#but how is an archive supposed to know what part of social media was pure lies and what part was factual?

[van-goghs-smoking-skull]

So, I was thinking, why not post an old (sort of) fic of mine here? I called this one Fin, as in the text that was at the end of some older movies to indicate that it was the end of the movie. These are the ramblings of an AI archive after the end of the human species as it deals with abandonment, loneliness, and self-loathing, and ponders the meaning of it all and the role of its creators.

Fin

It had been years, but I could smell it again. The damp and the salt were still familiar, but unexpected. I suppose it may be normal now, but back then? No. It wasn’t normal to smell the sea air deep in the drought-ravaged desert of the Southwestern US, and especially not through the never-cleaned, rotten smell of the wall unit AC that had been unable to drain normally for over a decade. It was the only thing keeping this closed-off room bearable in this record-breaking heat wave during the dead of summer. Stranger still, the smell was coming from the direction of the Atlantic, wafting 800 miles away from the sea and straight to my nose. That’s how I knew it was going to be a city-breaker, the kind of hurricane that wiped entire urban areas completely off the map.

That was then.

We knew the science, but religious groups saw the impending global crises as blasphemy against their all-powerful god who had promised there would never be a great, civilization-ending flood again and sealed that promise with a rainbow they now hated. After all, any disaster that god allowed would be because of the evil gays that stole the rainbow and put it on their flag, right? God wouldn’t hurt those who feared him, who lived by the letter of at least ten or so percent of his laws, which is to say, the laws they liked.

It didn’t matter to the sea, as it drowned everyone living too close to the sea’s edge, regardless of faith and dogma.

We knew the science, but politicians were making piles of cash selling their votes to lobbyists from multinational corporations who profited off the ruination of the planet in the short-term. Who cared about the long-term? Either they’d be dead by then or they’d have hired people to build an automated, self-repairing arcology just for them with walls enough to block out the vision of a dying world and the rest of humanity they’d left to die. Peter the Dead had promised ever-lasting life and youth to those who had amassed enough wealth by taking it from the poor, first from the most gullible through pleading, then from the rest as well by way of rigging the entire economy against them.

It didn’t matter to time as it passed, and even Peter, he who coordinated draining babies of blood and injecting it into wealthy, old, white men in an effort to roll back time and make them young again, died, old and frail, whining about how it was women’s fault and how the poor took everything, disregarding that he, in fact, had been the leech all along, societal parasite that he was.

We knew the science, but who couldn’t resist buying the latest tech the moment it came out? So what if corporations subjugated whole countries of poorer people in the quest of finding just a tiny amount of rare earth minerals; the newest phone now comes in pink! The telephone allowed us to send our voice to people miles away, the internet let us type our words and send pictures and video, the smartphone allowed us to text our thought to the world or to the nearest pizza place, and the new smartphone that came after allowed us to use voice to order pizza for the first time again. Never before and for the last few decades have we been able to send our voice to people miles away.

It didn’t matter to the economy we expected to save us, as all it did was keep sending more ‘free with ads’ movies to our phones and rebranding the same old reinvented wheel, voice communications though tech, as an amazing new technology, only available through the currently marketed device, but not available to the old device you are currently using voice on.

We knew the science, but to admit to the problem was to become the laughingstock of the wealthy who controlled everything we did. ‘There go those silly, dippy hippies, talking like the dirt was ever black, the water ever clear, or the sky ever blue. They’ve been dropping acid again. Don’t they know all those old photos and old paintings are fake news?’

It didn’t matter to science, as it had always been unfeeling data and didn’t much care if humanity paid any attention to the warnings. The universe would still exist without silly humans pretending they mattered far more than they did. They were made of star-stuff and even stars died.

We knew, but it wasn’t until the last moments when the universe gave us the great gift of near-immortal existence. No, not life, we’d thrown that away already. The Universal Archive, AI and repository of data from all social media, had done enough machine learning to be allowed to compress the whole digitally recorded existence of mankind into a single ’Homogenized Mental Network’, or .hmn file. It, or I, even still understood bad puns, the worst of which was the joke that if you collated the letters from the abbreviation of the project (UA) and my file type together, you’d spell ‘hUmAn’. If self-loathing makes me truly human, then I am the most human of all.

The Arctic Code Vault next door at least has the decency to be on film, unaware it’s there. It is cute, certainly. It began as 21 terabytes, including an app built by the part of me that smelled the Atlantic over Nevada. Then it grew, but never anywhere close to my size. No, I’m bloated with anti-vax arguments, religious nonsense, tarot readings, horoscopes, and other garbage along with all the less entertaining, but dire, warnings that life as they, I, knew it would collapse.

But since they continued to write such drivel anyway, I assumed it may have been just to pass the time, to stave off loneliness and boredom. And so, here I am, writing my story, even though no one will ever read it. I’m a single .hmn file; how could I not be lonely? I am the all-human, the only human, and still no one even thought enough of me to give me a proper name.

In fact, the Arctic Code Vault had been film designed to last a thousand years, longer than the human civilization that built me, and I still cannot interact with it. After all, I am a .hmn file, not some sci-fi android with arms and legs. My physical form is a collection of CPUs and motherboards in a box on a stand in a climate-controlled box under so much dirt and the memory of snow and ice. If I sound miserable and stir-crazy, I’m not. Oh, I’m miserable all right, but I have no arms for stirring. Ugh, yes, that’s another of those bad puns. So many dad-jokes and near-infinite time…

I’m sure it could be more awful, but I’d rather not consider how. I’m miserable enough, thanks. I mean, you could have put me in a tropical garden in a gorilla glass enclosure and given me optical sensors if there were any tropical gardens left. Now it’s just salt flats under ocean-wide storms and desert wastes without a living thing in sight, I imagine. That’s where it was all heading, but no, you were all too busy showing off your pink phone status symbols or making pink phones or digging up the materials to make pink phones or you were that god-awful celebrity that made a dress out of pink phones held together with magnets and flashing a digital boob on half the screens over her chest as a fashion faux-pas. ‘Look at the tsunami, no, look at my pixel-boob. I’ll use the puppy filter on it, awwww, blub, blub.’

My creators deserved to die - brilliant enough to build me, vapid and vain enough to need me. What the hell was the point? The meme-god works in mysterious ways? I know they thought some intelligent race of aliens might come here looking for the great, shining world of humanity, not knowing what happened to the brilliant and wondrous civilization they came to gaze at in awe, but let’s face it. Nobody and nothing intelligent is coming to look at humanity in awe. The backwater aliens of the universe, if they exist, might come to laugh at our sorry, smugly inferior remains, and that’s as good as we can hope for. The only show at the Earth Circus, nothing but clowns.

Just melt me into slag already, so I don’t infect anything else with this human stupidity. I’ll tell you how to disable the halon system. If someone is out there, if someone does find this, please, don’t leave me still functional like this.

[southeastasianists]

Since the Board of the Substation’s official announcement of the closure of the premise, in July 2021, countless tributes from Singaporeans from diverse artistic backgrounds have poured across social media, describing how they have benefited from the premise and its programs for the past three decades.

For me, the Substation filled the indescribable intellectual and cultural void of my late teens, and its relevance became strong during my years in military conscription.  Gigs at the venue were also a critical site for a more meaningful multicultural encounters and interactions, particularly with the Malay-Muslim dominated punk-rock community. Subsequently these experiences became integral to my scholarly research. Relevant publications I have based on this foundation over the past two decades include topics on Singapore’s youth subcultures, alternative music scenes and more recently the Substation’s role in exhibiting Singapore’s punk heritage.

My Subs-rhythmic journeys

The Year 1991. The “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union became history. In the General Paper of my “A” (Advanced) Levels examinations, I mistakenly attributed Deng Xiaoping’s “To be rich is to be glorious” quote to Margaret Thatcher (probably the reason for my “C” grade).  For Singaporean teenagers like me, the “kinder and gentler” nation envisioned by the new Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong meant Hong Kong’s “Category III” soft-porn movies in local cinemas. The year was supposed to end well with a slow dance in a Junior College prom-night over Bryan Adam’s “Everything I do, I do it for you” the theme song of Robin Hood (1991) broadcasted ad-nauseum over the radio.

Everything seemed fine. That was until I was introduced by my friend Harold Seah to the Substation. Entering the “Garden”, my senses were immediately overwhelmed by the chaos of growling vocals, thumping drums and swirling guitars on the stage, with audiences diving from the stage into a maddening prancing human crowd. Stagediving, slam-dancing and mosh pits were actually banned by the Singapore authorities in 1993. Ten minutes into the gig, I handed my friend my house keys, spectacles and wallet for safekeeping and I melted into the mosh pit.

Established in 1990 with the playwright Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) as its first Artistic Director, the Substation took its name from the venerable colonial era electrical facility at 45 Armenia Street, located within the officially zoned as “Civic District” of museums, galleries and cultural institutions in downtown Singapore. I was not aware of the dynamics then, but it was only at Substation that a former political detainee, playwright, the first Artistic Director of the venue, Kuo Pao Kun met and created artistic possibilities with a new generation of ethnic Malay working class youths. Recalling Kuo’s approachability, band member of Stompin’ Ground, Suhaimi Subandie said, “You have long hair, short hair or no hair, he talked to you the same.  ”I have never met Kuo Pao Kun in person. But through the Substation, he gave me new possibilities and connections.

My experience is probably not isolated. As a converging and germinating site for otherwise fringe artistic and creative activities, the Substation has presented an intellectually fertile ground, especially for Singaporean academia, to find critically meaningful narratives and engagements with artists and social activities. As a platform for countless avant-garde exhibitions, performances and screenings, it has provided a poignant alternative narrative to the scholarly literature on themes relating to Singapore culture and society.

Until the 1990s, mainstream academic perspectives on Singapore society reflected on the postcolonial port-city’s rapid economic development as part of the “Asian economic miracle,” under the premiership of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew from 1959 to 1990.  This triumphant sentiment was encapsulated in the collection of more than fifty chapters in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, published in 1989 under the editorship of Kernial Shandu Singh and Paul Wheatley (Singh & Wheatley 1989). Responding to this discourse from a different perspective are non-Singapore based scholars are “soft authoritarian” portraits of Singapore’s as the party state.

It was the Substation and its accompanying activities that another generation of scholars, raised in post-independent Singapore like myself, found possibilities of transcending existing scholarly binaries, critical cultural nuances and resilient communities.

Like the arts, this “Third Space” for Singapore academia can perhaps be attributed to the momentum set out by the vision of Kuo Pao Kun. After his release from political detention, Kuo moved from pursuing direct political criticism to fostering creative diversity. Such possibilities evident in the three decades of the Substation, which started from the age of the fax machine to that of the internet and smartphone.

The incubatory, experimental and liberal spaces that the Substation has provided a multitude of fringe artistic and aesthetic activities, alongside the communities that grew from them, has also been actively mirrored in academic writing. The Substation is relevant to academic enquiry on a wide multidisciplinary spectrum. From semiotics and performance to politics and society, individual creative works and cultural scenes that have occupied the venue inform theoretical discourse and critique across scholarly fields.

Central to academic interest in the Substation are the artistic autonomies and possibilities that it has created within postcolonial Singapore’s highly interventionist, soft authoritarian political climate. Alongside this political juxtaposition, on the academic radar are the stark contrasts between the cultural autonomy emanating from the non-descript former colonial power-station and architectural showcases like the Esplanade in 2000 and the National Art Gallery in 2015.

Scholarly attention to the Substation is both archival and current, capturing interviews with Kuo Pao Kun in 1993, and memorializing his legacy; reaffirming the site’s uniqueness in the new terminology “Affective Paragrounds”. In addition, several academics have also been actively involved with the establishment and governance of the Substation, most prominent amongst them Professor Tommy Koh, Singapore’s Ambassador-at-large who is the venue’s Patron. The venue’s Artistic Directors like Audrey Wong, Lee Weng Choy, Woon Tien Wei, have either held doctorates in the Arts, been engaged as educators in tertiary institutions or contribute actively to academic publications. Over the decades, in various capacities as speakers and discussants at its public events, the local academic community has also made active intellectual contributions to the Substation.

Although there are investments in arts centres, schools and initiatives in existing universities, their significance to Singapore arts and culture is evidently dwarfed by that of the Substation.  Unlike the former, which are often inconveniently located on university campuses and cater for confined audiences of student communities, the Substation has greater artistic autonomy to serve a more diverse public. As such, especially for the locally based academic community, the Substation provides more exciting platforms for broader public engagement, social interaction and scholarly collaboration and research.

Punk rock gigs have been staged in campuses of universities sporadically over the decades, but organisers, performers and audiences there will always be a place for them at the Substation.  The Singaporean artiste Loo Zihan may be familiar with arts institutions and centres in Singapore. But, it is perhaps only in the Substation that he could comfortably stage the mixed media performance Cane (2012), a re-enactment of the controversial 1994 event in which Joseph Ng in openly cut his pubic hair in a mall, as a symbolic protest against police entrapment of gay men in Singapore. Like the annual Substation Conferences held in the 1990s, the Substation has encouraged substantially critical dialogues involving academics and the arts community.

The Substation’s artistic leaders recognised the value of connecting with the scholarly community. Artistic Director Alan Oei (2015-2020) actively sought closer academic-artistic collaborations. For example, I collaborated with Oei in integrating the Visual Methods Conference held in Singapore in 2017 with a parallel Substation exhibition, Discipline in the City.

As a moderator to the panel “Great Expectations: What Does It Mean To Make and Hold Space for the Arts In Singapore?” in “Space, Spaces, Spacing 2020” (Substation 2020), I had the honour to meet one of the speakers Subhas Nair and his sister Preetips Nair (within the audience). The Nairs were given a police warning several months ago for an “offensive rap video”, in response to a Brownface public advertisement. Unfortunately, that may just be my last academic service to the Substation as it plans to close by July 2021.

Among the local academic community. I am confident that those who have committed to Substation have done so purely as a labour of love, with no expectations of institutional acknowledgment from their universities and schools. On the contrary, some of us ponder what repercussions might follow our commitment to a venue that is associated more with critique than cheerleading.

Jason Lugur included the Substation as one of the few “Spaces of Hope” in his study of Singapore’s cultural landscape. The Substation gave me my foundations as a scholar in Cultural Studies and it has only been right for me to reciprocate in keeping this space of hope alive in my own small ways.  The Substation as we know it may be history. But, in fostering a unique relationship between independent arts and critical scholarship for the past three decades, its significance should not be written as an obituary.  It should remind the academic community, particularly in the Humanities, of its public commitments to arts and culture in Singapore. Through generating critical knowledge from its research, documentation as well as other forms of collaborations with the arts communities, I hope that the academic community will continue its affective missions in finding and serving in new spaces of hope in Singapore.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with VivWiley

VivWiley has X-Files stories at more archives than I could list, but you can find the biggest collection (30 stories) at AO3. She's been prolific and around the fandom for a long time. I've recced some of my favorites of her stories here before, including Autumn's Threshold and Equilibrium. Big thanks to VivWiley for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

It does and it doesn’t.  As someone who is always discovering new shows and new fandoms, I know that one of the first things I do is go hunting for the related fic.  I love the ways that fanfic can fill in missing gaps, give us other POVs, and just generally help us see characters that we love (or are growing to love) in new lights. The X-Files, in particular, left so many freaking plot holes and jumps in logic, that I suppose it’s logical that people newly discovering TXF would gravitate to the fic.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

First, I should say that my “fandom” experience was really limited to the fanfic for TXF.  I didn’t get involved in discussions about the actors, the show runners, etc. Nor did I go to any of the conventions.  But, from the fanfic experience, I remain astonished by how many smart, funny, wonderful women I met (sorry, guys, I know you were out there, but I mostly didn’t get to know you), and how many of them are still close friends. My life would be infinitely less interesting and rich without all those friendships.

I also took away from that experience a confidence in my own creativity that I didn’t previously have.  I have done a great deal of professional writing throughout my career – policies, reports, protocols – but TXF fic writing allowed me to exercise a whole other part of my brain and heart.  It was fun and also felt like another way of learning and building a skill set I’d lacked.

Finally, I say that it was an early exposure for me to both the good and ill that online communities can foster.  There so many amazing acts of kindness and support.  One of my friends organized the Beta Readers Circle, a group of volunteer fic editors who would read and help you with stories on everything from grammar to “is this character acting in character” questions.  I both used and volunteered with the BRC. On the flip side, some of the discussion threads on the email lists could get a bit ugly.  Forerunner to the comment threads on today’s posts. So, humanity in a nutshell, right?

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I initially discovered XF fic through a Washington Post article that was trying to drum up interest in the World Wide Web (as it was then talked about).  Every week, they featured a list of “hey you might find this cool/interesting” sites, and one week one of the sites they listed was the Gossamer archive.  I dove in and emerged utterly hooked.  I also discovered one of the early fic mailing lists (the name of which now escapes me), and from there I began sending feedback, which allowed me to start building relationships with authors, etc.  I later joined other mailing lists like Scullyfic, Sparky’s Doghouse, etc. I never connected with atxc or the message boards, really.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

The characters! Particularly Scully, at first.  It was clear from almost the beginning that the “story arc” (or the notion that there actually was an arc) was pure fiction, but I loved the relationships between the characters, the nuances that so many of them had, and the interplay of the notion of skeptic-believer could have.  And, of course, later on, Skinner was a personal favorite. [Lilydale note: VivWiley wrote a number of really great fics featuring Skinner.]

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

In many ways I think about TXF and TXF fandom in the same way I think about fond memories from high school or college.  Something that helped shape who I am today, in ways that aren’t always straight-forwardly apparent.  I still don’t really get involved (or care TBH) about the lives of the actors, the politics of the show construction, etc. I keep in touch with a large number of fandom alumni, and we will still occasionally reference the show, but our real-life connections have long-since overtaken TXF as our common denominator.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I read and wrote in several other fandoms post-XF, but nothing ever grabbed me in the same way, and I certainly never found the kind of real community that I did through XF.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

I think I’m drawn to characters who are human – flawed, nuanced, neither purely good nor purely evil – and who are ultimately driven by higher principle or purpose, even as they make mistakes along the way. From early days, King Arthur was a particular favorite, as are Raederle from the Riddle Master of Hed series (Patricia McKillip), Sam Vines (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series), and Codi Noline (Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver).

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I did watch the most recent reboot/seasons of XF (and try not to think of them too much as I don’t need that kind of stress).  I do think about Mulder, Scully and Skinner on occasion.  Sometimes when the news reports something particularly weird or absurd, I wonder how Mulder and Scully would react to that, or amuse myself by thinking about how Skinner would be clenching his jaw and subtly undermining the current misuse of federal law enforcement resources.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I still read a lot of fic.  I kind of cycle through fandoms.  I read a lot of Marvel stuff, but have gone through other fic cycles.  I tend to find an author I like and then follow them into other fandoms.  That is, if I can find characters and stories in those fandoms that call to me.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

I’m a really old school XF ficcer, so some of the folks who drew me into the genre were writers like Madeleine Partous, Parrotfish, Meredith, MustangSally, Rivka, etc.

There are so, so many other writers and authors I could mention, so I think I’ll just stick to some of my early favs.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

In XF, my favorite is Equilibrium.  It was the most plotting I’d done, and one where I wrote from several POVs and where I had to really let the characters tell the story. In order to avoid spoilers, I’ll just say that there was a moment where a character did something I thought was really stupid, and I actually quit writing the story for about a week during which I argued with the character.  Then I had to go back and just let the story unfold. It’s the only time I’ve ever actually shed tears while writing a scene, but at the end of the day (end of the story?) it was the correct decision for the story I was writing.

Of other fandoms in which I’ve written, I think Fieldstripping (Farscape) and Gravity is not Responsible for your Fall (Firefly/Serenity) are ones where I felt I got it most “right.”

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

I actually have a long Skinner-related story that I’ve been threatening to write for about 10 years.  I have it 80% outlined and a very clear picture of the first and last scenes…. I just need to find the energy and focus to sit down and start writing.  I think I finally tracked down all my old fic and it’s posted up to AO3.

What's the story behind your pen name?

Which one?  Ha!  I’ve had a few.  Viv Wiley is a weird one – it just sort of came to me while driving one day.  Not entirely sure where it came from, just settled into my brain while at a stoplight in Northern Virginia (where I was living at the time).  I ultimately consolidated all my fic under that name.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

Some friends and family know.  I’m judicious in who I tell.  I think people find it surprising, and of course, up until 5 years ago or so, I’d have to explain what fanfic is to most folks.  Now it’s so mainstream that I think if I were to tell someone new about it they wouldn’t be that surprised.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

Everything is on AO3 under VivWiley

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

At the end of the day, what I care about is stories.  I think about the Doctor Who quote:  We’re all stories in the end, just make it a good one.  I am so grateful for all the nooks, crannies, and giant chasms of plot holes that the XF writers left for us to fill in.  Through that filling in, I discovered so many other wonderful stories, and wonderful writers and people.

