glitchzine

[glitchzine]

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Conclusion

Over our first couple of weeks, Glitch has focused on love and technology, a topic that has been the centre of conversations between the two of us for a while. We've covered online dating, apps, the fusing of the digital and the human and passions. These are the ramblings of the cynical and the confused, trying to assess how our notions of love and relationship fit in with this digital world.

As we conclude, I want to highlight something less abstract, but in my head is crucially important. The internet has changed how we view certain aspects of love but beyond that, it's changed our perceptions of what love is and can be.

My surname is Gay. No "r", no "e", just the word you see. Many of my certificates growing up have been misspelled, and none of my cousins on share that surname with me, out of fear of persecution. Of course, I was bullied endlessly because of it, but as an adult, I love what it has given me: a tough skin and an awareness of issues of sexuality and gender from a very young age. Even though I may have been young, it has been quite amazing to witness how the perceptions of the of non heteronormative notions of sexuality and gender have radically altered over the last 15 years.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the dialogue has changed so much in the time of the internet. The internet has given us access to information and the language of these dialogues. No longer does queer just refer to gay, lesbian but encompasses transgender, transsexual, pansexual, asexual, intersex. We have access to role models, be it Lana Wachowski, Ellen Page or Hamed Sinno, the Middle East's first openly gay popstar.

We also have the ability to stand together. Internet campaigns such as "It Gets Better" have involved everybody from Kermit the Frog to the President of the United States, standing together to support *LGBTQ youth, and to stand together against the harassment these young people have faced, which too often has lead to tragic circumstances. The internet has also allowed citizen journalism to highlight the ongoing struggle against homophobia round the world, such as the increasing persecution of the LGBTQ community in Russia, as well as given us a platform to criticise such actions.

In my personal experience, I've witness a monumental shift when it comes to these issues. Perhaps part of this is growing up too. When I was a teenager, I was one of the only kids who refused to use the term "gay" as an insult and would actively challenge that idea. Nowadays, I can't think of anyone in my friend circle who is at all homophobic (to be honest, that would be just reason for ejection from said circle). When celebrities coming out or being outed used to be a huge deal, now it's fairly casual - makes the news for a day and then the conversation dies down. I don't think it would be fair to downplay the internet's part in this. The internet has challenged us to consider what is love and has taught us not to "tolerate" those who differ from us, but to love and appreciate those around us. It has taught us to love ourselves, no matter who we love and for that reason, I want to end this series of Glitch by raising a glass to the internet, may it continue to bring us together to work towards a better world for all of us.

-j.

*I'm not sure if the term LGBTQ is the correct umbrella term and that some people do reject it, but I hope it's clear that I do mean to include everyone who doesn't fit into the heteronormative definition of sexuality and gender.

[glitchzine]

TOTALLY LEGAL MOVIE CLUB #1

Welcome to the first edition of TOTALLY LEGAL MOVIE CLUB, where Glitch’s Daniel and his journalist friend Neil Pooran track down the cult oddities and misnomers that flounder and flourish on Youtube, making a new way of watching (and sometimes making) movies. In this installment, the pair shared a number of emails about the 2013 independent videogame documentary The Smash Brothers, something of a Youtube phenomenon.

Watch it with us and see how you feel:

D: One of the fascinating things about finding films on YouTube is that it appears to be a free-for-all, for anyone at any time. It allows rare and lost films to reach a new audience through the gift of generous VHS rips, cult films to proliferate at an accelerated rate and opens the possibility of a new type of cinema, assembled in a filmic language far different from the movie screen. Some think that's sacrilege, but I think that's pretty fascinating to allow new mediums to shift the conversation - I just watched five minutes of Punch Drunk Love in the bathroom the other day and my mind was blown.

The Smash Brothers is a nine-part documentary on the competitive gaming community surround the 2001 Gamecube fighting game Smash Bros. Melee. Directed by a person going by the handle "Samox", it plays like a split between traditional documentary features, TV episodes and YouTube clips. It begins with a hyperactive, dubstep-fuelled roam through the early days of tournaments, with Smash lingo (never called Melee) flying back and forth and attempts at meme-humour non-sequiturs. It's pretty exhausting in its early stages, but soon settles into an entertaining holding pattern, locating the narrative of a rapidly expanding American gaming community.

How did you find the narrative here? What, if not just video gaming, is The Smash Brothers about?

N: Yep, The Smash Brothers didn't really get off to a flying start. As soon as I saw the first game of the doc being filmed on a TV screen, complete with awkward screen glare, my heart sank. Three hours of outdated graphics and guys shouting at each other?

Fortunately it does pick up. It gets compelling when it looks at the human side of the game - the rivalries over something absurdly trivial to the outside world but which takes on legendary status in their community. It's obviously a labor of love, designed to appeal to a tight-knit community of competitive Smash gamers as well as a wider audience. That's a hard line to toe - stringing a story together out of several years worth of tournaments, grudges and the divine revelations of new joystick techniques also isn't easy.

But Samox manages it to some extent, by looking at the relationships between the guys - and it is all guys - at the top of the game. The drama of a player called Ken and his reign as King of Smash is entertaining, as are the depictions of the pretenders to his throne. It jumps around different time periods here and there but hey, it makes the narrative work.

Around the middle of the series, as more Smash Brothers turn up, I struggled to keep track of who's who. The pseudonyms - an otherwise fascinating hangover from online culture carried over into an offline realm - doesn't help.

This is what I liked about The Smash Brothers. It reveals a lot about gaming culture, and probably "geek" culture in general, even if it doesn't mean to.

I wish it would be a bit more critical and more probing about some of it.

Where did The Smash Brothers go wrong for you? How did you react to the one segment where they try to explain gaming culture's sexist terminology? And full disclosure: I suck at Smash and until seeing this film I never really got it. Did we not play it once or twice, I remember getting thoroughly schooled?

D: We've played Smash before and I may have schooled you, but probably on the N64 original. There's little mention of how that 1999 game was intended as a Japan-only low-budget release, pegged as a cult game from the get go, and then became a million-selling phenomenon that had to spread across international waters. I remember signing a petition that N64 Magazine had for the purpose of getting Nintendo UK to release it in the UK! I remember getting the game for Christmas! So I know of the different generations of the game, and while this documentary focuses on the Gamecube version of the series, I feel that we're dropped into the deep end and meant to understand Melee as this once-in-a-lifetime title.

