#v. a catalogue of modern mistakes [modern]

[stellarstolen]

-- tag drop.

[singlesablog]

Have a Nice Day: The 1970s

“Alone Again (Naturally)” (1972) Gilbert O’Sullivan Epic Records (Written by Gilbert O’Sullivan) Highest U.S. Billboard Chart Position – No. 1 

To think that only yesterday I was cheerful, bright and gay Looking forward to who wouldn't do The role I was about to play But as if to knock me down Reality came around And without so much as a mere touch Cut me into little pieces

Leaving me to doubt Talk about, God in His mercy Oh, if he really does exist Why did he desert me In my hour of need I truly am indeed Alone again, naturally.

                                    – Gilbert O’Sullivan

Welcome to my childhood.  “Alone Again (Naturally)”, certainly one of the most depressing songs ever recorded, was my first most favorite record ever.  I remember it playing at the Boys Club of Savannah over the loud speaker in the gym along with all of the other groovy, long-haired country-tinged soft rock oozing out of the airwaves at the time.  It is a song about a young man being jilted at the altar, swearing to himself he will throw himself off a tall building soon, and then about the unexpected death of a parent and a mother mute with grief…and I loved it.  I would wander around the Boys Club with my own mute, melancholic fantasies of sorrow and loneliness, oblivious that most boys my age were still into Snoopy and Bubblegum music.  Listen: it was the 70s—no subject seemed off limits.

The open of the song is Sullivan’s signature broken piano style, something that sounds like a mistake but by being repeated within the song ends up as a very effective method of expressing brokenness itself.  Gilbert was Irish-born to a working-class family and moved to England as a child; his actual mother ran a sweet shop and his father was a butcher.  He was a natural musician, and intent on pop success he invented a Chaplin-esque, waifish turn-of-the-century affect: suspenders, shorts, a tilted cap. By the time of “Alone Again…” he switched to an even more ridiculous 1920’s college prep look, sporting V-neck sweaters with a large silly G pasted on them.  No matter; the songs spoke for themselves, little dour slices of life with old-fashioned melodies and a vintage feel, and proved enormously successful: he was the top star of 1972.

I mention this because it feels as though Gilbert’s catalogue is as lost as his records once sounded.  In America he is rarely mentioned (or so it seems to me) even though he had 3 top ten hits in the US (a second single, “Clair”, reached no.2 that same year, followed by a slightly funkier song in 1973 entitled “Get Down” that made it to No.7).  He was Grammy-nominated that year for Song of the Year and Record of the Year, along with Roberta Flack (for ��The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”) which she won (deservedly) for both. It is astonishing to my adult self that these two records exist in the same universe, much less the same year, Roberta’s record still feeling endlessly modern and fresh, and O’Sullivan’s feeling like it belongs in the Norton Anthology of English Literature instead.

This is not to diminish Gilbert in the least (he is still alive and working and, of course, very famous in Japan, like all the major/minors are).  If I happen to hear this record it is just as wonderful as it ever was, and it will still fill the 7-year-old in me with those wistful feelings of chances lost and memories of being jilted, even though my only real tragedies up to that point consisted of finding that the milk had run out for my Cap’n Crunch cereal that morning.  And yet I would still find myself wistfully kicking around the empty basketball gym, avoiding all of the other rowdy boys, just waiting around to see what the 70s had in store for me, and surreptitiously absorbing all of those groovy tunes ricocheting across the gym.

_

“Alone Again (Naturally)”, besides being a well-covered and highly regarded song (Nina Simone recorded a version), is notable for another inflection point in history: in 1991 O’Sullivan sued rapper Biz Markie for prominently using the piano break in the Hip hop song “Alone Again”.  Gilbert won 100% of the royalties for the rap song, and this would help to establish the industry standard for clearing (and paying for) any sample by another artist, which has changed the music business to this day, for better or for worse.

[stellarstolen-a]

@kiingbuilt gets a thing

      Maia sighed loudly, ensuring she had his attention. “Can you tell your guys I am more than just a cute distraction? I mean, it’s definitely flattering. But if I ever go down, it will not be as accessory to anything.” She leaned over the back of the couch looking at him. “This is what I do.” Used to do, she reminded herself. Would be doing. If they would let her. She held out her hand and curled her fingers toward herself. “I’m good at this, let me prove it.” She leaned closer, one finger pulling at her lip. “I’m good at other things too.” She raised an eyebrow, locking eyes with him for a moment, then turned away with a laugh. She was only half kidding, but it had become a game to turn on the charm and see how far it could get her. Not with the others though, they didn’t take her seriously. She certainly wasn’t going to give them another reason to look down on her. “I’ve been saving up, I could leave if I wanted to...” She paused. “But I don’t want to leave. I want in. For real.”

[stellarstolena]

❛ No one will ever keep us apart again. ❜ criminal modern

reign prompts // accepting – @azhefa​

          She lifted a hand to wipe the blood from her busted lip, realizing too late her hands were also blood spattered. Not hers, but the man she’d stabbed. He lay dead at her feet, his accomplices nearby each with a bullet hole or two. Maia didn’t spare them a second glance, they’d gotten what was coming for them. “Either my view on kidnapping is skewed, or they didn’t know how to do it right,” she said, stepping over the bodies. Her tone was light, as if she hadn’t spent the last two days getting the shit beat out of her. “The last time was much more fun.” Roan was standing in the doorway, still holding his gun. She’d been in the midst of orchestrating her own escape, when he’d burst in guns blazing. But she wasn’t going to complain, they both knew she was no damsel in distress. Besides, she didn’t need any more bruises, she was sporting plenty as it was. Maia draped her arms over his shoulders, and looked up at him. “Never again,” she agreed. “I’d like to see them try.”

[idesignedthefjords]

RSS Fic: Picture Perfect Bride

Recipient: @thestraggletag 

Prompt:  Arranged Marriage Modern AU

Notes: It’s my very first fic ever, so I hope you like it :) I had a really good beta; @avatoh who saved the day XD 

Summary: Maurice French, no longer wanting to take care of his daughter auctions her off on a mail-order bride website. Mr. Gold responds to the ad.

Belle was standing in the middle of her luxurious hotel room, looking at herself in the mirror. She looked beautiful in her wedding dress. It was a lace dress with a plunging V neckline. The bodice accentuated her slim waistline and had cap sleeves. Her soft skirt had lace flowers with tiny dots made of golden thread in the middle. Her hair was in a messy braided bun, with some baby’s breath braided in. She did not recognise herself. True, she looked like a typical beautiful blushing bride, but her face told a different story. She already had to redo her make-up 3 times, because she kept messing it up with her tears. Her lips were sore from gnawing on them; she had already drawn blood.

Just two months ago, her father decided that he had enough of her living in his house. He was dating a new woman, just two years after her mother passed away. He wanted to start a new life with her, and Belle was taking up precious space. “I just want a fresh start, Belle!” he told her on the same night he introduced his girlfriend He also had admitted that he didn’t think she would be able to live by herself. Yes, she had some mental issues in the past, she had been admitted to the hospital when her depression took the best of her. But that was in the past and she was building a life for herself; going to college, making friends. Maurice on the other hand, still believed she wouldn’t be able to cope by herself; “You aren’t getting any younger Belle, and neither am I. I can’t take care of you forever and you are nearly 25! It’s someone else’s turn now. Why don’t you get married and live with Gaston? He can provide for you; his family has money. You won’t have to look for a job anymore or go out with your shady friends to some disgusting bar.” She became so angry with him that he threatened to lock her up in the hospital again. “You are leaving this house, with a husband or a straightjacket and that’s final!” When she still refused to marry Gaston and screamed that she would rather marry a stranger, her father put her picture on some mail-order bride website. She still felt her cheeks burning with shame when she thought about it.

She had never expected him to do such a horrible thing, but she saw the page he had ultimately created for her, complete with a few happy pictures from her past and a brief description about her studying Library Science and a few of her hobbies which he had made up to appeal to possible suitors. Her father showed her the page with great pride even. “Look Belle, already multiple interested men! I’m going to pick the richest man though, only the best for my daughter!” Belle was so disappointed in her father. She couldn’t believe he would treat her like cattle; to be sold to the highest bidder. No wonder he thought Gaston was a suitable option for her; they were both equally misogynistic. She sort of accepted her fate in some strange way. If marriage was the way out of her father’s house, then so be it.

After a month of being on display on this awful website, someone with enough money had responded and her father agreed to make a deal. The man could marry her, if he would pay the rent for Maurice’s struggling flower shop for the next 5 years.

Her life was being exchanged for some bushels of roses..

--------

“Do the brave thing, and bravery will follow,” Belle thought when her father guided her down the aisle. She held her head up high, and stared towards the end of the aisle, keeping her eyes focused on  the priest. She didn’t notice, or pay much attention, to the other important person on this day; the man she was about to marry. He almost mirrored her body language when she finally looked at him. He too was staring at the priest, his back towards Belle. She could see the tension in his back; he was also nervous about this whole situation.  His legs were slightly parted and she could see he was leaning on a cane. He looked vaguely familiar but she couldn’t see his face.

When they reached their destination at the end of the aisle, Belle turned her head away when her father tried to kiss her cheek. She vowed she would never speak to him again after this day.

When she turned to face the groom for the first time, a shock went through her. It was Mr Gold! Mr. Gold was going to be her new husband! He wasn’t a complete stranger to her, afterall, but she knew his reputation and it wasn’t good. He was the owner of the pawn shop in town and her father’s defence lawyer when he was being sued for copyright infringement regarding his shops name, “Game of Thorns”. She had seen him a couple of times but hadn’t really spoken to him except for the occasional ‘good afternoon’ and ‘good evening’ when she ran into him around town. He had been nice to her in the past though. So he was the one she was being sold to. She knew more than enough about his reputation and the gossip surrounding him, and for a moment she was even more scared of him than of Gaston. But at least Mr Gold was smaller than Gaston and he had a limp. So she could outrun him is she needed to.

She was still in shock when they spoke their vows and it all went past her like in a haze. She didn’t realize it was over until she heard the priest say “You may kiss the bride.” Belle’s eyes went big with fear and she tensed up. She was going to have to kiss him! Gold gave a tiny, shy smile when he looked at her he finally leaned over he gently kissed her next to the corner of her mouth; nobody else seemed to notice he failed to kiss her a few inches shy of her lips..

Her friends weren’t invited to the wedding, so soon, she found herself in the backseat of a limousine. Mr Gold, her now husband, was sitting next to her playing with his flip phone. The wedding went by her so fast that she didn’t even hear a thing.

They arrived at their honeymoon location at the Boston Harbor Hotel an hour after they finished up signing all the papers to legalize their marriage, Mr Gold checked in while Belle was waiting by their suitcases. She was worried about what would happen on their wedding night. Would Mr Gold would expect something to happen between the two of them? Perhaps this is why he had wanted to marry her all along… Belle shook her head. He had a bad reputation, but he wasn’t a bad man, from what she knew of him. If this was the cost of her escaping her father, however, then it was a small price to pay.

When they reached their hotel room, she noticed there was, as you might expect from a honeymoon suite, only one bed.  There was, however, a small sofa in the corner by the window and a desk. Mr Gold walked over to the sofa and suggests “I can sleep here on the sofa tonight, if you’d like-”.

At the same time Belle blurted out “-So how do you want to do this?”

“Excuse me?”  Gold asked surprised.

“What?” Belle was confused. “I assumed you wanted to have a... “proper” wedding night. Consummate the marriage? I mean, that must be what you were after. Why else would you marry me? I know your reputation, Mr Gold. You find weakness in people and exploit them for your own gain. Me having had a mental illness is a weakness. And when my father put me on that awful website, you knew I was vulnerable. You found me and knew you could exploit me,” She spat at him angrily. She wanted to cry.

Mr Gold sighed and sad down on the sofa looking tired. “Belle, I’m disappointed you would think such things of me.”

His use of her first name made Belle feel powerless. She still had yet to know his.

“You see the good in people and I expected you to be better than just go by some rumours when judging someone.“ He started to explain: ”I saw you on the website; Maurice sent the page to every single one of his business relations. I was disgusted he would do this to you; selling you off to the highest bidder like that. So I decided to marry you just so you could get away from Maurice. Because I know you are capable of so much more. I just needed to get you out of that house. I wasn’t exploiting your weakness Belle, I was exploiting Maurice’s weakness; his love for money and his carelessness for you. I couldn’t sue him, because these mail-order bride websites are technically legal and I had to get you out of that house as fast as possible.”

Belle was even more confused now. “But where do we go from here? You got me away from my father, but now what? I have nothing to give you in return. I have no job, I’m homeless, I can’t even go back to college because father stopped funding it.”

