrome or subtly illustrated, minimalist, text-based logos are easy on the eyes and easy to adapt.

Logo design by vovking

Logo design by Hennyca

By using only the brand’s name in a design, these logos translate smoothly on business cards, websites, apparel, and anywhere else our minimalist hearts can dream up.

14. Geometric shapes

Logos are, at their cores, symbols.

A great logo acts as a visual representation of a brand’s personality, values, and purpose.

Every element of a strong logo must communicate these things clearly and memorably.

Geometric shapes can work as powerful, memorable symbols. As we wrote,

Geometric shapes of all kinds look man-made. Mathematically precise squares, perfect circles, and isosceles triangles don’t tend to appear in nature. So, using these shapes communicates a sense of order and power.

  Logo design by subur

Logo design by IM3D

Logo design by AlexandraKovacs

  With bright color choices and invitingly arranged shapes, the geometry trend is both minimalist and friendly.

But a simple geometric line design is a logo element that doesn’t work for everyone.

Logos must be distinct.

Zendesk uses geometry in very unique ways, branding its various products with complementary geometric branded symbols.

  The balance of the engaging color palettes with strong geometric shapes creates a pleasing mix of trendy and timeless logo designs.

In the age of the nerd, it really is hip to be square.

Just keep in mind that simplification can sometimes undermine your efforts to make a brand identity distinct.

This is a problem because your modern logo must also reflect your brand. This is where blindly following this geometric logo trend and designing a logo based on a shape can fall short for your business.

15. Bubble Letters

If your brand needs a bit of fun and energy, this trend might just pop your bubble.

Blown up typography was a common trend in the early 90s, especially in advertising and on TV (thanks, Full House!).

Like many other trends from the past, designers have started to incorporate bubble type in their designs, often mixed with modern elements.

This technique is an easy way to turn an otherwise static font into something bursting with personality.

Bubble type is often paired with bright colors and other vibrant elements to help reinforce the logo’s playfulness and energy.

But be sure your company’s name is readable. Not all bubble fonts or font treatments are easy to read.

Logo design by Ikhsanabrori

If your brand is all about spirited fun and good-natured joie de vivre, playing with bubbles might just balloon into something big.

16. Hand drawn logos

Custom, hand-drawn artwork will see a comeback in 2019.

The abundance of readily available, free to use stock art has heavily dominated the logo scene during the past decade.

Having access to cheap and accessible stock art catalogs or templates to design made finding logos easy for businesses of all kinds.

However, with ubiquity comes, well, ubiquity.

There are logos containing generic stock art on every street corner – seriously, we dare you to take a look. Notice any swooshy people hanging around? How about those omnipresent rooflines in real estate logos?

It’s hard to stand out from your competition when you share the same logo.

A generic logo will hurt your business.

Generic stock art and templates should not serve as design inspiration and you should never use elements from those designs in your custom logo design.

We feel strongly about this. Crowdspring has always had a rule that no stock art, templates, or generic art can be used in custom logo design projects on crowdspring.

The increased demand for custom logos has lead to an interest in hand-drawn artwork for logos.

Having real illustrations provides brands with a personality that generic stock simply can’t offer, and smart businesses are taking notice.

Logo design by nuliser

Logo design by lenty

We’re excited to see hand drawn logos become a major player in logo design in 2019.

17. Metallics

Metallics are worth their weight in gold for logos in 2019.

Whether a brilliant platinum, a shiny gold, or a romantic rose gold, you can expect to see these luxe designs in increasing numbers in the coming years.

It’s easy to think that metallics should be reserved for jewelers, but the broader use in recent years has made metallics accessible to businesses of all kinds – so long as your branding suits high-class luxury, or a truly classic look.

Logo design by wings63

The prestige and elegance associated with metallics are surprisingly versatile, and the powerful impact they make on consumers?

That impact is worth its weight in… gold.

Are you ready to embrace logo design trends and styles in 2019?

Logo design trends and logo design styles can offer a great way to breathe fresh life into your brand.

However, as with anything, it’s important to exercise caution.

You don’t want to carelessly update your brand for the sake of trendiness and wind up with a logo that doesn’t resonate with your business or market.

When you’re looking through 2019’s logo design trends, make sure that trend represents your brand thoughtfully, and can be integrated into the rest of your existing branding.

