#just what we needed: another one of those collage text/image posts

[goodpointsandbadpoints]

The Summer Book, Tove Jansson // Resident Evil: Vendetta // Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides // The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt // Resident Evil 6 // Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins // Resident Evil: Death Island // Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

[mostlysignssomeportents]

20 years a blogger

It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.

I'm a blogger.

Blogging - publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces - is the defining activity of my days.

https://boingboing.net/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a.html

Over the years, I've been lauded, threatened, sued (more than once). I've met many people who read my work and have made connections with many more whose work  I wrote about. Combing through my old posts every morning is a journey through my intellectual development.

It's been almost exactly a year I left Boing Boing, after 19 years. It wasn't planned, and it wasn't fun, but it was definitely time. I still own a chunk of the business and wish them well. But after 19 years, it was time for a change.

A few weeks after I quit Boing Boing, I started a solo project. It's called Pluralistic: it's a blog that is published simultaneously on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, a newsletter and the web. It's got no tracking or ads. Here's the very first edition:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/

I don't often do "process posts" but this merits it. Here's how I built Pluralistic and here's how it works today, after nearly a year.

I get up at 5AM and make coffee. Then I sit down on the sofa and open a huge tab-group, and scroll through my RSS feeds using Newsblur.

I spend the next 1-2 hours winnowing through all the stuff that seems important. I have a chronic pain problem and I really shouldn't sit on the sofa for more than 10 minutes, so I use a timer and get up every 10 minutes and do one minute of physio.

After a couple hours, I'm left with 3-4 tabs that I want to write articles about that day. When I started writing Pluralistic, I had a text file on my desktop with some blank HTML I'd tinkered with to generate a layout; now I have an XML file (more on that later).

First I go through these tabs and think up metadata tags I want to use for each; I type these into the template using my text-editor (gedit), like this:

   <xtags>

process, blogging, pluralistic, recursion, navel-gazing

   </xtags>

Each post has its own little template. It needs an anchor tag (for this post, that's "hfbd"), a title ("20 years a blogger") and a slug ("Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting"). I fill these in for each post.

Then I come up with a graphic for each post: I've got a giant folder of public domain clip-art, and I'm good at using all the search tools for open-licensed art: the Library of Congress, Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Flickr Commons, and, ofc, Google Image Search.

I am neither an artist nor a shooper, but I've been editing clip art since I created pixel-art versions of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood glyphs using Bannermaker for the Apple //c in 1985 and printed them out on enough fan-fold paper to form a border around my bedroom.

As I create the graphics, I pre-compose Creative Commons attribution strings to go in the post; there's two versions, one for the blog/newsletter and one for Mastodon/Twitter/Tumblr. I compose these manually.

Here's a recent one:

Blog/Newsletter:

(<i>Image: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_in_red_shirt_(48555421111).jpg">Marc Nozell</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en">CC BY</a>, modified</i>)

Twitter/Masto/Tumblr:

Image: Marc Nozell (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_in_red_shirt_(48555421111).jpg

CC BY

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

This is purely manual work, but I've been composing these CC attribution strings since CC launched in 2003, and they're just muscle-memory now. Reflex.

These attribution strings, as well as anything else I'll need to go from Twitter to the web (for example, the names of people whose Twitter handles I use in posts, or images I drop in, go into the text file). Here's how the post looks at this point in the composition.

<hr>

<a name="hfbd"></a>

<img src="https://craphound.com/images/20yrs.jpg">

<h1>20 years a blogger</h1><xtagline>Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting.</xtagline>

<img src="https://craphound.com/images/frnklogo.jpg">

See that <img> tag in there for frnklogo.jpg? I snuck that in while I was composing this in Twitter. When I locate an image on the web I want to use in a post, I save it to a dir on my desktop that syncs every 60 seconds to the /images/ dir on my webserver.

As I save it, I copy the filename to my clipboard, flip over to gedit, and type in the <img> tag, pasting the filename. I've typed <img src="https://craphound.com/images/ CTRL-V"> tens of thousands of times - muscle memory.

Once the thread is complete, I copy each tweet back into gedit, tabbing back and forth, replacing Twitter handles and hashtags with non-Twitter versions, changing the ALL CAPS EMPHASIS to the extra-character-consuming *asterisk-bracketed emphasis*.

My composition is greatly aided both 20 years' worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I've mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily.

A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.

Next I port the posts to other media. I copy the headline and paste it into a new Tumblr compose tab, then import the image and tag the post "pluralistic."

Then I paste the text of the post into Tumblr and manually select, cut, and re-paste every URL in the post (because Tumblr's automatic URL-to-clickable-link tool's been broken for 10+ months).

Next I past the whole post into a Mastodon compose field. Working by trial and error, I cut it down to <500 characters, breaking at a para-break and putting the rest on my clipboard. I post, reply, and add the next item in the thread until it's all done.

*Then* I hit publish on my Twitter thread. Composing in Twitter is the most unforgiving medium I've ever worked in. You have to keep each stanza below 280 chars. You can't save a thread as a draft, so as you edit it, you have to pray your browser doesn't crash.

And once you hit publish, you can't edit it. Forever. So you want to publish Twitter threads LAST, because the process of mirroring them to Tumblr and Mastodon reveals typos and mistakes (but there's no way to save the thread while you work!).

Now I create a draft Wordpress post on pluralistic.net, and create a custom slug for the page (today's is "two-decades"). Saving the draft generates the URL for the page, which I add to the XML file.

Once all the day's posts are done, I make sure to credit all my sources in another part of that master XML file, and then I flip to the command line and run a bunch of python scripts that do MAGIC: formatting the master file as a newsletter, a blog post, and a master thread.

Those python scripts saved my ASS. For the first two months of Pluralistic, i did all the reformatting by hand. It was a lot of search-replace (I used a checklist) and I ALWAYS screwed it up and had to debug, sometimes taking hours.

Then, out of the blue, a reader - Loren Kohnfelder - wrote to me to point out bugs in the site's RSS. He offered to help with text automation and we embarked on a month of intensive back-and-forth as he wrote a custom suite for me.

Those programs take my XML file and spit out all the files I need to publish my site, newsletter and master thread (which I pin to my profile). They've saved me more time than I can say. I probably couldn't kept this up without Loren's generous help (thank you, Loren!).

I open up the output from the scripts in gedit. I paste the blog post into the Wordpress draft and copy-paste the metadata tags into WP's "tags" field. I preview the post, tweak as necessary, and publish.

(And now I write this, I realize I forgot to mention that while I'm doing the graphics, I also create a square header image that makes a grid-collage out of the day's post images, using the Gimp's "alignment" tool)

(because I'm composing this in Twitter, it would be a LOT of work to insert that information further up in the post, where it would make sense to have it - see what I mean about an unforgiving medium?)

