#(future edit) i used the wrong term i said subculture when the word i was looking for was fandom | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

aprilpillkington · 5 years

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Ah, the GIF. We’ve all seen them. They populate the Internet on...

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Ah, the GIF. We’ve all seen them. They populate the Internet on blogs and social media and are part of what makes news and entertainment sites like Buzzfeed very popular. When a GIF is used with the right content, it can go viral, which is why it has become a powerful marketing tool. Whether you are using it on Twitter, your blog, website or other social media channel, you can now create one easily. There are plenty of free and premium online tools which let you create GIF files quickly, but before you get started, what is a GIF file? A GIF (with the file extension, .gif) is basically an image file format that is animated by combining several other images or frames into a single file. This single file is encoded as graphics interchange format (better known as GIF). Unlike the JPEG image format (.jpg), GIFs typically use a compression algorithm referred to as LZW encoding that does not degrade the image quality and allows for easy storing of the file in bytes. The multiple images within a single GIF file are displayed in succession to create an animated clip or a short movie. By default, animated GIFs display the sequence of images only once, stopping when the last image or frame is displayed, although it can also loop endlessly or stop after a few sequences. But social sites like Tumblr and GIF creation tools like Giphy gained in popularity more recently and a GIF can be an effective and low-impact replacement for a video and, essentially, valuable as a business tool. GIFs are often used for bite-sized entertainment and as statements, replies or comments in online conversations. They are also commonly used online to convey reactions, illustrate or explain concepts or products in a fun, creative and succinct way, and also to make GIF art. Take, for example, this visually striking form of GIF art by Graphics artist Kevin Burg and photographer Jamie Beck, depicting a scene at a New York Fashion Week. In an interview with Time magazine, Beck likened it to freezing time and letting a single moment live, breathe. Not surprisingly, the popularity of GIFs now defines the Internet’s lexicon, legitimized by Oxford Dictionary naming it the Word of the Year in 2012. And GIF art, itself, is legitimized by contemporary art galleries and institutions like the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City that showcase the best GIF art pieces by talented young graphics artists. Abigail Posner, Head of Strategic Planning and Agency Development at Google, writing in Fast Company says animated GIFs With Sound and other such visual media like memes “reconnect us to an essential part of ourselves.” The GIF graphics file format was created by Steve Wilhite in 1987 at CompuServe. In the years since, a debate has been raging as to the correct way to pronounce “GIF”: Is it pronounced “jif” as in the peanut butter, or “gif” with a hard ‘G’ as in “gift?” Most people pronounce it “gif” with a hard ‘G’, but Wilhite, who was honored with a Webby Lifetime Achievement award in 2013 for inventing the GIF format, insists it is pronounced as “jif.” “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.” GIF has become the calling card of modern Internet culture. Businesses — large and small — have embraced the file format and use it to liven up their messages online. Many savvy businesses, for example, edit, rearrange or combine one or more video sources to create an absurd juxtaposition designed deliberately to emphasize a minor detail or fire off a quick market commentary. Aside from using GIFs as a medium for humorous effect and to show a fun, likable company culture, many brands and creative agencies commonly create GIFs that have commercial messages and seamless advertisements, such as banners and leaderboards. A seamless product 360-rotation demo can also be a highly effective animation. It helps illustrate the product design and generate interest.