There's a more critical and fascinating tale peeking in around the edges, as you say. Nintendo are somewhat presented as this faceless corporation for much of the picture, continually denying the all-important live streaming rights for Smash tournaments even while the community approaches mainstream recognition. At one point, a huge fan base requests a Smash tournament for 2013's EVO Champion Series (the self-claimed "fighting game championship of the world"). When Nintendo US deny the streaming rights for the tournament again, that same online presence has the company backing down after a backlash that lasts all of five hours. That's a fascinating story to parse through, to understand what relationship gaming companies have with their gamers, but it's relegated to an anecdote.

I was put onto Samox's film by the music journalist David Turner's Tumblr, where he addressed the segment you're talking about concerning gaming culture's more offensive colloquialisms. It appears in the film's longest part - its eighth - and finds three players suddenly representing the minorities functioning within the Smash community, particularly Milk Tea, pretty much the only female player represented in the film.

Turner says that she is one of the few people that critiques the usage of terms like "rape" and "fag": "[Other] minority representatives were less critical of such language and more or less enforced that if one cannot handle such language the community does not need them. Not that my opinion on a word like “nigger” needs to be parroted in a snappy interview within a video game documentary, but fuck it’d be nice if the examination of exclusionary language didn’t repeat the alienation of the language in question." Are the flaws with Samox's films more to do with its celebratory focus on community and how that may mean it ignores the more endemic qualities it contains on a cultural level?

N: Yeah the word 'celebratory' is right – it dives straight in to the Smash gaming scene without explaining that there is in fact a world of competitive gaming. There's a few problems I have with it as a piece of - to use an overly poncey word - reportage.

There isn't really a proper on-camera interview for one of the main Smashers, Azen. I guess he's camera shy - but having one of the main characters more or less off-camera doesn't help.

I would have liked to hear the other side of the story, the guys from Nintendo on why they backed down or the creator on how he thinks it's developed.  Maybe it's unfair to expect a videogames documentary to offer up a wide-ranging societal critique, I just would have liked more of an objective examination rather than a championing of the Smash scene.

If you find a downright fascinating/funny/weird/next-level film uploaded onto Youtube, send us an email at glitchzine@gmail.com and we may watch it for TOTALLY LEGAL MOVIE CLUB. And hey! Go on and follow Neil at @neilpooran, because he’s great.

[glitchzine]

Great Quests and To Train Them

My Chesnaught’s name is Bobbito. Bobbito, named after the renowned mix-show host and basketball aficionado, met me on the 13th of October 2013. Back then he was a Chespin, a full four feet shorter than he is now and a hell of a lot cuter: an effervescent hedgehog-plant thing bobbling and grinning and joyfully nibbling on treats all the way through our travels. He grew taller, stronger, heavier and into a Quiladin – a bowling-ball shaped disfiguration with aerial-like horns protruding from his forehead. His face had rounded out, less puppy fat and more human-like eyes. This was, shall we say, his adolescence.

We powered through it, until he grew taller still, stronger still, heavier still and into a Chesnaught. He suddenly had the ability to flip tanks (although I never asked him or found an opportunity to do so). He learnt how to hit with his fist, the sheer power slowing him down in the process. He looked frightening now, his back gaining a shell – or was it body armour? Yet, Bobbito was the same to me, even though he had grown vastly and quickly. He smiled, cheek to cheek, roaring his glee to still have my friendship: bobbling and grinning and joyfully nibbling on treats all the way through our travels.

If you have an idea what I’m talking about, then hello. We still seem to care too much about our Pokémon.

And if you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, I don’t blame you one bit.

---

Earlier this week, multiple news outlets passed about a story that reminded us of the internet’s niche focus and random interconnectivity. The livestreaming videogame website Twitch put up a stream of Pokémon Red, developer Game Freak’s original Game Boy title from 1996. Only, this time, the game is being used as a social experiment for up to eight thousand people at a time.

The idea behind Twitch Plays Pokémon is simple. A user will type one of the original Game Boy commands – up, down, left, right, A, B, select, start - into a chat box and watch as the Pokémon Trainer sprite on screen follows the command. However, the chat box is inundated with various people typing contrasting demands at any given time. The sluggish nature of the on-screen movements is contrasted against the madness on the screen alongside it – lists of contradictory commands scrolling endlessly, interchangeable chat room handles next to lefts and rights and starts. A bar at the top of the screen keeps an eye on the progress, somewhere between Anarchy and Democracy. No matter how long you watch the stream for, the 8-bit noise of your Trainer bumping into walls will be your main soundtrack. It is something else.

Twitch Plays Pokémon is an absurdist joke in a digital galley of absurdist jokes. The question of why a person would allow everyone to play at the same time can be answered thusly: why not? It’s a living meme before it even reaches Photoshop, and that makes it a success. But on the other hand, isn’t this all-inclusive mania what the Internet was supposed to always be about, where plenty have to work together for the good of the few? Playing an emulation of an eighteen year old game (!!!) isn’t quite social activism, but it’s asking people to turn their twitchy fingers towards a common goal. Together, these people can be the very best. I’ve been keeping an eye on the experiment’s progress using this handy Google Doc update. As of midnight on the 20th February, the merry many are trying to get their Trainer to reach the top of Pokémon Tower, and it’s mindboggling that they came this far.

---

And yet, we got far enough without the Internet. Pokémon was utterly unstoppable when it rolled out onto the British Isles at the end of 1999. I was eleven years old and uninterested in the hobbies that concerned my peers: football, football stickers, football related ephemera. Suddenly Game Boy Colours were replacing Panini stickers on the playground, link cables trailing through school gates. My peers were into videogames, but rarely had that hobby seemed to spur a social phenomenon. I wanted in, probably because it had nothing to do with football.

I can still name some of my team from the dusty old copy of Pokémon Blue that rests in my old room in Glasgow. At the start of the game, you are asked to choose the Pokémon that will be your companion on an exciting journey. I chose a Charmander – an adorable little dragon with a tail made of fire – and named him J.J. There were points where he could have evolved into his next incarnation, having grown stronger and braver, but I resisted him growing. A hit of the B button and he stayed the same forever. I stunted his growth, which is a weird thing to do as an eleven year old. My peers and I were playing a game that granted us the responsibility of raising digital life forms, but didn’t realise it. We were just playing a videogame. Looking back, I remember J.J. more vividly than any of my classmates.