(While I'm on the subject: putting the "add tweet to thread" and "publish the whole thread" buttons next to each other is a cruel joke that has caused me to repeatedly publish before I was done, and deleting a thread after you publish it is a nightmare)

Now I paste the newsletter file into a new mail message, address it to my Mailman server, and create a custom subject for the day, send it, open the Mailman admin interface in a browser, and approve the message.

Now it's time to create that anthology post you can see pinned to my Mastodon and Twitter accounts. Loren's script uses a template to produce all the tweets for the day, but it's not easy to get that pre-written thread into Twitter and Mastodon.

Part of the problem is that each day's Twitter master thread has a tweet with a link to the day's Mastodon master thread ("Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? Follow these threads on the #fediverse at @pluralistic@mamot.fr. Here's today's edition: LINK").

So the first order of business is to create the Mastodon thread, pin it, copy the link to it, and paste it into the template for the Twitter thread, then create and pin the Twitter thread.

Now it's time to get ready for tomorrow. I open up the master XML template file and overwrite my daily working file with its contents. I edit the file's header with tomorrow's date, trim away any "Upcoming appearances" that have gone by, etc.

Then I compose tomorrow's retrospective links. I open tabs for this day a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and (now) 20 years ago:

http://memex.craphound.com/2020/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2001/01/14

I go through each day, and open anything I want to republish in its own tab, then open the OP link in the next tab (finding it in the @internetarchive if necessary). Then I copy my original headline and the link to the article into tomorrow's XML file, like so:

#10yrsago Disney World’s awful Tiki Room catches fire <a href="https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/">https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/</a>

And NOW my day is done.

So, why do I do all this?

First and foremost, I do it for ME. The memex I've created by thinking about and then describing every interesting thing I've encountered is hugely important for how I understand the world. It's the raw material of every novel, article, story and speech I write.

And I do it for the causes I believe in. There's stuff in this world I want to change for the better. Explaining what I think is wrong, and how it can be improved, is the best way I know for nudging it in a direction I want to see it move.

The more people I reach, the more it moves.

When I left Boing Boing, I lost access to a freestanding way of communicating. Though I had popular Twitter and Tumblr accounts, they are at the mercy of giant companies with itchy banhammers and arbitrary moderation policies.

I'd long been a fan of the POSSE - Post Own Site, Share Everywhere - ethic, the idea that your work lives on platforms you control, but that it travels to meet your readers wherever they are.

Pluralistic posts start out as Twitter threads because that's the most constrained medium I work in, but their permalinks (each with multiple hidden messages in their slugs) are anchored to a server I control.

When my threads get popular, I make a point of appending the pluralistic.net permalink to them.

When I started blogging, 20 years ago, blogger.com had few amenities. None of the familiar utilities of today's media came with the package.

Back then, I'd manually create my headlines with <h2> tags. I'd manually create discussion links for each post on Quicktopic. I'd manually paste each post into a Yahoo Groups email. All the guff I do today to publish Pluralistic is, in some way, nothing new.

20 years in, blogging is still a curious mix of both technical, literary and graphic bodgery, with each day's work demanding the kind of technical minutuae we were told would disappear with WYSIWYG desktop publishing.

I grew up in the back-rooms of print shops where my dad and his friends published radical newspapers, laying out editions with a razor-blade and rubber cement on a light table. Today, I spend hours slicing up ASCII with a cursor.

I go through my old posts every day. I know that much - most? - of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.

[96harmony96]

Chapter 2

Just before I exited the elevator into the vestibule of Waters Field & Leaman, the advertising firm I worked for on the twentieth floor, Lauren whispered in my ear, “Think about me all day.”

I squeezed her hand surreptitiously in the crowded car. “Always do.”

She continued the ride up to the top floor, which housed the headquarters of Jauregui Industries. The Crossfire was her, one of many properties she owned throughout the city, including the apartment complex I lived in.

I tried not to pay attention to that. My mom was a career trophy wife. She’d given up my father’s love for an affluent lifestyle, which I couldn’t relate to at all. I’d prefer love over wealth any day, but I suppose that was easy for me to say because I had money—a sizable investment portfolio—of my own. Not that I ever touched it. I wouldn’t. I’d paid too high a price and couldn’t imagine anything worth the cost.

Megumi, the receptionist, buzzed me through the glass security door and greeted me with a big smile. She was a pretty woman, young like me, with a stylish bob of glossy black hair framing stunning Asian features.

“Hey,” I said, stopping by her desk. “Got any plans for lunch?”

“I do now.”

“Awesome.” My grin was wide and genuine. As much as I loved Cary and enjoyed spending time with him, I needed girlfriends, too. Cary had already started building a network of acquaintances and friends in our adopted city, but I’d been sucked into the Lauren vortex almost from the outset. As much as I’d prefer to spend every moment with her, I knew it wasn’t healthy. Female friends would give it to me straight when I needed it, and I was going to have to cultivate those friendships if I wanted them.

Setting off, I headed down the long hallway to my cubicle. When I reached my desk, I put my bag and purse in the bottom drawer, keeping my smartphone out so I could silence it. I found a text from Cary: I’m sorry, baby girl.

“Cary Taylor,” I sighed. “I love you . . . even when you’re pissing me off.”

And he’d pissed me off royally. No woman wanted to come home to a sexual clusterfuck in progress on her living room floor. Especially not while in the middle of a fight with her new girlfriend.

I texted back, Block off the wknd 4 me if u can.

There was a long pause and I imagined him absorbing my request. Damn, he texted back finally. Must be some ass kicking u have planned.

“Maybe a little,” I muttered, shuddering as I remembered the . . . orgy I’d walked in on. But mostly I thought Cary and I needed to spend some quality downtime together. We hadn’t been living in Manhattan long. It was a new town for us, new apartment, new jobs and experiences, new partners for both of us. We were out of our element and struggling, and since we both had barge loads of baggage from our pasts, we didn’t handle struggling well. Usually we leaned on each other for balance, but we hadn’t had much time for that lately. We really needed to make the time. Up for a trip to Vegas? Just u and me?

Fuck yeah!

K . . . more later. As I silenced my phone and put it away, my gaze passed briefly over the two collage photo frames next to my monitor—one filled with photos of both of my parents and one of Cary, and the other filled with photos of me and Lauren. Lauren had put the latter collection together herself, wanting me to have a reminder of her just like the reminder she had of me on her desk. As if I needed it . . .