We’re happy to help – let us know if you’d like a free design consultation with our team.

  from http://bit.ly/2E28mTj

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Brooke Shields: ‘I got out pretty unscathed’ | Fashion

Brooke Shields has just got back from a lunch at the Lincoln Center, to mark the opening of New York fashion week. At the event, Whoopi Goldberg honoured American designer Thom Browne with an award, and as Shields settles on a pink sofa in the all-white photographic studio where we meet, she tells me she can’t get Goldberg’s speech out of her head,

“I don’t know how old Whoopi is, but she’s got to be 60 or something… She said that it wasn’t until a few years ago that she started feeling comfortable in her own skin,” Shields says. “She’s standing up there and telling an entire room of Fashion Institute people, and Anna Wintour, ‘Think of all the time we waste not feeling good about ourselves.’ You know? It’s exhausting.”

At 52, Shields is in great shape, her athletic 5ft 11in frame maintained with daily workouts and sessions of ashtanga yoga. When the American luxury publication Social Life magazine asked her to pose in white Calvin Klein underwear for a photoshoot this summer, the resulting cover image went viral, setting the fashion world abuzz with rumours that Shields was about to appear in a new campaign for the label she had made famous back in 1980. Attending the Calvin Klein show at New York fashion week in February this year, Shields was mobbed by people wanting selfies with her. Among the guests at the Lincoln Center lunch was Martha Stewart, who marched straight up to Shields and told her, “I can’t wait to see you in Calvin Klein underwear.”

“I said, ‘Well, thank you, but that sort of happened as a fluke.’” In the original Calvin Klein ad, the one that launched a thousand imitations and became the gold standard for controversy-courting ad campaigns, Shields had asked, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” So the underwear shoot, she says, was “kind of an in-joke. You know, what answers that question?” Besides, she says, “I thought, I’d never done underwear – it might be kind of a good message to be a 52-year-old being proud of everything, and being a mom, and working hard at staying in shape… We were just enjoying ourselves.” She gives a look that is at once dismissive and amused – a kind of what-can-I-do-if-I-still-set-the-fashion-world-ablaze shrug.

In the 1980 Calvin Klein ad, shot by Richard Avedon. Photograph: the Advertising Archives

In person, Shields is filterless and funny, hamming up the same vein of self-parody that proved so winning in her more recent comic outings on TV, in Suddenly Susan and Lipstick Jungle. She has just signed on to do five episodes of Law And Order: SVU – “Maybe more if I manage to stay alive,” she smiles. But despite the headlines, she hasn’t agreed to appear in any new campaigns for Calvin Klein. She was approached by the label’s new creative head Raf Simons last year, for her permission to use the 1980 image, shot by Richard Avedon, to be printed on shirt labels.

“I can show it to you,” she says, fishing out her iPhone and bringing up the iconic shot of her, scissoring her feet in the air in jeans so tight they look painted on. (Some stores provided sofas so that customers could lie down as they shoehorned themselves in.) In the TV commercial, Shields memorised and recited an excerpt of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, only to find the subject popping up in a quiz in her science class at school the next day. She got an A.

“I was 15 – it was 37 years ago. You know, it was a lot of work. And I wanted Dick [Avedon] to be proud of me. You just wanted a gold star, you know?”

Pretty Baby, 1978. Photograph: Allstar

The Blue Lagoon, 1980. Photograph: Rex

Endless Love, 1981. Photograph: Rex

Long before Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears, Shields was the most famous teenager on the planet. A shampoo model at the age of 11 months, she appeared in her first film at the age of nine, lit a blaze of controversy when she played a pre-teen prostitute in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978), and went on to appear in The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love (1981) – teen films sweet enough to give you toothache. In 1981 alone, Shields graced the covers of more than 30 magazines. A chaste pin-up, she peered out from her lustrous mane of hair, exotic but innocent, a lip-glossed naïf in a culture that has long sought to reconcile competing strains of libertarianism and puritanism. Shields’s virginity, proudly proclaimed in her autobiography, On Your Own, published when she was 20, was something of a national obsession. As was its eventual loss to her college boyfriend and future Superman star Dean Cain, at 22.