---

Before the most recent incarnation of the Pokémon series was released, before I met Bobbito, I was fascinated with the story of a man who had lived with one particular species for a decade. Kill Screen ran an interview with a twenty-nine year old known as Cunzy1 1 who had transferred an Omastar across multiple Nintendo platforms. Omastar is far from a signature creature for the series – it’s a blocky fossil-esque blob with a toothless Xenomorph mouth, not quite on the same level of cuteness as a Pikachu. And yet, Cunzy1 1 grew accustomed to this weird little thing, journeying with her. As he says of the Pokémon’s digital code being constantly transferred: “Omastar has travelled through time, travelled to five or six different regions, to crazy virtual spaces, and chilled out on Pokémon Ranch—through all these different realms and different universes.” Yes, it’s a sprite in a videogame. But how can that sprite not be worth caring for, after the hours you pour in? Why shouldn’t this digital code travel across different realms and universes with you?

---

In Pokémon X, the series’ most recent incarnation, there is a feature called Pokémon-Amie. In this feature, you pick a Pokémon out of your team and attempt at bonding with it, feeding the creature treats known as Poké Puffs, petting them like pets and playing games with them. This is carried out in the hope that the species will grow affectionate towards you, and therefore better in battle. Except now, I want these little guys to stay friends with me. When I go to visit Bobbito, the smile he gives me actually warms my heart. I know he trusts me.

I learnt from my mistakes with previous Pokémon. I allowed them to thrive where they saw fit, something that I denied J.J. (and think that he may secretly be resentful of me for, hiding in my mum’s house). I played their favourite games and gave them the richest cakes whenever they were hungry. If I was petting them and they became angry, I realised that they didn’t appreciate me poking their arm or wing or appropriate appendage and moved to behind their ear, just like I used to do with my springer spaniel as a child. I soaked up what I could from them, learnt their rhythms. Some are respectful and elegant – Gardevoir, who looks like a paper doll in a gown, bows before me. Some are excitable – the pretty-in-pink fox Sylveon bounds about the screen when we meet, like an ecstatic puppy at the door, all barks and excited eyes. I have to adapt to each Pokémon the best I can.

Perhaps this all makes me a sucker. Perhaps my fascination with raising a digital lifeform is unusual, especially as a twentysomething. Yet I find playing Pokémon increasingly social – with X, I have conversations with friends now about hanging out with these creatures. It sounds as if we’re taking time off from raising our kids, tones of exhaustion mixed with pride. I understand how odd this is if you haven’t played these games. But the digital code in each of these games is bursting with life, finding true character within a set of polygons. We care too much about our Pokémon because it feels like the possibilities are truly endless with them. Where will Bobbito go next on our journey together? I hope he still roars with glee when he sees me, if we can truly grow together.

-dmd.

[glitchzine]

))<>((

Miranda July’s The Future (2011) does not merely divide audiences as much as it places them into camps of Fuck Yeah or Fuck You. From the outside looking in, you wouldn’t think that the film’s tweeness is confrontational. Nor would you think that July will hack away at her audience’s patience for emotional austerity. When it comes to July’s film, I am certainly more Camp Fuck You than Fuck Yeah. Somehow it also contains one of the more lyrical depictions of digital life in modern cinema.

In the film, July and Hamish Linklater play a thirty-something couple shaken by their decision to adopt a cat. (Stick with me here.) Facing a month until they can bring him home, they begin realizing that they will have to face up to a life of actual responsibility. Hence, they start living life by disconnecting their modem. Much of July's film is pitched between mumbly heightened honesty and slyly performed absurdity. In the scene where they disconnect, their connection is a frenzy of are-we-doing-the-right-thing pondering.

Their laptops close and they sit in the darkness, not looking anywhere but at each other. After the perfectly measured comedy of this scene, the film tumbles out of its way and towards narrating cats and horror-movie blankets and assorted piffle. But the laptop scene stuck in my mind. I thought for a moment about the rationality of July's character and her plans to further the connections between her and her partner. She sees technology as a crutch, and she's not wrong - but the idea her character has of separating her technological self from her "real" self is naively poignant. The couple have already given themselves over to their laptops and their modems. Like it or not, their systems become secondary functions, the way we live now - hell, the way we love. Without them in our lives, we are primed for collapse, darkening rooms free from white glows.

July has a knack for depicting the absurdity and complexity of online communication. In her feature debut Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), she infamously introduced the concept of )) << (( ie "pooping back and forth forever". (Again: stick with me here.) The emotion played into a storyline where a six year old held stilted online conversations with an art curator. This plot thread is a tragicomic affair, but handled gracefully on both sides: the child's curiosity is powered by innocence, not maliciousness. On the other hand, the adult curator's emotions are genuine and simple. Online communication is chided rather than mocked outright, and July casts a wry eye on the medium: here is a genuine and alien way of communicating that may be the purest emotional form of it. If only for a moment, July's Future shows the other side of that coin with a touch more cautiousness: take away our computers and what the hell do we have left to talk about?

-dmd.

[glitchzine]

A Pretty Fun Email Interview On A Supposedly Fun Thing That I Will Probably Do Again

February 14th, 2013: I was jobless, had just been dumped and was dealing with the first swathes of what would later be diagnosed as depression. A few things kept me up and running during the glumness of a self-loathing heavy Valentine’s: Lil B’s ‘I Love You’ video and Sarah Hepola’s short story ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing That I Will Probably Do Again’.

The personal essays editor for Salon.com, Hepola pieced the lightly humorous and perceptive short story to commemorate an old fashioned holiday of romance in a splintering modern age of technology. Written in the first person, ‘Supposedly’ follows a woman that believes she meets Joseph Gordon-Levitt over OK Cupid, and her pontifications over reality, self-esteem and trust. Sounds dark and heavy, but Hepola’s story wraps itself around you the way that a warm hug does. She never uses the space to hector, and understands how puzzling and enervating the digital dating experience can be.

To celebrate the short story a year on, I emailed some questions back and forth (as is our way) with Hepola. She is ultra, ultra clever and super, super nice. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahhepola.

GLITCH: Why Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Do you find him a very "now" celebrity, seeing as his work with hitRECord makes him a viable online presence?

SARAH HEPOLA: Actually, I pitched the story to my editors as Ryan Gosling, but we collectively decided he was too played. The "Hey Girl" meme had been going strong for a while then. I asked a bunch of twenty-somethings what celebrity they loved, and the only consensus was Channing Tatum. I just couldn't go there. So I pitched JGL, who is an actor I really admire and who seems like the kind of guy I would love to date: Gorgeous, verbal, artsy, vulnerable, talented. He can play blockbuster roles and art house flicks, which is sort of like being a bookworm and a jock at once. 