I loved having those images of the people I loved close by: my mom with her golden cap of curls and her bombshell smile, her curvy body scarcely covered by a tiny bikini as she enjoyed the French Riviera on my stepdad’s yacht; my stepfather, Richard Stanton, looking regal and distinguished, his silver hair oddly complementing the looks of his much younger wife; and Cary, who was captured in all his photogenic glory, with his lustrous brown hair and sparkling green eyes, his smile wide and mischievous. That million-dollar face was starting to pop up in magazines everywhere and soon would grace billboards and bus stops advertising Grey Isles clothing.

I looked across the strip of hallway and through the glass wall that encased Mark Garrity’s very small office and saw his jacket hung over the back of his Aeron chair, even though the man himself wasn’t in sight. I wasn’t surprised to find him in the break room scowling into his coffee mug; he and I shared a java dependency.

“I thought you had the hang of it,” I said, referring to his trouble with the one-cup coffee maker.

“I do, thanks to you.” Mark lifted his head and offering a charmingly crooked smile. He had gleaming dark skin, a trim goatee, and soft brown eyes. In addition to being easy on the eyes, he was a great boss—very open to educating me about the ad business and quick to trust that he didn’t have to show me how to do something twice. We worked well together, and I hoped that would be the case for a long time to come.

“Try this,” he said, reaching for a second steaming cup waiting on the counter. He handed it to me and I accepted it gratefully, appreciating that he’d been thoughtful about adding cream and sweetener, which was how I liked it.

I took a cautious sip, since it was hot, then coughed over the unexpected—and unwelcome—flavor. “What is this?”

“Blueberry-flavored coffee.”

Abruptly, I was the one scowling. “Who the hell wants to drink that?”

“Ah, see . . . it’s our job to figure out who, then sell this to them.” He lifted his mug in a toast. “Here’s to our latest account!”

Wincing, I straightened my spine and took another sip.

* * *

I was pretty sure the sickly sweet taste of artificial blueberries was still coating my tongue two hours later. Since it was time for my break, I started an Internet search for Dr. Terrence Lucas, a man who’d clearly rubbed Lauren the wrong way when I’d seen the two men together at dinner the night before. I hadn’t gotten any further than typing the doctor’s name in the search box when my desk phone rang.

“Mark Garrity’s office,” I answered. “Camila Cabello speaking.”

“Are you serious about Vegas?” Cary asked without preamble.

“Totally.”

There was a pause. “Is this when you tell me you’re moving in with your billionaire girlfriend and I’ve got to go?”

“What? No. Are you nuts?” I squeezed my eyes shut, understanding how insecure Cary was but thinking we were too far along in our friendship for those kinds of doubts. “You’re stuck with me for life, you know that.”

“And you just up and decided we should go to Vegas?”

“Pretty much. Figured we could sip mojitos by the pool and live off room service for a couple days.”

“I’m not sure how much I can pitch in for that.”

“Don’t worry, it’s on Lauren. her plane, her hotel. We’ll just cover our food and drinks.” A lie, since I planned on covering everything except the airfare, but Cary didn’t need to know that.

“And she’s not coming with us?”

I leaned back in my chair and stared at one of the photos of Lauren. I missed her already and it’d been only a couple of hours since we’d been together. “she’s got business in Arizona, so she’ll share the flights back and forth, but it’ll be just you and me in Vegas. I think we need it.”

“Yeah.” He exhaled harshly. “I could do with a change of scenery and some quality time with my best girl.”

“Okay, then. She wants to fly out by eight tomorrow night.”

“I’ll start packing. Want me to put a bag together for you, too?”

“Would you? That’d be great!” Cary could’ve been a stylist or personal shopper. He had serious talent when it came to clothes.

“camila?”

“Yeah?”

He sighed. “Thank you for putting up with my shit.”

“Shut up.”

After we hung up, I stared at the phone for a long minute, hating that Cary was so unhappy when everything in his life was going so well. He was an expert at self-sabotage, never truly believing he was worthy of happiness.

As I returned my attention to work, the Google search on my monitor reminded me of my interest in Dr. Terry Lucas. A few articles about her had been posted on the Web, complete with pictures that cemented the verification.

Pediatrician. Forty-five years of age. Married for twenty years. Nervously, I searched for “Dr. Terrence Lucas and wife,” inwardly cringing at the thought of seeing a golden-skinned, long-haired blonde. I exhaled my relief when I saw that Mrs. Lucas was a pale-skinned woman with short, bright red hair.

But that left me with more questions. I’d figured it would be a woman who’d caused the trouble between the two men.

The fact was, Lauren and I really didn’t know that much about each other. We knew the ugly stuff—at least she knew mine; I’d mostly guessed her from some pretty obvious clues. We knew some of the basic cohabitation stuff about each other after spending so many nights sleeping over at our respective apartments. she’d met half of my family and I’d met all of her. But we hadn’t been together long enough to touch on a whole lot of the periphery stuff. And frankly, I think we weren’t as forthcoming or inquisitive as we could’ve been, as if we were afraid to pile any more crap onto an already struggling relationship.

We were together because we were addicted to each other. I was never as intoxicated as I was when we were happy together, and I knew it was the same for her. We were putting ourselves through the wringer for those moments of perfection between us, but they were so tenuous that only our stubbornness, determination, and love kept us fighting for them.

Enough with making yourself crazy.

I checked my e-mail, and found my daily Google alert on “Lauren Jauregui.” The day’s digest of links led mostly to photos of Lauren, in black tie sans tie, and me at the charity dinner at the Waldorf Astoria the night before.

“God.” I couldn’t help but be reminded of my mother when looking at the pictures of me in a champagne Vera Wang cocktail dress. Not just because of how closely my looks mirrored my mom’s—aside from my hair being brown, long and straight—but also because of the mega-mogul whose arm I graced.

sinu Cabello Barker Mitchell Stanton was very, very good at being a trophy wife. She knew precisely what was expected of her and delivered without fail. Although she’d been divorced twice, both times had been by her choice and both divorces had left her exes despondent over losing her. I didn’t think less of my mother, because she gave as good as she got and didn’t take anyone for granted, but I’d grown up striving for independence. My right to say no was my most valued possession.

Minimizing my e-mail window, I pushed my personal life aside and went back to searching for market comparisons on fruity coffee. I coordinated some initial meetings between the strategists and Mark and helped Mark with brainstorming a campaign for a gluten-free restaurant. Noon approached and I was starting to feel seriously hungry when my phone rang. I answered with my usual greeting.

“camila?” an accented female voice greeted me. “It’s Magdalene. Do you have a minute?”