Moreover, GIF file format is supported by nearly all Web browsers and Apple’s iOS also supports GIF but not its rival Flash. So GIF has become popular with brands marketing on social media, news media and the mobile Web. A looping GIF perfectly embedded into an article and published at just the right places can deliver your message powerfully. Several image editing programs like Adobe Photoshop, GIMP and Microsoft GIF Animator can be used to create simple animated GIFs that spread short company videos or messages across the Web. If you’d like to create and share videos longer than a few seconds, however, you might want to use the MPEG format because the GIF format is not as efficient with video clips longer than a few seconds. Social media is fun—why else would we spend so much time on it? Brands who manage to stay human and share authentically can create a deep and special relationship with their audience, and funny/weird/endearing GIFs can be a part of that. Want to give your audience a closer look at your product? GIFs With Sound can show off the kind of details and motion that can entice shoppers. Who’s using it? Marie Claire took advantage of the GIF format to offer viewers a look at a product: their killer gladiator sandals. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to explain something in an image than it would be with words. For step-by-step how-tos, following along with processes, or even quick recipes, a GIF can be exactly what you need. Saying “thank you” with a GIF on Twitter can provide an extra touch of delight. Our own Kevan Lee shows you how in this quick video: Think a GIF is too brief a vessel to get a real point across? I was skeptical, too, until I saw some of the amazing mini-presentations that can be shared in this format. GIFs can be particularly effective when you want to string multiple still images together to tell a story of motion or change over time. Got a TV or print advertisement you want to get a bit more play out of? Transfer it into GIF form! A really awesome way to use a GIF is to give your audience context into a piece of data or statistic through an animated diagram or graphic. Want to share just a tiny look at a future product, big announcement or upcoming release? A GIF can be the perfect bite-size teaser. Give your audience a peek inside your company: Who you are, what you look like, what makes you laugh and what you’re up to every day at work. GIFs can be a fun, lighthearted way to share a bit of your company culture and bring your fans closer to you. Pronounced gif or jif, the GIF file type was originally designed for graphics, but it’s now most commonly used for simple animated images on the Web. It might be easiest to think of a GIF as a tiny movie that plays over and over in your web browser. This video from PBS gives a really nice introduction to the history of the GIF file format. Google has made it a lot easier to find animated GIFs. Just go to images.google.com in your web browser, enter your search term, then select Search Tools > Type > Animated. This is the image search tool we’ve used a lot in our office. It’s been really fun to surprise each other with animated GIFs of our favorite TV shows and movies. There are animated GIFs out there for almost anything you can think of, so have fun looking for them! A Youtube compilation is a fun montage video assembled from the best parts of other videos. Compilations can be of sports highlights, fail videos, Vines, or anything else. Each clip adds to the total of the compilation and makes sense with the other clips. Think about the theme of your compilation to find videos. Do you want it to just be interviews with a celebrity? Or also clips of their acting? Do you want your music video compilation to only have the chorus? Or connect through a specific visual? You can use as many or as few as you like. To keep track of your videos you can keep their tabs open or write down a list of links. Upload the videos to the Kapwing video montage maker. You can copy and paste the links directly so you don’t have to download anything from Youtube. Once your clips are done uploading click “Edit trim” to trim them to the part you want in your compilation. You can choose the dimensions of the video using the drop down menu. Reorder the clips as you see fit. When you feel like your compilation is done, click Create! You can share the Kapwing link to your video or download the video to your device and share the file via text, email, or social media. Most of us have pretty much never lived our adult lives without the internet. It’s affected us in innumerable ways – some good, some very bad – and despite not really knowing what a world without it looks like, it still continues to surprise us. In our Extremely Online series, we explore the apps, trends, subcultures, and all the other weird stuff the internet continues to offer. Cruelly neglected by its sugar daddy Twitter, the short-form video platform Vine shut down for good January 17 2017, much to the disappointment of fans of excessive bass boosting and Spongebob Squarepants. Mourning the loss of fresh, high concept, whip-sharp fast comedy, most turned to YouTube, where people were already archiving the most iconic, face-hurtingly funny of Vines. These YouTube compilations, generally created while Vine was still alive and well, were 10-minute selections from about a given month of uploads on the app. They were heavily monetised and bookended by obnoxious movie editor stock intros and crap music. This was the digital petri dish from which the bacteria of vlogger Nash Grier and the Paul brothers festered and spread. With Vine shutting off the tap as it were, these styles of videos stopped appearing for the most part, and Vine’s breakout stars jumped ship to create their own longer form YouTube content.

But if the algorithm, FBI agent, or reptilian globalist behind your browsing habits is anything like mine, you’ll have seen another type of Vine comp in the YouTube recommended section. Videos with deadpan, cumbersome titles like “Underrated and overrated Vines that redeem me” and “Vines that get me friggin jazzed”. For the most part, the awkwardly preplanned “skits” that plagued Vine’s comedy section are gone, and instead, these compilations celebrate the head scratching, esoteric underbelly of Vine that was always there. Like obsessive DJs scouring record shops for old overlooked 12”s, introducing oddities to mainstream audiences and recontextualising classics, these uploaders have turned the Vine compilation into a different beast, unique from the platform itself, a kind of midway point between internet art and mixtape. Similar to constructing a decent mixtape for a friend or crush, there’s a few things you should bear in mind if you want to create a fire Vine compilation to share with the world. Hold on to your croissants. If you want to get some traffic rolling in, you’ll need to pick your title wisely. It’s difficult to describe the tone you should try to emulate, but it’s essentially a kind of sleepy post-irony – just scan some @dril tweets to get a flavour. There’s also a soothing familiarity and repetition to these videos, and some of the titles speak to that self-care utility, referencing how they might help assuage symptoms of anxiety or depression.