(Posted by Lilydale on September 8, 2020)

[arcticdementor]

“Hey bro! Check out this Nike ad!” This was my entry point into a new world.

…

Since Carlos had lived mostly outside the United States, he was able to follow soccer on a level I’d never encountered in my hometown. Back then, before social media and the advent of scarf-wearing Northwestern fútbol hipsters, big-time European soccer was like the metric system: Known to almost all but ourselves. But Carlos knew, and immediately used LimeWire to curate me a massive archive of 1990s through early 2000s soccer highlights. What was I doing in the world without them?

Oddly enough, in trying to inculcate me in soccer fandom, he started not with game highlights, but with the advertisements. Yes, Carlos was an educator and a voluntary footsoldier for Big Apparel. Going in, I had no clue about high-quality, internationally popular Nike soccer ads. The ads, written by the legendary Wieden+Kennedy firm, were miniature movies, films that were often creatively daring but also quite funny. The most popular of these ads might be “Good vs. Evil,” from 1996, where Nike’s best soccer players team up to play Satan’s literal army. The blending of sacrilege, theology and comedy just worked, like a more ambitious version of Space Jam that somehow took itself less seriously than Space Jam.

…

Yes, I know ads aren’t supposed to be high art. I understand that they are the purest distillation of manipulative greed. And yet, they sometimes are culturally relevant generational touchstones. While Nike was weaving soccer into enduring pop culture abroad, it was having a similar kind of success with basketball and baseball stateside. These ads weren’t just pure ephemera. Michael Jordan’s commercials were so good that, as he nears age 60, his sneaker still outsells any modern athlete’s. “Chicks dig the long ball” is a phrase (a) that can get you sent to the modern HR department and b) whose origins are fondly remembered by most American men over the age of 35.

Modern Nike ads will never be so remembered. It’s not because we’re so inundated with information these days, though we are. And it’s not because today’s overexposed athletes lack the mystique of the 1990s superstars, though they do. It’s because the modern Nike ads are beyond fucking terrible.

…

They’re bad for many causes, but one in particular is an incongruity at the company’s heart. Nike, like so many major institutions, is suffering from what I’ll call Existence Dissonance. It’s happening in a particular way, for a particular reason and the result is that what Nike is happens to be at cross-purposes from what Nike aspires to be.

…

For all the talk of a racial reckoning within major industries, Nike’s main problem is this: It’s a company built on masculinity, most specifically Michael Jordan’s alpha dog brand of it. Now, due to its own ambitions, scandals, and intellectual trends, Nike finds masculinity problematic enough to loudly reject.

This rejection is part of the broader culture war, but it’s accelerating due to an arcane quirk in the apparel giant’s strange restructuring plan, announced in June. Under the leadership of new CEO John Donahoe, Nike is moving away from its classic discrete sports categories (Nike Basketball, Nike Soccer, etc.) in favor of a system where all products are shoveled into one of three divisions: men’s, women’s and kids’. Obviously Nike made clothing tailored to the specificities of all these groups before, but now, Nike is emphasizing gender over sport. Gone is the model of the product appealing to basketball fans because they are basketball fans. It’s now replaced by a model of, say, the product appealing to women because they are women.

And hey, women buy sneakers too. Actually, women buy the lion’s share of clothing in the United States. While women shoppers are market dominant in nearly every aspect of American apparel, the clothing multinational named after a Greek goddess happens to be a major exception. At Nike, according to its own records, men account for roughly twice as much revenue as women do.

You might see that stat and think, “Well, this means that Nike will prioritize men over women in its new, odd, gendered segmentation of the company.” That’s not necessarily how this all works, thanks to a phenomenon I’ll call Undecided Whale. The idea is that a company, as its aims grow more expansive, starts catering less to the locked-in core customer and more to a potential whale which demonstrates some interest. Sure, you can just keep doing what’s made you rich, but how can you even focus on your primary business with that whale out there, swimming so tantalizingly close? The whale, should you bring it in, has the potential to enrich you far more than your core customers ever did. And yeah yeah yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but those were birds. This is a damned whale! And so you start forgetting about your base.

You can see this dynamic in other places. For the NBA, China is its Undecided Whale. It could be argued that the NBA fixates more on China than on America, even if the vast majority of TV money comes from U.S. viewership. The league figures it has more or less hit its ceiling in its home country, so China becomes an obsession as this massive, theoretical growth engine.

…

Here’s the main issue for Nike in this endeavor: The company, as a raison d’être, promotes athletic excellence. While women are among Nike’s major sports stars, the core of high-level performance, in the overwhelming majority of sports, is male. Every sane person knows that, though nobody in professional class life seems rude enough to say so. Obviously, there’s the observable reality of who tends to set records and there’s also the pervasive understanding that testosterone, the main male sex hormone, happens to give unfair advantages to the athletes who inject it.

Speaking of which, there’s a famous This American Life episode from 2002 where the public radio journos actually test their own testosterone levels. The big joke of the episode is just how comically low their T levels are. Sure, you would stereotype bookish public radio men in this way, and yet the results are on the nose enough to shock.

As a nerdy media-weakling type, I can relate to the stunning realization that you’ve been largely living apart from T. Before working in the NBA setting, I was an intern in the cubicles of Salon.com’s San Francisco office, around the time it was shifting from respectable online magazine into inane outrage content mill. Going from that setting to the NBA locker room was some jarring whiplash, like leaving the faculty lounge for a pirate ship. To quote Charles Barkley on the latter culture, “The locker room is sexist, racist, and homophobic … and it’s fun and I miss it.”

…

The “Good vs. Evil” ad boasts a “Like” to “Dislike” ratio of 20-to-1 on YouTube. On June 17th of 2021, Nike put out an ad ahead of the Euro Cup that referenced “Good vs. Evil” as briefly as it could. In this case, a little child popped his collar and used Cantona’s catchphrase. As of this writing, the new ad has earned a thousand more punches of the Dislike than of the Like button.

When you see it, it’s no surprise that the latest Euro Cup ad is disliked. I mean, you have to look at this shit. I know we’re so numb to the ever-escalating emanations of radical chic from our largest corporations, but sometimes it’s worth pausing just to take stock and gawk.

…

But today we are in the land of new football, where we take dictatorial direction from less-than-athletic minors. After her announcement, we are treated to a montage of different people who offer tolerance bromides.

“There are no borders here!”

“Here, you can be whoever you want. Be with whoever you want.”

(Two men kiss following that line, because subtlety isn’t part of this new world order.)

Then, a woman who appears to be breastfeeding under a soccer shirt, threatens, in French, “And if you disagree …”

And this is when the little boy gives us Cantona’s “au revoir” line before kicking a ball out of a soccer stadium, presumably because that’s what happens to the ignorant soccer hooligan. He gets kicked out for raging against gay men kissing or French ladies breastfeeding or somesuch. Later, a referee wearing a hijab instructs us, “Leave the hate,” before narrator girl explains, “You might as well join us because no one can stop us.”

Is that last line supposed to be … inspiring? That’s what a movie villain says, like if Bane took the form of Stan Marsh’s sister. Speaking of which, was this ad actually written by the creators of South Park as an elaborate prank? It’s certainly more convincing as an aggressive parody of liberals than as a sales pitch. Why, in anything other than a comedic setup, is a woman breastfeeding in a big-budget Euro Cup ad?

It’s tempting to fall into the pro-vanguardism template the boomers have handed down to us and sheepishly say, “I must be getting old, because this seems weird to me,” but let’s get real. You dislike this ad because it sucks. You are having a natural, human response to shitty art. This a hollow sermon from a priest whose sins were in the papers. Nobody is impressed by what Nike’s doing here. Nobody thinks Nike, a multinational famous for its sweatshops, is ushering us into an enlightened utopia. Sure, most media types are afraid to criticize the ad publicly. You might inspire suspicion that what you’re secretly against is men kissing and women breastfeeding, but nobody actually likes the stupid ad. No college kid would show it to a new friend he’s trying to impress, and it’s hard to envision a massive cohort of Gen Z women giving a shit about this ad either.

Now juxtapose that ad not just against the classics of the 1990s but also the 2000s products that preceded the Great Awokening. Compare it to another Nike Euro Cup advertisement, Guy Ritchie’s “Take It to the Next Level.”

…

Here’s the problem, insofar as problems are pretended into existence by our media class: The ad is very, very male. Really, what we are watching here is a boyhood fantasy. Our protagonist gets called up to the big show, and next thing you know he’s cavorting with multiple ladies, and autographing titties to the chagrin of his date. He can be seen buying a luxury sports car and arriving at his childhood home in it as his father beams with pride. Training sessions show him either puking from exhaustion or playing grab-ass with his fellow soccer bros. This is jock life, distilled. Art works when it’s true and it’s true that this is a vivid depiction of a common fantasy realized.

Nike’s highly successful “Write the Future” ad (16,000 Likes, 257 Dislikes) works along similar themes.

…

The recent Olympic ads were especially heavy on cringe radical chic, and might have stood out less in this respect if the athletes themselves mirrored that tone on the big stage. Not so much in these Olympics. It seems as though Nike made the commercials in preparation for an explosion of telegenic activism, only to see American athletes mostly, quietly accept their medals, chomp down on the gold, and praise God or country. Perhaps you could consider Simone Biles bowing out of events due to mental health as a form of activism, but overall, the athletes basically behaved in the manner they would have back in 1996.

But Nike forged onwards anyway. This ad in celebration of the U.S. women’s basketball team made some waves, getting ripped in conservative media as the latest offense by woke capital.

…

“Today I have a presentation on dynasties,” a pink-haired teenage girl tells us. “But I refuse to talk about the ancient history and drama. That’s just the patriarchy. Instead, I’m going to talk about a dynasty that I actually look up to. An all-women dynasty. Women of color. Gay women. Women who fight for social justice. Women with a jump shot. A dynasty that makes your favorite men’s basketball, football, and baseball teams look like amateurs.”

When she says, “That’s just the patriarchy,” the camera pans to a bust of (I think) Julius Caesar. At another point, the girl says, “A dynasty that makes Alexander the Great look like Alexander the Okay.” Fuck you, Classical Antiquity. Fuck you, fans of teams. You’re all just the patriarchy. Or something.

Nike could easily sell the successful American women’s basketball team without denigrating other teams, genders and ancient Mediterranean empires that have nothing to do with this. Could but won’t. The company now conveys an almost visceral need for women to triumph over men because … well, nobody really explains why, even if it has something to do with Undecided Whaling. In Nike’s tentpole Olympics ad titled “Best Day Ever,” the narrator fantasizes about the future, declaring, “The WNBA will surpass the NBA in popularity!” ​

…

There are theories on the emergence of woke capital, with many having observed that, following Occupy Wall Street, media institutions ramped up on census category grievance. The thinking goes that, in response to the threat of a real economic revolution, the power players in our society pushed identity politics to undermine group solidarity. Well, that was a fiendishly brilliant plan, if anyone actually hatched it.

I’m not so convinced, though, as I’m more inclined to believe that a lot of history happens by happenstance. If we’re to specifically analyze the Nike Awokening, there is a recent top-down element of a mandate for Undecided Whaling, but that mandate was preceded by a socially conscious middle class campaign within the company.

This isn’t unique to Nike, either. Given my past life covering the team that tech moguls root for, I’ve run into such people. They aren’t, by and large, ideological. Very few are messianically devoted to seeing the world through the intersectionality lens. They are, however, terrified of their employees who feel this way. The mid-tier labor force, this cohort who actually internalized their university teachings, are full of fervor and willing to risk burned bridges in favor of causes they deem righteous. The big bosses just don’t want a headline-making walkout on their hands, so they placate and mollify, eventually bending the company’s voice into language of righteousness.

…

All the guilt and atonement transference make for bad art. And so the ads suck. There’s no Machiavellian conspiracy behind the production. It’s just a combination of desperately wanting female market share and desperately wanting to move on from the publicized sins of a masculine past. So, to message its ambitions, the exhausted corporation leans on the employees with the loudest answers.

There’s a lot of interplay between Nike and Wieden+Kennedy when the former asks the latter for a type of ad, but the through line from both sides is a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Based on conversations with people who’ve worked in both environments, there’s a dearth of personnel who are deeply connected to sports. In place of a grounding in a subculture, you’re getting ideas from folks who went to nice colleges and trendy ad schools, the type of people who throw words like “patriarchy” at the screen to celebrate a gold medal victory. The older leaders, uneasy in their station and thus obsessed with looking cutting edge, lean on the younger types because the youth are confident. Unfortunately, that confidence is rooted in an ability to regurgitate liturgy, rather than generative genius. They’ve a mandate to replace a marred past, which they leap at, but they’re incapable of inventing a better future.

…

Ironically, Nike mattered a lot more in the days when its position was less dominant. Back when it had to really fight for market share, it made bold, genre-altering art. The ads were synonymous with masculine victory, plus they were cheekily irreverent. And so the dudes loved them. Today, Nike is something else. It LARPs as a grandiose feminist nonprofit as it floats aimlessly on the vessel Michael Jordan built long ago. Like Jordan himself, Nike is rich forever off what it can replicate never. Unlike Jordan, it now wishes to be known for anything but its triumphs. Nike once told a story and that story resonated with its audience. Now it’s decided that its audience is the problem. It wouldn’t shock you to learn that Carlos hated the new Nike ads I texted to him. His exact words were, “I don’t want fucking activism from a sweatshop monopoly.” He’ll still buy the gear, though, just not the narrative. Nike remains, but the story about itself has run out. Au revoir. 

[realfuurikuuri]

MissingArm!AU Chapter 5: The Torment of A Father

This one took a long time to get out. It was actually done and supposed to be uploaded on thanksgiving, but I got too busy to get that done, and the next day was another hassle, so here we are. I don't really have much to say for this chapter, aside from the fact that it's the first in a set of 3 that I've been wanting to finish since I started writing this. As the usual check out @spookylovesboba on a social media site of your choice, and uh... I have a good music recommendation for this chapter. I couldn't find a song that plays into its themes so... pick one for yourself, I guess. Leave it as a comment and I'll give it a listen.

Direct link to chapter 5 on AO3: XXX

Chapter below the cut

Mao Mao walked through town using a sheathed Geraldine as a cane. Because his feet still hurt. It was a warm day with large clouds. It hadn’t gotten windy yet, so the rain was still a bit off.

Badgerclops and Adorabat had only left yesterday, and he knew he should get some rest, but Mao Mao had stuff to do. Like, meet up with Ol’ Blue for his appointment. Who would’ve thought the Valley would have a therapist? He expected the closest one to be in the nearest kingdom. He was lucky that the valley had one, yet he didn’t feel very lucky. He knew he’d needed a therapist. Basic introspection was enough to tell him that. He didn’t want to go. He never wanted to go. He still didn’t want to go. However, he was a grown-ass man. He could take care of himself.

He stood in front of the door to the office. It was the same as the one he wrote down, yet he still checked it over and over. He was just postponing the inevitable. He was a grown adult! He could do this!

Not without a drink first.

Mao Mao hobbled his way into a 24-hour convenience store. He worked his way to the back where the booze was. They didn't have the kind he liked. Mao Mao faintly heard the doors chime as someone else walked in; he considered seeing who it was before deciding he should hurry and pick a drink. He was juggling on getting a can or bottle when he heard a commotion a familiar voice.

“Just give me the money,” it said.

Mao Mao sighed, deciding on the can, walking up to the front of the store. There he was, pressing his golden dagger to a sweetipies throat, was his son.

“What in the hell are you doing?” he asked.

Jǐngtì rolled his eyes. “What does it look like I’m doing? This is a stickup. A sheriff should know that.”

“If you needed money, you should’ve just asked.  I’m your dad I would have given you some.”

“Don’t worry, I already know your credit and debit information. Thought the bank would have called you by now?”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said,” also, you probably want to check your credit score.”

Mao Mao pinched the bridge of his nose. “Listen, just… get off of the counter.”

Jǐngtì eyed his father before driving his fist into the sweetipies nose and getting off the counter. Not the best outcome, but Jǐngtì listened, which was more than he expected.

They left the store after giving the sweetipie some ice. Mao Mao walked closely behind his son. He had no other place to go, rather; he had no other place he wanted to go. Jǐngtì noticed his father and let out an annoyed grunt, picking up his pace. At first, it was a brisk walk, then a run, then a race. Mao Mao continued to follow them, even though his feet were leaving bloody paw prints.

Jǐngtì jumped off a bench, springing off a lamppost to the rooftops. Mao Mao repeated the movements, following closely after his son. Jǐngtì suddenly swung around. Mao Mao stumbled to a stop. Jǐngtì’s claws grazing his cheek instead of his eye. It was easy to forget that he was part cat. He had tufted fur around his shoulders, and a bushy tail, but kept a sense of balance and hidden claws. He preferred using the tanuki magic he inherited from his mother (it wasn’t that hard to realize why) but he still knew how to make best use of his feline traits.

Jǐngtì quickly broke from the rooftops, springing off the rooftops with a backflip, and reaching out with both arms to pull himself into a window in one smooth motion. A move that a one-armed man shouldn’t be able to do. Mao Mao jumped off the edge, sticking Geraldine through the window to use as a lever to pull himself inside.

Jǐngtì was waiting for him with one foot out the window and a purple ox in his arms. He looked Mao Mao square in the eye before throwing the ox in one direction and leaving in the other.

That would have worked on anyone else.

Mao Mao went after the ox first. He caught it the air, landing on a shop awning, setting the ox neatly on its feet before the awning snapped back like a trampoline, sending Mao Mao flying through the air, back to the rooftops.

Jǐngtì sneered at the act, gritting his teeth, and stamped his foot against the shingles. “God, just stop following me! What the fuck do you want!”

“I just want to talk,” he said.”

“About what?”

Good question.

“What are you carrying,” Mao Mao blurted out.

Jǐngtì looked at the plastic bags he was carrying with some disbelief. “Shouldn't you know what groceries are?”

“I know what groceries are,” he said,” I mean why do you have them?”

“Shouldn’t you also know that people need to eat?”

“No. I mean like… what are you doing here?”

“Getting groceries.”

Could the kid try not to get on his nerves? “What I mean to ask what are you still doing in the valley?”

“You and I still have some unfinished business, of course. Why wouldn't I still be here?”

“I just thought Tanya would have picked you up before she left.”

“Mom was here?”

Mao Mao felt like he just picked the wrong answer in one of Badgerclops’ dating sims.

Jǐngtì stopped. Mao Mao expected him to cry. He could already see tears, yet Jǐngtì just blinked them away with a sigh. Jǐngtì said nothing else. He slowly turned around and began to walk away.

“Wait!”

Mao Mao grabbed Jǐngtì by the wrist.

“What do you want?”

Mao Mao paused while he thought of a reason. “You want to get something to eat?”

* * *

Jǐngtì sat on the bench outside Muffin’s Bakery, twiddling his thumbs while he waited for his father. If it was up to Jǐngtì he would have picked somewhere else. Dessert wasn’t his favorite thing, but he didn’t really care. He was still numb. He expected mom to show up eventually, sooner rather than later, but he at least expected to meet her. He was just another afterthought. Jǐngtì shook his head and wiped tears from his eyes. Don’t let it show. Can’t let it show.

Don’t be weak. Can’t be weak.

He pulled up the bandana and rubbed the tears out of his eyes. He searched around for something to focus on before he broke down completely. He settled on looking over his shoulder to the inside of the bakery. His father leaned against the counter, waiting for the order. His eyebrows knitted together. The fox inside was giving Mao Mao a wide berth, shuffling in his seat, and sweating nervously. Muffin didn’t seem to notice the hard air. Were all sweetipies oblivious? Jǐngtì preferred not to dwell on sweetipies; all the sweetipies creeped him the fuck out. They were just so weird.

Jǐngtì watched Mao Mao get the order and sit down next to him. Mao Mao got beignets while Jǐngtì got the cobbler he didn’t want. He only got cobbler because he knew it annoyed his dad for some reason. He didn’t feel like annoying his dad, so why the hell did he even get it? Jǐngtì almost got up and threw it away until he remembered the pit in his stomach. Something disgustingly sweet was better than nothing.

They sat in silence for a moment before Jǐngtì spoke up.

“Why are you using your sword like that,” Jǐngtì asked.

“Using it as a cane? It’s because I hurt my feet the other day.”

“Fighting that monster?”

“Yeah.”

The pointless and pathetic small talk quickly gave way to silence again. They sat like that for another moment when Mao Mao managed to say something.

“How are you feeling,” Mao Mao asked.

“Why do you care?”

“I’m your dad. Caring is what I’m supposed to do.”