I leaned back in my chair, alert. Magdalene and I had once shared a moment of sympathy over Corinne’s unexpected and unwanted reappearance in Lauren’s life, but I’d never forget how vicious Magdalene had been to me the first time we’d met. “Just. What’s up?”

She sighed, then spoke quickly, her words flowing in a rush. “I was sitting at the table behind Corinne last night. I could hear a bit of what was being said between her and Lauren during dinner.”

My stomach tensed, preparing for an emotional blow. Magdalene knew just how to exploit my insecurities about Lauren. “Stirring up crap while I’m at work is a new low,” I said coldly. “I don’t—”

“she wasn’t ignoring you.”

My mouth hung open a second, and she quickly filled the silence.

“she was managing her, camila. She was making suggestions for where to take you around New York since you’re new in town, but she was doing it by playing the old remember-when-you-and-I-went-there game.”

“A walk down memory lane,” I muttered, grateful now that I hadn’t been able to hear much of Lauren’s low-voiced conversation with her ex.

“Yes.” Magdalene took a deep breath. “You left because you thought she was ignoring you for her. I just want you to know that she seemed to be thinking about you, trying to keep Corinne from upsetting you.”

“Why do you care?”

“Who says I do? I owe you one, Camila, for the way I introduced myself.”

I thought about that. Yeah, she owed me for when she ambushed me in the bathroom with her catty jealous bullshit. Not that I bought it as her sole motivation. Maybe I was just the lesser of two evils. Maybe she was keeping her enemies close. “All right. Thank you.”

No denying I felt better. A weight I hadn’t realized I was carrying around was suddenly relieved.

“Something else,” Magdalene went on. “she went after you.”

My grip tightened on the phone receiver. Lauren always came after me . . . because I was always running. My recovery was so fragile that I’d learned to protect it at all costs. When something threatened my stability, I ditched it.

“There have been other women in her life who’ve tried ultimatums like that, camila. They got bored or they wanted her attention or some kind of grand gesture . . . So they walked away and expected her to come after them. You know what she did?”

“Nothing,” I said softly, knowing my man. A man who never spent social time with women she slept with and never slept with women she associated with socially. Corinne and I were the sole exceptions to that rule, which was yet another reason why her ex sent me into fits of jealousy.

“Nothing more than making sure Angus dropped them off safely,” she confirmed, making me think it’d been a tactic she’d tried at some point. “But when you left, she couldn’t chase after you fast enough. And she wasn’t herself when she said good-bye. she seemed . . . off.”

Because she’d felt fear. My eyes closed as I mentally kicked myself. Hard.

Lauren had told me more than once that it terrified her when I ran, because she couldn’t handle the thought that I might not come back. What good did it do to say that I couldn’t imagine living without her when I so often showed her otherwise with my actions? Was it any wonder she hadn’t opened up to me about her past?

I had to stop running. Lauren and I were both going to have to stand and fight for this, for us, if we were going to have any hope of making our relationship work.

“Do I owe you now?” I asked neutrally, returning Mark’s wave as he left for lunch.

Magdalene exhaled in a rush. “Lauren and I have known each other a long time. Our mothers are best friends. You and I will see each other around, Camila, and I’m hoping we can find a way to avoid any awkwardness.”

The woman had come up to me and told me that the minute Lauren “shoved her dick” in me, I was “done.” And she’d hit me with that at a moment when I was especially vulnerable.

“Listen, Magdalene, if you don’t cause drama, we’ll get by.” And since she was being so forthright . . . “I can screw up my relationship with Lauren all by myself, trust me. I don’t need any help.”

She laughed softly. “That was my mistake, I think—I was too careful and too accommodating. she has to work at it with you. Anyway . . . I’ve taken up my minute. I’ll let you go.”

“Enjoy your weekend,” I said, in lieu of thanks. I still couldn’t trust her motivation.

“You, too.”

As I returned the receiver to its cradle, my gaze went to the photos of me and Lauren. I was abruptly overwhelmed by feelings of greed and possession. she was mine, yet I couldn’t be sure from one day to the next whether she’d stay mine. And the thought of any other woman having her made me insane.

I pulled open my bottom drawer and dug my smartphone out of my purse. Driven by the need to have her thinking as fiercely about me, I texted her about my sudden desperate hunger to devour her whole: I’d give anything to be sucking your cock right now.

Just thinking about how she looked when I took her in my mouth . . . the feral sounds she made when she was about to come . . .

Standing, I deleted the text the moment I saw it’d been delivered, then dropped my phone back in my purse. Since it was noon, I closed all the windows on my computer and headed out to reception to find Megumi.

“You hungry for anything in particular?” she asked, pushing to her feet and giving me a chance to admire her belted, sleeveless lavender dress.

I coughed because her question came so soon after my text. “No. Your choice. I’m not picky.”

We pushed out through the glass doors to reach the elevators.

“I am so ready for the weekend,” Megumi said with a groan as she stabbed the call button with an acrylic-tipped finger. “A day and a half left to go.”

“Got something fun planned?”

“That remains to be seen.” She sighed and tucked her hair behind her ear. “Blind date,” she explained ruefully.

“Ah. Do you trust the person setting you up?”

“My roommate. I expect the guy will at least be physically attractive, because I know where she sleeps at night and paybacks are a bitch.”

I was smiling as an elevator car reached our floor and we stepped inside. “Well, that ups your odds for a good time.”

“Not really, since she found him by going on a blind date with him first. She swears he’s great, just more my type than hers.”

“Hmm.”

“I know, right?” Megumi shook her head and looked up at the decorative, old-fashioned needle above the car doors that marked the passing floors.

“You’ll have to let me know how it goes.”

“Oh, yeah. Wish me luck.”

“Absolutely.” We’d just stepped out into the lobby when I felt my purse vibrate beneath my arm. As we passed through the turnstiles, I dug for my phone and felt my stomach tighten at the sight of Lauren’s name. she was calling, not sexting me back.

“Excuse me,” I said to Megumi before answering.

She waved it off nonchalantly. “Go for it.”

“Hey,” I greeted her playfully.

“camila.”

I missed a step hearing the way she growled my name. There was a wealth of promise in the roughness of her voice.

Slowing, I found I was speechless, just from hearing her say my name with that edginess I craved—the sharp bite that told me she wanted to be inside me more than she wanted anything else in the world.

While people flowed around me, entering and exiting the building, I was halted by the weighted silence on my phone. The unspoken and nearly irresistible demand. she made no sound at all—I couldn’t even hear her breathing—but I felt her hunger. If I didn’t have Megumi waiting patiently for me, I’d be riding an elevator to the top floor to satisfy her unvoiced command to make good on my offer.

The memory of the time I’d sucked her off in her office simmered through me, making my mouth water. I swallowed. “Lauren . . .”