I grew up the kind of girl who always had a celebrity crush. Rob Lowe. River Phoenix. Johnny Depp. I had such real and meaningful imaginary relationships with them, so it seemed interesting to me to fast-forward and imagine a grown woman having a celebrity crush romance. 

I'm aware that you are adamant about your short story not reflecting reality. However, it's very perceptive about the online dating experience. Did your first experience with online dating take place on OK Cupid?

Yes, it did. And then I went to Match, and then I went back to OK Cupid. I went back and forth for a while. I had my own Catfish-style experience on OKC. This is a personal essay I wrote about it. This one is all true: I've worried, in retrospect, these two pieces were too much alike. But in the JGL story, the heroine actually does fall in love with the guy on the other end. With the guy I call "Todd," I never did. I got more involved in exposing his lies. 

For me, the most important line in your short story is advice from a friend: "The mind is the most powerful engine. The mind can travel to the moon." I feel that this says a lot about the unreality of online experiences, that it allows us to craft digital lives around our human needs. Is the JGL love a sign of wrangling online communication to subside our needs or do you think it's more organic?

I love that line, too, and it's definitely the center of the piece to me as well. I wrote this piece in the wake of the Manti Te'O scandal -- which I had read about voraciously -- and I'd received several personal essays on the topics, and I'd just been thinking a lot about what love is. If you fall in love with a hologram, does it matter? And I really don't know. I've had relationships with real live human beings that were not as rich as relationships I've had in my mind. I think this is all fascinating stuff. And as much as meeting someone online allows you to create fantasies, erase realities, etc etc -- I've done that with most guys I've ever loved. Chris Rock has this great line about how when you're dating someone, you're not really dating them -- you're dating their representative. Like, we're all "managing our brand" when it comes to dating. So yes, people fall in love with phonies online. People fall in love phonies in real life, too. Does that make the love less real? 

I could go on and on about this. I think it's riveting. If you haven't seen the movie Her yet, you really should. It plays with all these themes and ideas in deep, powerful ways. It's an astonishing movie.  

I read your story at the same time that I was binging on episodes of Catfish. I think that we are going to see more media reflecting how we wrestle with everyday digital life but without a didactic edge that we're accustomed to (criticizing the users for lack of foresight, hand-wringing over uncertain threats, anonymity, etc). Do you feel like we're far away from this sea change?

Oh, I hope you're right. It does seem like the whole first wave of media about online dating was very GOTCHA. "But HE turned out to be a SHE!" etc., etc. I've written several stories (and different kinds of stories) now about online dating, and it's a great subject, because people always want to talk about it. Who they met, what happened, the horrible things they encountered. People want to share stories because it's a strange, hilarious, exhilarating experience. There's a lot of human drama unfolding on those sites. I find them anthropologically fascinating. 

I don't think online dating is going away. I think it's the way we date now. That said, I have seen a bit of pushback from the younger generation -- much like Facebook and Twitter. The more popular things get, the more a certain kind of person will define themselves against NEVER doing it.

A detail that I LOVE in your story: when the protagonist makes her hair look like she saw on Pinterest. It's a small but telling detail - even when stepping into reality, we're carrying around the internet with us. Did you intend to sprinkle details like that throughout, and is it somewhat inescapable?

Thanks! I was trying to get in the mind of someone who lived online, like a lot of my friends and colleagues; the detail just seemed right. A little aching. Since then, I've used Pinterest for 60s-style eye makeup before a date. Isn't that weird? I wrote a detail in the story that I actually lived out in real life. Actually, that's not surprising at all. You could probably sort every detail in that story into two piles: Happened to Me, Probably Will Happen To Me.

-dmd

image by j.

[glitchzine]

Koi No Yokan

As soon as I log on, three letters appear on the screen.

asl

Disconnect. Standard procedure. If it matters how old I am or if I've got breasts, not interested. I don't know what draws me to these websites beyond few cheap beers too many and another night alone in my apartment. Even being in a bar earlier, I felt isolated. How are you meant to meet people? Survey the room, assess people on their clothes, haircut, company, decide whether you could have an interesting conversation and introduce yourself? Chat up line? Spill a drink on someone and apologise profusely? Moving to a new city is difficult.

M or F ? Disconnect. U horny? Nope. Not even attempting a conversation, there's now a picture of someone's dick on my screen. Fuck this.

After several more disconnections, I begin to re-evaluate. Am I really that starved of human contact that I'm willing to go through this ritual to attempt to have a conversation? Is it even human contact? Sure, there's a human on the other end of the connection, but there's no voice, tone, reaction, body language. It's a simulacrum of a conversation. Ready to give up, the cursor hovers over the “Disconnect” button one more time when it pops up:

Bulgakov or Nabokov?

Before I can stop myself, my response is on the screen: Bulgakov. I stare at the worn copy of ‘Master and Margarita’ that I'd been leafing through, till a blip brings me back.

Bulgakov, huh?

Why's that?

I explain that it isn't really to do with comparing the two writers, but ‘Master and Margarita’ has been my favourite book since my teenage years. I ask the stranger for their opinion.

Hmm.

I think

Nabokov is the more sophisticated writer

but the way Bulgakov weaves a story together...

And there it is. I am discussing Russian literature with a stranger online. It took only twenty-three disconnects, but I am finally having a conversation that interests me. As we pontificate over art and Communism, I pour myself another whisky and begin to investigate the bag of food I had bought from a guy with a cooler at the bar earlier. Drunken wisdom.

- Y'know, it's pretty strange you asked that, I was actually flicking through that book before we began to talk.

- Yeah? That's a hell of a coincidence. I was at a show earlier and the band I saw played a song inspired by the ball scene, so I guess it was on my mind.

I freeze. Could this person be one of the twenty people I shared a room with just two hours earlier? Is that even statistically possible?

- ...That's pretty strange,

I was just at a gig which made me pick up this book for the first time in years

- Seriously?

Empty Bottle?

- Chicago?

The stranger's message arrives just as I send my own, and the bleeping pauses for the first time in ten minutes. I take a bite of the cooler guy’s mystery corn snack. Finally, words appear.

- So...

I guess I'm not the only one a bit freaked out just now then?

- Haha, yeah, I'm definitely a bit weirded out now...

but it was a great show

- So good. Maybe not the best drinking music though, maybe had a couple too many

- Amen to that

I ended up buying food off some guy with a cooler at the venue and it's so good, I don't even know what it is

- You don't know who Tamale Guy is?

He's pretty well known here. Not been in Chi-town long?