Gold walked over to her and placed his hands on her arms, trying to reassure her. “You can have a home with me. I have a spare room for you in my house. And soon you will have a job. You’re studying Library Science, correct? I’m in the process of securing funding for the Storybrooke library, in the meantime you could help me out in the pawn shop. I have a lot of antique books that need to be catalogued and sorted. And if you want, you could save up some money to finish your degree; I’m not going to stop you” he laughed, “You can have all that, that is, if you spend just this one night with me.”

The blood drained from Belle’s face. So he did want to consummate this marriage. She tore herself away from his touch and took a step back. Gold realized his mistake “It was a quip, dearie. I didn’t mean… you misunderstand. I meant we have to sleep in the same room together. I can take the couch, it’s fine.”

He immediately limped back to the couch, to make sure she would understand that he was indeed intending to sleep there.

“No wait!” Belle apologized. “You don’t have to sleep on the couch, especially when you have been so kind to me. We can share the bed. It’s big enough and I trust you. Unless you don’t trust me?”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” Belle had made up her mind.

They took turns using the bathroom, and when they finally settled in their shared bed and the lights were out, all the emotions from this day washed over Belle and spilled out. She had started to cry again and hoped Gold wouldn’t notice her silent sobs, but she suddenly felt his hand searching for hers and he carefully held it, drawing circles with his thumb in comfort. Belle hadn’t felt this kind of kindness for a while now, and she rolled over to him in a hug. He tensed for just a moment, but relaxed as he rubbed her back. Soon they both fell asleep. They could make this work.

AO3 link

[lethesomething]

A note on fictional jobs

There's a joke that all fanfic characters are either baristas, teachers, lawyers or some denizen of the tattoo/florist au set. This isn't really fully true (there's also witches and vampire hunters!) but for anyone going for a realistic setting, let me at least, as someone who has worked a number of jobs in media, software development and catering, give some pointers on how that stuff works, because dear lord does Hollywood get it wrong.

This post is 2k words, so under the cut it goes.

Journalism/Photography/Media

General tips

This sector seems to be pretty popular in old school comics, and for good reason. Clark Kent gets to go out into the city and be near events. It's a job women are historically allowed to do (and be sassy in) and even Peter Parker gets to just traipse around the city getting into adventures.

It must also be noted that all these characters were developed in the first half of the 20th century, and media has changed a lot since then.

If your character is a journalist, they will work long hours and not be paid *that* much. Carrie Bradshaw is the most unrealistic journalist character in the history of everything. Especially after, oh, 2010 or so, when the traditional press sales really started declining. No journalist is that well paid for that little. And none will have that much free time.

Journalists generally have a beat, and what they do and know heavily depends on that. Your character can get into the gritty streets of downtown chasing drug dealers, or they can go to theatre premieres. They won't do both. The Vast Majority of modern media have beats. A person can be a sports caster and then he will go to sports events to report them. They can be a jetset reporter or restaurant reviewer and go to swanky places. They can be a cultural reporter and be invited to premieres and shows. They can be a dedicated business journalist, reporting on IT, or cardboard logistics, or whatever, and go to conferences around the world. But they will rarely be all these things at once.

How wide this beat is, depends heavily on the 'range' of the medium. Big news rooms, like NYTimes, have a lot of journalists, and some very, Very specialised ones. This is deep dive, spend weeks trailing every leak out of the White House stuff. In contrast, a small regional tv station can have their reporter (with or without a camera man and sound tech) drive around the countryside reporting on pumpkin carving festivals one day, and grisly murder the next.

A lot also depends on the medium. If the character works for a newspaper, they will have a noon to eight shift as a writer, and a two to ten shift, most likely, as an editor, because papers need to get printed overnight. If it's a weekly or a monthly print mag, there will be a few days with relative freedom to do interviews and such, and then a few days of crunch time. If they work for a news website they will have a desk job and most likely work in shifts. TV and radio news people are the ones doing most of the running around to get quotes, but they are also on the tightest of schedules.

Speaking of schedules. Unless the character is a blogger, they won't finish an article and immediately rush it to the printer/publish it. Reputable news sources have, at the very least, a copy editor to check for mistakes and typos. Bigger newspapers and magazines and sites have a dedicated fact checker.

Very VERY few papers in the world have full time photographers on the payroll. If your character is a photographer, they will most likely be a freelancer and do corporate events or weddings on the side (sorry Peter Parker). What happens is, a medium will decide in advance which article or interview will require a picture, and book a photographer for that piece.

Any other pictures tend to come from news agencies. Think Reuters or Associated Press. These sort of agencies do use full time photographers, as well as freelancers who happen to visit an event. They'll take like two hundred picture and sell them to the agency, who distributes them to media all over the world.

Few media have the money for correspondents, so they'll pick only a handful. This means a foreign correspondent has a large area to cover. European news media tend to have one correspondent in the US, covering the Entire US, for instance. American media tend to have more moneys, but if your character is a respondent in, say India, expect them to trek along India a lot, because they're prob the only one in that vast country.

Having said that, coverage, especially war coverage, is super expensive. If they're sending a journo to a war zone, it will absolutely not be a rookie. They will have proven themselves capable, preferably speak the language and they'll be Very Prepared. Think local guides, vast networks of informants etc. A startling amount of war reporters and investigative journalists are also freelance. If they are trekking through a jungle and come across anything exciting, you bet they'll try to sell that story in several angles/versions to different media.

Have you considered:

Bread and Butter Freelancers: It's a gig economy my friends. Freelance writey people don't have a boss and usually work from home or from some coffee shop. If they are to be successful (enough to make a living), they'll still have a beat, and will actually have to be fairly good at this subject. Since these characters make their own shifts, they do have the ability to go out in the middle of the day to do superheroing or witchery or to investigate the disappearance of their best friend. Upsides: Freedom. Downsides: Usually very little money. Unstable hours, like one day nothing and then a week of 14 hour days. The crushing stress of looming deadlines ànd job insecurity.

Copywriters: The people that write the text on corporate websites, that fill mail order catalogues with entries for every picture, compose newsletters for various organisations, turn technical instructions into actually mildly readable user manuals. Upside: money. If they're good at it, they will have a fairly stable income. They have the same freedom as freelancers to go flirt with flower shop assistants. Downside: the crushing knowledge that with every piece you write, your soul sinks deeper into the void. Anyone who's ever read clientsfromhell will know what to expect of their clientele.

Lay-outers: The creative side of making media. The bros making the graphs, putting the text to paper,  photoshoping the head of Putin onto the body of a baby, whatever. Upside: artist character. This is a slightly more realistic character than the 'painter'. They're creative, but they have yet to sell their soul to the corporate machine (depending on the medium you put them in, of course). Downside: this is basically a desk job with stable hours.

Cameraman, sound technician: the people that hang out with the news reporter and trot all over the region with him/her. Upside: see the world! Without being instantly recognizable. Downside: they're probably stuck in their mission and they rarely have the power to go 'hey, let's investigate over there'.

 Software development

General tips

There's actually a few different environments for software engineers to work.

Start-ups: the hip one. Think Silicon Valley, the upstarts in sneakers and Star Wars t-shirts living on pizza and red bull and basically coding 20 hours a day. Depending on where they are in the growth of their start-up, these people will be nearly alone, or have a team of coworkers. Traditionally, start-ups start with like a founder (or four) and an idea, and some coding. As the company grows they'll hire a sales person to sell this stuff, a marketing manager to brand it, a support person to troubleshoot it, an HR person, etc.

A very Very VERY large part of start-up business is pitching, aka selling your premise to a bunch of venture capitalists and investors. It's Dragon's Den. Literally. Your super shy, autism spectrum character who hates public speaking and who can't even look at another person without blushing would make a super crappy start-up founder by themselves. They will definitely need their bubbly, motivational speaker best friend. On the other hand: this is an amazing environment for that suave, smooth talking character who could sell sand in the desert.

Second environment: corporate. The vast majority of software engineers out there just work for some big company. These are the people building and deploying management system software for banks, installing security in factories, that sort of thing. A lot of the time they're consultants. They wear a suit. They use something called the Waterfall method, which sucks out your soul, or the Agile method, which also sucks out your soul. There's a lot of managing and meeting and progress reports. If they're good enough, they're allowed to leave the tie at home.

Software needs to be tested. You don't just write the code last minute and put it live.

The coders are absolutely not the only people in a software development team. There's the project managers, the designers, the copywriters, the testers, the lawyers, oh god, the lawyers, etc.

Software Needs to be tested. It takes ages. I cannot stress this enough. It usually happens in India or some other Asian country where the wages are lower.

Will a lot of environments, even corporate, allow their creatives to come to work in like… jeans and a t-shirt, the only people realistically allowed to actually act like teenagers, in any environment (corporate, start-up, small business), are the ones with skills that are very hard to find. In essence: security experts and specifically white hat hackers. Yes, you're allowed to have a hacker character that acts dumb and comes to work in his pyjamas and it will be realistic that he does not get fired. Your clerk character that's super rude and deals in hurtful quips? Not so much.

SOFTWARE NEEDS TO BE TESTED

 Have you considered:

Researchers: you know those people that made a song that can give Alexa commands without the owner knowing? Those are university researchers. A lot of really cool stuff is being developed not by office workers, but at universities. This includes software. Upside: probably a looser environment, with a lot of young people. Downside: you're basically writing a college AU.

Venture capitalists: in a Silicon Valley environment, this is basically the 'wealthy businessman' stereotype of old. The dragons in the dragon's den, the people that traipse around the city talking to people and assessing the potential of their pitch, before throwing money at them (or not). There's a bunch of paperwork, but they probably have a small army of accountants to handle this.

Evangelists: the cool people that hold TED talks. They usually work for a big tech company, as a specialist, and part of their job is to be a spokesperson.  A good example of this is the tech researcher, who has a day job finding nasty hackers or viruses, and who also blogs about that and holds talks and presentations about securing your business. A character like this has the advantage of being a deep tech nerd hacker type. They're rarely the CEO, so they can go deep into the coding, while also travelling places and meeting crowds of press or business people.

Project managers: these don't tend to do the actual coding, but they do, well, the managing. Characters like this will be more social and creative, they're the ones making the reports and presenting their progress to the CEO, and they're the ones troubleshooting when stuff goes wrong. In general, there's a lot of planning involved.

 Bakeries/Catering

General tips

Mass production of food is gruelling. You think you're writing about your sexy pastry chef and how they're carefully, tip of their tongue peeking through their lips, putting a cherry on top of that little moeilleux, but in reality, there's two hundred more to finish on this rack alone and they need to be done in under an hour.

Say it with me, people: baking is a night job. Industrial baking, mom-and-pop rural French bakery, bagel shop, donuts. Someone is going to be making all that stuff before the first customer arrives and that someone is slaving in front of a hot oven at four in the morning.

Any type of catering is a time management business. You know this. You've all watched Great British Bake-off (or, like, Chopped or whatever). If your professional cake maker is only working on one project/wedding at a time, they're not going to be in business for long. Your line chef will be plating up several dishes per minute. Your short order cook is baking six pancakes and scrambling eggs at the exact same time.

Unless it's a very large kitchen, the people that cook are the same ones that clean. And since it's food prep, there is a lot of cleaning.

Have you considered:

Recipe writer: ok so we're kinda back to media but big tv chefs don't make all those recipes themselves. Someone, usually a freelancer, writes them and tests them. Imagine someone getting the request to develop a seasonal cronut recipe that involves peaches and charcoal, because it's hip, and then baking several batches until they find something edible. This is a somewhat realistic environment for your super creative baker to live in a small house and make some money while also working on a book on the side, and falling in love with the quirky … goat… herd… brewer, florist, whatever.

[ts1989fanatic]

WATCHING Katy Perry promote her new album by exhuming the three year old feud with Taylor Swift highlights just how differently the two women operate.

You would imagine Taylor Swift would have to be held at gunpoint before she agreed to be filmed for 72 hours, including sleeping.

Perry’s one-person Celebrity Big Brother is a very curious experiment in the limits of self-promotion.

While she’s had publicists swat away anyone asking about Swift for years, in the last few weeks Perry has ripped the Band Aid off the scab herself.

Perry confirmed Bad Blood is about them (Swift never named names) and that she clapped back with her Swift-bashing Swish Swish.

During her live stream this weekend, Perry — in an interview with Arianna Huffington, founder of celebrity-driven website Huffington Post — offered up what she knew would be instant global clickbait — “I forgive Taylor Swift”.

Mission accomplished.

It should be a celebration of her surprisingly experimental new album, but Perry herself has made the narrative about Taylor Swift again — smartly keeping her in news cycles.

It started with her Carpool Karaoke — the headlines following that were Perry doing a CSI of the feud. Turns out it was actually a fight over communal back-up dancers — hardly Tupac v Biggie or Bette v Joan. Ryan Murphy isn’t going to make a Feud over this.