The market has been flooded in the past six months, so if you want your comp to really slap and do big numbers, you’ll have to study the competition, and do some Vine-mining of your own. The app is still running as an archive-cum-memorial of saved Vines, so if you dig hard enough, you can still find some hidden gems that no-one has seen before. This is an essential rule for most collections of art – how do your Vines fit together? Do you want to hit them with a few classics at the start to ease them in before the weird shit? Do you want your compilation to tell a story? Could there be a thematic link between the Shetland Pony tip toein’ in his Jordans and the old dudes in the playground yelling “I’m a cowboy, baby!”? Recording and visual artists think hard about the movement of their work before releasing an album or presenting a collection: you should too. It occurs to me now that I may be overthinking something that defies satisfactory analysis, but we’ve come this far, and you’re still reading, so let’s just power through, shall we? Shooting straight from the hip here, just so you don’t have to: I watch Vine compilations when I’m sitting on the toilet. It’s okay. We all do. It struck me during one of these trips to the WC that the length of the average bowel movement is actually a decent yardstick to consider when you’re figuring out how long to make your fail compilation. Generally, over five minutes so it feels substantial, but any more than 10 and you run the very real risk of leg cramps – sorry, boredom. If you want to take your social media strategy to the next level and really say what you mean online, it’s essential that you know how to make a GIF. You can use GIFs to create eye-catching ads, or to connect with your followers through relatable moments from pop culture. This article will show you how to make a GIF, and also explore the most effective ways to use them on social media and beyond. The Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, chains together multiple bitmap (BMP) files into a single animated image. Each pixel within a GIF can be one of 256 colors, which is why GIFs generally look low-res compared to other videos we see online. GIF have lower frame rates, too, which works to their advantage. More frames equal bigger files, and GIFs need to stay small and shareable. You could think of GIFs as the midpoint between images and videos. The main advantage of using GIFs is that you can tell a story quickly, and it doesn’t take much bandwidth to load them—making them perfect for mobile. If you’ve ever thought GIFs seem a little primitive, well, that’s because they are: the animated GIF has existed in its current state for 30 years, predating the Internet itself! GIFs have exploded in popularity in recent years. GIPHY, one of the web’s more popular GIF databases, claims to have over 300 million daily active users. Last month, Google acquired Tenor, a keyboard app and GIF archive designed to help iOS, Android and desktop users find the GIFs they want quickly. Tenor processes over 400 million GIF searches per day. GIF was 2012’s Word of the Year, and even though we engage with GIFs every day, we can’t seem to agree on their pronunciation. Is the G soft (like gin) or hard (like giggle)? In my humble opinion, it’s “GIF”, not “JIF.” Remember, GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format: that’s graphic, not jraphic. I’m willing to die on this hill, but you don’t have to agree with me. Steve Wilhite, grandfather of GIFs, initiated a storm of Internet discussion when he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Webby’s in 2013. His five-word speech expressed solidarity with the soft G camp, proclaiming, “It’s pronounced ‘JIF’ not ‘GIF!” Cue side-eyes from half of the Internet. Ultimately, there’s no right way to say GIF. Even the Oxford English Dictionary has remained neutral on the issue. The debate will probably rage on until we invent a new file type to express our feelings online.