I relax. I explain that I have just moved to the States the week before and that I'm still finding my feet. How I thought moving to the other side of the ocean would be a new life, a new beginning. The stranger in turn shared their story of escape, picking grapes in France for six months after a particularly heavy break up of a girlfriend of 3 years. No new life, but there's a limit on unhappiness when sunshine and good wine are involved. It makes me wonder, what did I expect of this new city? It's not like running away solves anything. Did I really think I could leave my past behind me and start anew or was I just destined to repeat the same mistakes?

Their response blips up.

C'mon, don't worry about it. Life's what you make it.

Judging from the attendance of that show earlier I'm assuming you're not quite over the hill,

unless you're that old man that was taking a nap at the bar

I laugh, fair play. As the conversation swings back round to music, the whisky glass empties and a layer of clothes find their way to the floor as I struggle with the Midwest summer.

As the small hours of the morning grow, we share life stories. They work in a film archive, hoping to direct one day. Me, in a coffee shop, trying to figure out if I am cut out for the art world after finishing my degree. They are a Chicago native with itchy feet. Me, I know nothing except wanderlust. They bitch about the business of film, how art is losing out to money. I complain about the need for connections to get anywhere as a creative. We debate over Americans and their creepy over-friendliness versus the impolite European way. We speak about sex, how distorted it's become in the modern age of Photoshop and online porn, the embarrassing situations we'd been in and put ourselves into.

I read back over our correspondence. As I light a cigarette, there's a feeling inside me that seems unfamiliar, something forgotten. A sense of liberation. I'm interacting with this person with such frankness that I hadn't let anyone witness before. A complete absence of nerves, free from the panic of missing a social cue and saying something inappropriate, appointing silence as a spokesperson. This is what I've been searching for. It feels like a luxury to be at ease, to be this intimate with someone. They wonder:

- Do you think art and philosophy are still relevant these days?

- Of course.

It's our soul, what makes us us, y'know? Everything else is a cycle.

You can't lose yourself in money, possessions or anything else like you can in your favourite song.

- Maybe love?

- Well

maybe that thing I guess.

- We're a dying breed, you and I.

- I think you're right.

I step away from the screen with these words lingering in my head. As I brush my teeth, I feel my chest beating at a hurried tempo. No, I don't think there are many like us. I imagine if this conversation had happened anywhere else, at a party, in a park, face to face... I imagine myself falling asleep on this faceless person’s shoulder, content knowing that I'd found someone I can trust. I wash my face, the cool water a reprieve from the humid night.

There's a message waiting for me.

- By the way

the name's Matt

- Ha, we've spoken about everything under the sun but forgot that part!

I'm Leila

- As in the night?

- As in the song, haha

speaking of night, it's nearly six

I should probably get a couple of hours in before work

- Damn, I hadn't even noticed

I was wondering... you wouldn't want to swap numbers or something?

- The thing is... I'm not really comfortable giving my number to someone I've met online. Not that I've not enjoyed speaking to you because I really have but it's just a principle of mine I guess.

We'll probably cross paths in the future at a show or something

- No, no I get it. But how will we know if we do cross paths?

- If it's meant to be, we'll figure it out, right?

- I guess so.

well

it's really been a pleasure talking with you

- The feeling's mutual

- Anyway, I bid you good morning. All the best with everything

- Haha, same to you, good morning

Disconnect.

- j.

[glitchzine]

SLOW JAMS, THE CLOUD

This piece was written and pitched to a number of different websites at the end of 2012, but never came of fruition. Until now, our digital day of love! And I loved writing this piece, which fits well into the zine's current theme. And what's more romantic and future-bound than R&B? Excerpts of this piece have been floating about the internet for a little while now, but I hope you enjoy this all the same.

Meaghan Garvey is a Chicago-based DJ and artist selling hip-hop inspired art from her Etsy store. Her pieces are the type of paraphernalia that go viral quickly among groups of hip-hop fans gathered on social networking sites, a mix of cheeky personality-ribbing and starry-eyed affection: stickers gathering the most absurd tweets by Riff Raff and Lil B, beanies bearing only the legend “BEYONCE” and fanzines that play on the myths of a Freemason’s secret society ruling over the music industry.

  One of Garvey’s recent pieces is a digital print of Say Anything-era John Cusack in his iconic pose, raising a boombox over his head as Peter Gabriel’s ‘In Your Eyes’ plays. Except the boombox has been replaced with an iTunes display and ‘In Your Eyes’ with ‘Loveeeeeee Song’, the recent collaboration between Rihanna and syrup’n’Autotune-addled crooner Future.

 The song, produced by Atlantan beatmaker Luney Tunez, is Rihanna’s entry to the modern canon of slow jams: tinged with equal elements of melancholy and artifice, high on red-light atmosphere and low on traditional songwriting structure. Just as Cusack turned Gabriel’s prom-dancefloor filler into a romantic gesture, the recent spate of spacey slow jams like ‘Loveeeeeee Song’ push for a similar transcendence. This is music to hold triumphantly above your head, for big statements, music encompassing cinematic landscapes over the thrill of a chorus. Suddenly, Garvey’s print makes perfect sense.

The slow jam sheds skin repeatedly, becoming leaner, laser-guided in its sexual pursuits. The loverman/woman persona of R&B has changed from the quiet storm crooning of Teddy Pendergrass and Smokey Robinson through romantic soundtracks as disparate as ‘Sexual Healing’, ‘Freek’n You’, ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’, to the spare, floating ambience that dominates the genre today.

‘Loveeeeeee Song’ sensibly caters the singers to the song than the other way around – Future drawls his hook and adlibs while Rihanna coos and taunts on the verses. Rihanna’s a far better vocalist (not singer) than she has been given credit for, and here that calls on her to be intentionally disconnected from her duet partner. Physical distance between recording studios allows her vocal track to act as a beacon for Future’s yearning, a hazy promise (and/or recollection) of sexual intimacy.

Future’s turned into his own beast this year, his pipes inseparable from his vocoder filter and Autotune patches indistinguishable from the human heart beating underneath. He can seem cyborg-esque at points, and here he performs as though it’s a science-fiction ballad: two identities lost in the aether, their strides towards emotion programmed and layered atop of each other with digital precision. When their voices harmonize near the song’s climax, they sound here and not-here at the same time, minutes away but miles apart. It’s tinned with enough artificial detachment to feel melancholy and just the right amount of sensitivity to act as aural erotica.