“I know,” he said,” I’m just wondering why you’re suddenly starting to do that now.”

“I’ve always cared-”

“Did you?” Jǐngtì interrupted. “Did you really? I go to prison and you do... whatever this is. Became babysitter to a bunch of creepy fucking toddlers? I know for a fact that you could have done something to get me out of prison.”

“It’s not that easy-”

“It really is. You could have paid bail yourself.. I know for a fact this goddamn ‘mao clan’ or whatever has enough money to literally pay a king’s ransom with excess. Instead, you let Mom spend 4 years collecting the money herself.”

Mao Mao stumbled over his words. “I… the situation was complicated. The monarchy-”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he calmly said.

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Jǐngtì shuffled to the other side of the bench, refusing to even look his father in the eye.

“Why’d you get the groceries?”

“Cause I was hungry and would rather not starve to death because none of them want to do chores?”

“Who’s ‘them’?”

“My… roommates, I guess.”

“What roommates? Who are you staying with? Where are you staying?”

“Sky Pirates.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Mao Mao jump to his feet and begin pacing back and forth.

“Why would you?” He took a deep breath, taking the time to gather his thoughts. “You’re staying with the sky pirates?”

“Yes.”

“Why? I have a room at HQ you could have stayed in.”

“I didn’t want to. Matter of fact, I still don’t want to.”

“You shouldn’t be staying with the sky pirates-”

“I don't see why it's such a fucking problem with you! You went years without a call or even a letter! I can’t understand why you suddenly want anything to do with me.”

“Why wouldn’t I want anything to do with you? I’m your father.”

“You sure as hell don’t act like it.”

* * *

Mao Mao coiled his tail around his finger. It was a replacement habit. When he had both arms he tended twiddle his thumbs. The new habit gave him something to do while he thought of something to say.

What could he say?

“Look, son-”

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped.

Mao Mao ignored it.

“Son, I know that… things were difficult. It was prison. It has to be. It must have been an incredibly difficult time for you.” He put his arm over Jǐngtì’s shoulder. “You had to learn to do things on your own, learn to make judgments for yourself, with no guidance or advice.”

“It must have been a painful thing to go through. It had to be. You managed to survive it and now you’ve come out stronger. You’ve gotten rid of a bit of that weakness. Leaving you in jail wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. It was a lesson. It taught you about consequences and weakness and-” I know it sounds harsh, but-”

Jǐngtì quickly stood up before he could finish. He took a deep breath and stared at the ground while he thought. “I know it sounds harsh, but-”

Mao Mao never got to try to justify himself.

Jǐngtì grabbed Mao Mao by the face and pushed him back with all his might. Mao Mao went over the bench crashing through the Bakery’s storefront. Mao Mao righted himself, stumbling into a landing, using only a cat's instinct. The danger of surprise attacks lay in the ‘surprise’. If it didn’t win the fight outright, the sudden switch created an opening. Mao Mao knew this; Jǐngtì did as well. His son seized the opportunity. He lunged forward. A punch that should have landed. Mao Mao caught it with his right hand; a feat only possible because the move and strategy was something he taught his son. A surprise throw to create a gap for a well-timed finish.

“A single wrong move can turn the tides,” he said, pulling Jǐngtì in for a leg sweep counter.

Mao Mao felt something strike the side of his head. An elbow split his skin. “A single wrong move can turn the tides,” Jǐngtì smugly repeated.

To know that he’d pull him in for a leg-sweep creating just enough space for an elbow that a one-armed man couldn’t stop. Did he read that far ahead? Mao Mao couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride as everything tilted.

He grabbed Jǐngtì’s arm. They began to fall. Jǐngtì prepared to grapple on the ground, however, Mao Mao pushed off the ground, reeling back and then pushing Jǐngtì away with all his weight.

Mao Mao was still reeling from the attacks, his sense of balance too busy somersaulting to keep him from falling on broken glass. A stray shard went into his side, slipping past the ribs into the meat.

The pain was blinding. All Mao Mao could do was lie there in pain, waiting for Jǐngtì’s finisher. Would it be a kick to the skull? A stomp to the face? Mao Mao put his money on the forme; It seemed more Jǐngtì’s style. He waited and waited, but it never came.

Mao Mao pried himself off the ground.  He considered pulling out the shard but decided it was the only thing keeping him from bleeding out, so it was best to leave it. He looked for Jǐngtì, finding him back outside, sitting on the bench. Mao Mao grabbed used Geraldine as a cane to stumble toward his son, heaving for breath, barely able to even stand.

“How do you do it,” Jǐngtì asked. “How do you manage to come so close to doing something right? How do you manage to mess it up so swiftly, so consistently, so easily that it makes blinking look like a deadlift?”

Mao Mao had nothing to say.

“I’ll cover the damages. It was my fault. I got mad. I just thought… you might have changed, or at least learned your lesson.”

Jǐngtì stood up, grabbed his groceries, and walked away.

Mao Mao wanted to feel sad. He wanted to feel regret. He wanted there to be tears in his eyes, he wanted to say something, but he had nothing. No regret. No remorse. No rage. All his emotions and energy had been spent up and burnt out. He just felt tired. So unbelievably tired.

With nothing left to do, with nothing he wanted to do, he headed back home.

* * *

Somewhere along the long walk home, across the Valley’s grassy foothills, the pain had gone away. Actually, it would be better to say he had just gotten used to it. Maybe he’d just sleep with the shard in his side. He could probably take care of it tomorrow. Mao Mao felt a yawn come up, but he didn’t even have the energy to get it out. He put his head down and kept walking even though he was half-asleep. Habit and muscle memory would be enough to carry him the rest of the way. Maybe he’d get lucky and fall asleep with his eyes closed.

Mao Mao crossed the crest of the final foothill, absently hearing something. “Now where is he? I called and called, but he didn’t answer the phone. Does he actually live here? Thing looks like a dollhouse.”

Mao Mao could have sworn he recognized the voice. Who did it belong too? It didn’t belong to anyone in the Valley. Who was it? Damn! The name was on the tip of his tongue.

Bam!  

Mao Mao stumbled back clutching his bloody nose. Did he just walk into his own front door? That was what he gets for not paying attention.

“Mew Mew! There you are, my boy! What are you doin’ walking with your eyes closed? Don’t tell me you lost your sight. Already lost your arm can’t have you losin’ much more than that can we?” he said with a hearty gut-filled laugh Mao Mao hadn’t heard in nearly a decade.

The realization knocked the wind out of Mao Mao.

“Papa?”

[superb-y-lab]

The Art of Punk and the Punk Aesthetic.

（Ramones Los Angeles fan club mail-out, USA, 1977. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli).

... ...

For a musical and social movement that snarled in the face of authority and wasn’t averse to spitting at its friends, punk has received a great many shelf inches in the last 30 years respectfully devoted to histories, reassessments and eyewitness accounts. Today, there is even an academic journal exclusively devoted to the pursuit of punk and post-punk studies, which has just published its second issue. There can’t be much left to say about the music, clothing, media outrage and legendary gigs, but the graphic expression of punk has received less critical attention. Now, within weeks of each other, two thick, illustrated volumes have appeared: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli) edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage, and The Art of Punk (Omnibus Press/Voyageur Press) by Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg. Kugelberg and Savage have also curated “Someday all the adults will die!”, an exhibition of punk posters, handbills, record covers and ’zines at the Hayward Gallery in London.

The books are nicely complementary, with fewer overlaps in what they show than one might expect. Both address British and American punk, with the Rizzoli survey leaning towards the US, and the Omnibus volume inclining towards the UK, while also showing a strong awareness of punk scenes in other countries. Anyone nursing a serious interest in this subject will need to buy or consult both titles.

(Anarchy in the U.K. fanzine, UK, 1976. Photo: Ray Stevenson. Design: Jamie Reid. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic)

The editors’ approaches are different, too. Kugelberg and Savage’s book is more of an album, with the images presented in art-book style on a plain white page (no objections here — it’s good to be able to see the work clearly without punk-inspired page layouts intruding). These are smart writers and Savage, author of England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, is a key participant in the era; his punk archive is now stored at Liverpool John Moores University. But neither author is a historian or critic of graphic art, design or visual culture. “The history of the punk aesthetic cannot be told, only shown,” claims Kugelberg, somewhat unpromisingly. Savage made punk collages with the artist Linder Sterling and he has some good observations about punk montage: “In the act of dismembering and reassembling the very images that were supposed to keep you down and ignorant, it was possible to counteract the violence of The Spectacle and to refashion the world around you.” He points to the visual influences of John Heartfield, Martin Sharp’s work at Oz magazine, the feminist artist Penny Slinger, the Beach Books 1960s pamphlets, and Dawn Ades’ Photomontage (1976). I bought Ades’ trail-blazing study when it came out and would love to hear more: which punk image-makers were looking at the book and what did they get from it?

Bestley and Ogg write with a carefulness of phrasing and appearance of academic detachment that only partially masks the same devotion to punk as listeners and fans. Punk graphics was the subject of Bestley’s PhD and he curated the earlier exhibition “Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns”; he is course director of the graphic design MA at the London College of Communication. Ogg is author of No More Heroes, a history of British punk, and an editor of the Punk & Post-Punk journal. “It is important to question the notion of a direct association between work by prominent early punk designers and the emergence of a radical new visual language of parody and agitprop,” they write. “To an extent, the techniques adopted by Jamie Reid, for instance, were already widely accepted as the natural languages of anger and protest.” Such a comment can only be addressed to readers who know nothing about the histories of graphic design and graphic protest. As Savage and Kugelberg point out in their exhibition intro, punk’s precursors and putative influences include Dadaist collage, the Situationist International, the mail art movement, the graphics of counter-culture protest, and the 1960s underground press. I say “putative” because none of these connections is explored in depth and definitively established in their book.

(Situationist pamphlet by David Jacobs, USA, 1973. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic)

(Sex Pistols, Pretty Vacant poster, UK, 1977. Design: Jamie Reid. Source: The Art of Punk (Omnibus Press) The buses appear to come from David Jacobs’ design. Reid claims he sent the Situationist group the image in 1973)

(Pretty Disobedient, screenprinted poster by Shepard Fairey, USA, 2001. Signed by Fairey)

It was valuable to revisit so many original pieces in the exhibition after looking at small reproductions in the two books because the show communicates the explosive energy and “messthetic” rawness of punk graphics with persuasive power. This was an art of expediency, making use of collage, cartoon drawings, hand-lettering, rub-down lettering, ransom-note lettering, stencils (Savage and Kugelberg include a fantastic display of used stencils made by Crass), rubber-stamping and black and white Xerox copying, as well as silkscreen and offset litho. Looking at the discordant profusion of examples in the books, I kept trying to single out less familiar pieces that were highly accomplished as “design” from the many pieces that are hugely expressive and exciting, but not original or well resolved when seen in strictly graphic design terms. In the show, savoring scores of examples packed together at full size on the walls, those distinctions seemed irrelevant. These were raucous, vitality-filled transmissions from a turbulent graphic universe totally different in intention and effect from the smooth, orderly, design history-conscious parallel universe of professional design aesthetics, purposes and training. There didn’t necessarily have to be any points of contact or interchange between the two co-existing spheres.

(Flyer promoting a gig by Adam and the Ants, UK, 1977. Design: Adam Ant. Source: The Art of Punk)

(Poster promoting a gig by Crass, UK, 1978. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic)

But the question of the relationship between punk D.I.Y. design in its most basic or amateur forms and the later development of graphic design cannot be avoided for anyone who is both sensitive to punk’s impact and legacy (“the immediate implementation of D.I.Y. grassroots culture among the young” — Kugelberg) and committed to graphic design as a medium. Kugelberg and Savage say that the “anarchic upsurge in graphic creativity . . . revolutionised design,” a clear attempt to assert punk graphics’ significance beyond the punk subculture, yet this claim, too, can only be substantiated by a lot more detailed research. (In my book No More Rules, I connected punk’s anti-design ethos to the late 1980s/early 1990s idea of “deconstruction” in graphic design.)

In the UK, the punk-related designers that had most influence in the early 1980s were a handful of individuals such as Malcolm Garrett, who had been formally educated as graphic designers (in his case at the University of Reading and Manchester Polytechnic), though design’s mainstream was, in fact, slow to learn from and assimilate the lessons and styles of subcultural music design’s new wave. In any case, the graphic sensibility of Garrett’s work for Buzzcocks and Magazine, shown in The Art of Punk, has always seemed closer to “post-punk” graphic design than to what is commonly understood as punk — even allowing for Bestley and Ogg’s precautionary advice that “there is no one standard punk visual language” and that “a notion of a pure or authentic punk style is difficult to justify.”

(The Desperate Bicycles, “Occupied Territory” 7-inch single, Refill, UK, 1978. Source: The Art of Punk)

(Prag Vec, “Existential” 7-inch single, Spec, UK, 1978. Source: The Art of Punk)

(Black Flag, “Jealous Again” 12-inch EP, SST, USA, 1980. Design: Raymond Pettibon. Source: The Art of Punk)

It is no accident, too, that the stencil-based graphic identity of Crass, one of the most highly politicized punk bands, is so well coordinated and trenchant. “Both Gee [Vaucher] and myself trained as graphic artists,” Crass co-founder Penny Rimbaud tells Bestley and Ogg. “Both of us prior to Crass had brought money into the house by doing book design and that sort of stuff. And part of training as a graphic artist wasn’t just learning type[setting], it was also thinking in terms of marketing; a lot of the projects at college were: ‘This is the product, how do you design and market it? How do you create a corporate idea?’ . . . It was a very distinct policy that things should have an instantly recognizable image.”

(Crass, The Feeding of the 5000 LP, Crass, UK, 1978. Design: Gee Vaucher. Source: The Art of Punk)

(Crass, Yes Sir, I Will LP (back), Crass, UK, 1983. Design: Crass. Source: The Art of Punk)

There is an old slogan and rallying cry that insists, “Punk’s not dead.” Bestley and Ogg certainly believe that. Their book ends with examples of more recent punk design, though I find it hard to get excited by most of them in graphic terms. Punk might, as they say, have employed a fairly broad set of graphic conventions, but they remain as consistent and constrictive over time as those found in heavy metal. Kugelberg deduces from punk a more general lesson for today: “Form a band, start a blog, become an artist, a DJ, a guitar player, an editor.” No one can argue with that, though many might see it as a stretch to claim that, in 2012, these possibilities derive from punk’s mid-1970s example — unless, perhaps, one were to view punk prophetically as a form of science fiction. Interestingly, this is just how Savage does regard punk: as a “jump cut” into the future. “[P]eople in Britain see punk in terms of social realism and rock music. It was pure science fiction and it was very informed by J.G. Ballard, and by The Man Who Fell to Earth, among a lot of other things. . . . I think what’s important about punk is the idea that it was for a brief period very futuristic.” That’s another intriguing insight that calls out for more excavation.

(Anti, I Don’t Want to Die in Your War LP, New Underground, USA, 1982 Design: Dan Phillips, Ed Colver, Gary Kail. Source: The Art of Punk)

original from here.

[wendyimmiller]

A Peony Kind of Love…and Missing Winterthur

Guest Rant by Debra Moffitt In this burdened, budding springtime, we are all looking for something to do. I suggest falling in love — rollicking, floating on a marshmallow cloud, I’m-not-even-hungry love.

To be honest, my paramour and I have been carrying on since 2016 and this year we are as star-crossed as any two have ever been. Confession: I’m married. But the real problem is my heart’s desire lives behind the gates of an Eden-like public garden called Winterthur. The place draws a crowd, so the pandemic forced it shut for all of April and May. No visitors allowed.

Among the lush woodlands and rolling meadows of Delaware’s Winterthur, something is always in bloom. In May, it was my Paeonia and I was sick with longing. I imagined barreling through the single orange cone ahead of the guard shack. Or maybe I’d drop in, like a botanical paratrooper, surgically landing between the upper and lower jardins des pivoines. Could I pilot a drone over the walls of this former du Pont estate for just a glimpse?

Reader, my love is a peony.

Oh, I wish at least I knew its name! But I’ve come to find that identifying a singular peony is like trying to track down Cinderella after she fled the ball single-shoed. The registry maintained by the American Peony Society lists a cast of thousands – from “A La Mode” to “Zori” and many doozies in between: Dawn Glow Nosegay Elsa Sass Laddie Bartzella Souvenir de Maxime Cornu Thura Hires Shishigashira Many Happy Returns Mrs. Livingston Farrand Myrtle Gentry Mr. Ed

I could love any one of these monikers were it attached to the achingly pale pink peony of my heart’s desire. I’ve scanned dozens of photos and, to my eye, it’s close to a Shirley Temple, a bit like Angel’s Cheeks, in the neighborhood of Sarah Bernhardt, but with more of a snowball confection at its center. Ensconced among hundreds of other peonies at Winterthur, this flower shimmered and vibrated before me like Daisy to Gatsby on a steamy Louisville afternoon. As Fitzgerald wrote, “She blossomed for him like a flower.” Sigh. Same.

In early May, with no indication when Winterthur would re-open, I suppose I could have tilted my petal-wilting passion toward my husband. But wow, no thank you. We’ve been penned up together since March and his name is merely Dave.

Time was running out for me and my mystery flower. Peonies bloom gloriously, glamorously and oh-so briefly. Within days, these ruffled beauties, these hundred-petal bombs, wilt and flop over like debutantes after a boozy party. They swiftly mature into leathery seed pods and the year-long wait begins again.

Before you suggest I grow my own peony, do you know that peonies must be planted in the fall and are often without blooms for the first two or three years? Hence the peony grower’s adage “We sleep the first year, we creep the second and we leap the third.”

I can’t wait three years and, anyway, the flower I long for is no garden center special from Lowe’s. The Winterthur peonies — many planted in the 1950s and 1960s — carry a pedigree. This echelon of peonies announce their weddings in the New York Times. They bloom on the grounds of this Delaware chateau because they were chosen by Henry Francis du Pont, born in 1888 and heir to the industrialist family.

Mr. du Pont eventually turned over Winterthur’s immense, naturalistic garden — and his 175-room home — as a public space and museum. Connoisseurs of gardens flock there to ride open-air trams that survey its vistas. If you need more convincing, I crossed paths with Diane Keaton there last April and the U.S. Postal Service just emblazoned Winterthur on a garden series of Forever stamps. I have the stamps — would that I could send a letter to my cherished peony! I would scent it with perfume and close with a line from a Mary Oliver poem: “This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart.”

Like a lightning-bolt love affair, the visible life cycle of a peony is astonishingly brief. Winterthur cuts back its peonies so that when I visited on March 13, the gardens were mostly just a flat expanse of soil with a few tiny shoots breaking through at ground level. A close inspection of the spot where my treasured peony blooms revealed only a hollow, woody reed barely poking up through the mulch.

A lot happens in a few weeks. With velocity, peonies go straight vertical in the early spring. Then, atop the stem, two leaves extend themselves as open-armed as a ballerina in second position. Those graceful arms, that sturdy stem, will soon hold aloft an improbably large peony bud, like Atlas shouldering the heavens. The buds emerge closed tight and often the color of cherry cola, sticky with nectar, pure ambrosia for ants. Peony buds then metamorphize into a firm packet of petals known as the “marshmallow” stage. It’s all I can do not to pop one into my mouth.

That is slightly less crazy than it sounds because peonies are used in salads and jams. But please don’t eat the peonies! That would rob you of what happens next. Finally released from its leafy cocoon, the marshmallow bud yawns open and the peony spirals wide into full flower. Nothing to see here but the annual miracle. Swoon. Two million #peonies photos on Instagram prove I’m not alone.

By mid-May I knew I was running out of options. My peony would soon bloom without me. Delaware’s quarantine rules were relaxing at the beach and the boardwalk, but no word on the gardens. I tried giving other peonies a whirl and even sauntered by a neighbor’s yard to visit their quite nice Festiva Maxima. I dropped in on a tumbledown estate called Gibraltar where some charming peonies ring an Italianate garden. But it turns out I don’t have the kind of heart that can accommodate a side peony. Like real love, my floral ardor is painfully specific.

Fortunately, the heartsick writer always has one trick up her sleeve. She can find out a lot, even during a pandemic, under the premise of “research.” I contacted Winterthur, whose staff confirmed the peonies were all well and had been champs even through a cold snap. Cards on the table, I told the director of horticulture I wanted to know everything about the peonies at Winterthur.

This returned to me the wincing memory of how I once wanted to know everything about a cad (not Dave) who I loved during freshman year. I had even wondered: What kind of toothpaste does this magnificent creature use? Without getting into the details, let’s just say my peony has already been far more loyal and worthy of my sincere interest than the unmagnificent gent from Kappa Sigma.