“I was famous from the neck up,” she jokes. “All the focus was on the eyebrows or the cheekbones, so you can imagine how easy it was to become a virgin.” She catches herself and laughs. “To stay a virgin, there was something very safe in that. It was a really interesting disconnect. You sort of desensitise yourself to anything sexual. In Blue Lagoon, I’m using a glue gun, taping my hair, anything I can so my body doesn’t show I have boobs… And I didn’t realise I was doing it, because I was a kid. I was in a cocoon with my mom. You know, we were one summer away from Grey Gardens.”

Shields detailed her enmeshment with her mother Teri, who was also her manager, in her unusually candid 2014 memoir, There Was A Little Girl. Her parents had divorced when she was five months old, and Teri raised her daughter alone in Manhattan. A glamorous, life-of-the-party alcoholic, “she drank and cursed like a construction worker” and would sometimes drunkenly haul Brooke out of bed in the middle of the night for a heart-to-heart or a dressing down, or interrupt journalists in the middle of interviews because her twentysomething daughter needed to “go tinkles”. Guarding her daughter’s virtue around the clock, she took control of her career, fending off agents and suitors alike, fearing that it would spell the end of her control over “little Brookie”. “I didn’t know where my mother ended and I began,” wrote Shields, whose immaturity was part of the “brand”. When the Brooke Shields doll rolled off the production line, her mother insisted that they alter the torso to represent her flatter chest. Yet she also pushed Shields towards sexually risque material – commissioning a photographer to take nude photos at 10, the role in Pretty Baby at age 11. Wasn’t she playing with fire?

At an Andy Warhol book launch at Studio 54 in December 1979. Photograph: Bettmann

“She tapped in to that, but by the same token, she wanted it to go away. It was a really interesting disconnect. I didn’t know she was so broken until later in life. She was so amazing on the one hand, but she was so broken.” Now, says Shields, whose mother died in 2012, she looks back and wonders: “Did I want it easier? No. I never wanted anything easier. I do sort of regret having hairdryers with my name on them and a Brooke doll and all these failed endeavours that were cool to do in the 1980s. I mean, what kid says, ‘I love my hair so much that I’m going to create a hairdryer with my name on it?’ Never once was I thinking, ‘I really want to do my own line of clothes.’”

Shields lost herself in her work. “If not for the entertainment industry, I would have been a train wreck,” she writes in her memoir. “The movie business kept me afloat and sane.” On movie sets, at least, her mother could be counted on to behave. Shields’s fame felt bigger than her mother’s addiction. She herself was notably abstemious. Hanging out at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol and Grace Jones, she stayed drug-free and was always in bed by 10pm. She platonically dated George Michael (“Nobody had ever been willing to move so slowly. It must be love,” she later said) and was friends with Michael Jackson. When the roles started to dry up, Shields headed to Princeton, where she earned an honours degree in Romance languages. After graduating and ending her relationship with Cain, she briefly dated Liam Neeson, before meeting Andre Agassi in 1993. The pair married in 1997 but the relationship ended two years later with the revelation that he’d spent part of it hooked on crystal meth. A classic co-dependent move, I suggest: marrying the man who reminds you of your alcoholic out-of-control parent.

With her mother Teri in 1980. Photograph: Ron Galella/WireImage

“Yes. Perfect. And no matter how you try to therapy yourself out of it, there’s clearly something on a cellular level that needs to work through. I think I got out pretty unscathed. Yet I also think I couldn’t have even been with my [now] husband had I not been in that relationship with Andre.”

She’s spent so much of her life running after other people’s chaos, cleaning up: does she wish she had come off the rails more herself?

“Oh yeah. I mean, I’m sure there’s still time, but somehow I didn’t become a tragic figure,” she says. “If I had I would’ve been celebrated. I could’ve come back from the brink and then they’d be like, ‘Oh wait, she seriously wants to be an actress’ or, ‘She’s really got talent.”’ Shields married television writer Chris Henchy in 2001 and has written about the postnatal depression she suffered after the birth of their first daughter in 2003. “Was that my going off the rails?” she asks herself now. “Not really, because it wasn’t a choice. I think my version of addiction was fear of losing control.”