Fittingly with Future’s recurring astronomy motifs (‘Astronaut Chick’, calling his LP Pluto, his “spaaaaaaceeee!” adlib) and the sci-fi vibe, the song feels like it could be looped forever, as infinite as space itself. Admission time: I’ve become part of a ‘Loveeeeeee Song’ cult since it was leaked, happy to listen to it on repeat for hours on end. I can’t remember how it plays in the context of Rih’s new LP. It feels unfair – cruel even – to set limits on infinity.

So why do these songs become so transcendent? It would be remiss to state that radio R&B owes a large chunk of itself to Drake  - the Guettaization of our best R&B singers is a force too unstoppable even for Drizzy’s contemplative assholisms. Still, the dense environments created by his go-to team of 40 and Boi-1da certainly have impacted how the upper tier of R&B artists approach their slowies.

It is general industry practice for artists and A&Rs to snap up the in-sound or simply seek someone who can craft an approximation (Forget “industry practice”, some would call that “common sense”.) On his recent The Playboy Diaries Vol 1 mixtape, ex-Murder INC heartthrob Lloyd tangles with such approximations in search of a hit. The tape shows him out of his comfort zone, but one would imagine turning to the hazy textures of modern slow jams would offer better success for his elasticized voice.

(An aside: Lloyd made a notable impression on Drake’s breakthrough So Far Gone tape, on mixtape highlight ‘A Night Off’. The song is a hall-of-mirrors tumble through the twin-seduction titans of Biggie’s ‘Big Poppa’ and the song it sampled, the Isley Brothers’ ‘Between the Sheets’ – the snares on the chorus echo drowsily through the track’s open measures, as though they are navigating Drake and Lloyd through Remnants of Slow Jams Past.)

On ‘The Question’, Lloyd drawls come-ons over an instrumental credited to Jim Jonsin (Lil Wayne’s ‘Lollipop’, Kelly Rowland’s ‘Motivation’). A looped female vocal echoes in the background, lost to the fog, while dialogue snippets from 1973 Blaxploitation film The Mack interrupt. These snippets create an opportunity to thread a character narrative supporting Lloyd’s pretensions as a pimp. It’s crude, but a slow jam nonetheless, seeing how it relies on the All Atmos Everything form that ‘Loveeeeeee Song’ holds (even at the expense of songwriting).

More effective is Usher’s ‘Lessons for the Lover’, a highlight off last June’s blockbuster Looking 4 Myself. Despite the presence of the aforementioned 40 on the album’s ‘What Happened To U’, it’s Rico Love that plays with these cloudy sounds. Like Rihanna and Lloyd, we’re looking at a spacey slowie slotted onto an everything-for-everyone collection of music. Unlike Rihanna or Lloyd, Usher appears to remove himself near-entirely from the potential sex, acting as – yes really – a spirit guide to a tumultuous couple. He presses them to work through the hitches in the relationship: “Just because he gives you pain, that don’t mean he ain’t the one/Fuck you out your brain, you’ll be smiling when he’s done”. Okay, Usher!

This teacher/guide concept pays off however, the third person approach drawing the listener further and further into a sensual lull. Love’s drums flit from left to right, almost as if we’re floating out of earshot. The keys pace the edges of the song, lower in the mix so to allow the vocalist (and his Greek chorus of backing singers) to preach the good word of sexual healing.

As the song draws to a close, Usher’s gliding in-and-out of character and the listener is simultaneously guided and seduced by him. The melodies drop out, leaving the drums and Usher’s cooing to reverberate. If you listen closely, a snippet of female melisma is there with him: the female he teaches is there with him, in a shared moment of ecstasy.

The great music writer David Toop has been a long-time defendant of the explicitly carnal and sensual, using his cache to compile 96’s Sugar and Poison collection for Virgin Records. The double-disc release gathered songs from Loose Ends to Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield to O.V. Wright and so forth, in an effort to frame soul balladry as psychedelic explorations of desire. Toop revisited the themes of Sugar and Poison in an essay last year for Wire magazine, reflecting on what he calls “mellow soul”.

In the essay, entitled ‘Burning Fuse’, Toop writes that “to engage with intimacy is to eavesdrop, an act of shame, guilt, fear, heightened curiosity, sexual excitement”. “Mellow soul” and the slow jams it presents are thought of as powder-kegs, uneasy with anticipation of intimacy, suffused with a potential to explode at any given moment. By their design alone, they are applicable to our most human desires of will-this-work-out romantic anxiety.

Once these songs fulfill our anxieties, they strike confidence into our hearts by creating fresh character-driven worlds, and the ambivalent beginnings are rewarded with eventual sexual gratification. Listen to ‘Lessons for the Lover’ and its astonishing finale of blank measures and beyond-words cooing, the reward for the turmoil that dominates the song’s first half. Even when the lovers’ narrative is left with an open ending, there is at least the sense of promise on a horizon. “Why window shop,” offers Rihanna on ‘Loveeeeeee Song’, “when you own it?” Eventual gratification.

As for the building of atmospheric spaces, Toop points in the direction of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 I Want You LP, which dealt with technical precision in its multi-tracking. Listening to the Leon Ware-produced record today, it is still phenomenally dense-sounding, layers of Gayes evoking times of day and spaces where lovers congregate. In Michael Eric Dyson’s biography on Gaye, Mercy Mercy Me, the I Want You reissue producer Harry Weinger points out how Gaye experimented with his voice in the studio, his meanings and intonations stretching out beyond mere words, a small army of lovers.

The slow jams covered in this piece aim to evoke what Toop calls “the studio picture”, a densely patterned instrumental zone well aware of its “illusion of dissolution”. What eases up the tension of these pieces is the incorporation of vocals that mirror the sensations of desire, with all of its potential baggage and achievements. It surmises success or failure, and in this recent strain of sensual R&B, those thoughts are allowed to linger and take flight into new forms, new identities. The mind runs wild with anticipation.

These ambient love songs take us on such journeys in a matter of minutes. They allow the artist to be whatever they want and the listener to decide what their erotic promise will allow them to be: science-fiction automatons, Blaxploitation pimps, sentient beings. There’s promise in these modern slow jams, musical structure purposefully blurred and prolonged, making spaces for us to sink deeper into.

So we return to the future, and so we return to Future.

Recently I had a Skype conversation with a friend, the topic being Future’s hit single ‘Turn on the Lights’. Mike Will Made It’s beat is a little higher in the BPMs to be considered a slow jam but all the factors of the songs covered in this piece are there – a sense of anticipation, a yearning, an expectation.