Giving the drama oxygen is smart crisis marketing (with Witness getting so-so reviews, her singles flopping and a string of publicity faux-pas) but a dangerous long game.

Swift has spent her career carefully constructing a public image; a reliable brand.

She deliberately refuses to reveal who her songs are about, citing the Carly Simon You’re So Vain blueprint. 45 years on, people are still discussing who that song is about.

Make no mistake, Swift throws shade, she just seemingly does it in the shadows.

She deliberately told Rolling Stone Bad Blood wasn’t about an ex lover, but a female pop star, thus starting a debate she then withdrew from, at least in public.

Swift’s team are saying her back-catalogue landing on streaming services on the exact same day as Perry released Witness was a total coincidence.

Even if that was true, they knew that chess move would give ammunition to those who see her as a snake — as well as promote Swift’s music on Perry’s big day. Once again, Swift is letting her music do the talking — thanks to cunning timing.

Release dates are a big deal in the world of music, and Perry’s has been fixed for a while.

The two women actually have a lot in common. Both realise they have a large fanbase of pre-teen girls; Swift keeps herself nice, Perry sings about sex, often in thinly-veiled metaphor. However they’ve both championed supporting other women, even if that’s been ironic at times.

Swift went to Max Martin — who steered Perry’s first hit I Kissed a Girl — for her first flirtation with straight up pop, We are Never Ever Getting Back Together, then her country-free pop album 1989.

But Swift has always been clever about knowing what to show and what to hide. Mystery is increasingly powerful in the modern share-all era.

Perry’s Big Brother/Truman Show experiment seems to want to rip back the curtain and show an exaggerated version of what an A-list pop star does while in promotional mode.

The problem — the curtain is there for a reason.

No one is interesting enough to carry a 72 hour show themselves — Perry has strategically surrounded by herself with guests, many using the airtime to educate and uplift whoever is watching and talk. Good on her.

But there seems to be a lot of Perry doing her make-up and being surrounded by people on her payroll. The entourage of yes people paid to keep the golden goose happy. That’s what your life as a pop star is; there’s always an assistant two steps behind. They’re just usually never seen.

Perry is one of the first pop star examples of the backlash that came from publicly supporting Hillary Clinton.

Swift, who came to prominence in country music, was notably silent on Twitter during the US election.

It’s increasingly brave for a celebrity to be so open about political issues — and increasingly dangerous for a career.

Trump supporters have continually trolled Perry on social media; the singer suggested her new music would be more socially conscious, or “woke”, however beyond single Chained to the Rhythm, the album is more relationship driven.

Perry talking about her ‘white privilege’ on her live feed, frequently, will trigger conservatives even more.

Read the online comments on any Katy Perry or Miley Cyrus have done lately and you see why Swift remains silent.

In the end, no one really wins from Taylor v Katy’s schoolgirl pettiness. Unless you look at the chart — Bad Blood was a global No. 1, Swish Swish peaked at No. 35.

So far only Ruby Rose (a former friend of Perry) has acted as any kind of Swift spokesperson on the feud.

If Tay and Katy’s ratchet hatchet can be buried, that first picture of the two women together will be worldwide news in this weird new world of ours.

But don’t be surprised if that photo op does happen that it happens around the time Taylor Swift has something to promote.

[eternaleve]

‘Simply Henry’

Welcome back costume and history fiends.

Thanks for those blank staring eyes, Henners. No nightmares here.

‘Henry and his court look to sign the treaty with France, though tempers of both kings flare up at the summit. Meanwhile, Henry takes on a new mistress named Mary Boleyn, though he soon tires of her and Mary’s sister, Anne, is summoned to the court.’

There’s a lot that takes place in this episode. I mean, the stuff with Mary Boleyn could cover an episode in itself but the pace just rattles on through several really important things.

What The Heckaroonie is a Field of Cloth of Gold Anyway?

The Field of Cloth of Gold was a peace summit between Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England, Ireland, and France that took place between the 7th and 24th of June 1520. The really interesting thing about English foreign policy under Henry and Cardinal Wolsey is their interest in creating England as a peaceful arbiter of Europe – to live out Renaissance Humanist policies in real life political policy. The Field of Cloth of Gold was designed to increase the bond between the French and English monarchs after the 1514 Anglo-French treaty. It was also a chance to show off. Both Henry and Francis were incredibly young, flashy, Renaissance monarchs who wanted to strut their stuff.

There’s a lot about the summit that is actually pretty accurate. Someone did really care about getting some of the finer details right.

This is a 1545 painting from Hampton Court depicting the Field of Cloth of Gold. You can see the English Palace of Illusion, a wine fountain, and Henry and Francis wrestling.

So, these parts are really quite accurate. What’s not so accurate is Henry turning around and throwing a massive temper tantrum.

You see, he lost a wrestling match. And as a perfectly logical thing for a twenty nine year old man to do, he’s having a temper tantrum that involves destroying all his belongings with an axe. The Tudors has gone for a very strange characterisation of Henry. They proclaim to be a new and interesting look at the young Henry, but this involves making him into a screaming, bawling brat with limited character depth.

Henners is also upset that Charles V of Spain, nephew to his wife, has become Holy Roman Emperor and pretty much the most powerful man in Europe. Only this happened in 1519, not 1520, so he’s having a bit of a delayed reaction.

‘Tis a Pity She’s A Whore

The next big thing in the episode is that Mary and Anne Boleyn are more formally introduced and start making things happen. Also they’re WHOOOOOOOOORRRESSSSS, sexy, sexy whores to add all this amazing sex appeal with their naughty sexy behaviour.

I hope I laid the sarcasm on thick enough. I generally find the portrayal of the Boleyn sisters to be pretty poor in anything, and I think Mary’s depiction is pretty degrading. (FYI, my family is descended from Mary Boleyn. Actually. So I tend to get very personally protective of her.)

Let’s compare the Tudors version of Mary and the real one.

Mary is introduced in a brothel/bar/some place full of sex workers. Because she’s a WHOOORRRRREEEEEE. She’s some woman that Francis I sleeps with – his ‘English Mare’ – and she’s shown as a stupid, slutty woman that has no idea what she’s doing in life other than looking for dick.

It’s a very nuanced character, you see.

In real life, Mary was an accomplished courtier who had been educated in the usual manner of a Tudor gentry woman. You know, maths, reading and writing, grammar, two or three languages, dancing, embroidery, music, singing, gaming, falconry, riding, and hunting. Maybe she wasn’t an overwhelming genius of science or theology, but she was still a highly educated woman. And her education didn’t involve sucking dick.

Suck my thumb. Do it. Show me your French wiles.

  Mary, it transpires, has been at the French court for two years. That makes this episode set in 1516, then. Mary Boleyn was sent to the French court in the retinue of Mary, Henry’s sister, when she was sent to marry Louis XII of France in 1514.

In real life, Mary and Henry did not meet until 1520 when she returned to the English court to be married. She may or may not have been a mistress to Francis I, but I would err on not. It’s very convenient for her to sleep around because it makes the family look bad, and I suspect it’s gossip that gets reported as fact. Henry and Mary did have an affair, but we don’t really know when or for how long. There’s actually very little evidence of their affair, other than Henry admitting it later when he needed to marry her sister, Anne.

Anyway, her dick sucking is not as good as advertised, and Henry tires of her.

So the Howard and Boleyn families decide that Anne should step forward and seduce Henry. Because over the course of fifty minutes, where Mary was in two scenes with Henry in total, they were showered with such preference and wealth and prestige that they’re just going to throw Anne at Henners and see if it sticks.

I don’t especially like the whole ‘the Boleyns and Howards planned and maliciously duped Henry for their own power’ idea which pervades shitty historical fiction, and this makes no sense in time. It’s 1520 – or 1516, or 1518 – and Anne and Henry did not become  involved until 1525/1526. Anne wasn’t even in England until 1522. They’re throwing her at him about six years too early.

Also There’s Some Treason

Yeah, the Duke of Buckingham is still plotting away. But not for too long because he’s going to die.

He’s gathering up people loyal to him and he’s going to… do something. Either just outright murder Henners or launch full, open rebellion. In real life, Edward Stafford did no such thing. There’s accusations of him doing treasonous things, such as talking about the death of the King and his lack of children, but he was never outright going to just stab him.

He’s also dressed just like Henry.

Literally just the same outfit. If you wanted to hire the guy as Henry, why didn’t you.

Anyway, Buckingham gets caught. Because he wasn’t exactly being subtle.

How could this happen to me, I made a mistake…..

Then some real bullshit takes place with his execution.

This is a catalogue of wrong. Executions of the nobility were generally private affairs, not open to the common sorts of the public. He’s a peer – and even in death, he’s treated with honour. He would not be dragged to his place of execution and he would not sob and weep on the scaffold. Yes, it’s awful to be dying, but he’s a member of the nobility. He would conduct himself with dignity and grace as to not reflect badly on himself and his family.

And a friend of Henners would not be holding a man’s arms down for an execution. That’s just… good lord, it’s terrible. What a terrible, sensationalised depiction of an execution.

Buckingham’s execution is secured by the Duke of Norfolk, uncle to Anne and Mary Boleyn. He’s blackmailed into this position by Charles Brandon, close friend to Henners, giving him his father’s ring. You see, the Duke of Norfolk’s father was executed by Henry VII.

There’s a lot of wrong in this short two minute scene.

For a start, Thomas Howard as not the Duke of Norfolk in 1520. His father would not die until 1524. Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, died of old age in his bed. He was not executed by Henry VII. That would certainly be a feat of time travel, seeing as Henners 7 had been dead for twenty five years at that point. You could say that they conflated the third and second dukes, sure. Only the first Duke of Norfolk was not executed by Henners 7 either. He died from an arrow to the face at the Battle of Bosworth. So, there’s nothing really right in this scene. Especially to have Charles Brandon threaten the frigging Duke of Norfolk in the street.

Also, the Duke of Buckingham was arrested and executed in 1521. This was a plotline that could have been allowed to develop for longer; as such, it feels like a rush of hot air that goes nowhere.

God, I Have a Son!

Henry’s mistress, despite finding out that she’s pregnant in the last episode, is already popping it out. Even though it’s Christmas 1520, and Henry Fitzroy was born the 15th of June 1519.

Tudor women didn’t generally give birth lying in a bed. They used a birthing chair. If they were in a bed, it was the pallet bed that would be underneath the main bed. You don’t want to ruin your nice bed with blood and afterbirth. People have to sleep on that.

Henners is so overjoyed at this arrival of an illegitimate son that he almost breaks his neck. Good job holding the baby. Guess we know why only one of your children with Katherine survived.

Sashay Shantay

Collars and high necks are very in this episode. Shame they don’t really become fashionable in Europe until the 1530s. Francis was fashionable, but not this fashion forward. He needs to be wearing a low, square neckline.

This is better. Square shoulders with undergarments showing. The hair is weird though. Too modern. Even him that nice chinlength bob Tudor men wore.

Where are your undergarments, Francis??? Your doublet is silk. You know what ruins silk? Water! What is your sweat made of? Water! Keep your clothes fresh and non-stinky with your underwear!

The collar on Henry’s outfit is far too high, and the doublet looks like it’s from the later half of the sixteenth century. It’s still far better than whatever this get up that Francis has on. Weird Swiss Guard/Fall of the Roman Empire runway look there, Francis. You brought a concept here, but it really doesn’t fit. At all.

Henry is clearly the architect of the Puritan movement. For some reason. He’s a king. He needs to look it.

Canadian beaver realness. To be honest, there is not enough fur on these costumes. I know that fur is not looked upon with favour these days, but he should be decked out in the finest of ermine and cheetah. Henry should look more kingly. More money, more power.

Turns out the greatest hunt is man.

Thomas Boleyn is continuing his fight against bad costumes. His remain the most accurate. Bless you, you evil man. Bless your ongoing stance against high collars.

Curtain Realness

The exposed shoulders are a bit iffy, as is the single colour for the gowns. Skirts had underskirts of a separate colour. The one colourness is a little cheap for two queens. And there are no trumpet sleeves.

That nursemaid is straight out of the 1590s. That’s some impressive time travel.

How hard is it to make a bloody hood? Women did not have their hair uncovered in public. Women didn’t have uncovered hair in public until the fricking 1960s, and they certainly wouldn’t in the 1520s. I hate the jewelled headpieces, I hate the stupid headband thing, and I laughed at the strange Nefertiti inspired headpiece worn by the French queen because I have literally no idea what it’s supposed to be. I like her expression though.

It’s the latest in Tudor maternity wear; pregnancy sack! With added useless shoulder cutouts! Because that’s what you want when you’re pregnant. Not easy access to a toilet, painkillers, and something loose to wear. Cold shoulders is what you really need.