The staff at Winterthur answered my inquiry by graciously opening their digital archives and sending me the kind of source matter that makes the heart pound. Though I wasn’t able to divine my peony’s name, I did learn a lot more about how the Winterthur peony gardens came to be.

The peony garden almost wasn’t: Du Pont initially planned to grow irises, but the archives hint at some sort of flapdoodle with the Iris Society, which visited in 1937. The visitors shared iced tea and cookies, the records show, but perhaps not du Pont’s inclination to plant his garden strictly “from the point of view of color.”

Du Pont collaborated with two talented women on the gardens: Landscape architect Marian Coffin and Silvia Saunders, daughter of the most well known peony hybridizer in the world, Arthur Percy Saunders Professor Saunders crossed variety after variety and du Pont is credited with having the foresight to acquire many of his cultivars, which he grew in upstate New York.

Du Pont wrote to Saunders, a year before the professor died: “I expect to have a yearly thrill during the remainder of my life from the Saunders garden.”

That time the Winterthur peonies traveled to London: Du Pont encouraged Silvia Saunders to travel to the 1962 Chelsea Flower Show with 300 Winterthur peonies. There, before a silver coromandel screen, and assisted by two famous British horticulturalists, she displayed the well-traveled beauties. The Winterthur blooms garnered five awards including the Lindley Silver Medal. Du Pont, who was among the judges that year, left Silvia Saunders a note on the peony table that read, “Good work, lass!”

It must have been a glorious, celebratory moment, but I like to rewind the tape to six days earlier, when the buds had to be collected in Delaware for the trans-Atlantic trip ahead. I’ve heard tell that they picked the peonies in the rain holding umbrellas over the buds to protect them. Is this not like every romantic movie ever made? And I wonder if my pink peony was in that winning bunch. I feel certain, yes.

How good it feels to be part of an audience that heaps public praise and recognition on those we love and who most surely deserve it. But this year, the Chelsea Flower Show “went digital” just like my son’s college graduation. The staff at Winterthur did all they could for me. They shared photos and videos of the blooming garden on social media That, plus all the archival information, soothed me, but in the partial way of a Zoom call for a momentous occasion.

We had such a call with my graduating son and it was something. But I wanted all 360 degrees, full immersion for my senses. At this moment in our sad year, one feels compelled to say these little griefs — over missed peonies and commencement exercises — are not such a big deal. But they’re not nothing.

Perhaps my joy will double when my son’s postponed graduation celebration finally happens. And I’m sure my heart will swell next May, when the peonies, those “silent, numb nudgers,” emerge from the cold soil to give us all the yearly thrill. Maybe I’ll bring Dave.

Until then, something is always abloom at Winterthur, whose gardens, I’m thrilled to say, have reopened. Summer is just getting started. We can still have purple rhododendron, blue hydrangea and orange day lillies — flowers for when the day is new. I’ll be looking at those blooms, but peony, I’ll be seeing you.

Debra Moffitt is a Delaware writer whose essays have been published in Slate, the Washington Post, and a middle-grade book series by St. Martin’s Press. Photos of peonies at Winterthur taken by the author in May of 2019. 

A Peony Kind of Love…and Missing Winterthur originally appeared on GardenRant on June 9, 2020.

The post A Peony Kind of Love…and Missing Winterthur appeared first on GardenRant.

from Gardening https://www.gardenrant.com/2020/06/peonies-winterthur.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[turfandlawncare]

A Peony Kind of Love…and Missing Winterthur

Guest Rant by Debra Moffitt In this burdened, budding springtime, we are all looking for something to do. I suggest falling in love — rollicking, floating on a marshmallow cloud, I’m-not-even-hungry love.

To be honest, my paramour and I have been carrying on since 2016 and this year we are as star-crossed as any two have ever been. Confession: I’m married. But the real problem is my heart’s desire lives behind the gates of an Eden-like public garden called Winterthur. The place draws a crowd, so the pandemic forced it shut for all of April and May. No visitors allowed.

Among the lush woodlands and rolling meadows of Delaware’s Winterthur, something is always in bloom. In May, it was my Paeonia and I was sick with longing. I imagined barreling through the single orange cone ahead of the guard shack. Or maybe I’d drop in, like a botanical paratrooper, surgically landing between the upper and lower jardins des pivoines. Could I pilot a drone over the walls of this former du Pont estate for just a glimpse?

Reader, my love is a peony.

Oh, I wish at least I knew its name! But I’ve come to find that identifying a singular peony is like trying to track down Cinderella after she fled the ball single-shoed. The registry maintained by the American Peony Society lists a cast of thousands – from “A La Mode” to “Zori” and many doozies in between: Dawn Glow Nosegay Elsa Sass Laddie Bartzella Souvenir de Maxime Cornu Thura Hires Shishigashira Many Happy Returns Mrs. Livingston Farrand Myrtle Gentry Mr. Ed

I could love any one of these monikers were it attached to the achingly pale pink peony of my heart’s desire. I’ve scanned dozens of photos and, to my eye, it’s close to a Shirley Temple, a bit like Angel’s Cheeks, in the neighborhood of Sarah Bernhardt, but with more of a snowball confection at its center. Ensconced among hundreds of other peonies at Winterthur, this flower shimmered and vibrated before me like Daisy to Gatsby on a steamy Louisville afternoon. As Fitzgerald wrote, “She blossomed for him like a flower.” Sigh. Same.

In early May, with no indication when Winterthur would re-open, I suppose I could have tilted my petal-wilting passion toward my husband. But wow, no thank you. We’ve been penned up together since March and his name is merely Dave.

Time was running out for me and my mystery flower. Peonies bloom gloriously, glamorously and oh-so briefly. Within days, these ruffled beauties, these hundred-petal bombs, wilt and flop over like debutantes after a boozy party. They swiftly mature into leathery seed pods and the year-long wait begins again.

Before you suggest I grow my own peony, do you know that peonies must be planted in the fall and are often without blooms for the first two or three years? Hence the peony grower’s adage “We sleep the first year, we creep the second and we leap the third.”

I can’t wait three years and, anyway, the flower I long for is no garden center special from Lowe’s. The Winterthur peonies — many planted in the 1950s and 1960s — carry a pedigree. This echelon of peonies announce their weddings in the New York Times. They bloom on the grounds of this Delaware chateau because they were chosen by Henry Francis du Pont, born in 1888 and heir to the industrialist family.

Mr. du Pont eventually turned over Winterthur’s immense, naturalistic garden — and his 175-room home — as a public space and museum. Connoisseurs of gardens flock there to ride open-air trams that survey its vistas. If you need more convincing, I crossed paths with Diane Keaton there last April and the U.S. Postal Service just emblazoned Winterthur on a garden series of Forever stamps. I have the stamps — would that I could send a letter to my cherished peony! I would scent it with perfume and close with a line from a Mary Oliver poem: “This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart.”

Like a lightning-bolt love affair, the visible life cycle of a peony is astonishingly brief. Winterthur cuts back its peonies so that when I visited on March 13, the gardens were mostly just a flat expanse of soil with a few tiny shoots breaking through at ground level. A close inspection of the spot where my treasured peony blooms revealed only a hollow, woody reed barely poking up through the mulch.

A lot happens in a few weeks. With velocity, peonies go straight vertical in the early spring. Then, atop the stem, two leaves extend themselves as open-armed as a ballerina in second position. Those graceful arms, that sturdy stem, will soon hold aloft an improbably large peony bud, like Atlas shouldering the heavens. The buds emerge closed tight and often the color of cherry cola, sticky with nectar, pure ambrosia for ants. Peony buds then metamorphize into a firm packet of petals known as the “marshmallow” stage. It’s all I can do not to pop one into my mouth.

That is slightly less crazy than it sounds because peonies are used in salads and jams. But please don’t eat the peonies! That would rob you of what happens next. Finally released from its leafy cocoon, the marshmallow bud yawns open and the peony spirals wide into full flower. Nothing to see here but the annual miracle. Swoon. Two million #peonies photos on Instagram prove I’m not alone.

By mid-May I knew I was running out of options. My peony would soon bloom without me. Delaware’s quarantine rules were relaxing at the beach and the boardwalk, but no word on the gardens. I tried giving other peonies a whirl and even sauntered by a neighbor’s yard to visit their quite nice Festiva Maxima. I dropped in on a tumbledown estate called Gibraltar where some charming peonies ring an Italianate garden. But it turns out I don’t have the kind of heart that can accommodate a side peony. Like real love, my floral ardor is painfully specific.

Fortunately, the heartsick writer always has one trick up her sleeve. She can find out a lot, even during a pandemic, under the premise of “research.” I contacted Winterthur, whose staff confirmed the peonies were all well and had been champs even through a cold snap. Cards on the table, I told the director of horticulture I wanted to know everything about the peonies at Winterthur.

This returned to me the wincing memory of how I once wanted to know everything about a cad (not Dave) who I loved during freshman year. I had even wondered: What kind of toothpaste does this magnificent creature use? Without getting into the details, let’s just say my peony has already been far more loyal and worthy of my sincere interest than the unmagnificent gent from Kappa Sigma.

The staff at Winterthur answered my inquiry by graciously opening their digital archives and sending me the kind of source matter that makes the heart pound. Though I wasn’t able to divine my peony’s name, I did learn a lot more about how the Winterthur peony gardens came to be.

The peony garden almost wasn’t: Du Pont initially planned to grow irises, but the archives hint at some sort of flapdoodle with the Iris Society, which visited in 1937. The visitors shared iced tea and cookies, the records show, but perhaps not du Pont’s inclination to plant his garden strictly “from the point of view of color.”

Du Pont collaborated with two talented women on the gardens: Landscape architect Marian Coffin and Silvia Saunders, daughter of the most well known peony hybridizer in the world, Arthur Percy Saunders Professor Saunders crossed variety after variety and du Pont is credited with having the foresight to acquire many of his cultivars, which he grew in upstate New York.

Du Pont wrote to Saunders, a year before the professor died: “I expect to have a yearly thrill during the remainder of my life from the Saunders garden.”

That time the Winterthur peonies traveled to London: Du Pont encouraged Silvia Saunders to travel to the 1962 Chelsea Flower Show with 300 Winterthur peonies. There, before a silver coromandel screen, and assisted by two famous British horticulturalists, she displayed the well-traveled beauties. The Winterthur blooms garnered five awards including the Lindley Silver Medal. Du Pont, who was among the judges that year, left Silvia Saunders a note on the peony table that read, “Good work, lass!”

It must have been a glorious, celebratory moment, but I like to rewind the tape to six days earlier, when the buds had to be collected in Delaware for the trans-Atlantic trip ahead. I’ve heard tell that they picked the peonies in the rain holding umbrellas over the buds to protect them. Is this not like every romantic movie ever made? And I wonder if my pink peony was in that winning bunch. I feel certain, yes.

How good it feels to be part of an audience that heaps public praise and recognition on those we love and who most surely deserve it. But this year, the Chelsea Flower Show “went digital” just like my son’s college graduation. The staff at Winterthur did all they could for me. They shared photos and videos of the blooming garden on social media That, plus all the archival information, soothed me, but in the partial way of a Zoom call for a momentous occasion.

We had such a call with my graduating son and it was something. But I wanted all 360 degrees, full immersion for my senses. At this moment in our sad year, one feels compelled to say these little griefs — over missed peonies and commencement exercises — are not such a big deal. But they’re not nothing.

Perhaps my joy will double when my son’s postponed graduation celebration finally happens. And I’m sure my heart will swell next May, when the peonies, those “silent, numb nudgers,” emerge from the cold soil to give us all the yearly thrill. Maybe I’ll bring Dave.

Until then, something is always abloom at Winterthur, whose gardens, I’m thrilled to say, have reopened. Summer is just getting started. We can still have purple rhododendron, blue hydrangea and orange day lillies — flowers for when the day is new. I’ll be looking at those blooms, but peony, I’ll be seeing you.

Debra Moffitt is a Delaware writer whose essays have been published in Slate, the Washington Post, and a middle-grade book series by St. Martin’s Press. Photos of peonies at Winterthur taken by the author in May of 2019. 

A Peony Kind of Love…and Missing Winterthur originally appeared on GardenRant on June 9, 2020.

The post A Peony Kind of Love…and Missing Winterthur appeared first on GardenRant.

from GardenRant https://ift.tt/2XMupa2

[jonathanalumbaugh]

What I learned

January 13th, 2018, 7th issue. A roundup of what I learned this week, sources linked. Published weekly. All blurbs written by yours truly unless otherwise noted. Grouped in quasi-random order.

Design

Land art is awesome. — 10 Female Land Artists You Should Know

There's free money out there for projects! — The Complete Guide to 2018 Artist Grants and - Artwork Archive

Better design can help guide the user to what they want to do, while leaving them in control. Bad design lets them flounder. — Hawaii missile alert: Blame terrible interface design for the Hawaii debacle — Quartz

Looking at a familiar environment through a photo can give us a new perspective. — January Cure 2018 Assignment 7 - Photograph Your Home - Apartment Therapy

Design-centered companies like IBM seem like the ideal, if there must be monoliths like them. — IBM’s Quest To Design The “New Helvetica”

Things that are interactive get more attention than things that are static. Things that are interactive in strange and unexpected ways, probably even more so. — Ikea’s New Ad Is A Pregnancy Test You Pee On. Really.

The impact of simple choices ("this font or that one?") is important. — The importance of typography in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

International fire code/OSHA guidelines for evacuation floor plans are a thing that exists. — Is there a Standard for Emergency Evacuation Maps? - NFPA Xchange

Basic principles of animation apply to more than just animated films. — Making CSS Animations Feel More Natural - CSS-Tricks

CNC made houses cause quite a stir in the comments section. — The PlyPad: CNC Machine Yourself A Tiny House - Hackaday

Design nostalgia looks to an era that never existed, a charicature of an era that wasn't as glorious as it's made out to be. — That font you hate is coming back in style - The Outline

Git

Yes, a section dedicated solely to all the things I learned about git.

Git is a powerful way of managing projects that have releases, ongoing development, and multiple team members. — A git Primer

Use "git checkout" to use files from a different branch in the current branch. — Git: checkout files or directories from another branch – clubmate.fi

This was supposed to help me deploy my website. — Git: copy all files in a directory from another branch - Stack Overflow

Git can also be used to automate deployment of web apps or websites, especially powerful when combined with post receive hooks. — Setting up Push-to-Deploy with git - Kris Jordan

Order of operations: git commit > git pull > merge whatever needs to be merged > push to server. — When do I need to do "git pull", before or after "git add, git commit"? - Stack Overflow

Finance

In systems of continually growing complexity, administration becomes more and more difficult. — An Alleged Theft of a Billion-Dollar Fund Grips ETF World - WSJ

A lot about retirement accounts. — Congratulations, Your Income Is Too High: Non-Deductible IRA Conversions - Part 2 - Seeking Alpha

Ethereum is a crypto-currency that is built to be used for smart contracts, which function as multi-signature accounts, manage agreements between users, store information about an app, and more. — How Do Ethereum Smart Contracts Work? - CoinDesk

Scandal

In a shitstorm of bad apologies for terrible assaults, a victim accepts her harasser's apology. — Dan Harmon’s apology to Megan Ganz was a moment of self-reckoning - Vox

Excerpt: “We are talking here about destroying all the ambiguity and the charm of relationships between men and women,” explained the writer Anne-Elisabeth Moutet... “We are French, we believe in gray areas. America is a different country. They do things in black and white and make very good computers. We don’t think human relationships should be treated like that.”

What I learned: I'm not really sure.

— Opinion: Catherine Deneuve and the French Feminist Difference

In the almost every one of the differing opinions about Ansari's wrongdoings, even the ones who decry his accuser, there is at least some shred of truth. — The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari

Social media

Facebook has shifted its focus from personal connection to advertising. Can it be saved? Probably only by killing it. — Facebook Can’t Be Fixed. — Facebook (FB) is using an old drug dealer tactic to keep its users hooked to News Feed

In a society anxious to be texted back, we value the ability to put off replying. — How It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails

Algorithmic systems like Youtube feed off of its users preferences. If we don't like it, it's our fault. — Making a Better YouTube

There is a new dialectic, or at least one that has been brought to the fore by the over-availability of news: virtue signalling vs. engagement. Every inflammatory headline begs to be shared with righteous opinion attached, and every time one is it fans the flames of the 24 hour news cycle. Maybe before long, it'll be called the 1400 minute news cycle. — Seriously, You—Ok, We—Need To Stop Watching The News This Year

Massive systems like Youtube are now almost completely run by algorithms that are exploitative. It's not that there is aberrant behavior in the algorithm; it is built to be exploitative, and it's now being taken to its natural end. And yes, as users, we are complicit. — Something is wrong on the internet – James Bridle

We need to consider the root beliefs collectively held by society that have given rise to the services that now run our lives. — Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here?

Life

A catch-all category for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else, or fits in too many other categories!

There are points in time that we're more likely to work to push beyond our current capabilities; perhaps by preparing for them, we could push even farther. — The Bizarre Motivating Power of Aging Into a New Decade

Spiciness is carried to our brains through nerves in the dermis on our tongues, not through taste buds. — Did You Know That "Spicy" is Not a Taste?

Alcohol hits the bloodstream very quickly (~90 seconds) but takes hours to be fully released into the bloodstream, so BAC can climb even after the last drink. — Here's Why You Vomit After Drinking Alcohol And How To Feel Better After Getting Sick

Discomfort and fear keep us from enjoying ourselves. When we experience them, slow down, check them at the door and forge ahead. — I Was the Youngest Person at the Dump - Kathleen Ann Thompson

The authors argue that inequality is almost the same as it has been for decades, the top 1% is simply receiving their large slice of the pie in salary, rather than in increasing shareholder value pre-Reagan tax changes. — A new study says much of the rise in inequality is an illusion. Should you believe it?

Making room for opportunity to occur is the first step to seizing opportunity. — Opportunity Knocks When You Least Expect It. - Kathleen Ann Thompson

What I learned: The internet is a utopia; it does not physically exist, it's a virtual space that enables the amplification of the moral outrage that is a tool of self-absolution. And now we are no longer able to shape the internet, what we made now shapes us. Excerpt one: "The utopian ideal of the internet—unregulated access to information, pure connectivity—now feels antiquated. Also antiquated: trying to determine if the internet is simply good or bad. Possible and necessary: thinking more deeply about how it’s rewiring our brains and warping our experience of time, about the vistas of reality it’s revealing and creating, and what to do with our positions therein, so that we do not go mad from it all nor flee altogether." Excerpt two: "Communicating every thought about every moral conflict has become so effortless, even obligatory, that it feels like nothing could possibly be informing our reactions beyond the conflicts themselves." Excerpt three: "The myriad reckonings we’re desperate for might be cultivated in the kind of safe space Kaufman describes. Not a literal dream state, but somewhere where you don’t feel watched or compelled to perform. Somewhere private, or where you’re listening to one person at a time rather than a ton of little representations of people all at once. Somewhere where the discomfort of moral responsibility can’t be mowed over with the stimulus of an outrageous story. Where, if you’re disturbed to come upon a transgressive thought of your own, the next move is to pick it apart, rather than to go online and project an image of yourself as perfectly evolved." — Rookie » Editor's Letter

Automating repetitive tasks using whatever tools at hand is a powerful way to reach past a productivity plateau. — Schedule Tasks on Linux Using Crontab

Giving our viewers "everything" is doing our audiences a disservice. Shows like Twin Peaks make us work to understand. — ‘Twin Peaks’ Episode 8 Explained: Recap & Top Theories

B teams at Google (teams that were not composed of top performers) made more significant contributions to the company than its A teams, once again proving that soft skills are incredibly important. — The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students

Figure out your most productive hours and be prepared to work on your most important projects in that time. — Work During Your Hours of Peak Productivity

Google may not be explicitly evil, but it is starting to force web developers to do things the Google way. — Web developers publish open letter taking Google to task for locking up with web with AMP / Boing Boing

Psychology

I have no idea what's going on here. — Carl Jung Was Alt-Right

Contradicting perhaps decades of psychology, personality (as measured by OCEAN, or the "Big Five") shows downward trends in all traits except agreeableness. — Study of 50,000 people shows personality changes throughout life

A free "Big Five" or "OCEAN" test! — Understand Yourself - Personality Test

Beginnings, endings, and other psychological landmarks are powerful times to take advantage of in our lives. — You’re Most Likely to Do Something Extreme Right Before You Turn 30

[topmixtrends]

IN RETROSPECT, it seems clear that Norman Mailer, the author, director, columnist, TV personality, war veteran, and wild-eyed raconteur, developed a sense of himself over his varied career as playing the part of a character in a novel. As he wrote of himself in his enduring record of the 1960s war protest movement, The Armies of the Night: “His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.”