“You wanted my attention—now you have it. I want to hear you say those words.”

I felt my face flush. “I can’t. Not here. Let me call you later.”

“Step over by the column and out of the way.”

Startled, I looked around for her. Then I remembered that the Caller ID put her in her office. My gaze lifted, searching for the security cameras. Immediately, I felt her eyes on me, hot and wanting. Arousal surged through me, spurred by her desire.

“Hurry along, angel. Your friend’s waiting.”

I moved to the column, my breathing fast and audible.

“Now tell me. Your text made me hard, camila. What are you going to do about it?”

My hand went to my throat, my gaze sliding helplessly to Megumi, who watched me with raised brows. I lifted one finger up, asking for another minute, then turned my back to her and whispered, “I want you in my mouth.”

“Why? To play with me? To tease me like you’re doing now?” There was no heat in her voice, just calm severity.

I knew to pay careful attention when Lauren got serious about sex.

“No.” I lifted my face to the tinted dome in the ceiling that concealed the nearest security camera. “To make you come. I love making you come, Lauren.”

she exhaled harshly. “A gift, then.”

Only I knew what it meant for Lauren to view a sexual act as a gift. For her, sex had previously been about pain and degradation or lust and necessity. Now, with me, it was about pleasure and love. “Always.”

“Good. Because I treasure you, Camila, and what we have. Even our driving urge to fuck each other constantly is precious to me, because it matters.”

I sagged into the column, admitting to myself that I’d fallen into an old destructive habit—I’d exploited sexual attraction to ease my insecurities. If Lauren was lusting after me, she couldn’t be lusting after anyone else. How did she always know what was going on in my mind?

“Yes,” I breathed, closing my eyes. “It matters.”

There’d been a time when I’d turned to sex to feel affection, confusing momentary desire with genuine caring. Which was why I now insisted on having some sort of friendly framework in place before I went to bed with a man. I never again wanted to roll out of a lover’s bed feeling worthless and dirty.

And I sure as hell didn’t want to cheapen what I shared with Lauren just because I was irrationally scared of losing her.

It hit me then that I was off balance. I had this sick feeling in my gut, like something awful was going to happen.

“You can have what you want after work, angel.” her voice deepened, grew raspier. “In the meantime, enjoy lunch with your co-worker. I’ll be thinking about you. And your mouth.”

“I love you, Lauren.”

It took a couple of deep breaths after I hung up to compose myself enough to join Megumi again. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Everything all right?”

“Yes. Everything’s fine.”

“Things still hot and heavy with you and Lauren Jauregui?” She glanced at me with a slight smile.

“Umm . . .” Oh yes. “Yes, that’s fine, too.” And I wished desperately that I could talk about it. I wished I could just open the valve and gush about my overwhelming feelings for her. How thoughts of her consumed me, how the feel of her beneath my hands drove me wild, how the passion of her tortured soul cut into me like the sharpest blade.

But I couldn’t. Not ever. She was too visible, too well known. Private tidbits about her life were worth a small fortune. I couldn’t risk it.

“she sure is,” Megumi agreed. “Damn fine. Did you know her before you started working here?”

“No. Although I suppose we would have met eventually.” Because of our pasts. My mother gave generously to many abused children’s charities, as did Lauren. It was inevitable that Lauren and I would’ve crossed paths at some point. I wondered what that meeting would have been like—her with a gorgeous blonde on her arm and me with Cary. Would we have had the same visceral reaction to each other from a distance as we’d had up close in the Crossfire lobby?

she’d wanted me the moment she saw me on the street.

“I wondered.” Megumi pushed through the revolving lobby door. “I read that it was serious between you two,” she went on when I joined her outside on the sidewalk. “So I thought maybe you’d known her before.”

“Don’t believe everything you read on those gossip blogs.”

“So it’s not serious?”

“I didn’t say that.” It was too serious at times. Painfully, brutally so.

She shook her head. “God . . . listen to me pry. Sorry. Gossip is one of my vices. So are extremely hot women like Lauren Jauregui. I can’t help but wonder what it’d be like to hook up with a gir whose body screams sex like that. Tell me she’s awesome in bed.”

I smiled. It was good to hang out with another girl. Not that Cary couldn’t also be appreciative of a hot guy, but nothing beat girl talk. “You won’t hear me complaining.”

“Lucky bitch.” Bumping shoulders with me to show she was teasing, she said, “How about that roommate of yours? From the photos I saw, she’s gorgeous, too. Is she single? Wanna hook me up?”

Turning my head quickly, I hid a wince. I’d learned the hard way never to set up an acquaintance or friend with Cary. He was so easy to love, which led to a lot of broken hearts because he couldn’t love back the same way. The moment things started going too well, Cary sabotaged them. “I don’t know if he’s single or not. Things are . . . complicated in his life at the moment.”

“Well, if the opportunity presents itself, I’m certainly not opposed. Just sayin’. You like tacos?”

“Love ’em.”

“I know a great place a couple blocks up. Come on.”

* * *

Things were going well in my world as Megumi and I headed back from lunch. Forty minutes of gossip, guy-ogling, and three awesome carne asada tacos later, I was feeling pretty good. And we were returning to work a little over ten minutes early, which I was glad for since I hadn’t been the most punctual employee lately, even though Mark never complained.

The city was thrumming around us, taxis and people surging through the growing heat and humidity as they crammed what they could into the insufficient hours of the day. I people-watched shamelessly, my eyes skimming over everyone and everything.

Men in business suits walked alongside women in flowing skirts and flip-flops. Ladies in haute couture and five-hundred-dollar shoes teetered past steaming hot dog vendor carts and shouting hawkers. The eclectic mix of New York was heaven to me, stirring an excitement that made me feel more vibrant here than anyplace else I’d ever lived.

We were stopped by a traffic light directly across from the Crossfire, and my gaze was immediately drawn to the black Bentley sitting in front of it. Lauren must’ve just gotten back from lunch. I couldn’t help but think about her sitting in her car on the day we’d met, watching me as I took in the imposing beauty of her Crossfire Building. It made me tingly just thinking about it—

Suddenly, I went cold.

Because a striking blonde breezed out of the revolving doors just then and paused, giving me a good, long look at her—Lauren’s ideal, whether she’d been aware of it or not. A woman I’d witnessed her fixate on the moment she’d seen her in the Waldorf Astoria ballroom. A woman whose poise and hold over Lauren brought out all my worst insecurities.

Corinne Giroux looked like a breath of fresh air in a cream-colored sheath dress and cherry red heels. She ran a hand over her waist-length hair, which wasn’t quite as sleek as it’d appeared last night when I’d met her. In fact, it looked a little disheveled. And her fingers were rubbing at her mouth, wiping along the outline of her lips.