To prove that Mary Boleyn is a whore, they’ve literally dressed her as a Venetian prostitute.

Why is your hair loose? Where are your trumpet sleeves? There is an incredibly famous picture of Katherine – use that! Use that as your basis for her clothing and design around that. We know how she dressed, and it was not like this.

What the fuck is on your head.

Bessie Blunt is wearing some Restoration gown. Look at those thin sleeves and cuffs – seventeenth century, ish. The hair net is fine, some women did wear them, but look at that woman on the right. That is a 1490s style hood there. Did you get it from your grandmother? That’s thirty years out of fashion, and it’s still not right. The front part of her head is out.

That waiting woman is wearing a seventeenth century dress. They took that straight off the rack of an English civil war drama and thought ‘eh, it’ll do’. Her hood is Elizabethan as well.

In Other News

The Pope’s dead. Sorry bout it.

Unpicking the Tudors; S1 EP2 'Simply Henry' Welcome back costume and history fiends. ‘Henry and his court look to sign the treaty with France, though tempers of both kings flare up at the summit.

[jobtypeblog]

DEATH OF RAVE

The Death Of Rave is a vinyl and digital imprint, housed within Boomkat, rooted in Manchester. There is little information online about the label, but it’s contributions to UK sound and arts practices speak for themselves, and have continually caught my interest in their redirecting of rave culture, avant garde sonic practices and sound composition as a medium for philosophic contemplation about the entanglements of electronic music and culture. The more I dig into their catalogue of releases, the more I appreciate the impact of this label has had to my listening for the past several years. I am always unpacking contingencies within the community of electronic production and sound art. The Death of Rave roster is home to a few artists in particular whos work has sat in the ambient subjectivity of my creative mind in the past few weeks.

Notable artists and releases that have shaped my understanding of a sound art approach to contemporary electronic club sounds will be briefly discussed below:

Mumdance, Logos and Shapednoise: The Sprawl - ‘The Sprawl - a sindicate of mutant sound carriers individually known as Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise. Mastered and cut to vinyl by Matt Colton. Artwork by Dave Gaskarth.William Gibson's uncannily prophetic novel Neuromancer was the 1st in a set collectively known as The Sprawl. The same term also refers to a fictional Megatropolis covering the entire Eastern US seaboard in the books, and was also the title of a staggering, standout track on Mumdance's pivotal Take Time EP. The Sprawl is now also a noun for Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise's new collaborative trio))), which was first conceived at Berlin's CTM15 festival, and now makes their recorded debut with EP1 of a rolling series to be archived by The Death of Rave. Inspired by Gibson's notions of uploaded consciousness in a post-human society, and the way in which the sensory-scrambling effects of technology have played out across our collective reverie, EP1 ventures four cuts of retina-scorching dis-torsion and chrome-burning modular synth work attempting to emulate the physical and mental impact of SimStim overload and fractious hyperreality. Head first, Drowning In Binary rinses us thru a maze of recursive techno chambers and convulsive noise, acclimatising us to the temporal displacement in preparation for the retching, body-quake detonations and finely-contoured synthetic sensuality of From Wetware to Software to take hold. On the other side, their references become more explicit, and violently dynamic, as the gutted late '90s tech-step structures of Haptic Feedback glance in the direction of classic Prototype and Reinforced Recordings, before Personality Upload steadily dismantles your mental firewalls with a gyroscopic sense of weightless delirium. Ultimately, EP1's mostly beat-less dynamics lends it to polysemous reading; at once comparable with elements of La Peste's late '90s french flashcore or the unquantised designs of FIS, and likewise, it's applicable as both 'floor-shocking DJ tools, or as a prop in your own, private sci-fi fantasy.’ - press release description for ‘The Sprawl’ on Soundcloud.

The trio of The Sprawl are known collectively, and in their individual outputs for their love of analogue hardware sound systems and exploratory sample and synth modulation. Composition is a defining methodology in electronic music and sound design, and in the case of Mumdance especially, the rearrangement and performance of deconstructions/reconstructions of Grime, Hardcore, Noise and Stockhausen-style musique concrete and Cagesque industrial ambience have remained integral to his practice. Combined with regular DJ sets, mixes, and a backlog of instrumental backings for UK MCs, Mumdance has made efforts to pioneer a new terminology for this re-engineering of audio culture: ‘Weightless’ refers to ‘the sound, the movement that traces the liquid space between spectral grime, sound design & electronic experimentation’.

Gabor Lazar:  Hearing for the first time the slapped out laser resonances and hyper synthetic drum programming of Gabor Lazar’s ‘Unfold’ EP last year was a pivotal moment in my perception of the potentials of forward-thinking dance music. Reading as much terminological music journalism as I have been doing, phrases appear in my mind when attempting to descirbe the sounds of this Hungary based engineer across his live performances and physical releases, phrases such as  hyperprismatic mutant elek-trance. Gabor Lazar is an artist who has the discipline to properly explore an idea with composition, to recallibrate technique over a significant duration to increase potency >>  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYzSvepYwuI

Yorkshire Sound Artist Mark Fell, who has a number of solo releases on Death of Rave, as well as a collaborative album with Gabor Lazar, has been equally  ear-opening for me, and has informed a more sophisticated conceptual understanding of the entangled concepts of sound, technology and meaning>> https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/collateral-damage-mark-fell

http://markfell.com/media/2015_fowleryoungs_sleevenotes/mfell_REvERsE_pRacticE.pdf 

^This is a sleeve insert to a record by Luke Fowler and Richard Youngs on which Mark Fell contends with certain philosophies of media theory and listening using (amongst other methods) digital technology and computer software. The text is extremely useful in applying aspects of Marshall Mcluhun’s ideas to the search for meaning and creativity in the saturated media landscape of contemporary society. Imagining and engineering sound as ‘truth’, simulation and ‘the real’ produces fascinating philosophical conundrums, especially when you place the magnifying glass over the dance music and sound art worlds. The record is intended as ‘research music’ to document interactions within and between vibrational phenomena and technoculture. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUspVAx9FKA

^A video depicting important research into technological advancements in the last few decades that have defined sound culture for generations.

Sam Kidell: Sam Kidell’s work sits in a very specific mode of sonic art and UK music culture that deeply resonates with my own preconceptions of a progressive sonic practice that combines sound composition with social theory. Kidel credits grime as an ‘enduring influence’ on his work, which takes a significant departure from the conventions of this nearly 20-year-old movement, and brings as much care, attention and conceptual motivation to the accompanying artwork. and visual performances. Operating as a designer of sound pieces and installations within his solo work, and as part of the Bristolian Young Echo collective, who experiment with sound and performance to explore the intersections of collective consciousness, identity and contemporary existence with a forward-facing take on ambient, dub and post punk.

SUPERMARKET! (2015): This is a deeply hauntological and brilliantly simple ambient inversion of pop r&b into 

Adam Harper writes: “The one thing you can say about underground music in 2015 is that it’s talkingpop’s language. No longer are its stars enemies to be derided - now they are appreciated for their perfection, the craftsmanship, their transcendental demi-god status, and, displaced from their original industrial contexts, as totems of everyday listening.

As SUPERMARKET!, Sam Kidel of Bristol’s Young Echo collective offers the latest and one of the most surprising re-engineerings of pop. He takes acapella R&B vocals from Aaliyah, Brandy, Destiny’s Child, Ciara, Timberlake, and Beyoncé and wraps them in fine fragile films of quaverous machine breath and the stultified knocking of a rapturous trance in which no other response is possible. In doing this, SUPERMARKET! is a way of listening, encoding a strange, otherworldly response to pop that couldn’t be more different from pop, but that finds again the awe and wonder that gets lost among the shopping aisles.”

Disruptive Muzak (2016):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdAjgt3MR10

‘Sam Kidel’s debut for The Death of Rave is little short of a modern ambient masterpiece. Following a celebrated debut for Entr’acte in 2015, the Young Echo and Killing Sound member’s sophomore solo album is a playful, emotive inversion and subversion of Muzak - that “background noise” variously known as “hold” music, “canned” music, or “lift” music - employing government call centre workers as unknowing agents in a dreamily detached yet subtly, achingly poignant 21 minute composition, backed with a DIY instrumental in case you, at home, want to get your phreak on. Drawing on research by the Muzak Corporation (the company who held the original license for their eponymous product), and his concurrent interests in the proto-internet technique of phreaking (experimenting or exploring telecommunication systems - Bill Gates used to do it, and thousands of kids have probably made a prank call at some point in their time), Sam played his music down the phone to the DWP and other departments, not speaking, but recording the recipient’s responses; subsequently rearranging them into the piece you hear before you. Aesthetically, the results utilise a range of compositional styles - ambient, electro-acoustic, aleatoric - and could be said to intersect modern classical, dub and vaporware, whilst also inherently revealing a spectrum of regional British accents rarely heard on record, or in this context, at least. But make no mistake; he’s not making fun at the expense of the call centre workers. Rather, he’s highlighting a dreamy melancholy and detachment in their tedious roles and tortuous, Kafkaesque systems, one known from first-hand experience. Disruptive Muzak may be rooted in academia, but it’s far from pretentious. We really don't want to give it all away, but the way in which he executes the idea, both musically and conceptually by the time the final receiver drops the line, is deeply emotive without being sentimental; making tacit comment on questioning our relationship with technology, economics and socio-politics in the UK right now: in the midst of right wing policy delivering swingeing benefits cuts and zero-hours contracts which damage those on the margins most, and a scenario where corporate composition and electronic sound form a blithely ubiquitous backdrop to capitalist realism.’ - Boomkat Description of ‘Disruptive Muzak’

‘Sillicon Ear’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uoM8FmfXZk

‘Following his compelling comment on the modern-day culture of call centres, Disruptive Muzak – awarded Album of the Year 2016 by Boomkat – Sam Kidel turns his analytical artistry towards the ominous gatekeepers of online communication with a rave-inspired rebel spirit to match his scientific methodology.’ 

“Chamber music meets free-party-scene warehouse-invasion”  First exhibited at EBM(T) in Tokyo, Live @ Google Data Center trespasses in Google’s data centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa to perform electronic music amongst the humming banks of servers and endless cable runs, without actually breaking in. In a process he describes as “mimetic hacking,” Kidel used architectural plans based on photos of the data centre to acoustically model the sonic qualities of the space.  The resulting acoustics on Live @ Google Data Center simulate the sound of Kidel’s algorithmically-generated notes, rhythms and melodies reverberating through the space, as though a bold illegal party was being held in the maximum security location. Kidel’s manipulation of his generative direction of the music, all inspired by images of the data centre. “Music that deafens the silicon ear” The generative audio patch Kidel used to make Voice Recognition DoS Attack seeks to disable the functionality of voice recognition software by triggering phonemes (the smallest units of language). The project, first developed for the Eavesdropping series of events in Melbourne, exploits a weakness in voice recognition that cannot distinguish between individual voices. When you speak while the patch is playing, the cascading shards of human expression mask your speech and thus protect you from automated surveillance, questioning our vulnerability in the face of global data giants. In amongst these displaced sounds, Kidel fed additional musical elements into his patch to create the version of the project heard on this release.’ - 

Mark Leckey:

Masters lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJHyg4g8MzQ

‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dS2McPYzEE

Next year, on January 2nd 2020, The Death of Rave will be reprinting their inaugural release to vinyl, the soundtrack to the Turner Prize Winning video and installation by Mark Leckey - ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ (1999). This seminal work that defined a career for Leckey was in many ways a response to the ‘heady critical thinking’ he had struggled with in art school. The work for Leckey presented an oppurtunity to tackle something he was familiar with in a creatively satisfying and nostalgic sense, though the final 15 minutes of footage presents more melancholia than it reminiscing. The narrative of the video gives glimpses into the miserable reality of late capitalism and the absurd and sublime world of British dance music. Leckey confronts cultural phenomena and the history of his own identity in relation to society. Through nostalgic collaging, abstraction and manipulation of the temporal quality of archival media, Leckey presents a hauntological speculation of his cultural and societal position as a child growing up 11 miles from Liverpool’s city centre. 