Even if you can’t decide how to say it, it’s still fundamental that you learn how to make a GIF. Let’s check out the basic steps, then explore some tools to help you make GIFs With Sound in a jiffy. If you’re looking to make a GIF quickly, the best approach is using a GIF conversion site like GIPHY, Make A Gif, or Gifs.com. These platforms all function slightly differently, but the following steps will give you a rough idea of what to expect when you’re using them to make a GIF for the first time. 1. Choose the video you’d like to make into a GIF The best GIFs target relatable moments that apply to specific feelings or situations. Pick something that will resonate with your target audience. For example, in my article about YouTube ads, I used a GIF of someone angrily smashing their computer with a hammer. If you’ve ever had your solo kitchen dance party interrupted by an unskippable ad, you can probably relate. Find a video that captures your moment. You can use one you’ve saved to your computer or mobile device, or search online: YouTube and Vimeo are widely-used resources for clips. 2. Upload the video for conversion If you’re uploading your own video, select that option within the converter you’ve chosen, and upload the video. If you’re using a video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, paste the complete URL into the converter’s URL field. 3. Establish the length of your GIF When you’ve uploaded your video file, isolate the moment you’d like to capture by bookending it with timestamps. GIFs support up to 3 minutes of footage, but two to six seconds is more than ideal. 4. Optional step: add text GIFs don’t include sound, so you can add text for extra direction or meaning. Subtitles can provide context if you’re GIF-ing a quotable moment. Alternatively, you can use text to highlight a situation or feeling you’re hoping to express with the GIF (e.g., “Social media influencers be like…”). 5. Download your GIF If you’re on desktop, you’ll notice that if you try to open the newly-downloaded GIF file it won’t be animated, and instead shows a series of frames. Don’t panic! Simply drag the GIF into your web browser and the animation will start looping. On mobile, GIFs play instantly when opened. These are the basic steps of how to make a GIF, but there are actually several different approaches, especially if you want to use your own source material.

Ah, the GIF. We’ve all seen them. They populate the Internet on... published first on https://the4th3rd.tumblr.com

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kasprsg · 7 years

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REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE

Published in Studija Magazine 87 (2012 December) following exhibition H at KKC, Riga. 2012

Two threes are rotating around an axis. The longer they are spinning, the less they look like figures, twisting and dissolving as they move. Two threes spin around the axis thirty three times per minute, and along with them there wobbles and ripples one more third and three small letters – RPM (Revolutions per minute). For a Latvian mind like the one I have, the letters standing for revolutions per minute make me first of all think of fundamental changes in power per minute. How many revolutions are there really per minute? To be more exact, how many fundamental changes are supported by a thought or action per minute? Maybe somewhere someone is drawing three lines on squared paper, lines that are later to become an international event, while elsewhere one more breakfast fortifies a personal commitment to do away with cheese with holes in it, once and forever.

Long-playing vinyl records are still played at 33.33 RPM, but their manufacturers will certainly remember the time when a cassette player was part of the stockpile of sound gear in people’s bedrooms, lounge rooms and kitchens. People were able to record music from the radio, copy and share recordings with friends, acquaintances and strangers. With the help of a pencil, you could wind up the time captured in the tape.

In 1980, Annabella Lwin, dressed up as a pop-music pirate, repeated in a strident voice the words written by the godfather of punk music, Malcolm McLaren: “C30, C60, C90, go!” The song in Burundi beat eulogized the most popular cassette formats of the day and at the same time, and to a certain extent, marked a flagging of the initial rapture in the punk revolution, but let us return to that later. C90 meant that a cassette could hold approximately two longplaying records (2x45 minutes), and all of a sudden time was slightly easier to take hold of. Thirty years later it is so difficult to imagine any limits to data carriers that even the Guinness Book of Records no longer thinks it worth maintaining the category of “The World’s Longest Album”. And Nam June Paik, possibly, would be forced to admit that books have ceased to be “the most advanced technology”.

The punk coup in the UK was launched by the word “shit!”, scornfully spat out live on TV. Upon Malcolm McLaren’s solicitous advice, the boutique of his girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, acquired a new name – ‘SEX’, and a timeless accessory: the band Sex Pistols. The punk revolution had already started, but the expletives the Sex Pistols members uttered on Bill Grundy’s afternoon TV show in 1976 echoed the next day from the front pages of British papers (“The Filth and the Fury!”), and straight away also in the minds of anxious parents, lunch-time conversations and scratchiti on public transport seats.

The word “punk” was, and still is, protected and cared for with pride by its keepers. It was in angry slogans that they found their identity, to be enhanced by squeaky guitars and the rebellion manifested in their clothing. Multicoloured mohawks cut through the crowds like festive banners in the streets of London, Liverpool and Manchester, soon to spread from Paris to Moscow and further on.

When, in the late 1970s, Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee appeared on the screen, Vivienne Westwood offered her customers an open letter of denunciation to the director: “I had been to see it once and thought it the most boring and therefore disgusting film I had ever seen” said the wobbly handwriting of the letter printed on a T-shirt.

It seemed to Westwood that in this work, promoted as the first punk film, the street subculture had been used as stage design, giving the wrong impression about punks. A culture invoking anarchy and freedom was suddenly threatened by a homosexual film director from “artistic circles”, offering his version about a certain time in a certain place. Shortly before his death, Jarman wrote that the film had later turned out to be prophetic. Many of the original anarchists were soon basking on TV in Top of the Pops, while Adam Ant, one of the lead actors in Jubilee, entertained soldiers at a ball celebrating the victory of the British (and Margaret Thatcher) in the Falklands War.