I pulled my smartphone out, activated the camera, and snapped a picture. With the proximity of the zoom, I could see why she was fussing with her lipstick—it was smeared. No, more like mashed. As if from a passionate kiss.

The light changed. Megumi and I moved with the flow, closing the distance between me and the woman who’d once had Lauren’s promise to marry her. Angus stepped out of the Bentley and came around, speaking to her briefly before opening the back door for her. The feeling of betrayal—Angus’s and Lauren’s—was so fierce, I couldn’t catch my breath. I swayed on my feet.

“Hey.” Megumi caught my arm to steady me. “And we only had virgin margaritas, lightweight!”

I watched Corinne’s willowy body slide into the back of Lauren’s car with practiced grace. My fists clenched as fury surged through me. Through the haze of my angry tears, the Bentley pulled away from the curb and disappeared.

[wackygoofball]

Gwenspiration: The Wacky Version Vol. 3 - The Moodboards

So, here I go again parading myself and tooting like there is no tomorrow.

As people still brave enough to follow me on Tumblr will know, I do a lot of moodboards, or at least I call them such. Others call them collages or storyboards or pictures with random text. Either way, for me, moodboards became a neat tool to somehow capture story ideas not yet anywhere near a level that I could write fic about them - or serve as inspirations for fics I am actually writing.

And it gives me opportunity to hoard unhealthy amounts of Gwen and Nik pics, in the name of moodboards. And science. And stuff. Whoozah!

So yeah, in this post, I want to share some of my personal favorites. A lot of them actually, because I can’t decide, really.

I will start off with a group of moodboards which took inspiration from the Marvel universe, since the Marvel universe was my gateway into the more active parts of fandom.

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An all-time fave is the Iron Man AU... I mean, what not to love about a JB AU with Jaime as sassy Tony Stark and Brienne as the not-taking any shit from you army doctor, am I right? But yeah, seriously, Jaime *is* the Tony Stark of the GOT universe, and I can’t be convinced otherwise. And neither should be you.

Also, the Iron Man suits just totally fit the color scheme for both, which made creating the moodboards all the better for me. Jaime and Brienne were made for armor, now in medieval or modern times, let’s not kid ourselves.

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Another Marvel fave has got to be Captain Westeros. Because if there is a female GOT Version of Steve Rogers, it’s gotta be Brienne of fuckin’ Tarth. This one is really close to my heart because it gave me a lot of feels coming up with plot bunnies for it, and the tragedy of those two people missing each other in time over and over again, always trying to protect one another, only to end up on opposite sides because of the machinations of others... *sigh*

And I mean, one guy loses an arm. The other is blond and strong... I don’t make the rules but this delivers me enough material to re-imagine this as a JB AU... so yeah, I do kinda make the rules after all. Anyway.

Since I realized that this post’s gonna get even looooonger, I decided to make a cut here and put the rest below, so not to have you scrolling for five hours.

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Although it’s not the most popular moodboard amongst my followers (you brave people, I can’t parade you enough for staying through the madness lol), I really, really love that Fantastic Four moodboard and the concept behind it. And I just know a lot of effort went into making Valyrian Steel Brienne, which took all of my three computer editing skillz brain cells. But yeah, here again, I liked to play with the idea of them not admitting to their love until shit hits the fan and then they hide behind that because... drama, angst, feels, pining, yadda.

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And we go from Marvel to DC little quick. Because Brienne is, most certainly, a Wonder Woman. Nuf said.

Now, let’s move on to other big movie franchises that give me all the JB feels:

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Jurassic Park (aka Valyrian Park) evidently holds a special place in my heart because JB fighting dinosaur-dragon hybrids and kicking ass while being disbelieving about what was bred out in Valyria thanks to some certain someones to rescue Brienne’s adoptive daughter Arya is just... a thing? For me anyway.

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More down memory lane, I don’t know how often I watched the LOTR movies, suffice to say it was a lot a lot. We had the extended versions DVDs of the first two and basically it was the one thing to watch when nothing was on (which was the case a lot). Either way. JB in MIddle Earth long after the days of Frodo et al. - why? Because I just loved the idea (and aesthetic) of Jaime as a ranger and Brienne as a knight of Gondor working in disguise. And Hobbipod. I mean, Pod as a Hobbit. Come the fuck on. And Tyrion as an asshole wizard. What could possibly go wrong? This moodboard was very time-consuming as I had to do a lot of edits (pointy ears, tiny up people, smudge Brienne’s face on a lot of Boromir and Faramir images, smudge Jaime’s face on a lot of Aragorn images, you name it). So yeah. No matter its popularity... I dig it. Despite not having read the books yet (I know, shocking), I continue to ogle at the idea and go like: Must. Write. But. Must. Resist. Either way. Mood.

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So yeah, I grew up watching these movies a lot, too (I grew up watching a lot of TV, period). And when Gwen was cast as Captain Phasma, I got a lot of JB juices flowing as a result. Mehe. I found it was a fun idea to play with, to basically *kill* Phasma so *Brienne* can come into play and assume her identity. And a rundown Jedi!Jaime who’s lost faith in himself and everything else safe for his partner in crime/resistance is just... I needz. So you gotta cope with it. I still adore this concept a lot even if others may not. :)

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This one’s just... gah. Feels. And I really liked the color scheme lol. And I watched Horse Whisperer A LOT. Because of feels. And horses. And Honor is a horse and he deserved better than be barbecued at Highgarden, dammit.

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The No Reservations AU definitely has to be in this post because I live for this dynamic. Brienne taking care of the girls, not knowing how, though, constantly doubting herself while always trying to be perfect and composed, not just in life but on the job as well. And Jaime being the laid-back guy who’s just a darn good chef but may carry his own baggage of problems that keep him from his happy ending story is just... mah jam.

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This one was a lot of fun to do because you don’t really think about Erin Brockovich when you say Brienne of Tarth in terms of character. But when you scratch away the boob jokes and the differences in where they come from, what you find are two hard-working women who fight for justice, so I found that close enough. And it was excuse enough for me to go down the lane of biker!Jaime because... dayum.

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Music and Lyrics is an all-time guilty pleasure romcom of mine. It’s so light and easy and I kind of love how everyone is basically a bunch of awkward losers. All the more perfect for Jaime as a singer (we need that in our lives after the infamous video Nik was in to sing to us about global warming...) and Brienne as the unexpectedly gifted songwriter. What I like about the moodboard per se is how the color scheme turned out because it’s all warm and bright and... makes me happy.