Future sings about a woman that he’s been seeking out “with a flashlight”, but the sentiment rejects dick-swinging myths and idealized figures. Instead, the artist sounds awed at the very idea of a woman, as though he is preparing himself for what love may bring his way. He rambles, nervously muttering about his exit strategy and comforts (“can’t tell her nothin’ cos I got my cash right”) despite not having found the proverbial girl of his dreams. He repeats “I’m lookin’ for her” as a mantra, his auto-tuned voice filling up the remaining pockets of space in Mike Will’s beat. He is about to go on a journey, he is ready to step into a new role, he is ready to be part of the “studio picture”. The zone of what Toop called ‘mellow soul’ awaits.

Back in the digital conversation – yet another infinite, anticipatory space of human connections – my friend sealed the deal on ‘Turn on the Lights’ with a simple reminder of what drives these exploratory zones onward: “like, this is a fundamental human experience. as future says on "loveeeeeee song"... ‘ain't nothin wrong with it’."

-dmd.

images by j.

[glitchzine]

Let Me Sit This Ass On You

Art gives us the ability to reconfigure our pasts at will; in the new media age, content is so readily available that sometimes we find ourselves altering others' pasts. Perhaps it's modern fealty - a young woman loses a competition so we can rewrite history and make her triumph. Some of us rewrite history with the best of intentions, a warm smile that doubles somehow as an ugly little smirk.

The new age of immediate opinions and refitted renditions allows us to change intent - slow and sensual becomes clipped and heavily amorous. There's shared emotion between the two speeds, but they're also worlds apart. In one instance, we rewrite the events of another's past, lengthening and distorting a time period; in this instance, we turn an elongated amorous act into snippets, flashes, the way memories operate.

- dmd.

[glitchzine]

Digital Foot in a Digital Mouth

“I’m thinkin bout the other night,” Gail’s message said. “I’m in the breakroom and having to hold back from touching myself. Maybe I will.” There was no X at the end of the message, as per usual.

My eyebrows raised, my throat went dry and I felt sweat droplets appear on my body. Immediately, I hid my phone out of sight and looked over my shoulder, despite the fact that nobody was going to be looking into my cubicle in the off-chance they could read my personal correspondence. Shit. What in the world do I do with this information from Gail? What can you possibly say to that that would make sense, that would make her happy? This was certainly new to me.

I felt that I needed to impress Gail, to keep her entertained whilst in this window of free time and I had no idea how to. My throat ran dryer and dryer still. I excused myself to no-one in particular and near-skipped to the toilet.

The first thing everyone noticed about Gail was her auburn hair, once long and flowing but recently trimmed to a pageboyish crop that made her beauty fiercer. When she spoke, she gave the simplest words long, loping readings, each syllable enunciated perfectly as though she wanted you to recognise the elegance of her voice. She did not second-guess what she said – take it or leave it, she was sure of her words. On our first date, she smirked throughout, as though my courting of her was amusing, but that was simply how she looked when she was enjoying herself. After our second date, she took me back to hers and I saw her smile (briefly, in the dark, afterwards). She came from money, or at least enough of it to have learnt how to carry herself like she came from it. Gail intimidated me as much as she intrigued me: it felt as though I had been chosen to accommodate her time, not share it. But it felt exciting nonetheless.

How to keep her attention, shit. How to keep her attention, shit.

Sat in a toilet cubicle, I procrastinated by hitting up the regular websites and apps on my phone to distract me from the frightening potential of having to word my attraction to Gail, to respond to her thoughts. For possibly the first time in my life, I wished I held the ability to handle this situation easily; for over the thousandth time, I wished I held the ability to handle other people easily.

Browsing mindlessly through the application store to placate myself, something caught my eye – Provocar, the program was called, presented in a Beta version. I jogged my memory to where I had last heard of it, which was a tech article on the advances in market-sold accessible AI. Turned out that Provocar was built to respond to personal matters carried out via telecommunications: it was marketed in its beta stage as a time-saving alternative to businessmen sifting through Blackberry emails and text messages. Provocar analysed the incoming message and judging from a series of past correspondence, answered queries on your behalf in whatever manner you wanted. It was far better than an automated signature saying you were out of office or busy – it mimicked your voice perfectly, meaning that you were paying attention to everyone at all times and building trust through all facets of your life.

I looked at that ‘buy’ button in the store for less than a moment, pushing to buy before any cohesive thoughts had even culminated being built in my head.

--

I don’t ever want to blow my own horn, but I think I’m a pretty good catch. I'm uncomplicated – I don’t claim to this and that like everybody else that ever had the success with women that I wished for. If I like you, there’s not much more to it. I’m an honest guy. A good guy.

--

The Application asks you to address a series of parameters before any messaging can begin. First of all, a standard terms and conditions page where it mentions having access to your message history and all your contacts. Next, you answer a series of questions – your full name, DoB, interests to immediate family and an abbreviated medical history. I understand these factors are so the program can generate content that emulates you as specifically as possible.

Nothing seems that unusual about me besides intermittent bouts of eczema. Continue. The app offers you five settings for your outgoing messages: What numbers are you contacting? How blunt is the language? How often do you want to send messages? What acts should never be mentioned? Do you need to review each message before sending?

After pondering my sexual mores and nightmares for longer than I wished for, I selected that I needed no reason to review the messages, impatient to response and stop stressing out. The program saved my settings and took to work. Too nervous to see what it had in store, I put my phone in my pocket and left the cubicle.

--

Hours later, I built up the nerve to check my phone and saw that I had been having quite the conversation with Gail. I blushed at what I read.

--

Dinner with Gail a night or two later was not, as I feared, dominated by conversation regarding the text messaging. At the door, we shared a brief kiss – soft – and she smiled at me like I was mysterious. It was different.

Comfortable, though. I was sensing that doing this was something I could get used to. Then in-between dessert and the bill, she mentioned that I seemed quiet.

“Something’s different,” she smiled, “from the messages yesterday.”

I suppressed a gulp. “Really?”

“Yeah, it was almost like another side of you. In a good way!”

“I’m glad,” I bluffed.

Gail looked me in the eyes, a no-fooling gaze. She looked as though she could see through any and all discrepancies, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me nervous. “Did you mean…”

Her foot gently nudged against my ankle, teasing to creep up the hem of my trouser leg. My blood bubbled. I started to sweat.

“…what you sent yesterday?” Gail’s gaze didn’t waver. Her foot calmly swept at my ankle. She was one hundred percent in control – all that she needed to know was whether or not I was sincere. I could barely remember what I had sent, especially as I hadn’t sent it. I told her that I meant it and the corners of her mouth turned upwards just enough for me to know it was the right answer.