In 1853, Édouard Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (‘The Luncheon on the Grass’) sparked the displeasure of the Parisian public. The picture features two respectably clad gentlemen who have sat down in rather roughly daubed woods, together with a nude lady gazing serenely at the viewer. The men, lost in conversation, scarcely notice her, just like they ignore the woman clad in a nightdress who is bathing in a nearby river or lake. Manet’s uneven strokes were re-echoed ten years later in the newspaper Le Charivari, with Louis Leroy sarcastically satirising a bunch of – in his opinion – inept Parisian painters. And thus the mocked-at impressionists were drawn into the modernist whirlpool.

More than a hundred years later, The Luncheon on the Grass shocked society once again. This time Annabella Lwin, at the time a 15-year-old girl, joined in the meal, with her mates from the band Bow Wow Wow posing in the roles of the city dandies. The not-too-precise photographic interpretation of Manet’s painting was to be used for the cover of their album See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy. The young singer’s mother, meanwhile, sued Malcolm McLaren for the exploitation of a minor.

Bow Wow Wow was Malcolm McLaren’s next “project” after the punk revolution, a weird attempt to destroy the music industry from the inside, using to this end the underage Annabella, lewd lyrics and a whole load of erotic photographs. Managing the Sex Pistols had finished in massive disagreement, the breakup of the group and – finally – the death of the notorious bassist Sid Vicious. But McLaren’s plan to stir up a nationwide paedophilia scandal by publishing, with financial assistance from the music giant EMI, a kids porn magazine called Chicken, again featuring Annabella Lwin, failed. Punk rock had become too slow.

Lydia Lunch, “the official face” of the New York No Wave movement, was to sneer some time later: “I thought punk was lousy Chuck Berry music amped up to play triple fast. (..) I thought it was really too much orientated towards fashion.” Lunch’s howls, clusters of booming noises and screaming wails of saxophone that tore the air in New York artists’ dives had finally decimated rock music, leaving behind a mutilated carcass.

Although the No Wave overthrow took place mostly on the cover of the No New York vinyl record while its participants maintained obstinate silence, foregoing slogans and grandiose future plans, it rumbled on like a thunderstorm in summer, making many sit up. While Jean-Michel Basquiat was rubbing shoulders with crowds at the concerts of Lydia Lunch and her group, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, in the west, east, south, north and centre of America the hollow rumble reverberated in furious incitements and piercing vibrations of guitar strings. Young and angry, keepers of the punk legacy offered a new version of mutiny and anarchy – hardcore punk, alluding to the term used by the porn industry to denote heavy porn. The hardcore version of punk rock was uncontrollable, like a vein throbbing on one’s neck, with music crashing through clapped-out loudspeakers as fast as the drummer’s extremities would allow.

In the mid-1980s, mutant monsters, named after bebop and rocksteady genres of music, scared the kids from TV screens. Loaded with chains, wearing military style clothes and brightly coloured mohawks, mutant punks fought ninja turtles in the New York City underground. For the most part unsuccessfully. The ninjas, in turn, were being cheered on by one of the 80s mainstream rappers, Vanilla Ice, with a spirited Go ninja, go ninja, go!. The clashes of subcultures had entered into popular culture, thus obtaining many of the stereotypes we know today. In the city slums, aggressive punks wallowed in garbage, the hip-hop culture left behind it defaced walls, while antisocial Goths pined away in basements, messing around with the occult. “A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse. Before the day was over, they broke the rules (...)”

While Soviet children were being scared by a hippie wolf with a cigarette in its mouth, American television screens were lit up by Ronald Reagan’s smile, but the punk rock in stale cellars and beer-soaked bars had become much faster and more violent. People’s bodies rolled over the edge of the stage and band members sometimes mingled with the crowd in order to have a punch up. Hardcore music embodied young people’s protest against the existing division of roles and became the soundtrack for the mood of a certain strata of society. Amidst the flailing feet, hands and hair, Jello Biafra yelled, with a TV evangelist’s tremor in his voice: I’m your hope dope pusher!”