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Very much in contrast to the former stands this one. I still love the overall mood of it and I dig the story idea because I dug both The Prestige and The Illustionist because they presented something dark yet very different, which made it all the more appealing to put into a moodboard for me. While not the most well-known moodboard of mine, I keep going back to it time and time again to basically lust at all the illusions and magic and drama. And blue butterflies.

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What is there not to love about a Pacific Rim AU for JB, am I right? Right?! JB ain’t just compatible when it comes to the Drift, yo, that’s all I’m gonna say. Reasons why I like the moodboard a lot is that it’s very different, flashy colors, gigantic robots, and I was mostly alright with how the edits turned out. It is tough to get images that fit the angles, yo.

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Jumping back in time once more, I really adore this one even though it’s not one of my popular moodboards. I dug the fusion of elements from Cinderella Man while granting Brienne as the female lead more space to develop as a character and make her a badass sniper nurse who is about to get her doctor’s degree. And Jaime doing anything to make it work because he owes her a debt (and his love) by boxing his way to their shared life is just... nice.

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Another supposedly lesser known moodboard is this one, though I really adore it for its premise and the amount of work I put into it (all the giffing and moodboarding). I also found use for that image of Gwen with what looks like the veil of a nun, which was probably what had me inspired in the first place lol. The plot bunnies revolve less around Se7en and more the novel El ùltimo Catón (2001) because it has a nun solving a mystery revolving around Dante’s works. But Se7en gives us the Seven, which is a delicious parallel too hard to ignore. For me at least. If only I knew how to write crime, dammit.

Now, to  move more into the serial (smooth transition from serial killer to serial TV shows, I know, I know) way of life, here is some moodboards inspired by TV shows (although some have since gotten movies which I also took inspiration from... yadda):

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Childhood memory galore. I spent many weekends watching The A-Team with the whole family. When the movie came out, I was happy about the feels it gave me (and the “you spin my head right round” scene still cracks me up more often than it should). Either way. I found it absolutely necessary for Jaime to be Face, for Tyrion to be Hannibal, for Bronn to be B.A. and cuss at everyone and everything and Brienne giving us the strangest genderbend of a Howling Mad Murdock. It added some angst, which I always need because I am a thirsty hoe for it. In case no one noticed yet. Ha.

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This one is very remotely inspired by The Bletchley Circle and the Imitation Game (because both feature encryption and one features Charles Dance already, yo.) I just really dug the idea of Brienne being so good at this because she is such a straight thinker but being underestimated because “she a woman.” And of course her not being done just encoding messages but getting into action, very much to the dismay of the stupid soldier wanting to defend the bae from harm. What could possibly go wrong? Right. A lot.

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Then. Elementary. Let me count the ways in which I love that show... ALL THE WAYS. And I really dig it as a JB AU. I have so many thoughts and feelings, I can’t even begin to tell you. I especially had my fun basically making Jaime Sherlock without making him really Sherlock because that guy was the one who taught him how to be an investigator before disappearing and fucking up his life for bad. And Brienne as the army doctor turned sober companion turned private investigator turned love interest is just too delicious to ignore.

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Pants down I mean hands down, this may be the actual favorite (currently) amongst them all for the plain reason that I also grew up watching that series and still watch it and keep obsessing about it. Ever since Discovery launched and has since given me both joy and grief, I found myself intrigued by the premise of a JB Star Trek AU where Brienne would be standing *with* the Klingons during the war around the time Discovery takes place, and Captain Jaime Lannister having lost far too much to this war already to truly trust anyone, even less so a woman who ran to the Klingons, for what it seems.

You would not believe how many ideas I have for a fic based on it. You wouldn’t believe that I basically have a sequel to that fic already in mind. And you would definitely believe, knowing me, that I am nowhere near writing that fic. But a fangirl can dream and moodboard, right? The moodboard was such a fun way of going about it, not only for the edits but because I could sneak some secret Klingon messages in there. :)

Now, on to the last part, which are the moodboards not inspired by movies or TV shows primarily but really just spewed out of my wacky, wacky brain:

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This has a special place in my heart because it combines military and the traumas it comes with for JB and.... the aesthetic of farming. And both finding a kind of peace they didn’t know they were looking for as they struggle to adjust and find their way back “to normal” after the horrors they have both seen in war. And did I mention the aesthetic? And Jaime in plaid? All dirty and sweaty? Do I have to say more?

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Why this one? Because it combines angst and romance and falling in love twice because DESTINY. And paintings. I love me my artist AUs. So that was my go at it, combining it with the “mystery” to be uncovered about what history Jaime and Brienne actually share as he tries to put his memories back together.  Also. This moodboard gave me opportunity to try out new filters and create JB paintings. :)

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This one’s gotta be on the list since I also added the Horse Whisperer. Now it’s Dog Whisperer Jaime and Brienne who won’t give up on her dog who’s seen some shit in the warzone (as did she, but Brienne will put it all aside for her doggish best buddy, of course). While it’s not a very popular moodboard of mine, I really enjoy the premise of it and how the dynamics can so easily change between the two of them if you see it in comparison to the Horse Whisperer AU. Also. I just really think Jaime is a total pet person.

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Another lesser known moodboard, I’d assume, but I really dug the premise of it (still do), and it was intriguing to do some edits to make Jaime’s hand *truly* golden lol. With people having developed strange mutations which aren’t nearly as much fun as they are in Fantastic Four AUs. What I liked about it was the idea that Brienne would have a kind of mutation/ability that links to the mind, since she is such a physically strong fighter that she may rather rely on that than on her own mind, fearing that she cannot control that with discipline the same way she can train her body with it. What unites the two is their strong wish to protect the people in their care, in a world on the verge of collapse forcing two unexpected allies together (okay, I totally expected it, but they didn’t). Either way. Much love for this one. :)

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Aaaand the last one (not of all the ones I made but the ones I picked for Gwenspiration). I really, really, really adore this one because I was so happy with how the aesthetic turned out and how the colors all match. And I dig the premise. Like holy moly do I dig it deep. Jaime and Brienne both serving in military, but on different fronts, and almost accidentally ending up writing each other letters? I mean... the PINING. And Brienne having to decipher Jaime’s chickenscratch. Yeah no, but for real. I just love the idea so much. That they are both committed to the cause while also yearning for a home, for peaceful times, for sweet, sweet love. And them meeting up and acting like stupid teenagers, only for drama to keep hitting because. It’s eh me angsty Wacky.

Either way. I dig the premises of a lot of my moodboards (in fact... basically all of them or else I wouldn’t be making them, I guess). I spared you listing all of them, though I listed a whole damn lot already. Moodboards are an awesome means for me personally to visualize and (re-)imagine. And since quite a few people seem to continue to be onboard with them, I am all the happier to keep making them.