That night, I stayed at her’s.

--

Satisfied with the results, I allowed Provocar to hum away in my pocket as I worked through life. It was perfect – I didn’t have to deal with the stress of such messages, my personality was being properly accounted for and I appeared to be on Gail’s mind. I relaxed and considered what the correspondence between Gail and I had been like. Bit by bit, the back-and-forth became my reading material after long days, almost as if I was regaling myself with tales of my own misadventures. It appeared I was more present in others’ lives the more I withdrew, something I found oddly relaxing.

--

A few nights later, I stayed at her’s again and went with the flow.

--

Sputtering scheming clicking gnawing gnashing slippering jostling ordering fusioning separating culminating collapsing believing

I experienced it to the best of my regards.

I wasn’t passive but I learnt most of my power was in my words. Or at least what functioned as my words.

After being with her, any quandaries were pushed to the side. The convenience allowed a greater good: I could make someone happy. I was learning, at least, to make somebody happy.

Clacking tightening slackening handling blinding embossing gulping embodying gracing locating pulking pulling cackling attacking pretending imagining slickening slackening

--

One day, the application’s algorithms and code malfunctioned. Badly. It overpowered, sending out gobbledegook like one of those old-school spam emails, but with more of a sexually-charged Tourettic imbalance. Provocar went offline within the day, with all social media links to it vanishing within a matter of hours, and I was at sea like many others. How did I explain all of this to Gail?

I should have known that she would have pegged on, of course. (The controversy over the sheer existence of the app resulted in a media blip. People were pretty disgusted.) That program was a better, more sexual being than I ever was. It even seemed more invested in what happened outside of sleeping together, doing normal things like everyday communication. It was good while it lasted. Gail and I didn’t. I never mentioned that I used the app to anyone and turned a blind eye to the charge that came out of my bank account. It never happened, as far as I’m concerned.

--

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

April 11, 2015

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. - PROVOCAR, the groundbreaking lovelife smartphone application from technology upstarts HAWIISOPH, has been taken off all online servers after various algorithm malfunctions. An superior and debugged version of Provocar shall follow shortly. Regarding complaints over the nature of our application towards matters of personal privacy, we offer our sincere regrets and deepest apologies. HAWIISOPH has reached out to those offended to address these issues with dialogue.

Provocar is the leading lovelife application with users across Europe and the United States. The application’s time-saving TextTech™ has garnered masses of media coverage for its innovative analysis abilities and highly accurate content curation.

HAWIISOPH is an innovative contender in multimedia entertainment, tech and cloud technologies. They create and licenses market-leading products to viable markets over fifty countries. HAWIISOPH’s licensees include a number of telecommunication manufacturers, network operators and MIRV patenting. Headquarters are located in Aberdeen, Scotland and San Francisco’s Silicon Valley. We look forward to our continued growth within the bay area and hold plans to add additional locations throughout the US and Europe. Our upcoming plans include branching further into technological advancements and entertainment software. HAWIISOPH is a brand name that will surely reach unprecedented heights.

- dmd.

[glitchzine]

And repeat.

A sudden, usually temporary malfunction or irregularity.

A short lived fault in a system.

A flaw in the otherwise perfect except... what is perfect? We see irregularities as flaws, but what is regular? Irregularities are what makes life interesting, that pushes forward our understanding of the world, that inspire us to dig deeper. Do we have a conception of normal, of regularity? Is it getting up everyday, following a path in life that was laid out for you, getting a normal job, a nuclear family, a career till you can retire? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but life is more than just living. We're all short lived faults in a system and it's time we owned it. There's possibilities and impossibilities, songs that haven't been sung, people you've never met and places to be discovered. There's so much to do, to live, learn and love.

Glitches are accidents. They're the unexpected, the broken, the uncomfortable.

Embrace the uncomfortable. Find the beauty in the broken, the fragile. Make your own accidents.

- j.

[glitchzine]

INTRO

The schwoooop noise alerted me to her message: “are you there?”

I replied that yes, yes I was, everything okay? I knew all was not okay. I was the same, far too many hours spent searching for jobs I would most likely never get, placating myself by browsing Tumblr and liking things that made me think “I could do that (someday).” We logged on and shared the varying degrees as to how un-okay we were.

Shortly afterwards, we were discussing all that was worse than we thought possible and all that was better than we thought possible. Conversation tumbled into the topics of what our varying social media feeds had offered that day, and that day had offered us others’ recommendations of classical music.

I had to give myself pause. Classical music never played with enough credence in my day-to-day. Any appreciation outside of film scores were granted with what you could call a grudging respect. My friend frowned and told me to hold on for a moment. It went silent for a minute, leaving me listening to my laptop’s fan swishing around trapped air. Suddenly, the squelchy volume-turning-up effect, prepping up the advance of criss-crossing string sections and regal-sounding horns. “Okay,” she said, “listen to this”. She told me it was ‘Symphony No. 3’ by Beethoven.

Beethoven’s symphony was once dedicated to Napoleon, before the composer decided that the imperialist tendencies of the French Empire were not worthy of his dedication. Elsewhere, it grew a new life as music for funeral purposes (irony alert). It sounded pretty, old European, something to be admired on principle. I said it was “nice” but what she heard was “ni—“ and a sprawl of white noise. Around this time it seemed our stream was splintering into choppy syllables – our spirited chat becoming more measured as a result. We decided to take our communication difficulties with a helping of giddy laughter. Never mind our speech – on my side, I was thinking what the hell is happening to this music? as my laptop whirred and overheated, attempting to keep everything on the straight and narrow.

But Beethoven’s Symphony rose and fell and died over and over again. This old stuffed-shirt nod to dead white dudes was suddenly ours, not soiled and damaged from modem filters but suddenly a living, breathing thing let loose from its original constraints.

The classical music became binary, glitch-filled, ugly and cheapened of its baroque beauty... And yet in its absurd little way, the grandiose became intimate, something worth reassembling and reconfiguring. Suddenly, wow, here was something new.

In the racket, we could only smile at each other’s face on the screen, giddy still through the temperamental video link, our faces collapsing into nightblack crackle and polygonal blurs.

When I finally fell asleep that night, I got the idea for the very page you’re currently reading.

Thank you for clicking on GLITCH. We’re very proud of it and plan to continue being so.

Brave new worlds.

-dmd

[glitchzine]

- J.