With first husband Andre Agassi in 1994. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

A compulsive cushion-arranger, Shields says she fights a losing battle with her neatnik instincts in the Manhattan town house where she lives with Henchy and their two daughters, Rowan, 14, and Grier, 11. Both girls are now roughly the same age Shields was when she first started playing teen Lolitas – a milestone not lost on her. “I want to put a chastity belt on my girls, I get it,” she smiles. She’s finding it particularly difficult with her older daughter. “I’m going psychotic about what I’m dealing with, with men looking at her and looking at her body… I mean, this is my 14-year-old! At the top of the stairs I can see her rolling her skirt up. I’m like, ‘Unroll your skirt.’ It’s a constant negotiation.”

Yet, she says, her relationship with her own daughters couldn’t be more different from the one her mother had with her. “It’s like, ‘What do you mean you don’t think I walk on water? How dare you be so independent? Why are you so healthy?’ I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I raised you like that?’ All of a sudden I’m jealous of my own kids because I’m thinking, ‘How dare you be so normal?’ You know?”

‘I love making people laugh. It gives me such joy.’ Photograph: Philip Gay for the Guardian

She and her daughters were watching Miley Cyrus perform on The Voice recently (Shields once played Cyrus’s mother in the Hannah Montana film), and she marvelled at the artist’s transition from Disney tween to sexually uninhibited pop icon. The assurance of today’s child stars is startling to her. “To see what she’s done with this princess, basically, adding this explicit, explosive depth to her persona. To see her just get up and start dancing – you watch it and you think, ‘That’s so cool. How did you do that? Where is my version of that?’”

She pauses to think.

“It came in comedy for me,” she says, with satisfaction. “I’ve got zero censorship. There’s something that takes me over physically and I don’t remember a lot of it. Maybe I substituted a little bit of that sexual energy there.” She laughs. “Well, isn’t it chocolate, laughter and sex all release the same endorphins? I love making people laugh. It gives me such joy.”

Cast as a quirky magazine columnist on the television show Suddenly Susan in 1996, Shields earned two Golden Globe nominations and a producer credit; and in 2008 played a movie executive in the alpha-female comedy Lipstick Jungle, adapted from the Candace Bushnell novel. She also played Joey’s delusional stalker in an episode of Friends – which involved maniacally licking Matt LeBlanc’s hands and giving him a passionate kiss, which she later wrote enraged Agassi so much that he smashed up his trophies. Comedy seemed to free her – the chaste teenager whose innocence was a national institution had turned into a blowsy comedian va-va-vooming it across the screen, complete with Lucille Ball-like pratfalls and double-takes. In comedy, she got to perform a kind of voodoo on the Brooke Shields doll.

With second husband Chris Henchy in March 2017. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Shields says she was in Starbucks recently when a young woman asked her, “Can I show you a picture?” and brought out a photo of a for-sale maroon two-door 1983 Mercedes SEC she had recently taken in Jersey City. There was a bumper sticker that read “I ♥ Gstaad” and at the bottom of the sign, in parentheses, were the words “Previously owned by Brooke Shields”. It was the car Shields had bought for herself, two years after making Endless Love.

“Can you believe that? It’s dumb. You’re going to sit on a seat that I sat on? It’s creepy. It’s weird, right?”

She tracked down the seller and rebought the car. Her brother-in-law repainted and repaired it, and Shields now drives the Mercedes around on Long Island, where she has a house. Take it as a symbol of her reclaimed identity. These days, she will sit in meetings with companies who are interested in working with her, and keep hearing the word “brand” – “Well, it’s your brand, it’s your brand!” – and she’ll realise with some pride that, for the first time, her brand is bound up with her and her longevity, not her hair, or chest, or youth.

“I can sit at a lunch today and not think, ‘Oh, I’m so lucky to be here.’ I can think, intellectually, I can have a conversation with anybody. I’ve been around so long, I’m not scared to go and talk to Anna Wintour or whoever. And then I can also say, well, you did have an impact on the fashion industry. And I’m a mom, and I’m a businesswoman. I can go into these meetings now, and I’m not looking over my shoulder saying: is somebody on to me?”

• Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).