‘A phantasmic and transcendent collage of meticulously sourced and rearranged footage and sound samples spanning three decades of British subculture - from Northern Soul thru '80s Casuals and pre-CJB Rave - it may be considered an uncanny premonition of the Hauntological zeitgeist which has manifested in virulent sections of UK electronic dance and pop culture since the early '00s.This record severs the sonic aspect from the moving image, offering a new perspective on what rave culture maven and esteemed author Simon Reynolds calls "a remarkable piece of sound art in its own right." Detached from its visual indicators, Leckey's amorphous, acephalic cues are reframed as an ethereal, Burroughsian mesh of VHS idents, terrace chants, fragmented field recordings and atrophied samples cut with his own half-heard drunken mumbles. At once recalling and predating the eldritch esthetics of Burial or The Caretaker; it's an elegiac lament for an almost forgotten spirit; an abstracted obituary to the rituals, passions and utopian ideals of pre-internet, working class nightlife fantasias, now freeze-framed forever, suspended in vinyl. It's backed with an edit of another soundtrack to a Mark Leckey video installation: 'GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction' (2010). In stark contrast, the original video features a black Samsung Bottom Freezer Refrigerator stood in front of a green screen infinity cyc, recounting its contents, thoughts and actions as narrated by the artist in a radically transformed cadence. Taken as a wry comment on cybernetics and the ambient ecology of household appliances which permeate our daily lives, it's an unsettling yet compelling piece of sound design whose subtly affective dynamics reflect the underlying dystopic rhetoric with visceral and evocative precision. The piece has since been used in a collaboration with Florian Hecker for the Push and Pull exhibition at Tate Modern in 2011.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CATey5LcEF4&t=116s Leckey quotes in a video interview on the Tate’s Youtube Channel: ‘I think it put me in a position where I felt outside of the action... on the periphery of the action... on the edge of the dancefloor looking in’, a perspective that articulates a sentiment that has in many ways shaped my own creative thinking and world view with regards to the topics I choose to contemplate with my creative work. I even draw a similarity with my very first electronic compositions and Leckey’s installation ‘Exorcism of the bridge@Eastham Rake’, as it was a motorway bridge underpass where me and my friend Archie would discuss and listen to our first compositions, and imagine alternate possibilities of living through music. We even codified the accompanying texts to our music with the longitude and latitudes of the bridge where we conceptualised our creative endeavors.

I inhabit urban environments temporarily, but ultimately am a stranger to a life subsumed by industrial machinery and the concrete and metal of urban sprawl. Perhaps this is what has led my creative mind to embrace the dystopian hyperstitions of late modernity as aesthetic strategies for radical art-making and sound production. I have lived in the same house, 10 miles from Leeds city centre quaint middle-class rural countryside, and feel an affinity to the slow pace, fresh air and wildlife. I contend with the stresses of urban and industrial living, but ultimately with the knowledge and experience of a ‘better place’, or more natural environment... ‘it stood me in good stead for being an artist. You become more observational in a way’. You take an interest in things that might seem humdrum, or might not excite other people in the same way that I would’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8HlSHTEtdc

Leckey describes himself as the kind of person who has ‘perpetual crisises’, and often questions the meaning and person of art practice in the modern economic and political landscape. As Steven Shaviro points out in an article on E-flux, ‘transgression no longer works as a subversive aesthetic strategy. Or, more precisely works all too well as a strategy for amassing cultural capital as well as actual capital’. He gives an image of his works as being ‘exorcisms’, moments where he is ‘overbrimming’ with nostalgia or curiosity and in turns creates temporal, sculptural and experiential manifestations of the things that have buried themselves into his sensibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS18_iVTQEs&t=731s 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWMfnK7bEg4

- Dream English Kid 1964-1999AD was one of Leckey’s earliest videos, which contemplated the anxieties and mystification of living with and between electronic and mechanical technology. Leckey explains in an inteview about the moment he found an audio recording of a Joy Division gig he attended on Youtube, which inspired within him a fantasy of timeless recalling of history, and an exploration of how audio-visual software has changed our relationship with our past. Leckey put together much of his most important video work in a time that predated the speeds of the modern internet. Through the laborious process of sourcing footage, writing to people and waiting for responses and VHS tapes, Leckey talks about getting drunk and editing the video alone, often to the point of tears, which can be heard in the backing track.

[caveartfair]

Alex Katz on 10 Artists Who Inspire Him

Portrait of Alex Katz. Photo by Ander Gillenea/AFP/Getty Images.

“A lot of art books are very tiresome to most people,” admitted Alex Katz who, at 91 years young, is one of our most prominent living painters. There’s nothing tiresome about Looking At Art With Alex Katz, a new volume in which the artist shares relatable, off-the-cuff impressions of dozens of his favorite artists, poets, and creatives, from Fra Angelico to Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Everyone gets art on their own level,” he said in a recent interview with Artsy. “If you don’t know a lot about art history and you look at a picture, you’re not seeing the same picture that someone who knows something about art history sees. But that doesn’t mean you receive less from the picture. Art is very multifaceted that way.”

Below, we share excerpts from the book that highlight nine eclectic artists who have amazed and inspired Katz over the years.

Louise Bourgeois

Spider, 1997. Louise Bourgeois "Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Existence: The Cells" at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

Fée Couturière, . Louise Bourgeois Sotheby's: Contemporary Art Day Auction

“I first heard Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson on a Sunday afternoon in 1950, when I had just come to Manhattan. They spoke in a loft on 10th Street and 4th Avenue. They seemed arty and quite irresponsible, as they kept talking about the fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions. However, when one looks at the body of work by Louise Bourgeois, one cannot help but admire the energy to go out and at the same time to reveal what is inside of her. The sculptures of mixed techniques, like 3-D collages, on which she later embarked, are as problematic and exciting as those of anyone alive.”

El Greco

Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541-1609), ca. 1600. El Greco "El Greco in New York" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014-2015)

The Vision of Saint John, 1608-1614. El Greco "El Greco in New York" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014-2015)

“El Greco was very fashionable when I was in art school. Since I did not have a background in art history, I decided to read a lot in the summer. The books on El Greco from before 1900 recorded him as a minor painter. One said he had astigmatism. El Greco paintings should be seen from below. His studio was small; if you get on your knees and imagine a dark room with flickering candles, they make more sense. He followed his instinct, and it led him to visions. I remember his painting of the Cardinal as much for the painting around the figure as for the figure itself.”

Edward Hopper

Early Sunday Morning, 1930. Edward Hopper "America is Hard to See," at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015)

“I saw the Hopper exhibition at the Whitney Museum in the summer of 1995, and I was amazed at the number of people there and how they reacted to the paintings. It seemed he was able to capture a feeling that most people could relate to their lives, despite the fact that the time of many of the paintings was 60 or 70 years earlier.

“The styles, as John Updike noticed in his article in the New York Review of Books (10 August 1995), were misinterpreted by some of the writers in the catalogue, who thought the people were down and out, poor people. However, they were mostly our classless middle class. The viewers had no trouble relating to the paintings’ subjects. Hopper seems to reach more people than any other American artist.

“The paintings themselves have strong images in a pedestrian technique. The colors all seem made up and applied. They don’t come from perception and are far from realistic. He has a nice sense of a long line and a big shadow, but the paintings often collapse around faces and breasts. Some of Hopper’s compositions seem forced, like a cartoon or illustrated advertisement. They seem a distant cousin to Theodore Dreiser, whose writing is often awkward and labored but who has created some novels that seem real or convincing.”

Franz Kline

Lehigh V Span, 1959-1960. Franz Kline San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

“Kline is both new and traditional. He’s my favorite Ab-Ex painter. The show at the Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1994 was the only time he’s been seen properly. His early black-and-white paintings were sensational in styling but mainly graphic. They’re more absolute. The later work is more painterly. The larger cathedral painting, on view in Madrid in 1994, was to me in a league with the great paintings at the Prado.

“As he grew, the paintings became more about weights and depth, and they left the rigid flat space for a more romantic energy. It’s emotionally extended, not contained or calculated. In Black, White and Gray (1959) at the Metropolitan Museum, the edges open up, and the painting becomes romantic. The emotional extension separates him from the other painters of his time. He’s closer to Frank O’Hara than to Clyfford Still.”

Henri Matisse

Intérieur à la fougère noire (Interior with Black Fern), 1948. Henri Matisse Fondation Beyeler

Interior with Egyptian Curtain, 1948. Henri Matisse Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Another big artist for me was Matisse. Matisse has an ability to create an overall light and a local color in enough parts of the painting to make the whole thing quite realistic. He can paint a thin wash of brown, and you have a table. A thin wash of blue, and you have silk, a thin wash of orange, and you have flesh. Then he can use a neutral color like red, a transposed color, and it will give the whole painting a light that seems the equivalent of a perceived light, and also the objects in the painting seem accurate in that light.

“Impressionist painting rarely has that accuracy of surface. Matisse does it in an economical fashion. His colors are contained, so they don’t expand into a more Impressionist type of color. They’re more like Rothko, held in more. There is a great deal of push and pull on the surface—things going in opposite directions—and you have a great deal of implied space. The color works with and against the spaces. There is a beautiful, fluid surface of line that works both decoratively and volumetrically in space.”

Fairfield Porter

Tree-lined Street, 1972. Fairfield Porter Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

“Fairfield Porter is a painter of great refinement and subtlety. He has a strong technique and a wonderful sense of place, and is skillful in combining local surfaces with an all-over light, particularly in some of his still lifes. He has a tendency to go for all-over painting, and the images, which are interesting and intelligent, suffer. I find the painting more interesting than the images. The realistic world he painted always had a great deal of style.

“Fairfield made me feel I was okay. He called up and visited. We disagreed on almost every painter, but he wrote about me and was very supportive. It made me feel that my paintings were okay; it gave me confidence. In a Whitney Biennial I had a large face of Edwin I was surprised that Fairfield liked. He said it was the best painting in the show.”

Charline von Heyl

Daydrinking, 2016. Charline von Heyl Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

“Charline von Heyl paints every painting differently. Her project is against an idea of an art product. In this, she is similar to Chris Martin and Nabil Nahas, but more extreme. Her paintings should be exhibited one at a time, like the Donatello show at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York, where they separated all the pieces with white nylon. Product painting, where an artist makes identifiable products, makes it easier for collectors and museum curators. Von Heyl’s painting is not product painting—her paintings are contemporary in thought, and very well done.”

Henri Rousseau

Tropical Forest with Monkeys, 1910. Henri Rousseau National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

“Henri Rousseau is a terrific image-maker. His was the only art book I had for 20 years. I liked Rousseau because he was like a French classicist in space. His spatial development in the paintings seemed as well worked-out as Poussin’s, Picasso’s, Léger’s or Fragonard’s. They were all good at spatial mechanics. One of the things about French art is what is referred to as plastic. They were all good at working out and depicting the space in their paintings. French plastic painting can be decorative. In American art, we think of plastic painting as being non-decorative, because it goes into a more physical space. Like that of Hubert Robert, who’s a good 3-D painter, Rousseau’s painting is just good enough to get him around the canvas. It isn’t any great shakes….

“He doesn’t give you much in terms of local surfaces. There are signs of the surface, rather than paintings of the surface. He’s more like Poussin than Renoir. He works with his colors and grays beautifully. He never makes any mistakes in colors, and he can work into higher-chroma colors very smoothly. He goes gracefully from dull grays and greens to reds within a painting….

“Rousseau’s images have the flatness and directness of a photograph, but they also seem to come from his unconscious and, somehow, this makes them more real than a photograph.

I admire his range of subject matter and form enormously—to be able to go into the grand poetic paintings of the lady on the couch, of the tigers running into the rain, and do them well; to paint prosaic things—still lifes, and little street scenes; and then do people, too. He’s a painter who really extended himself in terms of forms. Rousseau has images that are so inventive and so strange, and they communicate so well. I think his technique was unextended, however. The actual painting technique is mechanical.”

Kitagawa Utamaro

Courtesan Hitomoto from the House of Daimonjiya, ca. 1805. Kitagawa Utamaro Ronin Gallery

Kitagawa Utamaro, Moatside Prostitute, 1794–95. © William S. and John T. Spaulding Collection. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

“Japan has visual art forms that produce great art: architecture, interior design, cloth, lacquered boxes, sculpture, screens, kimonos, swords, ceramics, calligraphy. The woodblock prints are at the lower end of the list. However, Utamaro elevates them to the level of the other great arts. His woman with a toothpick (Moatside Prostitute, 1794–95) is very clear without being overly explicit. The gesture in the eyes and mouth is completely original as subject matter and as depiction. His close-ups have a big swinging line that functions both for surface and for three-dimensionality. The color weights and patterns go together very well. The transition from the tight forms, hair and features, to the generalized line and background colors is smooth. Finally, I like Utamaro because he presents the same bohemian world that I live in—which was and is considered unsuitable for high art.”

from Artsy News

[blockheadbrands]

Bill to End Federal Cannabis War Gathers Steam

David Downs of Leafly Reports:

A strange-bedfellows mix of powerful state governors and members of Congress signed on to end the decades-old war on marijuana—via the newly introduced STATES Act.

Momentum seemed to build over the weekend for the bill, introduced Thursday by Sen. Corey Gardner (R-CO) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). On Friday, the governors of California and New York, as well as their counterparts in 10 other states, urged congressional leaders to advance the bill.