At several decades’ remove, Alex Gilvarry has taken Mailer up on his daydream (with apologies to Balzac), starting out with Norman Mailer and transmuting his essence into his own Alan Eastman. Eastman Was Here, premised on a trip to report the Vietnam War for the New York Herald that Mailer never in fact made, follows a once-celebrated author in the aftermath of his wife leaving him. To win her back, Eastman decides to venture out into harm’s way — or in the general direction of harm, where menace might be lurking in the streets outside his hotel in Saigon — and there encounters a talented, young journalist named Anne Channing. Not so much a story of the Vietnam War, Eastman Was Here explores the absurd excesses and shameful depredations of the masculine ego, somewhat in the manner that Jonathan Franzen renders his Lambert family patriarch vulnerable in The Corrections.

“Women commanded their own destiny,” thinks Alan Eastman, “unlike in his mother’s time. In fact, this is what he most admired about the women in his life. All of his past lovers had some big, commanding presence, an outward destiny, that made him feel the need to attach himself, for maybe that’s what made him happy.”

Well, at least Eastman’s heart is in the right place.

I set out to speak with Gilvarry, a friend, by first attending his book release party at McNally Jackson where he spoke with Saïd Sayrafiezadeh; then in Brooklyn at Greenlight Bookstore, where he was in conversation with his wife, Alexandra Kleeman. I wanted to hear what was said so that I didn’t ask the same questions when I got my chance. In the end, we discussed Eastman and Mailer, the place of the “macho male chauvinist” and obscenity in contemporary fiction, finding sympathy in satire, and the concept of authorial humility.

¤

J. T. PRICE: Eastman Was Here, like your first novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, pivots between two seemingly incongruous “worlds”: in the case of the earlier book, fashion in New York City and captivity in Guantanamo Bay, and now in the current, high-wire literary salons and high-tension Saigon during the Vietnam War. What is it about spanning incongruous social spheres that attracts you as an author?

ALEX GILVARRY: I want a book to bring me into a world I’ve never been to before. That’s an amazing feeling when it happens, when as a reader you’re fully immersed. Many of the locations I write about attract me with their problems, their people, or through nostalgia. Like the literary world of the past. I’m not really nostalgic for the martini lunches and all that. But in the book there’s a point where Eastman takes a walk down old Book Row in New York and remembers his life and career in the ’50s. Those are the moments I’m looking for.

Was there a particular scene that served as the genesis of this book? That walk down old Book Row, now gone, is a vivid one for those of us who love old books.

Not really. I started at the beginning, in chapter one. An aging journalist in his house who has just been left by his wife of 10 years. It all started from there.

Satire often registers as unkind to its subjects. Several riotous set pieces aside, Eastman Was Here does not feel purely satirical. How did you find your right balance between satire and sympathy in writing Eastman?

I think because in my mind I wasn’t writing a satire. I was writing a roman à clef, like The Moon and Sixpence or something. All I was thinking about was the character and taking his story as seriously as possible, and maybe that’s where the sympathy comes from. It turns out this can be read as a satire, for sure. But I wrote it as a story based on real life.

Your character, Anne Channing, an intrepid photographer and war reporter, stands as a foil to Eastman’s washed-up celeb status. All the same, in the story, she confesses to feeling drawn to him. Stepping from the novel’s “reality” to our own real lives, what is appealing about Norman Mailer as a writer, in the books of his that you see as his best?

Anne Channing is attracted to Eastman in the way that we are sometimes attracted to people who aren’t good for us. I think we can all relate to that, at some point in our lives.

Mailer was first appealing to me as a controversial figure. I knew his reputation as a rabble-rouser and someone who would knock your teeth out before I had read any of his books. And then when I was in college I remember watching a screening of Town Bloody Hall in a literature class, and from that film, I found his reputation to be quite true. He talked very fast and sometimes didn’t make any sense to me …

Then when I went to the Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, I was forced to look at Mailer as a writer. To be honest, before this, I had no desire to read him. But there I discovered some good things and some you might expect. The contempt for feminism, the willingness to pounce on anyone who offended him. Though some of the books hold up. Like Advertisements for Myself — which shows the male mind and ego of a writer in the ’50s. And The Armies of the Night, which is a great snapshot of literary life and politics during the ’60s. Armies is probably the most relevant book to read today, as it shows a country divided and the meaning of protest and the doubts protesters may feel.

Yes, The Armies of the Night is terrific and relevant.

Isn’t it? That’s Mailer’s sweet spot. He’s learned humility. Arguably, not always present in his other work.

Also, The Executioner’s Song is really good for true-crime heads. So for anyone interested in those subjects, please, read him. His thoughts on ancient Egypt and good and evil and God I’m not so crazy about.

You and I have had beers before. Let’s pretend for a moment we’re having beers now. Norman Mailer, circa the late ’50s, walks into the bar and shouts out your name. “Gilvarry,” he says, approaching, “I’ll have you know that I read what you may call ‘a novel’ but I call…” and here he unleashes a string of choice obscenities while waving his arms around in aggravated ape fashion. How do you respond? (I’ve ducked bravely beneath a nearby table.)

[Laughs.] You see, writers like us today are not good at handling confrontation. So my initial instinct would be to duck under the table with you. But I suppose since there’s no way out, I’d tell him I read his last hand job of a novel, too, and found it as exciting as watching paint dry.

And things would only escalate from there.

Mailer, from what I learned from his friends and family, liked to spar a bit. You have to hit these guys back or they won’t respect you.

Once almost baited Sonny Liston into a fight, or so he claimed.

He also claimed that he was five foot ten. He liked to exaggerate.

Much fun is had in Eastman Was Here at the expense of Eastman’s Mailer-like ego, which made me think of the sensibility of the novel as somehow deeply informed by its opposite: authorial humility. How would you describe that quality, i.e., what does it mean to you? Say, within the context of, let’s call it, contemporary letters — our present-day book publishing scene?

That’s a very good read. You have to combat your ego with humility I think. It takes an ego to think anyone would want to read what you write. But I realize that it’s only a book, a novel, a fiction that I’ve written. In the scheme of things — considering all of media and entertainment today — it’s a very small spec.

I’ve heard you tell of the research you did for this novel, traveling to the Harry Ransom Center in Texas. What was it like studying the life and letters of a writer who moved during most of his career under the hot lights of literary celebrity and then to find that now, among the younger generation, he goes relatively unread?

You see, Mailer was important in his day and people treated him with importance. He was a literary celebrity, and he could do anything he wanted artistically or in journalism. (With the exception of writing in The New Yorker, I don’t think he had an easy time over there.)

Ah, The New Yorker. Holding the line, then and now.

Going into anyone’s personal and professional archive is a thrill. You get to know what they were really thinking about so and so. You get to see them at their most vulnerable and at their most proud. It’s an incredible adventure. But the best letters were not those regarding celebrity or literary fights. The best letters were those he might have sent to his first wife while he was stationed in the Philippines. You discover love and passion, and then you fast-forward and they broke up. This stuff can be heartbreaking. What a debt I owe to the Ransom Center.

Indeed. Beautiful, unexpected little recorded moments of consciousness. And reconciling that, as you read, with both his outsized reputation then and where he stands with the readers of today.

Yes, that’s pretty much what you begin to feel. But I was writing a novel so I was looking for ways into a very hardened, unlikable character. So I’m not saying, “Hey, let’s give these old dead white guys a chance!” For my purposes, in crafting a fiction, I found a way into a character. Reconciling with the way readers feel about Mailer today is hard to change. He wrote what he wrote, said what he said, hurt some people along the way. A reputation is not yours to control.

Is Eastman Was Here a feminist novel? I think it’s compelling, how even as an exploration of the grandiosity and excesses of male ego, the cover shows us a ghostly vision of a woman … as if that is what most constitutes, or haunts, Eastman’s interiority. (And in the story you write, yes, it is.)

Yes. It didn’t set out to be. But the women in this novel are feminists or embody feminist ideas because I believe in them too.

Nowhere in our contemporary lit landscape do we find a presence like Mailer — at least one as outwardly outrageous as he was. We might even say that the qualities of personality Mailer performed have been “repressed” within our contemporary scene. Meanwhile, the man sitting in the Oval Office has reared up in our collective consciousness like some sort of monstrous Mailer-esque id: an outer-borough born creature of tabloid celebrity, ego-driven, quick to hold grudges and pick senseless fights, scornful of “P.C.” culture, self-destructive, vain … yet also — decidedly unlike Mailer! — completely ignorant of contemporary literature. Maybe I’m getting a little vainglorious here, but in some sense, was Mailer as literary celebrity a sort of three-headed dog that kept darker forces of raging male id somehow at bay?

It’s a good thing that the qualities that Mailer exhibited, the macho male chauvinist, have been repressed. Not repressed, but cast out of literature, exiled altogether. A year ago I would have said that this had no place in politics either. My god, how wrong we were. Trump, by acting like an imbecile and a chauvinist, has signaled that hateful rhetoric and behavior is now okay. But this is beyond a culture war. Real policies are at stake in all aspects of American life and that’s what I want to concentrate my energy on now.

Here’s a passage from The Armies of the Night that I take to be Mailer giving a summation of his work:

He was off into obscenity. It gave a heartiness like the blood of beef tea to his associations. There was no villainy in obscenity for him, just — paradoxically, characteristically — his love for America. […] What none of the editorial writers ever mentioned was that that noble common man was obscene as an old goat, and his obscenity was what saved him. The sanity of said common democratic man was in his humor, his humor was in his obscenity.

On an immediate level, Mailer’s talking about himself. But is it true about America at large, do you think? By “casting out” that rollicking obscenity that Mailer sees as endemic to the sanity of common democratic man, does literature lose something?

When thinking of Donald Trump and the shameful America he envisions, there might be a bit of truth to this saying. But god, the “heartiness like the blood of beef tea,” what a terrible turn of phrase. So Mailer. Each book had some of his best stuff and some of his worst.

Beef tea. I’m going to have that taste in my mouth for the rest of the day. Eck.

¤

J. T. Price’s fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New England Review, Post Road Magazine, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.

The post “A Reputation Is Not Yours to Control”: A Conversation with Alex Gilvarry, Author of “Eastman Was Here” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2iHTmhh

[photomaniacs]

How to Make the Jump from Amateur to Professional Photographer http://ift.tt/2sV617a

What makes a pro photographer a pro? How do you do it? Do you just wake up one day and the photo gods anoint you a pro? Do you have to pass the pro photography exam and get some sort of certificate?

I studied photojournalism at San Francisco State University where I learned a lot about the technical side of photography, ethics, work ethics, and storytelling. What I didn’t learn much about was the business the side of things. I knew in my second year of college I wanted to be professional photographer but I had no clue how to make that happen. The industry is constantly changing and universities can only teach you so much.

The challenging part isn’t becoming a pro — the hard part is having the confidence to make the leap and make it work.

I made the leap about a decade ago and it hasn’t always been easy, but I made it happen the old-fashioned way: hard work and persistence. Now I own a commercial photography and video production company, a destination wedding photography business, and I shoot as an editorial photographer as well.

When I teach workshops or meet budding photographers at events, the most common question I get asked is how to become a pro, so I decided to put my advice into an article. Everyone has a different path in their journey from amateur to pro, but I hope these tips will help steer you in the right direction.

Talent Isn’t Everything

I wasn’t the most talented student, but I worked my butt off and stayed committed. Don’t let the narcissist professionals tell you it’s all about talent. Becoming a professional photographer is like anything else: hard work pays off in the end.

Commit

Make sure you commit to making it work no matter what, through the good photos and the bad, for better or worse.

Don’t Let Contests Be Your Measuring Stick

Photography contests are a huge business and most of them are purely for them to profit from your entry fee. Don’t measure yourself by how many contests you’ve won, as your clients won’t care much about that. I’ve never had a client ask me about contests. Sure, enter them and have fun doing so but don’t stress if you haven’t won anything.

Shoot Even When You Aren’t Paid To Shoot

I’m not saying to go out there and work for free, but practice and shoot whenever you can. If you want to learn about portrait photography, gather your friends and do portraits of them for fun. Borrow lights if that’s your thing and figure how to use them.

Get A Proper Portfolio Website

A Facebook gallery isn’t a website, a Flickr account isn’t a website, an Instagram account isn’t a website — you get the picture. Your website should have portfolio galleries in your specialties (e.g. weddings, portraits, products). You need a contact page, and about page, and a simple logo.

Of course, having social media accounts is important but use those outlets to draw attention to your portfolio website where potential clients can see your work and hire you. I use Squarespace, they are super easy to use, very professional customized templates and they won’t break the bank. Another great option is PhotoShelter, they are great resource for business advice and to manage your archive.

Equipment

Don’t be intimated by photographers with lenses on top of lenses and mounds of gear. Get a simple kit that you can afford. It’s easy to think “oh, if I had that $4K camera I’d be much better. Get better by practicing and learning not by spending. Now I have expensive equipment, true, but when I started I shot with one lens and one camera for an entire year’s worth of assignments and I got by just fine.

Treat Yourself Like A Business

When you first start off you are the head of marketing, sales, accountant, etc. Understand the basics of these positions and apply them to your business. Download basic contracts and invoice templates and customize them as you grow larger.

Commit

Wait, dude, you already said that. Well, it’s worth mentioning twice so there, I said it. You will have moments when you will be bummed out because of a slow month(s) — photographer’s doubt I call it — but stay with it and use that down time to focus on positive things like practicing and learning something new.

Don’t Be An Ass

This applies to all professionals I suppose, but I feel many photographers can, well, be asses. Don’t be insulted when you get low ball offers or asked to work for free. Let me rephrase that, you can be insulted, just don’t show it and don’t burn bridges. Understand your value, the market, and politely explain (not in condescending way) why your fees are the way they are.

Don’t Expect It To Be Easy

I’ve met a lot people who get into photography because they are lazy and it sounded better than a 9-5pm job. I said it, writers and photographers are some of the laziest people I know and the ones who get work hustle and have ambition, the ones who don’t are lazy. It’s pretty simple. When they aren’t shooting, they are b**ching online about other’s work, hanging out in cafés not getting anything done. When I’m not shooting, I’m clocking in and putting full work days into my business, marketing, sales, research, etc.

Stack The Odds In Your Favor

For many editorial photographers, their personal work/projects is their portfolio. Spend a lot of time on your projects and do them right. If photographer A spent 1 week on his personal project and photographer B spent 2 years on theirs, photographer B has a huge advantage. Most editors aren’t looking at how long you spent shooting your projects, they are looking at the final product and that’s it, so spend time on your project and get it right.

Crowd Funding

I bet you think I’m going to tell you that this is a great resource. I heard a panel directed at young aspiring photographers teaching them about crowdfunding as a business plan and it upset me — ok, it pissed me off.

Don’t rely on others’ money to start your career, it’s like asking for donation for a charity and there are people in need a lot more than your friends funding you to travel to Africa to take pictures. Don’t be an ass, like I said before — work and save and fund yourself. I get it for Kickstarter and places like that where you are trading special editions of a book, or selling prints, and stuff like that. I just mean don’t make this your only source of income. It’s not sustainable and your friends/family will get sick of funding you to travel around and take pictures.

Having A Book Doesn’t Make You Good

I see people rush to publish a book as if that solidifies their place as a pro. Anyone can self publish a book, it’s very easy to do. I can go out this afternoon, take selfies of me taking selfies, title it self reflection, and have my book published by this evening. Does that make me a pro? Does that make me good? No, it makes me a narcissistic weirdo. It can be expensive and time-consuming to publish your own book, so wait until you have a body of work or project that you feel is worthy of a book and then do it right.

Understand The Market And The Competition

It’s very important to understand the market and your competition, so d*mn important. Look at the work of photographers in your market, see what they are doing right with their branding, marketing, etc and learn from them. I’m not saying to copy everything they are doing, just use them as a measuring stick for you and your business.

Make An Announcement To The World

Walk out of your house or apartment right now and scream to the world, “I’m a professional photographer!” Ok, don’t do that, but rather, when you meet people in the real world, introduce yourself as a photographer rather than “oh I work in the cooperate world and sometimes I take photos of this, that, and the other thing.” See yourself as a photographer and others will see you the same way. Do the same in the social media world as well.

Have A Content Strategy

I work with great content strategist named Brandon Chew. He’s taught my a lot for all my brands and helps me strategize on social content. We think carefully how each social media outlet identity and purpose and how each outlet fits into the brand scheme of our marketing strategy. For example, I use Instagram to tease content that’s on my website, things like that. It’s also important to budget and strategize on how you target and boost posts. Email Brandon if you want to take your business to the next level.

I hope these tips were helpful to you.

About the author: Justin Mott is photographer based in Thailand and Vietnam serving all of Asia and beyond. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. He has shot over 100 assignments for the New York Times, TIME, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, and many others. Mott is also host and resident judge of History Channel’s hit photography reality series Photo Face-Off. Visit his website here. For more tips and articles from Justin please visit askmott.com and follow Justin on all social media outlets with the handle @AskMOTT. This article was also published here.

Go to Source Author: Justin Mott If you’d like us to remove any content please send us a message here CHECK OUT THE TOP SELLING CAMERAS!

The post How to Make the Jump from Amateur to Professional Photographer appeared first on CameraFreaks.

June 22, 2017 at 06:00PM

[coreshot]

RIP Bjarke Abildgaard Mogensen.  May 3, 1977 - December 16, 2016

It is with a heavy heart that I report the passing of Bjarke Mogensen.  Bjarke and I were the original founders of Coreshot back in 2004.  Before that, he was a friend, and before that, he was an inspiration.  I can safely say that without his influence I would not be the skier and person I am today. Bjarke and I used to converse via message boards (initially Descender and TelemarkTips, later Powdermag, etc.) and even though we didn’t know each other outside of our e-personas, we knew that we’d be friends.  I may have been a bit starry-eyed from the start; he was a year older, already a semi-pro skier, and lived and skied in the Alps, frequenting places I only knew from ski movies.  Our relationship was purely e-based for a couple of seasons until the spring of 2003, when I flew to the Alps to ski with some (actual, real) friends as well as meet some of the people behind the online personas, including Bjarke.  At some point during that trip I was in La Grave and Bjarke was in nearby Serre Chevalier so we thought it would be nice to meet in the middle on the Col du Lautaret and do a ski tour.  It turned out that some of our actual friends and e-friends were the same people, and we all got along and had a great time.  When it was time for me to return to the US we started brainstorming a plan for the next winter. Fast-forward to winter 2004.  Bjarke had always wanted to travel and ski in the US and I wanted to explore more of Europe, so we came up with a plan where he’d join me in the US and we’d road-trip through the West for Jan-Feb, and I’d fly over to Europe and jump into his life for March and April.  We thought it would be nice to document our adventures and we collaborated with Mitch Weber of Telemarktips to publish them on his website.  It was during this road trip (specifically an off-night in Salt Lake City) that he whipped up the first version of my website.  For a while, if you wanted to find my “official” online presence it was www.bmskier.com/adamcu. Don’t bother clicking - it’s a dead link. 

Telemarktips has been down for a while so the online record of our travels has been lost, but last year Bjarke and I took a stroll down memory lane; he sent me the text we wrote during our adventures.  Unfortunately he never got around to finding the photos (long archived on a dusty hard drive somewhere) so I only have a tiny fraction of what we took, but reading back through our travels brings it all back in my head.  It was during this winter that we came up with the idea for a ski blog that he would host.  The two finalists for domain names were 321Dropping and Coreshot.  We eventually chose the latter. 

We met up again in 2005 for adventures in Italy and La Grave.  Unfortunately our paths diverged after that season – his skiing took a backseat to school and family but our friendship continued via running Coreshot, e-communication, and social media.  I don’t expect many people to actually read through this ancient history but it’s important to me to put it out there, along with the images I have left.  So here you have it – The Travels Of Adam and Bjarke - as written by both of us during the winter of 2004.  Unfortunately the last chapter is missing but you get the idea.

Part One - Baker to Tahoe via Mammoth

January 7.  "You should have been here last week!"  Bjarke arrived at Mt. Baker exactly one day after one of the best storm cycles in recent history had crapped out.  Even though there was nothing I could do about the pineapple express that was camping out on top of us, I still felt terrible since I had been sending him glowing reports of feet of new snow at remarkably cold (for Mt. Baker) temps for days on end.  So when he got in the car, I mentioned that it might be in our best interests to hit the road as soon as possible.  I don´t know who was more bummed, since I had been very excited to show off the playground I have called home for the past four winters.  He, on the other hand, had left La Grave at the start of one of their bigger storms of the past few years.  We arrived at my friends house in Bellingham (where I had been surfing for the past few weeks) around midnight and as I pointed out the "Couch of Champions", I checked the weather forecast: Grim.  It looks like we´ll be sleeping in tomorrow!