Styling: Bobette Cohn, assisted by Katherine Askerova. Hair: Dominick Pucciarello. Makeup: Meredith Baraf, both at Bernstein & Andriulli. Digi tech: Joseph Bourduin. Above: dress by Sonia Rykiel. Necklaces by Fruzsina Keehn. Top: sweaters by Sonia Rykiel. Rings by Ayaka Nishi and Kalevala Jewelry

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4 Killer Typography Tips from the World’s Biggest Brands

When words and letters are printed, they have to wear the clothing of a typeface. Like our fashion industry, typography has its own trends, famous designers, and also fashion faux pas’s..

Just as wearing crocs and lycra to a business meeting is probably a bad idea, writing your resume in Schoolbell or Comic Sans isn’t likely to set the tone you’re hoping for.

We not conscious of it, but whenever we read anything, we are doing it through the someone elses’s visual styling decisions and this deeply impacts on the way we perceive the message. There have been countless studies analyzing the power of typography. From the way people scan through documents to the power of certain fonts to manipulate the way we think, results have pointed to the influence of font choices on cognition.

As a marketer and a typography enthusiast, I’ve always been intrigued by the complex connections between fonts and our decision-making process.

Now, I know I’m not the only one to talk about typography and branding, but I think there are four interesting tips you may not know about.

1. Less Means More

Websites like Medium, [Teamweek]www.teamweek.com), and DevTasker(a website I worked on) are like yoga studios from a typography perspective.

The information is blindly following the KISS design principle(Keep It Simple Stupid) and it makes it extremely easy for the user to grasp what’s going on.

However, avoid being simple in a dull and repetitive way. With the flat design, minimalism, and Helvetica on the rise, designers tend to limit their capabilities to safe design techniques which usually lead to plateauing.

The same way that printing more money isn’t the solution for poverty, adding more information, or text in our situation, isn’t the solution for a lack of clarity in their message. The most valuable asset a brand can provide anybody today is clarity and simplicity.

You see, despite your constant pursuit for creating top-notch content, grabbing your user’s attention is a hassle if your content isn’t aesthetically pleasant. SocialMediaExaminer is one of my favorites examples for content cannibalization. They have millions of people reading their innovative articles and the quality of their content is terrific. However, the information is a bit cluttered.

Having content written in different fonts popping out from everywhere leads to ‘content inflation’.

The actionable advice here is: try to say more using less content, and if you find that difficult to do or impossible, well…

2. Create a Unique Brand Experience

Typography in branding is important because it carries the message of the brand. Very often you can actually understand a brand’s identity just by looking at the typography before you even read the words.

Big brands are looking for a font that can be read globally and expressed everywhere. A brand font should have personality. It should be legible for an eight-year-old as much as for a sixty-year-old. It has to be used in print and digital regardless of the size and format.

Creating an innovative font and developing a unique brand experience is really hard to achieve. It’s not just 26 letters and the English alphabet, it’s about expanding it into a variety of systems and languages.

To be completely honest, creating your own typeface isn’t something that you should pursue if you are a startup or a local brand. The logistics of creating a font are simply horrendous and Samsung can relate.

When they designed the Samsung One font, they wanted to unify the visual branding across multiple platforms and formats. This font’s purpose is to reach and be imprinted in the consumer’s mind as being Samsung’s visual personality.

Samsung is not the only company who designed their own font. Google is known for their famous Roboto and Apple has used their own adaptation of ITC Garamond the Apple Garamond which has been used for more than 18 years as their corporate typeface.

Even Donald Trump has his own font and it’s called ’ Tiny Hand’. The font is a satire created by the folks from BuzzFeed and it copies the handwriting of the Donald.

Also, if you want to learn more about branding and typography, I recommend following Designhill. They offer amazing tips on how to create an awesome brand experience, and they are your go-to guys if you are looking for a good graphic design marketplace.

3. Be Practical and Legible

Believe it or not, choosing an ink-friendly font like Garamond in the detriment of Helvetica or Times New Roman can actually help you save a lot of money. If you work in some sort of institution or if you’re printing tons of documents everyday, you should consider the fact that ink is more expensive than perfume.

Sadly, buying a new printer can often be cheaper than refilling the cartridges, considering the fact that one litre of printer ink is about $5000.

[caption id="attachment_146416" align="aligncenter" width="624"] Font choices can cost money.[/caption]

But being legible isn’t just about making the font bigger or about letter spacing – although that might play a part.

Continue reading %4 Killer Typography Tips from the World’s Biggest Brands%

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