California Gov. Jerry Brown endorsed the plan to exempt legalization states from federal pot law in a joint letter with Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, and others.

Saturday, Sen. Kamala Harris, one of two senators from California, tweeted, “We need to get this done.”

RELATED STORY With Trump’s Support, STATES Act Could End Nationwide Cannabis Prohibition

“Legalizing marijuana at the federal level is about stopping our country from repeating the same mistakes of the past,” she wrote. “Most Americans already know that too many lives have been needlessly ruined because of the War on Drugs.”

Harris said that US Attorney General Jeff Sessions should focus on international gangs and traffickers, “not going after Americans who are using recreational and medicinal marijuana.”

A Washington Post analysis finds the STATES Act to be a well-built bill that many Republicans could get behind. “It would enable them to simultaneously say on one hand that they still believe marijuana is an evil weed … but … if it’s what their constituents want…”

California consumer advocate Dale Gieringer, the executive director for California NORML, wrote Saturday that among the half-dozen cannabis bills in Congress, “the STATES Act offers the most realistic, far-reaching path forward towards ending federal marijuana prohibition.”

The bill also won support from growers on the West Coast and bankers on the East.

RELATED STORY FAQ: What the STATES Act Would Do, and Why It’s a Game-Changer

“It’s a really elegant solution,” Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It doesn’t go all the way, but it does alleviate some of the day-to-day challenges we face.”

The Maine Credit Union industry also chimed in, noting the real and present danger of increased robbery due to federal cannabis prohibition’s banking bans.

“This has become not only a states’ rights issue, but an important public safety issue,” wrote Todd Mason and Scott Earl, the CEOs of two Maine state credit union industry groups.

The bill is quite narrow in legal scope, exempting some states from the Controlled Substances Act’s marijuana provisions. Nick Etten, founder and executive director of the Veterans Cannabis Project, noted it does nothing on its own for veterans.

Columnist Ira Stoll notes that it unites progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the left and conservative bulwark Justice Clarence Thomas on the right. It’s also quite a big deal, temporarily patching a problematic bit of the source code of modern American law.

“The question of marijuana regulation offers an opportunity to revisit the entire misguided history of Commerce Clause jurisprudence that goes back to Wickard v. Filburn (1942) and even before that to the Shreveport Rate Cases (1914),” Stoll writes.

Justice Thomas wrote in his dissent of the decision underpinning the federal war on cannabis: “If the Federal Government can regulate growing a half-dozen cannabis plants for personal consumption �� then [federal Commerce Clause powers] have no meaningful limits.”

This rare bipartisanship is actually how democracy is supposed to work. Dismantling prohibition state by state would be similar to how it was built, state by state.

RELATED STORY Sen. Cory Gardner: How a Prohibitionist Became Legalization’s Defender

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal catalogued US Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ setbacks on cannabis policy Monday. Though he’s usually fond of the bully pulpit, Sessions didn’t say a peep about cannabis at a conservative conference in Colorado Friday, noted writer Tom Angell.

Both sides of the cannabis issue are fundraising off of it, naturally. Patients group Americans for Safe Access told followers, “We have never been closer than we are right now to permanently changing federal cannabis policy.” Conversely, anti-legalization group Project SAM told followers in an email to donate and call the White House before the STATES Act unleashed a drug epidemic.

The STATES Act has to get a committee hearing date, and then be allowed to come up for committee votes on a long path to a White House signature.

Critics warn of believing anything President Trump says, pointing to a record of deception and ethics-free quid-pro-quo. In that transaction, however, more than 70 percent of voters support a states rights solution to the federal-state impasse.

“At least nine marijuana bills are scheduled for committee hearings this week,” Angell estimated. And four added sponsors over this past weekend.

TO READ MORE OF THIS ARTICLE ON LEAFLY, CLICK HERE.

https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/bill-to-end-federal-cannabis-war-gathers-steam

[minusculetinyworld-blog]

The Mistake in Photography: Patrick Pound, Jackson Eaton and the Paradoxical Self Image

According to a recent book on snapshot photography, there ‘are now no more “mistakes” in the image archive’.[i] Apparently, digital habits of viewing, deleting and retaking are driving images towards a kind of inhuman perfection. But fortunately, human behaviour remains unpredictable and even digital cameras make mistakes. The other day, for instance, I accidentally pressed the shutter-release button on my digital SLR while the lens cap was still on (I realise my use of this antiquated device already tells you something). The camera, not quite intelligent enough to recognise the lens cap itself, correctly sensed that the light level was exceptionally low and kept the shutter open for several long seconds. As a result of my all-too-human failure, the digital sensor scrambled to register any vestigial photons to turn into electronic pulses and digital image data. Eventually, the mirror descended with what seemed an unusually loud and empty clack. However, viewing the resulting ‘image’, I saw a more or less regular, striated field of fuzzy pink and purple pixels [fig. 1]—as if I had closed my eyes while staring at the sun. Evidently, the algorithms inside the camera were confused. But it made me wonder. Is this hallucinogenic image what photography has become in the age of code? Is this the dark truth of digital light?[ii]

Whether or not my purple haze is an indexical image is surely no longer an interesting question. The pixels represent a complex relationship between technology, algorithms and light far beyond the scope of my current concerns. My interest here—the nature of the mistake in photography—is far less technical and more concerned with human errors and aesthetic conventions. Think, for instance, of all those books around ‘good’ composition that proliferated in the post-war years, famously parodied by John Baldessari in his 1967 photo-canvas Wrong, which shows him standing with a palm tree coming out of his head and a single capitalised word below it that says ‘WRONG’. I am interested in how the possibilities for such untutored mistakes in photography are progressively being removed by the various automations that now facilitate image making. My argument is that these automations inevitably change what it means to photograph. As digital cameras become more and more sophisticated they increasingly remove decision making from the photographer—even, in some cases, making them completely unnecessary to the basic process.[iii] As we know, more and more photography today does not involve human operators (think red-light cameras, security cameras, robotic cameras, etc.). At the same time, everyone with a mobile phone is a photographer now, and, as if in resistance to their obsolescence, many of these people regularly take pictures of themselves.

The process of deskilling the photographer gained pace with Kodak in the 1880s, epitomised by their brilliant marketing slogan ‘you press the button we do the rest’. However, Kodak—whose success was based on a consumer- friendly method of pre-loaded roll film—simply shifted adjustments in exposure to the printing stage (‘the rest’). The first camera to feature automatic exposure appeared in 1938, but it was prohibitively expensive, and auto-focus cameras did not appear until the late 1970s. By the 1980s, almost no skilled work was required of a human operator of an instamatic or SLR to produce sharp and correctly exposed negatives. Writing about this development in the mid-1990s, at the precipice of the digital era, Julian Stallabrass romanticised the erstwhile skilled amateur photographer’s activities as a zone of compromised but nevertheless non-alienated activity, and bemoaned their demise into instrumentalised gadgetry.[iv]

In the new century, digital cameras have taken automation to a completely new level. For instance, in-built smile recognition software tells us when people look happy, removing the need to ask subjects to say ‘cheese’. Optical image stabilisation removes the need for a photographer to remain still when taking a picture. Recognising that the time-consuming decision-making labour of photography now lies primarily in the editing rather than the taking, Google even pioneered automatic editing on its social media site Google Plus, promising to privilege photos of people recognised to be in a user’s closest Google circles.[v] Similarly, Apple’s iPhone 6 features a ‘burst’ mode that takes 10 photos in a single second (a feature perfect for ‘burst selfies’, according to Apple marketing head Phil Schiller[vi]). Crucially, the task of selecting the image(s) to keep can be outsourced to the software, for blink and smile detection in burst mode ‘allows the camera to recommend the most appropriate shot from the series’.[vii]

We are now accustomed to being recommended things by computers, which is to say by (often networked) software. Amazon’s ‘recommendation engine’ has helped to make it the most successful bookstore in the world. You buy one book, it recommends another based on an aggregated history of user choices. YouTube recommends videos to watch based on how your demonstrated tastes align with others. However, the idea of the camera recommending the most ‘appropriate’ image seems a little unnerving—perhaps because of the intimate association between photography and memory. And yet, the technology of the camera is simply following its own black-box logic. As Vilém Flusser famously argued, the camera is a programmable apparatus that paradoxically programs the photographers who use it.[viii] In Flusser’s terms—contrary to the marketing myth— photographers are functionaries to a technical program, rather than creative visionaries. Undoubtedly, like the emergence of photography itself in the early nineteenth century, automations express broader cultural and political imperatives.[ix] Most obviously, aside from minimising mistakes, automations are designed to reduce labour time. In this sense, automation represents an inherent distrust of human agency. As networked software becomes increasingly ‘intelligent’, the technical program of photography remains the reproduction of visual clichés, but becomes more of a communicative act in the present rather than a way of recording memories. The ephemeral photographic messages of Snapchat exemplify this new logic.

Within this intense visual present, life is consumed and the self is performed.  All of this underlies why the ‘selfie’ has become the watchword of photographers. Oxford Dictionaries named selfie as its word of the year in 2013. The Guardian described 2013 as ‘the year that the selfie reached saturation point’ in an article featuring the year’s so-called ‘best, worst and most revealing’, including celebrities (Kim Kardashian posing in the mirror) and politicians (Barack Obama with other world leaders at the funeral of Nelson Mandela).[x] The same article complained of the surfeit of ‘faux-sociological rationalisation pieces about selfies’ that have appeared in the past few years in newspapers (and, we might add, art and academic journals). Selfies appear to be the ideal symbol of our hyper-vanity; narcissism perfected as a popular distraction. The reality star Kim Kardashian is perfectly attuned to this moment, photographing herself obsessively for her Instagram feed, and then compiling a collection of these images in a book, sardonically titled Selfish (2014)—inspired by a similar collection she originally gave to her husband.[xi]

Selfies clearly belong to photography’s long and intimate relationship with narcissism and celebrity. Such tendencies were already identified in Charles Baudelaire’s brilliant 1859 essay ‘The Modern Public and Photography’. In that essay, Baudelaire took the Daguerreotype’s mirrored surface as proof that photography makes narcissists of us all. Baudelaire’s critique—in which photography breeds and reproduces self-absorption—was based on the rapid success of portrait photography. He was responding to the cultural success of the Daguerreotype as a medium that enabled the mid-nineteenth century bourgeois to look at its own ‘trivial image’.[xii] Baudelaire detected in the ardent desire of the masses for conformity a deceptive equality of social representation.

Even if deceptively democratic, photography is a ‘generous medium’, as the photographer Lee Friedlander once put it. When you think you are photographing one thing, you are inevitably also photographing a whole lot of other stuff as well.[xiii] In the nineteenth century, it was the camera’s indiscriminate recording of all detail, the seeming incapacity of the operator to select one detail over another, which rendered the photograph outside the boundaries of art. Later, precisely the same quality became one of its defining features of modernist art photography, not to mention an important part of its theorisation by Roland Barthes.[xiv]The mistake in photography, like the punctum, is a particular result of photography’s indiscriminate and contingent record of whatever is in front of the lens (even if that happens to be a lens cap). Walter Benjamin famously described this quality as ‘the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject’.[xv]

Indexical mistakes in photography have preoccupied Melbourne-based artist Patrick Pound. Pound is obsessively interested in collecting, which he views as a way of cataloguing the world. Found photographs feature prominently within his collections, and the act of photography itself often becomes a way of categorising these images. For instance, Pound has meticulously collected images of people holding cameras, and another set of people holding photographs. He has amassed a collection of photographs of amateur models, but not just any kind: Pound only collects images of models in which the imprint of a waistband or sockline is visible on their skin.

For one of his best-known collage works, The Photographer’s Shadow (2012), Pound collected photo- graphs of amateur photographer’s shadows: dark figures looming towards or behind the intended subject of the image, hands up, caught in the act of photography. Pound gives his overall collection of such images—parts of which have also been exhibited as prints—the general title The Photographers (1990–) [fig. 2]. Indeed, in their accumulation, these unintentional self-images become a portrait of the twentieth-century amateur photographer.[xvi] To the extent that their charm lies in their apparent innocence, they can be read as the opposite to the calcu- lated pose of the selfie. There is also a gender shift: the self-effacing father figure of Pound’s Kodak-era images has long since given way to the self-conscious young woman with a camera phone.[xvii]

In a related vein, Pound has a large collection of photographs where photographer’s fingers or thumb appear in the frame. Some of these he exhibited as enlarged scanned images under the title The Photographer’s Hand (2011) [fig. 3]. The result is a kind of homage to what is perhaps the amateur photographer’s most common mistake.[xviii] Sometimes, to Pound’s obvious delight, a thumb and shadow appear in the same photograph. In a perceptive review of an exhibition that included these two tributes to ‘crimes of photography’, Anna Newbold speculates that it is as if ‘the people on the other end of these cameras haven’t quite succumbed to the notion that they can’t be in the photo’.[xix] Both forms of mistake can be viewed as accidental portraits of the photographer, in which they are both present and absent. They are more than that, of course: Pound’s use of found photographs operate as icons of loss on multiple levels. However, it is hard not to read them in terms of our culture’s insistent, now digital, drive to create the perfect image. Photographer’s shadows and fingers in photographs are, of course, precisely the kind of thing that digital software encourages us to immediately delete.