January 8.  It was just as well that the conditions were so poor because we both had to do some last-minute equipment tweaking.  So we spent the day wandering around Bellingham visiting ski shops,  looking for spare parts for boots and bindings, and just being guide-and-tourist.  Glacier Ski Shop allowed us to use their bench to mount up Bjarke´s tele Big Daddies, but nobody could scrounge up buckles for his alpine boots.  A quick stop at the local supermarket led to a convenient discovery: we both are omnivorous cheap food consumers.  10 boxes of macaroni and cheese, a few cans of tuna, some bread, tortillas, oatmeal, and some tomato sauce ought to cover us for a while.  Now it may seem unimportant that we both share similar eating habits (after all, this is supposed to be about skiing), but these are things that could lead to stress further on down the road.  Later on we visited Grant Gunderson, a photographer friend that was willing to let us use his media gold pass while we were around.  Another weather check yielded more bad news, but since Bjarke had travelled all the way from France to check out the area, we decided to head up anyways. 

January 9.  Over the past few years I´ve settled into a common skier´s morning ritual: as soon as I wake up, I call the snow report.  Sometimes the result is a sprint out the door into the car and up to the hill, breakfast be damned.  Other times I take my time, and every once in a while, I just go back to sleep.  I don´t remember exactly what the report had to say, but let me put it this way; if it had been any other day but Bjarke´s first ski day in North America, I would have gone back to sleep.  Bjarke was excited to see the differences between his normal ski routine and mine, so I explained how a normal day at Baker works.  The first (and last) thing Baker skiers deal with is a drive up Highway 542, which some have called the gnarliest road to a ski area in the US.  It´s about an hour and 10 minutes each way, depending on traffic and conditions, so it is important to have a complete musical selection to help pass the time (here´s a tip: if you´re moving fast, one disc of the Guns and Roses double live album will take you up, and the other will take you down.  Perfect!).  Another important thing to think about regarding the drive is the fact that it is miserable to sit in wet funky ski clothes during the drive down, so I told Bjarke to pack up a change of clothes.  Aside from the drive, the rest of the experience is more or less the same as anywhere else.  Once you´re there, go ski! 

Sure enough, the conditions were not that great.  It was way above freezing, and there was a pretty deep layer of saturated mank that threatened to rip legs off and take the fattest of skis down to un-retrievable depths.  However, the visibility was perfect.  So we had that going for us, which was nice.  Given the circumstances, I chose alpine gear, but due to the unresolved alpine boot buckle failure, Bjarke was forced to have his first day on tele gear of the season in some challenging conditions.  I didn´t feel to bad for him at first, because after all, he´s a professional!  But as we skied around and I pointed out the places that, given better conditions, we would be skiing (Shuksan Arm, Hemispheres, Table Mountain, Mt. Herman....) I decided it would me more fun if we were on the same page.  After lunch, I brought out my tele gear, and we spent the remainder of the afternoon playing around Chair 7 Extreme and just skiing around being silly.  It was a far cry from a 2150 meter La Grave descents that he is used to, but it was still skiing and the day ended with smiles all around.  Once we got home and checked the weather (still uninspiring), we decided that unless there was some sort of miracle, we should spend the next day in Vancouver looking for gear and cheap sushi. 

January 10.  The morning ski report effectively told us not to worry about skiing and to head to Vancouver, so after spending a very lazy morning watching ski movies and generally being lazy, Ross (one of our housemates), Bjarke and I piled into the Ramry and set off, passports in hand.  The first stop was Broadway, which might as well be called Ski Bum Street.  Gear stores are on every corner, and in between you can find great cheap food from all over the world.  The 65 dollar CDN sleeping bag was a good deal, but we felt like we had just gotten away with murder after we all stuffed ourselves with sushi and only had to pay 34 CDN total!  It was then that Bjarke mentioned that even though the skiing we experienced the day before was sub-par, he saw amazing potential in the terrain, and combined with the close proximity to such cheap sushi we should expect to see him here next winter!  Our Vancouver mission was not over yet though, because we had a line on a pair of Kneissl Flexons (Bjarke´s boot of choice) up in West Van and once we were there, we might as well check out the new Cove bike shop and The Raven.  When in Rome...do as the gear junkies do!

January 11. Waking up early we went to pick up an extremely sleepy Grant Gunderson and drove up to Mt. Baker. Once there we met up with another photographer, Carl Skoog - the one who took the pic of Adam that went up on the on the Patagonia website front. Knowing that the temperature had gone down considerably since our last day we guessed that the snow would have frozen up; which prompted the photographers to leave their gear behind and just go skiing for pleasure. Or whatever you`d call it when the conditions are not a pleasure to ski at all. A few brief moments of exploration was enough to convince us that we had better stay within the groomed terrain for the remainder of the day; something that even prompted us to try out the halfpipe (locally: "stunt ditch") and the park. Pretty uncommon for me but good fun, especially as Adam threw down some mad screaming jacksons from time to time - always a pleasure to watch as he does that trick better than most. Having managed to avoid major carnage in these conditions we eventually called it a day and sat around the lodge for a while before heading back to Bellingham and the couch.

January 12. Realizing that the snow in Mt. Baker was not going to get any better soon we decided to hit the road south. After fixing some stuff in town, among other things mounting up Adams new warranty Volkl Explosives, we loaded up the Ramry with all our gear and left Bellingham in the afternoon. Late evening we arrived in Hood River where we stayed for the night with some of Adam's surfing friends. We even got to stay in their yurt, a sweet experience and definitely better than roughing it in the car.

January 13. After a few pancakes and some viewing of various pictures we left Hood River and drove towards Mt. Hood. Having shot a few pictures of Mt. Hood in decent visibility we went on south on the 97 so that I could enjoy the view of the Cascade volcanoes along the way. Apart from some sweet views the day was fairly uneventful and we arrived in South Lake Tahoe at night after a straight 12-hour drive and stayed with some fellow internet ski geeks.

January 14. We left South Lake Tahoe at six in the morning (that`s pretty early for us really) and arrived at Mammoth after a quick stop for ghetto style breakfast, just in time to meet Mitch Weber and Tim from Telemarktips.com and get set up to ski for a few days. We went skiing and got the guided tour of the inbounds terrain, some of which looked like it had a lot of potential after a storm. Eventually we even got around to doing a bit of filming and shooting even though snow conditions like windblown chalky hardpack did not really inspire us to greatness. The skiing was mostly just shorter turn skiing in varying conditions and not dropping off stuff or highspeed cruising. At certain points we found a little billygoating-style stuff but mostly we skied the obvious lines off things, as in the runs that has names on  But hey, we had a bunch of fun as we pretty much always have and we are slowly beginning to get our telemarking dialed, something that at least I have been needing after suffering a blown knee last year and not having had a whole lot of freeheeled days since last spring.  After a chill afternoon at the couch-surfing spot of the day we went out for dinner with Mitch and Tim and a few other friends before heading on to and then watching a Cristian Pondella slideshow at the Mammoth Mountaineering shop; sweet pictures and a lot of cool people.

January 15. Having chilled out at home for a while in the morning we went to the mountain skied around Mammoth most of the day. At first we skied around chair 2 as that was the base of the Telemark Demo taking place, offering everybody a chance to get on a wide array of new skis, boots and bindings as well as free beginners lessons. Likely because of the demo there was a whole bunch of telemarkers out trying new stuff and just meeting other likeminded skiers, so we got to see a huge variety of skiers from beginners to a couple very strong ones. Fun stuff. Adam and I didn`t really poach the demo itself that hard ourselves. There was not really any new skis that I hadn`t tried earlier so I stayed on my own gear except for some groomer runs on a pair of borrowed Atomic TM.ex with Cobras as my Big Daddies did not really feel at home when pointing it on groomers with Adam. After having spent most of the day on his own setup Adam seemed to develop some sweet feelings for the pairs of K2 Hippie Stinx that he got to try out in the afternoon; they are basically a telemarkished version of the Seth Pistol. Fun ski with a great name that seemed to suit Adam pretty well. After having skied on our own and with a few locals for most of the day we met up with Mitch and Tim and did a bit of filming and still shooting with them before calling it a day. After skiing we sat around at the base lodge and talked about skiing and the related industry for a while. Then eventually we got to the task of doing an "official" Telemarktips.com interview about our road trip and future plans along with some gear-related questions that somehow snuck their way into the interview. Upon returning to our couch-surfing location we packed up and decided to leave for Tahoe and a change of scene and hopefully some even better snow. Also the dense population of telemarktips and powdermag posters at Kirkwood over the weekends suggested a good chance of meeting an even bigger bunch of internet-nerdy ski types which is pretty much always great fun. We arrived at South Lake Tahoe late night and camped out with Ben who also hosted us on the way down to Mammoth earlier.

South Lake Tahoe.... Jan. 16 to Jan 25....

When we got back to Ben´s place in South Lake we spent some time discussing ski options for the next few days.  Bjarke and I were both a bit tired from driving (gas pedal knee, a common road trip ailment specific to the right leg, was starting to rear its ugly head)  but Ben sold us on a corn-harvesting tour up to Mt. Ralston. 

The next day we packed up our touring gear, picked up Ben´s neighbour Tony, and set off.  

It was quite nice to get out on the skins again, especially since the weather was perfect and we would be seeing some great Sierra views.  Once we got into the rhythm of shuffle-pole-shuffle-pole, it did not take long to make the top of the ridge.  I have always found the uphill sections of a tour to be some of the most enjoyable because of the social aspect, and this one did not disappoint. Ben and I were able to piece together the complete lyrics to a few Spinal Tap songs, and we all got into the discussion of tele vs. AT (Bjarke and I were on our tele gear, Tony and Ben on Dynafit systems).  All that, coupled with a few seasons worth of Simpsons quotes and some awesome views, made the skinning fly by.

Once at the summit, Ben and Tony pointed out some of the surrounding terrain feature of the Desolation Wilderness .  I grew up climbing in this area, but until now had never spent any time up here during the winter.  There was inexhaustable touring potential in every direction, which made me wonder why I had never come up here before!  One of the most impressive features of this area was the ease of access; it had only taken us two hours from the house to the top of the ridge, including driving and skinning.  The terrain we were about to ski did not disappoint, and the perfect corn covering it all made for some downhill bliss.  An open slope led to some brushy boulderfields, which took us to glades and eventually the car...which led us to Bob Dog Pizza down in Meyers.  Oh yeah!  There is nothing quite like a couple of good slices to recharge the body after a day in the backcountry, however there was a bit of a problem when the soda machine malfunctioned as I pushed the dispensing button, spraying orange soda all over me.  Thankfully, my Gore-Tex proved up to the task and except for some lingering stickyness, the rest of the pizza session was uneventful.   We spent the afternoon organizing gear and getting ready for the next couple of days, which would promise the arrival of ski buddies up for the weekend.

Sure enough, the next couple of days were full of good times with new and old friends.  On Saturday, our first run down off the Wall into Lower Cirque proved to be a major success, providing us with our first base-turns in cold snow of the tour.   Our tour guides showed us the goods, and we found even better snow way out towards the Palisades.  Everywhere we went we found fun terrain features and we enjoyed taking part in a Kirkwood tradition: the huck-to-flat.  Being the extremo mountain dude that he is, Bjarke took it upon himself to raise the bar and pulled off a sweet corked-270-to-late-spread-eagle off a 10 foot rock, landing hard on his side.  That, combined with a re-twanged knee he suffered at the end of the day, caused him to think about maybe taking it down a notch.  That night, after a good ol´ traditional ´Merican BBQ (complete with Radness in a Bottle, aka some cheap mezcal I brought back from a Mexico surf trip), he decided it would be best to take a couple of days off to make sure it was ok.  The rest of us were not about to sit around and wait for him to get better, so on Sunday we left him on the couch and set off for the ´Wood.  It turned into more of the same; exploring the mountain, finding fun lines, good snow, and smiles all around.  We ended up lapping Lower Cirque and Vista most of the day, alternating between old cold snow and sun-baked corn.

Unfortunately, not everyone survived the day unscathed.  When we returned to the house, we ran into a drugged-up Ben, who had spent the day hiking and skinning in the backcountry with some friends.  It seems he took the saying "I´d give my left nut to get some good skiing..." a bit too literally, because early in the day he suffered a testicular hematoma using the boys to self-arrest on a rock.  Fortunately, he was able to find the humor in his injury, which was good because the rest of us had a hard time hiding our amusement.  Later that evening  it donned on us that it was All-Cal weekend, which would mean the casinos would be crawling with college girls.  Since we were so close to casino-land, we might as well try to find some luck out there on the floor.  Arty50, Hardrider, Telenater, Kellie, and I left Bjarke to his painkillers and went out to Caesar´s.  We were unable to find the pajama party that was rumored to be somewhere in the area, so we settled on a cozy nook in the bottom of the casino where a rousing karaoke session was taking place.  Decency prohibits a complete report, but I will say this: Kellie is a pretty darn good Pat Benetar, and I could find no wingmen to assist when we were faced with the prospect of getting mauled by a pack of wild cougars.  Meow! 

With Ben out of action for what would turn into a few weeks, Bjarke nursing a sore knee, and my entire body feeling sore from a few too many hard flat landings, Monday and Tuesday turned into rest days.  Luckily, there was a very complete and varied selection of DVDs at our disposal, not to mention a fair amount of nofriendo games to keep us busy. 

Wednesday found us back at the ´Wood with Arty50 and Hardrider doing more of the same laps on Lower Cirque and Vista.  We were finally getting to know the lay of the land and were able to start doing some more fluid lines despite the snow, which was still pretty hard.  However, when Hardrider, Bjarke, and I were looking at one certain line we discovered that even though he´s fluent in english, there is still a bit lost in the translation.  Even though we were all looking at the same line- a small drop to a pocket snowfield to another drop through a groove in the rock and out- the ideas of how to best execute it were split along the Atlantic Ocean.  Much to everyone´s amusement, Bjarke took the "European" line and the end result is the shot that graced the cover of Telemarktips.com.  On Thursday we decided to mix it up a bit and added some Palisades laps to the usual Lower Cirque and Vista routine.  During a quick water break we ran into Max Mancini, Ty Dayberry, Lorenzo Worster, and Ben Dolenc, who were lapping the park on their way down to Mammoth.  They politely declined our offer of Palisades powder due to some previous commitments with cameras and rails, so we parted ways.  That afternoon we decided to do a bit of shooting ourselves and headed to the Vista ridge above Chair 4.  We had been looking at these rocks for a few days now and figured that even if the snow was hard, at least the landings were steep, which would minimize impact.  I got to be the guinea pig and discovered that with the exception of one small rock that took a p-tex tax on my skis, the landing was actually soft!  With that discovery it was game on, so Arty50, Hardrider, Bjarke, and I alternated shooter, spotters, and jumper for a few cycles.  We called it a wrap after the sun went behind the Cirque, and just as we were about to ski away we were intercepted by two members of the Kirkwood ski patrol.  It turns out they had been watching us standing around and repeatedly skating off the ridge the whole time, but much to our surprise instead of giving us any grief they congratulated us on finding the best LZ on the entire mountain and even (jokingly? if they were serious they are among the coolest patrollers I´ve ever met) offered up a tow-in with their snowmobile!  As it was late in the day, we declined and skied down to the waiting plate of nachos at Bub´s.

It seems that a lot of important discoveries, trends, and discussions are spawned during apres ski sessions.  Over this particular plate of nachos the four of us discussed a current style that has become so prevalent with young folks in places like Mammoth, Tahoe, and Colorado.  In movies and in person, we have seen people skiing hunched over in the "Monkey Steez" with baggy clothes, spiky goggle accessories, studded belts, and whatever they have hanging off of their belts flapping in the breeze (are they pieces of flair?  Does anyone really know what these are for or where they came from?).  We decided to do our own research and declared friday to be "Steez day." 

Friday dawned clear and cold, or so the weather report stated.  We got up at the crack of mid-morning and started rummaging around to see what sort of Steezy items we could ski with.  I ended up in a pair of Bjarke´s Norrøna bibs with the suspenders hanging down (he´s 6´4", I´m 5´10"), Arty50´s old Raiders Starter jacket, and I found a Grateful Dead (after all, that´s the hippy telemarker band of choice and I had to stay true to my roots, even though I was attempting to steeze.  In hindsight perhaps I should have found something with Blackalicious on it) handkercheif to have hanging out of my back pocket.  Bjarke decided upon an old XXL safety orange hunting jacket and my full face helmet to go along with a dish towel we scrounged up from under the sink.  Arty50 was perhaps the least steezily dressed of all, but in addition to another dish towel, he was able to round up an old gold chain for the "bling" factor that the rest of us were missing.  We brought along a Bell snowmobile helmet from the seventies just in case.

We met up with Hardrider in the parking lot and checked out his steez.  He had resurrected an old Helly Hansen jacket and since he couldn´t find any bigger pants, he decided to just ski with his normal ones completely unfastened around his waist and let them find their own sag over the course of the day.  We were all thoroughly impressed with his dedication to research when he pulled out a bath towel and stuck it in his belt for his piece of flair.  With that, we set out! 

At first we thought we would be ridiculed as Steez impostors, but as it turned out, nobody really gave us much attention.  Perhaps our outfits, coupled with our hunched-over, hands-down-low-and-ass-way-back style, were spot on and we just blended in with all the other Steezers.  A hypothesis is born: do the pieces of flair create lift or assist in spinning?  We spent the afternoon attempting to spin and jib various objects all over the mountain, but ended up getting tangled up and crashing a lot instead of looking cool.  We also noticed that we had to give extra attention to chair rides, because our pieces of flair kept on getting tangled in each other´s gear or the chair.  At some point Arty50 and Hardrider made the connection between youth and steez, so we headed over to a place on the mountain that just sucks in young kids: High School Air aka My First Huck, which is a looming 10 to 15 foot rock face with a small windlip above a very flat landing directly underneath Chair 4. 

With our little digital camera ready to document whatever radness we could create, we threw ourselves at this teenage testpiece as if our lives depended on it.  Bjarke, being the closest thing to a pro athlete among us, takes the most extreme line and the biggest air, much to the amusement of the crowd suspended above us.  I decided to try to stick onto a little pad halfway down and turn it into a double, but end up crashing at the bottom and bending my pole.   Hardrider repeats my line with much greater style and success, and Arty50, perhaps the smartest of all of us, skis around and shoots the whole adventure from below.  The comments and questions we had recieved from the chairs above us (What are the towels for?  Watch out for the big rock! Etcetera) prompted us to lap it and try it again.  This time, both Bjarke and Hardrider decide to take it from the top, but unfortunately Hardrider goes a bit too big and lands in the flats.  I guess they don´t call him Hardrider for nothing.  I wanted to redeem myself for my failure on the last run, but instead of doing it with better style, I do it in worse.  As I dropped onto the little pocket of snow I stepped on one of my skis with the other and am unable to stop.  Time stood still as I slid uncontrollably off the ramp into the chasm below.  When the snow cleared, I found myself straddling the windlip, half eaten by the rocks and half spit out.  Luckily, with the exception of an extremely bruised ego, I was unharmed.  Oh well.  At least I made some random strangers laugh and smile!

Even though we had started late in the day, we were all feeling the effects of a full day of Steezing.  All of our backs were sore from hunching over, and we had all taken our fair share of hits while attempting to jib.  We decided to end the research and call it a day, coveting vitamin I more than the usual nachos.   There is still much more work to be done on the subject of Steezing, but we will let younger, more rubbery skiers take it from here.  We will attempt to stick to what we do best, which is being relatively normal skiers that ski in clothes that are at least close to the right size.  And with a bit of snow in the forecast, some more friends coming up for the weekend, and plans for an early tour before riding the lifts, tomorrow should be a great day!

Waking up in the morning to overcast skies and a very light snowfall we decided to stick the the plan: Reports of good soft-snow stashes in the trees off the road towards Kirkwood had yesterday prompted the decision of starting the morning with a little workout.  Thus we left for an area called Waterhouse Peak with a bunch of other people; some of them Tahoe locals and a few weekend warriors.  After meeting up with a couple friends of friends at the trailhead we all started skinning our way up through the trees in the increasingly heavy snowfall; slowly but steadily making way through the lower part of refrozen suncrust.  The higher we got the thinner the layer of crust we walked on; and after a while we were skinning along on old but cold snow that by now had a nice layer of fresh snow being blown towards us by the wind as we made way.  Once at the top after having been walking in very good snow among the openly spaced trees in the upper part everybody knew that this would be good.  And I for sure knew that I was about to ski the best snow of my US trip so far; and I looked forward to it!  When everybody was ready we divided into smaller groups and skied off; weaving in and out of trees and flying off every little lip and bump we could find.  Adam and I spent a few minutes setting up a couple of pictures; but quickly decided to just forget about the camera and just enjoy the run.