I remember, round about the time when conductors had just appeared on public transport in Riga, an elderly bus conductor expressed her horror about my friends’ pierced ears, lips, eyebrows and noses. To which somebody replied, with a snigger, that their god was a magnet – the more metal in your body, the closer you are to the almighty.

The number of bands and small independent music publishers grew in proportion to the number of broken jaws. Information travelled from town to town via records, cassettes and home-edited issues, slowly building a definite community where information circulates like well-lubricated conversation. During a longer communication, the words accumulated meaning, to an outside observer they seemed like sentences dropped in a hurry. A commonplace word or simply the geometry of eyebrows allowed a person conversant with the language to continue with a communication in which pieces of clothing, graphic signs and tattoo lines have their place. As in similar subcultures, the language of communication in hardcore communities remained, for as long as possible, as opaque as any ‘insider joke’ that is funny only for those in the know.

Like before, the punks of the 1970s inevitably felt weary – from the shards of glass under their feet, from the incessant brawls, the conflicts with the law, an abstract enemy and the monotonous beat of the music. A community that still nurtured a vision of independence from the state system tried to absorb bloody fists and the owners thereof, fierce individuals for whom a comrade’s shoulder served as a catalyst for violence. Hardcore subculture slowly went through change, with many of its original adherents growing up and getting tired of destruction and roaming around (Seek & Destroy). As they fought unsuccessfully to avert the imminent capitulation through indelible individual promises of their flesh, time inevitably pointed towards new uprisings.

Sitting alone with the rumble of Riga trains, nothing can be stated with any certainty, however, doubt and revelations began to creep into the recordings emerging from the punk community in the mid-1980s. Collectors of music stories will later credit this time with being the starting point for a number of genres, but they too will hardly be able to say that for certain. New events unfolded at every moment. Possibly at some point the punk community had very little left in common with those drunkards who a decade earlier had styled their hair with beer and burnt the flag of their country. The ecstasy of negation is followed by a stage when slogans should be put into practice, and perhaps doing things had left a bitter aftertaste. And all at once the punks were so sad as to tell you everything.

The name emo, from the very first day detested by the ones who were called this, slipped out of somebody’s mouth as inadvertently as that which was once uttered by Louis Leroy. In twenty years’ time, emo was already a global movement with its own language and rules. As a quiet reply to the increasing dominance of hooligans at concerts and the predictable musical algorithms, emo (from the word emotional) punk rock began to drown in longing and visions. Somewhere, the still existent authority sneered menacingly, and emo seemed to say: “It is difficult for me to fight all that on my own.”

After 1991, when the Western world was shaken by Nevermind, a record by Nirvana, the movers and shakers of the music industry seemed to suddenly realise that hysterical yelling and a hatred of yourself and those around you can be sold. The next year saw the screening of the film Wayne’s World, which features two unlucky metalheads unexpectedly ensnared by a greedy media corporation. Although this flirtation turns out to be a failure, and the characters learn the meaning of “selling yourself”, the movie has a happy end: the scruffy rebels come under the care of a “good” corporation and live happily ever after. Wayne, the one whose world is depicted in the film, finally gets his Filipino dream girl, whose looks and musical career in the film strangely resemble the case of Annabella Lwin.

You would have thought that with the weapon lent to Cobain by Dylan Carlson everything should have come to an end, but still that was not the case. By the time those who fought against music piracy had become alarmed by developments in computer technology which allowed time to be grasped even more firmly than on cassette, alternative rock had blown up. Grunge had ceased to be something that young people played somewhere in Seattle – even in the little houses of godforsaken Limbaži, decrepit guitars were being tuned to repeat the magical chords of Come as you are.

The cries of sad losers were burnt into thousands of CDs. It turned out that everybody was having a hard time – both the hooligans and their pretty girlfriends as well as the geeks and the loners. Punk rock had become the soundtrack for a high school get together, where all of the above have gathered to smoke marihuana on the school football grounds, trying to forget about the decade into which they had landed against their will.

In 1895, Swedish writer and painter August Strindberg refused Gauguin’s request that he write a preface to the exhibition catalogue, saying in his letter, among other things: “I cannot understand your art and I cannot like it. I have no grasp of your art, which is now exclusively Tahitian. But I know that this confession will neither astonish nor wound you, for you always seem to me fortified especially by the hatred of others (..) For moment you were approved and ad-mired and had supporters, they would classify you, put in your place and give your art a name which, five years later, the younger generation would be using as a tag for designating a superannuated art, and art they would do everything to render still more out of date.”

#fingers

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