And yet, digital software doesn’t only delete. Sometimes, it can be additive, as when the High Dynamic Range (HDR) mode on cameras stitches together several frames. But just as the web is littered with examples of ‘Photoshop fails’, auto-HDR mode often produces accidentally uncanny results—as when moving subjects appear as morphing spectres. For the Melbourne-based artist Jackson Eaton, the ready-made archive of Google Images represents a particularly rich source of imagery to work with in an additive fashion. Long concerned with the peculiar relationship of the self to others, and the restless quality of our self image, Eaton has made various bodies of work involving his own libidinal self image, including ironic images of himself on t-shirts. In his ongoing series Melfies 2 (2014) [fig. 4], Eaton has plugged images of his body parts and clothing into Google, sampled from selfies taken in various mirrors. The process is simple: Eaton spots a mirror (usually in a bathroom or clothing store), takes an image of himself, then cuts up his body in Photoshop into geometric parts and uses these images to do a reverse Google image search. Google’s image-analysing algorithms struggle to find an accurate match to the images submitted due to their always contingent backgrounds, and generate bizarre and seemingly random associations. As Eaton described it to me, the resulting surrealist collages mask ‘the “biological self ” with technologically-matched yet erroneous images that are usually saleable commodities and criminal faces’.

Eaton is interested in Lacan’s notion of the narcissist’s frustration with the self as projected object. Just as narcissism, for Lacan, is based on the child’s misrecognition of its self-image, Eaton relishes Google’s misrecognition of his body sections. His ‘becoming other’ speaks to the obvious point that the popularity of selfies is at once because they seem to empower individuals to control their own representation, but also represent a symptom of networked isolation—of geographically fragmented individuals desiring connection through little screens. And since self-presentation is fundamentally always in doubt, since in order to conform and ‘blend in’ to established stereotypes we invariably perform an act of mimicry, the act of self-representation must be constantly repeated. Moreover, if selfies, following Baudelaire, represent a pseudo-democracy of appearances, Eaton’s work also speaks to the commodification of the self in online networks that are designed to monetise the expression of desire. Concentrated on corporate networks as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, selfies are fundamentally linked to consumer culture.[xx] Every day, users post about 130 million photos on Tumblr, and starting in 2014, the Yahoo-owned media brand began to analyse all those images for clues to users’ brand affiliations. Eaton’s work makes a mockery of this process. When even the ideal self-image can now be determined by software, Melfies can be interpreted as both a critique of demands for self-representation online and a parody of aesthetic outsourcing to algorithms.

Pound and Eaton are meta-photographers. Where Pound redeems the photographer’s mistake, Eaton exploits Google’s mistakes to reintroduce randomness and chance into the contemporary self-portrait. Pound collects unique, unintended traces of photographers, while Eaton works with the overload of generic images online to see how his own digital self-image mingles with millions of others. Where Pound collects photographs precisely as they have become obsolete and available for sale as decontextualised objects on eBay, Eaton’s work suggests that the online self—the selfie—is already determined by its relation to objects of commerce. In both cases, the photographer’s self-image, their residual trace, can be read as some kind of resistance to their own redundancy in the face of ever increasing automation. Automation, as we have seen, seeks to homogenise image making. Its illusions of control and efficiency are like the operating principle of contemporary capitalism, seeking to eradicate chance from our lives while simultaneously fetishising spontaneity. Nevertheless, mistakes still happen. Recently, a rare glitch in my iPhoto software saw all the thousands of images I had ever deleted suddenly return to my library. Once I had recovered from the initial horror, I discovered that some of the images I had carefully deleted turn out to be more interesting than those I had originally decided to keep. In photography, like life, perfection is illusory and temporary, always haunted by the under appreciated mistake awaiting a second life.

Figures:

1  Daniel Palmer, Untitled (Mistake), 2014. Digital image file.

2  Patrick Pound, installation  view from The Photographer’s Shadow, 2012. 1200 × 2580mm, inkjet print on archival paper. Courtesy the artist.

3  Patrick Pound, detail view from The Photographer’s Shadow, 2012. 1200 × 2580mm, inkjet print on archival paper. Courtesy the artist.

4  Patrick Pound, detail from The Photographer’s Hand, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

5  Jackson Eaton, Untitled from the series Melfies 2, 2014. Courtesy the artist

Notes:

[i] Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images (Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2013), 315.

[ii] If I had left the lens cap on a film camera, the negative would have been equally hungry to draw light, but the resulting ‘thin’ negative would have resulted in a solidly dark positive or print.

[iii] I have written about this topic elsewhere. See Daniel Palmer, ‘Redundant Photographs: Cameras, Software and Human Obsolescence’ in Rubinstein D., Golding J., and Fisher A. (eds.) On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation (Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013), 49–67.

[iv] Julian Stallabrass, ‘Sixty billion sunsets’, in Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (London: Verso, 1996), 13–39.

[v] See Daniel Palmer, ‘Lights, Camera, Algorithm: Digital Photography’s Algorithmic Conditions’ in Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer & Nate Tkacz (eds.), Digital Light (London: Fibreculture Book Series, Open Humanities Press, 2015), 144–162.

[vi] Victor Luckerson,  ‘The iPhone 6 Will Have Apple’s Most Advanced iPhone Camera Yet’, Time, 9 September 2014, accessed 16 September 2014, http://time.com/topic/iphone-6.

[vii] ‘Apple iPhone 6 Camera Brings Low-Light and Focus Improvements’, Forbes, 9 September 2014, accessed 12 September 2014, www.forbes. com/sites/amadoudiallo/2014/09/09/

[viii] Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Matthews, (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).

[ix] See Geoffrey Batchen. Burning with Desire: The Conception  of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)

[x] Stuart Heritage, Selfies of 2013—the best, worst and most revealing, The Guardian, 12 December 2013, accessed 16 December 2014, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/dec/11/selfies-2013-the-best-worst-most-revealing.

[xi] I thank Jackson Eaton for alerting me to this illuminating detail.

[xii] In Baudelaire’s inimitable words, ‘our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate’. See Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Modern Public and Photography’ in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 86–7. On Baudelaire’s motivations, see Pierre Taminiaux, The Paradox of Photography (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 49.

[xiii] ‘I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.’ Lee Friedlander, ‘An Excess of Fact’ in The Desert Seen (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1996), 104.

[xiv] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Fontana, 1984).

[xv] Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ [1931] In One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcot and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), 243.

[xvi]Where Lee Friedlander had intentionally produced a series of playful photographs of his own shadows and reflections in the 1960s—a self-reflexive deconstruction of the medium of photography published as Self Portrait (1970)—Pound simply collects the readymade archive of amateur versions.

[xvii]A recent study of selfies around the world has confirmed that women take significantly more selfies than men, and that most are taken by people under the age of 25. See Selfiecity, accessed 10 September 2014, www.selfiecity.net.

[xviii]I discovered, researching this essay, that the prolific Dutch designer, publisher and artist Erik Kessels has recently devoted Volume 13 of his ongoing self-published series In Almost Every Picture to this same theme of fingers obscuring their subject. The 2014 book is subtitled Attack of the Giant Fingers. See www.kesselskramerpublishing.com

[xix] Anna Newbold, ‘Patrick Pound’s Collected Works: Telling Tales’, Inkblot, 14 October 2011, accessed 10 September, 2014, www.inkblotreview.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/dad-jokes-of-patrick- pound.html.

[xx] See Marco Bohr, ‘Deconstructing the Selfie’, Visual Culture Blog, 30 March 2014, accessed 1 April 2014, www.visualcultureblog. com/2014/03/deconstructing-the-selfie.

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[mistermexico-blog]

Favorite Songs of 2016

21 tracks that moved me in 2016. 

Celebrate by Anderson .Paak

In my humble opinion, 2016 was the year of Anderson .Paak. Like many, .Paak (pronounced pok) first graced my ears on Dr. Dre’s Compton.  In early 2016 he dropped the soul/funk/hip-hop masterpiece Malibu, of which I could put almost every damn song on this list (and he did sneak his way onto this list multiple times). Celebrate literally brought a tear to my eye.  I was driving, and the song hit my face with a wave of emotion. This song wins with simplicity. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that simply being alive is a gift in itself-- so why not celebrate?

Favorite Lyric: It’d be a bad look talkin’ bout what could of been, so lets celebrate while we still can”

Also check out: The Bird

Celebrate VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SKpOW_o8Do

Forever’s Gone (ft. Na’el Shehade & Via Rosa) by Drama Duo

This song is beautiful. New age, bassy edm production laced with the voice of an angel.  You can kick back and chill with it, or get lifted and dance to it. That is something special, folks...to me at least. I’m excited to see where this duo out of The Windy City ventures next.

Favorite Lyric: “And I’ll love you far, after forever’s gone, and I’ll be here long, after forever’s won”

Also check out: Low Tide

Forever’s Gone VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVZRKAGD-kw

Cash Machine by D.R.A.M.

After Drake’s Hotline Bling allegedly jacked Big Baby D.R.A.M.s Cha Cha (the production is strikingly similar), I was very happy to have discovered this guys catalogue. Cash Machine is that feel good Chicago style piano driven jam (prod. by Ricky Reed) that makes you want to celebrate success. I took the crew to see him in Seattle and had the pleasure of a spacious front row viewing in an iconic intimate venue (Neumos). Dude can really sing, too!

Favorite Lyric: “I'm in the sky like all the time and now it's no layover, my records all across the wave and there was no payola”

Also check out: Broccoli

Cash Machine VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rx0eqQl8wk

Stupid Rose by Kweku Collins

My brother & I brought back “ghostriding the whip” to Stupid Rose this summer in Lake Chelan, a short and sweet highlight of the summer for me. Not the traditional song for such an extremity, but if felt right. His rap/sing style seems to come from a very natural place; hippy vibes, educated, rides the rhythm like a joyride pilot? Is this the result of the legalization of pot? Either way, this killer D’Angelo flip is a hypnotic warped out bouncy son of a bitch.

Favorite Lyric: “’Til she sat across from me my curiosity coiled like a snake around a finger”

Also check out: Death of A Salesman

Stupid Rose VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl6OW07A5q4

Show Me Love (Skrillex Remix) ft. Chance The Rapper, Moses Sumney, Robin Hannibal by Hundred Waters 

This song was hot, then I watched the video and for some reason fell in love. It gave me chills. I’m assuming it was shot in LA, but it’s a gloomy day and they’re just running around the city enjoying themselves. Chance the Rapper brings the best energy to every track he graces-- just anticipating his verse gets me hyped! Great message here too.

Favorite Lyrics: “Don’t let me show cruelty though I may make mistakes, don’t let me show ugliness though I know I can hate”

Also check out:

Show Me Love VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5bAVKzrBzI

Crazy Dream ft. Loyle Carner by Tom Misch

My guy Chase Decker threw this on a video he made and I HAD TO KNOW WHO THE FU$K IT WAS. I dug into the London prodigy’s Spotify/youtube accounts back in early Spring and continue to visit them on the regular. He plays guitar like a boss and sings like a swoon, bringing an incredibly sexy rock element to hip-hop. 

Favorite Lyric: “I had a dream about you last night, and we were listening to Pharcyde”

Also check out: Beautiful Escape

Crazy Dream VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa5HNkGrl8E

Real Friends (ft. Ty Dolla $ign) by Kanye West

This was one of the first songs I heard at the start of the Pablo run. I wish every song on the album was in this vein. This is as close as we’ve got to “old Kanye” to date. They snagged a sample from Couches by Frank Dukes and that just might be the kicker. Definitely a nostalgic, dreamy feel, Kayne getting a little vulnerable, Ty Dolla doing what he does, it’s nice.  

Favorite Lyric: “Who your real friends, we came from the bottom, I’m always blaming you but what’s sad you not the problem”

Also check out: 30 Hours

Real Friends VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUkV-U6_F_Q

Lingerie & Candlewax by Mayer Hawthorne

I’ve been hot on Mayer for almost a decade now, and the man continues to impress with every project he puts out. Definitely play Mayer’s Man About Town at the next function you host/DJ/highjack the aux at. This is some 213 meets Marvin Gaye, fighting temptation in the cadillac, smoking with the boo-thang music. 