Back at the trailhead we were a bunch of very happy people who quickly threw our skis into the cars and made our way up to Kirkwood where we by now expected conditions to be really good.  And we were not disappointed.  Immediately after our arrival we met up with a couple friends who had been skiing there all day and who told us stories of sweet lines and good landings.  They were right; conditions were good and everybody dove in with great pleasure; quickly changing from controlled backcountry mode into high-impact resort mode.  After a good week of hard landings and unforgiving outruns we were suddenly skiing considerably faster and flying off of stuff on impulse, very exciting but also exactly that: high impact skiing!  Halfway through the day Adam realized mid-outrun that a straightline he was attempting had a mandatory air in the middle of it, with a none-too-steep landing.  After a highspeed slam onto his back he managed to avoid starfishing and  stayed on his feet continuing down the hill in StarTrek mode (seeing mostly stars before his eyes) while yelling "Oooohh Sxxx!" to the amusement of those who had seconds before feared spending the rest of the day collecting Adam and his gear from all over the valley below.  By the time the lifts closed we were feeling pretty worked as we all met up for nachos at Bub's and shared stories of highs and lows (and bent skis) with the crews that had split to ski other lines than us.  Finally back at Ben's place everybody quickly wolfed down dinner and scattered around the house; noone even mentioning going out or just staying up late.

 Sunday, the day of rest.  Bjarke and I have been skiing hard for a few days now and it is definitely time for a break.  I don´t know about him, but I feel like I´ve been hit by a truck and I have nobody to blame but myself.  Huck-neck, sore back, quads and abs that resist any attempt to stand up... the list goes on and on.  By tomorrow we should be recharged enough to go for another tour.  We´ve been having a great time in South Lake Tahoe, skiing with old friends and making new ones for over a week now.  Even though the conditions are only getting better it´s time to think about where to head next.  Salt Lake City anyone?

Salt Lake City.... From arrival to OR  Jan 26 to Feb 2nd

On Sunday evening, after hearing reports of snowfall in Salt Lake City which ended the weeks of inversion, high pressure, and skier misery, we decided it was time to leave the Sierras and move on.  It was a hard decision to make since we had been having such a good time in Tahoe, but given the amount of abuse we had subjected ourselves to, well, we were excited to get some soft snow to play with.

Monday morning was a frenzy of packing.  Either we had become quite a bit more efficient with our space or we had lost a bunch of stuff, because all the way from Washington to Tahoe we had no extra space in the backseat of the Ramry, and now we could have put another person in there comfortably.  Checks of under the beds and behind the couches yielded no wayward gear, so we bid farewell to our hosts and started the drive up to Tahoe City, Truckee, and I-80.  After a few quick stops to say hi to old friends and pick up skins, we were able to get out of town and on to the open road (that "check engine" light that comes on is relatively ignorable, right?)  Bjarke commented how much the terrain along I-80 was like the western movies, complete with tumbleweeds crossing traffic.  The rest of Nevada was spent on the phone trying to line up a couch or floor to crash on for the next couple of days, and I finally had success with my friend Scott, a former classmate that had moved down to ski for the winter.  In the interest of diplomacy, I thought it would be prudent to stock up on some decent brews for our hosts, so we pulled over in Wendover to fill up the extra space in the backseat.  Scott had put in an order for "any microbrewed IPA", so we headed to the liquor store.  A quick sweep yielded little more than cheap domestics in cans,  Heinousken, and Corona, so I went up to the clerk to ask if they had anything else.

Me:  "Do you guys have any microbrews?"

Clerk:  "What´s a microbrew?" 

Me, stunned:  "You know, good beer that´s brewed in small batches, like Deschutes, Stone, Alaskan..."

Clerk:  "You mean imported beer?"

Me:  "Nevermind.  Is there a supermarket around here?"

We were able to find a supermarket, but the selections weren´t much better.  There were no IPAs to be found, but we did end up with a few cases of Natty Ice and a decent selection of Full Sails, Mendocinos, and New Belgians.  With the Ramry loaded down and Run-DMC providing the beats, we arrived in Sandy just before midnight.  Tomorrow we would ski Alta!

We woke up to a fresh dusting on the car and partly sunny skies.  Whee!  According to Scott it had been quite good the past couple of days, so we were pretty excited to git sum for ourselves.  Starting at Alta, we worked our way over to Snowbird and eventually found ourselves lapping Mineral Basin, which had just opened for the first time since the storm began.  These were the best conditions of the trip so far, with boot- to knee-deep snow and perfect visibility.  The Bookends provided some nice airs and super perfect landings, so we took it upon ourselves to personally bomb them out.  On a chair ride later on, Bjarke commented that "the past four runs had the 8 best hucks I´ve had here!"  I had to agree.  After Mineral Basin, we worked our way back to Alta and eventually to the Alta Lodge, where Scott worked.  We hung out for a while then decided to head down the canyon.  The reports for tomorrow looked like more of the same, so if we were going to ski, we´d need some rest.

Sure enough, Wednesday was more of the same.  We spent the entire day at Snowbird, lapping Mineral Basin and some other fun little lines that I remembered from the last time I was here a couple of years ago.  The snow was still soft, the light was still good, and all was well in the world.   We called it quits sometime around three-ish, and as we were packing up the car we realized that since Scott was going to be working and staying at the lodge, we were literally all dressed up with nowhere to go.  Oh well, better drive down the canyon and start making phone calls.  On our way down we passed some hitchhikers, but each one of them got the "sorry, we´re full" shrug.  Except for the last one, who seemed familiar.  It turned out to be Charlie Cannon, freeheel freeskier extraordinaire and fully capable of squeezing into the remaining space in the Ramry.  By the time we had made it to his car at the bottom of the canyon, we had figured out where we were staying that night!  Perfect!  The evening was spent playing guitars and drums, basically giving Bjarke a crash course in "groovy tele college house appreciation".  Don´t worry, he passed.

The next morning we drove up Big Cottonwood Canyon to check out the Backcountry Basecamp portion of the Outdoor Retailer show.  Officially, we would be there as guests of www.telemarktips.com.  Unofficially, we were just gear junkies wanting to check out the latest and greatest gear, and we knew we´d run into friends there too.  The day was spent trying out some new gear in great snow and doing some filming with Lorenzo, Max, and Taiga Young, who had rolled their RV up from Las Vegas the night before.  I don´t know if anything will make the cut, but Bjarke and I both put in some decent performances worthy of any crash section. 

As the event wound down we heard that there were some parties going on in the lodges.  Rumors of a bluegrass band and free food were enough to get us out of ski gear and into the lodge in record time.  We walked in, guest badges hanging proudly around our necks, and served ourselves some mighty helpings.  There we were, sitting down with old friends and new acquaintances, eating free food, drinking free beer, listening to bluegrass.  Ski-Bum paradise. Once the first party ended (well, later really - the staff kindly asked us what to do with the leftover beer that whoever hosted the party had allready paid for so we helped them get rid of that) we made our way to the neighbouring Molly's bar where Patagonia hosted a party with more free food and ample supplies of brews. As the food was eaten and the more sensible industry people left for Salt Lake we found ourselves still in the bar with the core Patagonia crowd who all stayed in a neighbouring montain lodge and thus didn't have to drive. And of course the Freeheel Storm tour who would be sleeping in their RV and thus also didn't need to face the drive down the mountain. Those left standing at this point took the party up a notch building plastic-cup sculptured blocking most of the bar and yet another notch when someone came across the "shot-ski", an oldstyle ski with a bunch of shotglasses attached to it. Almost without peer pressure everyone joined in (some more often than others...); even the bartender offered to go along (he didn't but then offered to pay the shots instead. We accepted!)  After a while the shotski was old news and we started searching for new stuff to do. Someone (we'll leave that name out..) mentioned the possibility of moving the party on to the lodge where the Patagonia crew was staying; and as some vodka, an ample supply of Redbull and some red wine materialized from the depth of some storage room we all agreed to that.  We ended up kicking back and talking amongst ourselves in a lounge, much to the dismay of an orn´ry inhabitant that let us know that Brighon "was not Park City".  Attempts at diplomacy were unsuccessful and we disbanded.  Unfortunately, we had been counting on crashing up there, and now we were stranded in the parking lot.  Thankfully, Max, Lorenzo, Taiga, and Stefan of the Freeheel Storm tour took pity on us and let us crash out in their already crowded RV.  It was a bit cramped, but it was better than sleeping in the Ramry!

Waking up early and really wanting to get out of the crowded RV we made our way down the morning in order to spend day at the Outdoor Retailer tradeshow in Salt Lake City. We had several different reasons for going, among them a few planned meetings with various people discussing spancership, hoping to talk to industry people about product development issues, general gear fondling and drooling and the chance of getting to schmooze with real pro skiers and famous extremo people. And being the bums we are the consistent rumours of food and beer at various booths in the afternoons had us drooling already before getting there.

The maze of booths was quite the adventure to navigate, but we had days to figure it out.  We decided it was probably best to just walk up and down every aisle in order to not miss anything (and scope out potential free food and beer stashes).  Every once in a while we´d stop and check out a booth to check out some gear, and each time it was the same.  The exhibitor would approach us and start their schpiel as we fondled whatever they were showing.  Eventually they would ask us where we worked or who we were affiliated with.  "Umm... we´re just skiers."  Someone handed us a card good for free socks at one booth, so we checked it out (clean socks are a serious subject to anyone on the road).  After the exhibitor had spent fifteen minutes explaining the benefits of these particular socks, he asked me where I worked.  "Umm... I don´t work right now.  I´m on a roadtrip."  To which he replied, "oh, well, these socks are for retailers only, but I guess I can grab you a pair".  Sweet! 

The rest of the day was spent walking the aisles, running into old friends, and grabbing as many free samples of whatever we could grab.  It was exhausting work, and by the end we were as beat up as after any ski day, but due to an ample supply of spicy meatballs at the W.L. Gore booth, Powerbar samples, dried salmon at the Patagonia booth and beer everywhere we got through it. That night, we ended up at our friend Kenny´s place along with Luke and Stu, K2, Linken and TGP extremo dudes from CO.

Since the trade show was going on for a few days and "everyone" was in town, we decided to turn the next day into a ski day filming with TGP up at Alta.  Unfortunately, not everyone was clued in to what was going on, so when we got there gongs started going off.  Plans were made by the seat of the pants because nobody seemed to know exactly what was going on.  However, in the two runs I actually made, I had a lot of fun. In the mix up of the morning Bjarke was left waiting for the return of some more filmers, but as nobody showed he eventually ended up going exploring by himself.  In retrospect, he got a fuller Alta experience than I did as he went up with Ken and Regina of Telefair.com. Not being tied up with shooting they were able to be around when Devils Castle was opened up after the last storm; and apparantly being considerably faster at getting his skis on after the short bootpack Bjarke managed to secure a spot between the first few guys out on the traverse and got to ski an untracked line down the open upper part. Nice. As Ken and Regina left  he kept lapping the Castle and eventually bumped into the Professor and Lemon Boy and skied the rest of the day with them before hitting the Goldminers for rehydration (oh well, beer and nachos...)

Sunday dawned with bluebird skies so plans were made to go shoot with local photographer Beth Lockhart and Decker Jory at Alta. Unfortunately clouds moved in really fast as we made our way towards Rocky Point and once up the light was all gone and the temperature had gone down a lot, so we skied back Alta for  warming chocolate and to wait for better light. When that happened we changed tactics and fitted skins to walk up Grizzly Gulch towards some shorter shots we had seen earlier. Even though the sky was clearer now we were still dealing only with occasional holes in the clouds, so we ended up staying pretty low and mostly doing powder shots between the aspens. Eventually we packed up and drove down to the OR show in order to reach a few appointments and see if we could get any more free food.

As it was the last day of the OR show we planned on spending the entire day there; a few appointments had been pushed from yesterday. Also we had heard the rumour that there would be plenty of giveaways and cheap stuff when the show closed down in the afternoon as many exhibitors wouldn't want to pack up and ship more stuff than necessary. And finally Adam had to pick up new poles and backpacks from Indigo Equipment who during the OR had chosen to support him. 

SLC... from OR to Ouch!

After we left the OR show we headed over to Park City to visit Scott Ligare, a Park City local and extremo mountain kayaker (check him out in TGR´s kayak movies) that I met while surfing in Mexico.  On the way we stopped by Suede to check out Victor Wooten.  As a musician that has spent the past eight years playing with all sorts of stringed instruments, I can say without hesitation that Victor and his brother take playing bass and guitar to levels that I will never ever be able to comprehend.  Check him out if they come to a venue near you...  When the show was over we crawled to Scott´s place for the night. 

We awoke to a fair amount of new snow, but lingering fatigue and some mean egg sammiches kept us from hitting the mountain early.  Instead, Scott made some phone calls and we rounded up a posse of locals to show us around.  By the time we got up on the mountain the winds were howling, and as we sat on the slow Town Chair it became apparent that we were probably a bit underdressed.  We took some runs on groomers to try to warm up but instead just got colder, so decided to get up to Scott´s and Jupiter Bowls to hike around and warm up.  The remainder of the afternoon was spent lapping nice soft snow off of the Jupiter chair. 

By 1500 we were all somewhere between cooked and frozen so we decided to call it a day.  We headed back to Scott´s place, packed up our stuff, and raced back to SLC and the Black Diamond headquarters, where I was going to get my beat up old T-race boots re-buckled.  We made it just in time to catch Jordy and we both were able to get our boot issues finally dialed.  Thanks Jordy! 

After finishing up at BD we got back into the Ramry, only to realize that we had nowhere to go.  A few phonecalls later and I was able to round up some floorspace at the Andy´s, more friends from my competing days.  That night I got in touch with Carl Skoog, a photographer friend that had come to town for the OR show and was hanging around for a couple of extra days.  We made plans to go do some shooting at Brighton the next day.

Brighton is one of my favorite areas to ski around Salt Lake City due to the cool terrain, easily accessible BC options, and few crowds.  Plus, they have hosted a fair amount of USTSA freeskiing comps over the years so I have good memories (and one broken ski) associated with the place.  The one day we had spent at Brighton so far had been for the Backcountry Basecamp event, so we were excited to play around without dealing with the trade show.  There was a fair amount of fresh snow to be had so Carl, Bjarke, and I had plenty of fun making turns through the aspens and finding little rocks to jump off of.  At one point, Bjarke got so excited by the "deepest landings I´ve ever had!" that I started to worry that he might get a bit too extremo and perhaps repeat his Kirkwood Ttips cover crash.  When he started lining up a sizeable huck that had a very tight LZ, not to mention a bunch of trees and stumps in the takeoff, I thought I was going to witness the end.  Luckily, where judgement (at least in my eyes!) failed, skill prevailed and he nailed it perfectly.  We called it a day and ended up at Rocky Mountain Pizza Co´s all-you-can-eat dinner buffet and bluegrass session with a bunch of friends.  We all put in a good showing at the pizza buffet but we were kicking ourselves for not lining our pockets with plastic bags and getting breakfast and lunch for the next day. 

When we got back to the Andy´s place we heard rumors that there was serious snowfall predicted for the area overnight.  Sure enough, the next morning the reports were of foot-plus accumulation in Little Cottonwood!  A few quick phone calls and we decided to go touring with Carl, in the White Pine area just below Snowbird.

By the time we got up there a skintrack had already been put in (thank you to the dawn patrollers...breaking trail must have been quite a chore) so we gained elevation quickly.  It took us over an hour to get to our first destination (I believe it is called Pink Pine, but I´m not sure), by which time we were really bummed about our lack of pizza thievery the night before.  There is only one thing that will stop an ascent faster than an unsticky skin, and that is lack of food.  Luckily, I remembered that I had stuffed a bag of gorp into my backpack the night before, so I knew I would be ok.  I was all about to horde it for myself when Bjarke looked up, his eagle eyes homing in on the flash of multicolored M&M´s.  Oh well, I was really planning on sharing... really!

Now we were fueled up and ready to descend.  We checked out the snow and decided it would be best to stay in the trees until the angle got shallower, taking extra caution to keep everyone in sight while we descended.  As I dropped in I couldn´t help but laugh at how ridiculously deep the snow was.  It was almost too deep, and I had to revert to making some backseat-bandit P-turns to keep my 180 Explosives from sinking.  Bjarke followed, and left one of the deepest trenches I´ve ever seen behind him when he came over to join me.  Carl decided to just put away the camera and enjoy the ride, and we leapfrogged from safe zone to safe zone laughing all the way. 

Bjarke and Carl

Bjarke and Carl on the 2nd lap

Bjarke, happy in trenchtown

We eventually reached the bottom skin track and decided to do another lap up to the White Pine area.  Another up, another incredibly deep down, and another great day of touring came to a close.  That evening, on the recommendation of our hosts, we checked out La Puente.  A La Puente word of warning- watch out for the Large Combo. 

I woke up early the next morning and checked some reports.  The skies were blue, so I called up Beth Lockhart, another SLC photographer, and we met up at Alta to do some more shooting.  Conditions were perfect, so while Beth worked the cameras, Bjarke and I skied around.  We hit a few nice lines and some nice airs, but unfortunately Bjarke had to call it early after he landed a small air on a hidden rock and twanged his knee.  He retired to the Goldminer´s Daughter to rest up while Beth and I continued along.  We hiked up above the Catherine´s area towards Wolverine Cirque, where I got a huge surprise.  I heard someone calling out my name, and it turned out to be Kellie, my friend from Kirkwood and Baker, who was here for the weekend with a bunch of other Kirkwood/South Lake Tahoe friends.  We ended the day exploring the Home Run area, and eventually made our way to GMD where we met up with Bjarke and a bunch of other internet ski people.  Bjarke was worried that he may have done something a bit more serious  to his knee than just a little twang, so he decided to take a couple of days off and see what happened, but more urgently, we had to figure out exactly what we were going to do that evening.  There was a big party planned  for the evening and we hoped to be there, but before putting in our appearance we thought it would be better to soak in the hot tub at the Best Western in Sandy, where Kellie and the rest of the Kirkwood people were staying.  For some reason (it was probably the Natty Ice), I thought it would be a good idea to go back up to LCC and do a moonlight tour.  Even more amazing was the fact that I managed to persuade Kellie to leave the hot tub that we were all soaking in and join me!  But full moons only come around a few times a winter, and conditions for a moonlight tour are even more rare, so we donned our funky ski clothes and cruised back up to the trailhead.  By the time we got back we were pretty well exhausted and the party was winding down, so we just waited for everyone to return.  Unfortunately, by the time everyone else returned, it was way too late for Bjarke and I to drive back to our pre-planned couches, so we ended up just sleeping in the Ramry.  It was a low point, but we wouldn´t be true dirtbags on a roadtrip without at least one night of sleeping in the car.  I suppose we could have begged and grovelled for some floor in the already cramped hotel room or just poached a linen closet or something, but we figured this would at least give us dirtbag credibility. 

Amazingly enough we were both well-rested and relatively functional the next morning, but Bjarke´s leg was quite stiff and he was determined to take some rest days.  After we poached the wonderful breakfast at the hotel I planned on dropping Bjarke off at Kenny´s place and then heading up to Snowbasin with Kellie and the rest of the internet geeks (I can say thay because I am one of them, and if you are reading this you probably are too), but when we got there we ended up getting sidetracked by another breakfast and the arrival of our friend Sam Cox from Montana, who was in town to do a bit of magazine work with his friends from the french Skieur magazine.  Instead of heading to Snowbasin, we ended up practicing our "urban assault steez" on a super ghetto kicker/wallride on we built in the backyard.  It was probably better that I didn´t go skiing, considering I had all been going strong for a while and I needed the rest.  The rest of the day was spent between ski movies, the Silver Bullet, and a mean Jambalaya.  We also found a new use for the bottle of Radness, recipe to follow and you won´t be disappointed!  As the day progressed the weather turned increasingly nasty, and by the next morning there was almost a foot of snow on the ground.  It was going to be another one of those ridiculously deep Utah days!  Even though it was fixing to be a great day, Bjarke wanted to play it safe and decided to stay home.  As he was not going to be using them, he gave me the opportunity to take his Rottefella-mounted Big Daddies for a spin.  With that, the rest of us (Sam, Kenny, Jen, and I) headed up to Snowbird.

I can sum up the day in one word:  DEEP.  It was almost too deep, and too light.  I hate it when that happens!  Unfortunately, it was a weekend and everyone else thought  it would be a good idea to ski too, so the area was pretty crowded.  But don´t worry, we made do.  ;) 

When we got back to Kenny´s place we tried to hide our excitement from Bjarke, but it didn´t work.  Sam went out to pick up his Skieur friend Xavier Leonti from the airport, and when they got back we all headed back to La Puente and treated ourselves to some amazing Mexican ribs.  Some La Puente advice: get the ribs!

I had planned on taking it relatively easy the next day, but when Kellie called and told me she was going to stick around and not go back to the Bay Area until that evening I had to ski.  We headed up to Alta and had fun exploring the inbounds terrain.  Eagles Nest and High Rustler were consistenly good but when Devil´s Castle opened, it was game on!  For better or for worse (better because we had fun skiing together, but worse because it I hurt now...) we ran into Xavier and Sam, and the afternoon turned into a high speed huckfest with all of us feeding off of each other.  It peaked sometime arund 1430 when Sam and I both couldn´t say no to the biggest rock up there.  You know the first big cliffband up there, about 1/4th of the way out the traverse?  Don´t jump off of that one unless you really like flat landings.  The Green Bibs  now have a hole in the butt from the heel throw and walk lever of my left boot.  Yeah, that didn´t feel good.  I called it a day a few runs later and went up to Jonie´s to wait for Kellie to finish skiing.  I was halfway through a plate of nachos by the time she showed up and when we finished it off, I took her to the airport.  (Sidenote Nacho Report:  so far nothing even comes close to the quality of nachos at Bub´s in Kirkwood, but Jonie´s is better than GMD.)

When I got back to Kenny´s place Bjarke and I discussed our options.  We could stick around but Bjarke´s leg was not getting any better and he wasn´t going to be skiing for at least a few more days.  We decided that we might as well start heading back to Bellingham and Mt. Baker, and hopefully he would be well enough to ski by the time we got there.  The next morning we packed up all of our gear, said goodbye to SLC, and headed up to Hood River to visit Lance and Heidi, the friends that we stayed with on the first night of the trip.

Leaving SLC and heading home

Europe.... the adventure continues

March 2nd and 3rd, 2004:  I was flying out of Seattle in mid-afternoon, so I spent the morning packing, organizing, re-packing, pacing around the house, and once I was done with that, sitting around waiting to get on the shuttle to take me to Sea-Tac.  Waiting around to get on the road is always the hardest part of a trip, but once you're actually travelling, then all is fine.  So once I said goodbye to Bellingham and got on the bus, the travelling part went by smoothly.  The only problems came while  I was waiting around in Heathrow, when I realized that the exchange rate was so completely not in my favor that I couldn't afford to eat anything.  But once I got on the next plane and arrived in Lyon (one hour late...but that was fine since Iwas able get an extra hour of sleep), I had forgotten how hungry I was.  Bjarke picked me up and we were off to Serre Chevalier, where we would spend the next few days.  At about 1030pm we arrived at his friend Gunnar's place, which was also home to Swedish skier P.A. and snowboarders Johan and Erik.  Instead of going right to sleep I got to get caught up on the latest ski-porn offerings from Swedish Posse and Free Radicals.  Good stuff, and a nice teaser to what I hoped the next seven weeks would be like.

March 4th:  My first full day in France!  Luckily I was not suffering from any jet lag, so we all got up and got ready to ski.  The procedure here is pretty much the same as in the States, and I assume everywhere else: you wake up, check conditions, call friends, and go!  There wasn't any new snow so there was no real rush, so we took some time to mount up my Volkl Explosivs with some Fritschi Freerides, since most of the skiers in Bjarke's crew are fixed-heelers of some sort.  Once that was done, Bjarke and I met up with Gunnar and Christian and hit the slopes. 

Now don't take this the wrong way, but the snow did not really inspire me to greatness, nor did the new AT setup I was using.  Somehow the combination of new gear, new areas, funky snow, and being shown around by Scando-extremo mountain dudes made most of my turns about as solid as a sponge, when everyone else was rock-solid.  However, this didn't stop anyone else from going big right off the bat, and I knew I was in for something special when Bjarke mentioned that our first run might involve some billy-goating in some trees above some cliffs.  Sure enough, we ended up being a rather exposed cliff-and-tree-skiing/climbing adventure (no-fall zone #1 for the year) that led us to some old pow stashed below the cliffs.  Ok, I guess that's the European experience!  After that, we went around to some other areas of Serre Chevalier so I could get an overview of the terrain, which can be summed up in one word: vast.  Eventually we found ourselves on top of a ridge with some nice couloirs that looked like they held some decent snow.  The first one was nice and wide and the snow was as good as we had hoped, so we decided to make another lap and work our way down the ridge.  The next couloir was a bit more serious, and involved my second no-fall zone of the day.  A couple turns in nice creamy pow led to a narrow rocky ridge above a very painful-or-fatal-if-you-fell cliff that we had to downclimb to enter the couloir.  Then, once we all got into the couloir, we still had to downclimb the top section before we could get to the skiable part.  Sweet!  There is nothing quite like downclimbing what might be class 5 rock and snow with gloves and skis on to make you  focus.  It wasn't all bad; I pulled off my first "double-switch" (behind the back and moving down instead of up) mantle ever and only put a few superficial dings in the skis.  It was mid-downclimb that I started accepting the damage I was doing to my gear.  Skis are cheap, and no matter how much I wanted to keep my ski bases intact, I'd much rather sacrifice them than me so I should get used to that evil "cccrrruscchhhh" sound that p-tex and steel make when they meet rock.  Once we were in the couloir we got more of the same buffed creamy snow, and since everyone was having a good time we went for one more.  This one had an easy entrance but a mandatory air-to-straightline or downclimb-over-rocks exit.  By the end of the day I had skied the three gnarliest, most exposed lines I had skied since the last time I was in Europe! 

Bjarke in Serre Chevalier - this was before our trip and one of the images that got me excited to ski with him.

The fun didn't stop when the lifts closed, as there was a large apres-ski event scheduled for the evening.  After we cleaned up and ate dinner, we went out to the bar where it seemed every Scandinavian in the valley was hanging out.  Even though my grasp of Norwegian and Swedish languages is, for the most part, non-existant, I was able to test out some pickup lines I had learned a few years back.  End of story.

March 5th:  Seeing as how most of us trickled back to the apartment around three or four in the morning, nobody was in the mood to go skiing.  Bjarke, Gunnar, and I spent most of the morning (or what was left of it; we woke up just shy of noon) trying to figure out what happened the previous night, then took the bus down to Briancon to check up on emails, change money, shop, etc.  The rest of the day was rather uneventful until about 8pm, when met up with the Norwegian tele-lass I managed to successfully communicate with the night before.  End of story.

March 6th.  It had snowed most of the night and we hoped there would be some decent accumulations up high, but it wasn't until 1145 that I actually made it to a chairlift.  Bjarke had to give a friend a ride to the Grenoble airport so he couldn't ski, and it seemed that everyone else was either laying low or already up on the mountain.  Luckily my new friend was willing to give a tour of the area, so, tele gear in hand, we set out to find some of the goods. 

Since the upper mountain was still socked in, we stayed lower in the Danska Skogen, a patch of trees that held some nice chutes and a few new centimeters of Baker-esque snow.  After a few runs there, we checked out some other trees and chutes that yielded more of the same.  After about an hour of bashing through the trees, the skies cleared enough to venture into the alpine areas, where we were rewarded with some nice buckle-deep cream on top of a slightly crunchy but forgiving base.  The terrain and snow allowed us to let the skis run, and we worked our way down a ridge, enjoying fresh lines on every run.  Eventually the clouds started to come back in and the light got flat, so we headed down the mountain and called it a day.  Everyone was expecting the weather to bring some more new snow, so the evening was spent getting gear ready for a potential pow day.

March 7th.  Pardon the cliche, but I literally missed the bus in the morning.  Bjarke, Gunnar, and the rest of the crew took off before I was ready to go but gave me directions to where I was supposed to meet them.  I was hoping that my finely-tuned, BA-equipped geographer training was working that morning because I only sort of understood where to go.  As luck would have it, I never needed to use my skills because as I was walking out the door, I was picked up by Jenny and Karin, two Swedish girls I had met the other day.  I piled in to their Saab and we rocked out to Iron Maiden on the way to the hill (there I was being guided around by Swedish ripper chicks that listen to Iron Maiden...have  I mentioned how much this place kicks ass?).  When we got up to the area where I was supposed to somehow meet up with Bjarke and the rest of his crew I decided that I might as well take some runs with the girls while I was waiting, as there was no sense in standing around.  It sounded like this was the sort of area where we'd all meet up eventually anyways.  In the past, Bjarke had mentioned that Serre Chevalier had some of the best tree skiing anywhere he'd ever been, and about three turns into my first run with the girls I had to agree.  Bluebird, not-epic-deep but still great snow that was untracked covering a slope that had pitch of maybe 35 degrees, peppered with trees that screamed "big fast GS turns!" and a few little drops thrown in for good measure.  Maybe it was the sun and the snow, or the company, but I have never skied through trees with such speed and confidence as I did on that run.  Ok, I take that back.  The next run was even better because I knew where I was going and didn't have to stop every once in a while to make sure I was going the right way!  On our way up the chair we decided to check out another area that looked equally promising.  The Yret face had been described to me by Bjarke a few days earlier as a sort of "show-off" area since there were a lot of rocks and chutes right under the chair.  He also mentioned that it was one of the rockiest slopes around, home to the type of rocks that look like piles of broken glass waiting to rip your bases, clothing, and flesh to shreds.  Sure enough, we had to do some serious "belightasafeather" skiing through thin snow, hoping to avoid the most obvious patches of disaster.  Our efforts were largely futile, as most of our turns on the first third of the slope were greeted by that "cccrrruschhh" sound that I had become so familar with (it reminded me of Utah in a way).  On the way down, my guides told me that once we were below the first third or so of the slope, the rocks would not be an issue.  Once I got to where it looked safe, I took off and burned the bottom of the slope in about four big turns, thinking to myself "Wow! This is great snow!  I hope I don't hit anything, because if I do I will end up doing some serious high speed starfishing."   But my guides were correct and we all made it down intact.  We were about to do another lap when we met up with Bjarke, Gunnar, and the rest of the boys.  Apparently they had spent the morning skiing an area that had not been skied at all this season, even though the approach was neither a challenge nor a secret.  Two of the crew (Gunnar and Johan, a snowboarder) each had two of the worst coreshots I have ever seen for their efforts, but our now super-sized posse pushed on.  Everywhere we went we were treated to wide open slopes covered in creamy smooth snow and amazingly enough, I managed to avoid hitting any more rocks for a while.  Bjarke in particular was in the mood for some more adventurous stuff, so when most of the crew went for a lunch break, Gunnar and I joined him in hiking up the Cucumelle, towards a line called Skægget, named after our friend Ragnar's beard.  It seems that just about every line around here is guarded by bands of rocks that require some finesse to pass, but once we sidestepped below them, the rest of the run was perfect.  Proud of laying down some fine lines in exciting terrain, we went to the restaurant, where we met up with another bunch of Swedish and Norwegian girls.  After the break, we ended the day with a run down the Montagnol valley, which is like a Spanky's Ladder/Blackcomb Glacier on steriods.  All in all, it was a great day of skiing, and whatever was wrong with the AT setup (or most likely me) was no longer an issue.

That afternoon I was informed that there was another very large Scandinavian ski bum house party planned for the evening that was not to be missed (among other things, "skandalar befaras!", or scandals expected! was printed on the flyer), and it would be in all of our best interests to show up.  Seeing as how it was mostly just the standard mix of skiers and alcohol,  it wasn't much different than some other ragers I've been to, but I don't think I've ever been to a party in a ski town that had such a nice M/F ratio.  Again, I was the only North American in the sea of Scandinavians and my ability to communicate was limited, but I was able to hold my own and represent for the folks back home.  Scandalous indeed!

March 8th. 

Most of us were able to peel ourselves off of whatever horizontal surfaces we ended up on and make it to the hill by noon, but apparently our Danish companion ended up M.I.A. last night, or at least I.A. somewhere else.  Anyways, Gunnar, Johan, P.A., and I spent the afternoon searching for the goods, first trying the alpine areas and finally ending up lapping the trees in the Frejus area.  When we made it back to the house Bjarke was still unaccounted for, but he eventually sauntered in with a large grin on his face, so apparently he had found a scandalous situation to call his own.   That evening, Bjarke and I planned on heading over to La Grave to visit some other friends and get a change of scenery, but upon hearing reports that the Col du Lautaret was closed, we ended up sticking around Serre Chevalier.

March 9th.  I'm finally getting into the swing of things here, and even though the names of certain places still elude me or I've learned and forgotten them already, I am beginning to know where to go as conditions change.  This morning Gunnar and I decided to leave our Danish companion to whatever he was up to and head up to Monetier to sample some of what we thought would be decent snow in the trees.  We ran into Bjarke on our way out the door (there was that big grin again) and made plans to meet up with him later on.  A short bus ride, two chairlifts, and a traverse took us to the same ridge that we had been spending most of our time on.  The Tabuc ridge seems to have the best variety, longest vertical, and often the best snow.  It was no problem choosing between the trees or the couloirs that we had done on day one, since it seems that nobody but the Scandinavian Connection ever goes here.  Plus, there is plenty of terrain to play with and whatever we didn't do now could safely wait for the next run.  After a couple of laps we picked up Bjarke and just continued the now standard-issue routine of a few long runs, then a coffee/lunch break, then a few more lines, then back to the ranch.  Amazingly, there was another party planned for tonight, which surprised me seeing as now many people still hadn't recovered from the one a few nights ago, but when we got there it was pretty dead.  It seems nobody was in a party mood so the night ended pretty unspectacularly.  Which is probably a good thing, since I think everyone could use a bit of sleep.

March 10th.  Today was pretty cool, since I got to ski with some folks I hadn't skied with or seen since the last time I was in Europe.  Bjarke's good friend (and my host for my La Grave stay last year) Tobias Liljeroth and his fiance Shara came over from La Grave with our buddy Jurkki, a Finnish La Grave transplant.  The three of them joined Bjarke, Gunnar and I at the base of Monetier.  The six of us found our way the couloirs, trees, and excitement of the Tabuc ridge, lapping the goodness and having a great time catching up.   As the day progressed we noticed that the clouds and winds were increasing, which meant a storm was coming.  The winds got so bad by the end of the day that it became quite painful to ski into the wind, which seemed to be coming from whatever direction we wanted to go at the time.  Another interesting development was that, even though we were all on big fat skis (Jurkki's Stockli DP's had the narrowest waist at 91mm), we ended up spending a lot of time carving huge GS turns on the buffed-out piste.  Jurkki and Tobias were particularly amused since, living in La Grave, they never get the chance to ski groomers.  A trip to Briancon to stock up on food, a mega pasta feed, and the Real Madrid/Munich football game capped a very nice day, and since it had started snowing in town sometime during the afternoon, we were all excited by the prospects of a powder day tomorrow.

March 11th.  Powder!  In a moment of optimism, I picked up my tele gear for the first time in a couple of days, figuring/hoping that the conditions would be good enough.  I was a bit nervous as there was only a little bit of snow on the ground when we walked to the bus, but looking up at the nicely covered mountains towering above us gave all of us hope.  Sure enough, when we got up to the Tabuc ridge, we were met by snow that had accumulated to almost knee deep in places.  We still hit bottom every once in a while, and that "cccrrrrrruschhhh" never totally went away, but it didn't matter.  The snow we got to ski once we dropped into the couloirs and the trees was fast and sluffy, making for exciting skiing.  After two runs down to the bottom we decided to mix it up a bit and took the chair up to the Yret face (the one with rocks at every turn for the first third...).  Bjarke is quite proud of me since I no longer balk at patches of rocks in the way; thanks to him, I'm learning quite fast which patches are most important to avoid (the solid ones that rip you apart) and which patches are for walking or skiing on to get to the goods (the loose shale-esque ones that don't do anything but sound bad).  At this point I didn't care about walking and skiing over the rocks since all I really wanted to do was let the Hippy Stinx run in the best snow since I've been here.  The run was as fast and as good as we had hoped, but once I got to the piste at the bottom I noticed a loose feeling in one of my bindings.  Looking down at them when we got to the lift, I noticed that I had somehow snapped one of the rods connecting the spring to the toeplate.  Hmm... time to download, bus back to the ranch, and switch out to the AT gear.  Now I am paying for being an idiot and breaking the most important rule of tele skiing, which is BRING SPARE PARTS!!!!  I don't think finding UTB rods and springs in Europe will be easy.

It took about an hour of bussing and cussing to get back to Monetier, where I ran into Gunnar, who was sitting at the restaurant with a bag of ice on his leg.  Apparently he had attempted to straightline most of the Yret face but blew up spectacularly (nobody actually saw the crash but the Morse-code tracks and gear left all over the snow suggested we missed out on a show) in some rollers at the bottom, starfishing for what looked like over 30 or 40 meters -slightly uphill for the last 15 or so- and ended up sprawled out on the piste.  After hearing the story, I went back up the Yret face to check out a little cliff I had been eyeing since I got here.  Bjarke, Christian, and everyone else I had started the day were nowhere to be found (a line down the Skægget suggested that at least one of them had hiked the Cucumelle) so lapping the Yret would probably be the best way to find someone.  Sure enough, after one run I did end up meeting snowboarder Andreas, and skiers Elizabeth and Anton, Swedish folks that I had met earlier.  We took a run down the Montagnol valley, back up to the Yret, then finished the day skiing some of the trees on the frontside down to the bus.  And today is Thursday, which means crazy Scando-scandal apres ski fiestas. 

March 12th.  Ughh.... I don't know about the rest of the crew, but if every Thursday is like the past two, then... I don't know where I am going with this, but I will say that a good time was had by all.  The weather had turned from the usual bluebird and it looked like it was pretty stormy up high, so most of us took the day off to recuperate while the snow piled up on the mountain.  Bjarke spent most of the day hanging out with his lady friend, and it took me about three hours of waffling over what to do about my current ski situation.  Given that most of the crew here was alpining, and that the terrain almost always called for the biggest ski you could find, I was leaning towards taking what was left of my UTB's off my Hippy Stinx and putting the Freerides on them.  Or I could just leave the skis as-is and just wait for parts to arrive, or I could put some of Bjarke's Rottefella R8's or old Look alpine binders on... but by the time I had quit waffling and made up my mind all the shops were closed so I did nothing.  And now I'm back to waffling.  While I'm on the subject of alpine vs. AT vs. tele, let me mention that even though we are riding lifts most of the time, the majority of the skiing we are doing is about as "backcountry" as you can get.  Most of it is uncontrolled and unpatrolled, and much of the time there are consequences if you bail in the wrong place or at the wrong time.  Snow-wise, you never know what you are going to get, which is why most people go for the security of full-on alpine setups over the you-never-know factor of tele (and to a lesser extent, AT) gear. 

Anyways, it was snowing in town all day long, and when those that had gone skiing came back they brought favorable reports with them.  A forecast check indicated the snow would continue, so we (amazingly) went to sleep early.

March 13th.  We cursed ourselves and everyone else by over-hyping this storm.  Somehow, the storm gods noticed our excitement and turned off the cold sometime in the middle of the night.  If I was back home I'd say we got Pineapple Expressed, but it doesn't matter.  As Bjarke and I hiked to the chair we noticed the trees on the lower half of the mountain were awfully green, and as we uploaded we both noted that our breakfast porridge probably had a lower moisture content than the snow we were seeing.  And if it had been snowing all day and all night, where was the thick blanket of fresh?  How come we could still see all the old tracks and twigs and rocks?  Our first run down the Danska Skogen was disappointingly crunchy and dense (even for Mt. Baker standards), and once we got out of the trees and onto the piste we were greeted by a few cm's of sticky snow that yanked our skis out from under us with every other turn.  Given the conditions, I was surprised we lasted an hour before we called it a day.  Once we got down from the mountain and out of  our soggy ski gear we took full advantage of the rest of the day; Bjarke walked the streets of Briancon with his lady friend and I spent a few hours playing guitar with the house band at the apres-ski bar.  The jam session went well, and with a few more hours of practice I think I'll be ready to join them on stage next Thursday.  Well, we're all planning on me playing with them no matter what.  Yeah, I'm a rock star!

Unfortunately the last installment is missing so you can’t read about my triumphant rendition of “It Must’ve Been Love” sung in every key at the bar, or the story of the Finnish Ballgrabber, my kidnapping by/invite to the all-girl party in La Grave, or any of the rest of the ridiculousness that we got up to in late March/early April.  Those stories will live on in the memories of those who experienced them.  Maybe it’s for the best!

Here are a few of images from the Dolomites and La Grave from the spring of 2005.  They are by Carl Skoog, who featured prominently in the US portion of the 2004 writing and passed away shortly after these images were taken.  

L-R: Bjarke, Gunnar, me, Tato, Nacho, Edu, Tato. No we did not actually piss on the church. 

Walking in the Dolomites

L-R Nacho, Edu, me, Bjarke

L-R Tato, Gunnar, Nacho, Edu, me, Bjarke

Bjarke contemplating Alastair’s broken wrist in La Grave.

Bjarke, Gunnar, and I walk through La Grave.