Favorite Lyric: “Angel on my shoulder said, hold up, don't touch it, I'm so torn up, Latoya Luckett”

Also check out: Love Like That

Lingerie & Candlewax VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBlCRYE4rQ&list=PLykkJfCk9HuODiVwhic00RUlnF05jwnSU&index=18

Nights by Frank Ocean

Frank is such a unique artist. Nights, is nearly three songs in one. He delivers these incredibly intriguing lyrics over rather bare-bone guitar and drum. I can’t tell if he’s rapping or singing and it doesn’t matter because it sounds fantastic. The song starts off upbeat then slowly transforms, allowing Frank to change up his delivery accordingly. His content is mysterious; I want to know what he’s talking about but at the same time I get the feeling it’s personal and therefore don’t need to know everything. He coulples up a lot of his bars, allowing just a few lines to coincide together then he’s off to the next subject. It’s a borderline ADD stream of conscious and it’s beautiful.  

Favorite Lyric: “Why your eyes well up? Did you call me from a seance? You are from my past life, hope you doing well bruh”

Also check out: Solo

No audio sorry folks! (Frank’s a boss like that)

Dang! (ft. Anderson .Paak) by Mac Miller

Mac Miller dun grown up! He seduced this groovy Pomo production just right, smooth talking his feminine subject until his honesty pushes her away. In an interview I watched, Anderson .Paak was apparently talking about losing someone to the skies above. Mac decided kept it here on earth and I think it worked. 

Favorite Lyric: “Wait, we was just hangin', I guess I need to hold onto, dang, the people that know me best, the key that I won't forget, too soon”

Also check out: We ft. Cee-Lo Green

Dang! VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR3GQfryp9M

Riot by Jon Waltz

Problems have never sounded so good.  Things aren’t picture perfect for Jon, yet I’m jealous of the picture he’s painting. I’d really like to see a video for this song; so much room for audio irony! The song itself is sonically untouchable, yet the lyrical contrast makes it super badass! 

Favorite Lyric:”We just wanna be loved, we need money and drugs, and a new place to stay”

Also check out: Bang

Riot VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNh34RlmE-A

Jusfayu (ft. No Wyld) by Kamau

While Andre 3000 was snoozing, Kamau must’ve crept in and inhaled Mr. Benjamin’s soul.  I first discovered him by his interpretation/cover of Hey Ya! by Outkast (well played) and instantly had to find out this guys story. He uses a decent amount of VOX throughout his tracks; beat-box elements with incredible harmonic layers. He sings, he raps, he dances, he’s fun as fu*k and despite drawing comparisons to Andre he brings a very unique flavor to the music industry.  

Favorite Lyric: “I’m not a bad guy, I ain’t all put together, but if you stick around you gon see I’m getting better”

Also check out: Gaims

Justfayu VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tim7MeDItPw

Lucy The Tease by Allan Rayman

I don’t have a lot of info on this guy, but he was a Spotify Discovery find and I’ve really enjoyed his raspy chilled out vocals over it’s dirty hip hop production.  Super sexy track. I can see it in some action/drama movie soundtrack in the near future. Waitress seduces badboy motorcycle dude in a cheap hotel? 

Favorite Lyric: “And don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Lucy The Tease VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o04LHGQwNf4

The Waters (ft. BJ the Chicago Kid) by Anderson .Paak 

The song is too smooth! .Paak rides the beat with such natural, genuine swag, telling his story so effortlessly. BJ lays it down like a young Usher meets D’Angelo. I had the pleasure of catching BJ open for Anderson in Portland in early 2016, and when they took the stage for this song I felt like I was witnessing the reason people make music. 

Favorite Lyric:”And I can do anything but move backwards, the hardest thing is to keep from being distracted”

Also check out: Am I Wrong

The Waters VIDEO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2R2ticmolk

Caroline by Amine 

Young dude reppin’ Portland, Oregon! Another jam I found on Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” and instantly put in on repeat. So damn bouncy! Every component of this song is catchy. Amine played this like a savage too, being that this was his first release!  

Favorite lyric: “I love your bloopers, and perfects for the urgent, baby I want forever”

Also check out: Baba

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j8ecF8Wt4E

Guru by Coast Modern

This is simply a chill-ass-feel-good-airy-summer song. Take it slow, cool out bruh. Reggae vibes with a hint of Glass Animals. Makes a man giddy for summer.   

Favorite Lyric: “Chillin’ on the sofa, I don’t want to yoga, I don’t want to life right now”

Also check out: Animals

Guru VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XVrGv2W7Y

Wow by Beck

I recall thinking, “this is in response to Kanye West discrediting him after he won album of the year for Morning Phase” (he later admitted not even listening to the album).  Anywho, Beck’s Wow felt like old Odelay Beck was back in business.  Hints up hip-hop with modern cowboy vibes are you kidding me? This has to be Kanye approved, not that it matters. 

Favorite Lyric: “Standing on the lawn doin' jiu jitsu Girl in a bikini with the Lamborghini shih tzu”

Also check out: 

Wow VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyCkhPTU13w

Need to Know (ft. Chance the Rapper) by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

I feel like Macklemore’s This Unruly Mess I’ve Made was overlooked. Lot of great songs that album. This song was a highlight for me; an honest song about telling lies. Or rather, leaving out the truth. Ryan orchestrated this bad boy to perfection, Mack put his heart on the horn and Chance was the perfect addition. 

Favorite Lyric: “I cry when she smile with her eyes closed”

Also check out: Bolo Tie

Need to Know VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFztNcQ0KE

One Dance (ft. WizKid & Kyla) by Drake 

I Can’t not have a Drake song on here. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t vibe the f*ck out to Views all damn summer. He recruited an amazing team to collaborate here and the result is this worldly piece of perfection.   I’d like to the video shot at some sexy beach side hostel somewhere near the equator. 

Favorite Lyric:”I need one dance, got a hennesy in my hand, one more time for I go, higher powers taking a hold on me”

Also check out: I’m With You 

One Dance VIDEO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcer12OFU2g

Dapper (ft. Anderson .Paak) by Domo Genesis

Like Dang!, this is another groove monster produced by Pomo and headed by Anderson .Paak. They shot the video in a roller rink and they were 100% correct in doing so. Just dance y’all. 

Favorite Lyric: “Now I can turn a pussy to a kiddy pool”

Dapper VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_9HNEyLa4U

Neighbors by J. Cole

My guy Jermaine’s flow is straight head bobbing call the fire truck fuego here.  And I think I can call him Jermaine because dammit, I feel like know the guy-- he’s one hell of a story teller!  Apparently the house they rented to record the album at in North Caroline was raided by SWAT while they were away because “the neighbors think I’m sellin’ dope”. All they found was a studio. I believe it’s J. Cole’s altered voice on the chorus and that matters because he’s suddenly two different dudes. This is the Cole I’ve wanted since Warm Up. He might even slip up in my top 5 with this song alone.  

Favorite Lyric:”I been buildin' me a house back home in the south Ma, won't believe what it's costin', and it's fit for a king, right? Or a nigga that could sing and explain all the pain that it cost him”

Also check out: Change

Neighbors VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOPgg7qqlcA

COMPLETE YOUTUBE PLAYLIST: 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLykkJfCk9HuODiVwhic00RUlnF05jwnSU

ALSO, 

follow on Spotify @ Tyler Roberts “best of 2016″

[stellarstolen-a]

Treat Bag

drabble meme // always accepting – @kiingbuilt

Treat Bag: My character sharing something with yours

        It had been a long day, and she was dead tired. Though she hadn’t exhausted herself enough to keep her from dropping into the bakery on the way home. The house, she corrected. She still wan’t entirely decided on whether or not this was home. She’d picked up one of those miniature cakes that was too big to be a cupcake, but far too small to be considered a real cake. However, it was definitely too big for her to eat by herself. Yet here she sat on the couch, legs tossed over one arm rest, using the back as a table, attempting to get through the entire thing by herself. And then Roan walked in. She shoveled a few more bites in her mouth, as if that was going to magically make the entire thing disappear. She met his skeptical expression with a raised eyebrow. “I deserved a treat. Today was a challenge, okay?” He should know, it had been his idea to send her in. Though, she had been asking for more jobs, so it was really her fault. 

        But she wasn’t going to tell him just how awful today had been, she’d keep that part to herself. If he decided she was putting herself in danger, he’d probably stop letting her go. Which was stupid, what gave him the right to be protective over her? Didn’t he know she worried just as much about him when he was gone? She patted the seat next to her, and when he sat down she leaned her back against his shoulder. Scooping up a generous bite, she held the fork over her shoulder toward him, pushing it into his mouth whether he wanted any or not. With a sigh she spun around, so her legs were draped over his instead of the armrest. She balanced the cake plate on her knees and looked up at him. “I’ve gotten this far, I can’t stop now. You gotta help me finish it.”

[stellarstolen-a]

the other version of this that @kiingbuilt didn’t ask for

        It had been a long day of sitting at home. Damn it. The house. Who was she kidding anymore? These were her people now. She’d never meant to get so attached, but here she was. The guys had left almost 24 hours ago and they’d yet to return. It was nearly 1am and she hadn’t gotten so much as a text confirming that they were still alive. She was fairly certain they weren’t in jail, someone would have used their one call to reach her. Right? What if they didn’t come back? What if they were lying in a ditch somewhere? What if Roan was lying in a ditch somewhere? She started pacing again. Pacing was good. If she was pacing she wasn’t having a complete breakdown. She should’ve been there. Who’s stupid idea was it to leave her at home? She didn’t even know where they’d gone. Probably because Roan knew damn well she would’ve followed them.

       The door opened and she whirled toward it, nearly taking out the lamp as she swung around. No one spoke as they walked in. Everyone was bloody and bruised, looking like they’d been through hell. Normally she would’ve been angry, interrogating them about what they’d done without her. But she couldn’t focus on being mad right now. Her eyes jumped from face to face as they walked in, waiting. Finally. “Roan,” she sighed, running toward him, pushing through the others. She shoved him, as hard as she could, which normally wouldn’t have even swayed him, but this time he recoiled a little and she realized just how rough he looked. Her angry words died on lips. “I was worried,” she murmured instead, fingers tracing over new bruises and still bloody cuts. Her hands stopped on either side of his neck, looking at him. And before she could second guess it, she leaned up and kissed him. She slid her arms around his neck and holding on tight, not caring if she hurt him, that was his own damn fault. She pulled back, just enough to look at him. “If you ever do that to me again, I will leave. I refuse to sit here like some middle-aged housewife worrying about whether or not you’ll make it back in one piece. Either you come home when you tell me you’re coming home, or you take me with you, or I walk out that door for good.” This time she really did mean it as an ultimatum, and she hoped he’d take it seriously. Because she didn’t want to leave, not even a little bit. This was home. 

[stellarstolen-a]

gimme dem kisses

kisses 1/3

       She’d been sleeping on the futon in the basement for weeks now. The cold didn’t bother her, neither did the squeaky springs. In fact the arrangement was sort of nice, she never had to worry about anyone bothering her down here. The only time the guys ever came down was when they needed to do laundry (which was honestly not as often as they should be doing it) or if they needed something out of the deep-freezer. Neither tended to happen in the middle of the night anyway, which meant she had the whole room to herself. Tonight was just like all the others, except something had woken her up, and from the looks of things it was not a person. She sat up, clutching her blankets around her. “Hello?” She whispered. Another shuffling noise. She hopped up and made a dash for the light switch by the stairs, using her phone as a flashlight. She slid to a stop, and stumbled up onto the first stair. She was a little afraid to turn on the lights, scanning the room once with her phone before deciding that was way creepier, and just smacked the switch. A rat the size of a small chihuahua darted across the room, she let out a yelp and ran up the stairs, slamming the door closed behind her. 

        She didn’t even stop on the first level or acknowledge the guys playing cards by the tv. She just sprinted up to the second floor and down the hall to Roan’s room. He was awake, or at least he was awake now. He sat up frowning. Maia realized she was still holding the entirety of the covers from her bed. “There was a rat. I can’t sleep down there with a rat.” She walked over and sat on the edge of his bed. He sighed quietly but started to stand up. “Where are you going? I’m not going to make you sleep downstairs with the rat either.” She pulled her legs up, sitting cross legged and tangling herself in her blankets. “Plus if you leave, who’s going to stop me from having nightmares about rats crawling on my face? You have to stay.” He kicked his legs back up on the bed, and she curled up next to him. She tilted her head up to look at him, and he looked down at her with a raised eyebrow. She smiled softly and leaned up to kiss him, just a quick peck, then ducked back down to lay on his chest. “Goodnight,” she whispered, hiding her smile in her blanket.