That’s all for today.

Much love! ♥♥♥

*flies away*

[bryonysimcox]

Cutting, calling, sticking, sitting, subtitling: Week 15, Spain

With future certainty and concrete plans nowhere in sight, this week’s blog post is in praise of the mundane. Seven days of everyday life.

When prepping for this blog entry, I started panicking. What’s the overarching message? The big-picture mood of the week or the lesson I’ve learnt? Well this week, there isn’t one. It’s been seven days of everyday life and I reckon that’s worth celebrating too.

We’ve been pitching for some exciting work this week.

I can’t talk about the specifics, but it’s heartening to be actually planning and quoting for real-life projects that could bring in real-life money and real-life experience. We pretty much work on Broaden as a full-time venture anyway (regardless of if it makes us money), so when prospective clients reach out to Broaden to ask us to do more of what we love, then that’s a bonus.

I guess that’s the beauty of filmmaking, it’s so broad and its potential is so great that it can be valuable for a whole lot of people. I also think in the coming ‘new normal’ as countries, cities and communities come to adapt life around Covid-19, that the role of video and online streaming will shift, and perhaps become a more central element in our lives.

I’ve also been working away at editing the video we started filming last week about Economics for a more just and equitable world. It’s starting to take shape, though there is a lot of refinement needed (I’ve cut 150 minutes down to 30 minutes but still have a fair way to go!). Working on this video is also bringing about a newfound challenge of how we make videos like this visually stimulating, when they predominantly feature digital interviews and we can’t film footage out and about due to lockdown. It’s forcing us to get more creative with motion graphics, which is no bad thing.

In what is the culmination of a longstanding project, we also interviewed Rich Evans about The Foundations in New South Wales this week.

‘The Foundations’ is a truly extraordinary project/place in Portland, a tiny town about two-hours inland from Sydney. I first discovered the project when I worked in Australia, and the company I worked for, RobertsDay, was involved in a masterplanning process. Portland was established around a cementworks which went on to not only be the driving economic force behind the town, but also the backbone of the community. It was a source of civic pride (cement from Portland famously went to Sydney amid the building boom, coining it the phrase ‘The Town That Built Sydney’), and also helped establish social infrastructure like the swimming pool that is still a celebrated destination in the little town today. Sadly, as the cementworks decreased in scale and eventually closed in the nineties, it had a huge impact on the town.

(images) Scenes from January 2019 when we started filming at The Foundations, Portland NSW.

Back at RobertsDay, I had the pleasure of working on the masterplan and placemaking work for the next chapter of the cementworks, and I immediately fell in love with the place. Not only was it this incredible place of industrial heritage, but the owners actually wanted to transform the site into something really special - a tourist destination, an asset to the community, and a revitalised part of the town. From its current state - fenced-off, closed, and perhaps even an eyesore, the owners wanted to introduce artwork, markets, community gardens, museum collections, fishing and camping, weddings, concerts and a whole host of other things.

It was obvious that there was a story about The Foundations that deserved to be told, and so in January 2019 George and I spent a weekend there, filming local residents, business owners, and the wonderful Rich Evans, ‘Chief Reactivation Officer’ from The Foundations. This was before we’d even launched Broaden, but we were passionate to use filmmaking to document the transformation that was taking place there. However, over the course of 2019, other things took centre stage in our lives and we never got around to editing the final film.

And so, in lockdown here in Spain, we decided it was finally time to close off this story. Just this week,we called Rich over Zoom and asked him all about how things have progressed since we last visited Portland. Rich is a larger-than-life character who had so much good stuff to report (an artist in residence, growing market attendee numbers, new custom-designed public furniture, and the renovation of a central historic building which involved the removal of 1000s of bees!).

In a strange way, I’d originally thought of this hiatus as a weakness for our film, but it now has added another facet to the story: giving Rich a chance to reflect on progress at The Foundations and show viewers how much is possible in the space of a year.

Making collages serves as respite for the mind.

I return to my collage practice as a meditative practice, and a restorative one too. It’s something I do when I want to clear my mind, and use a different part of my brain from the video-editing-zoom-calling-analytical-planning side of my brain.

That said, the last few paper collages I’ve made have felt like a bit of struggle, and I’ve felt rather uninspired. The collages are never meant to be a forced thing, but instead something visceral and playful, but in recent times they’d stopped being that.

Until this week! This week, inspired to make a collage for my mum’s birthday, I started getting my boxes of magazines and compiled sheets out, stuck my ‘Making Collage’ playlist on, and somehow just found my groove. Shapes and forms shouted out to me, and I was more preoccupied with the mood of the pieces than perfection and precision. I was drawn to more ambiguous textures and the way that they could be layered, and what started as one collage ended up being a series of three (the other two of which I’ll later publish this week).

(image) The collage I made for my mum’s birthday, ‘Flirtatious Textures’.

Whilst I’ve feel as though I’ve found my swing with collage-making again (and have been also considering embarking on some critical writing about my creative process using academic texts for reference), this week I had a piece rejected. I’d made it to enter into a competition, and when the rejection email landed in my inbox this week, the usual heart-racing pangs of inadequacy entered my mind. Not only had I lost money on the entry fee, but my work was ‘unwanted’. I’ve spent some time facing those demons these last couple of days and reminding myself that I make my work for ME.

So if that’s the cutting and sticking, and the zoom interviews were the calling, what’s the sitting and subtitling this week’s post refers to?

We’ve been doing a lot of sitting. Sitting and staring, sitting and watching the sun set, sitting and reading books, sitting and checking Instagram, sitting and feeling guilt for sitting, sitting and swatting mosquitoes away (it’s rather hot all of a sudden), sitting and eating crisps, sitting and calling friends, sitting and laughing, smiling, frowning, thinking.

(images, left to right) Everyday scenes from the cottage, cutting and sticking, and a lot of sitting (as demonstrated by George!)

It feels totally bonkers that as we face a global health pandemic, all I’m drawn to do (or able to do) is sit. And George and I have certainly discussed the guilt, lack of motivation, boredom and soul-searching that’s grown (and comes along with sitting!) in recent weeks. I’m not sure if there’s some grand benefit to all this sitting, but it has called for the enjoyment of many a good book, and also a good phonecall.

One of the most joyful moments (spent sitting!) this week was surely the video call I had for my Granny’s 80th birthday, between my mum, my brother, my aunt and my Granny herself. There were laughs and cheers, ridiculous filters used and lots of talk of birthday booze and plentiful cake. But after the call, there were also moments of reflection and of gratitude; that we are able to celebrate together (albeit digitally) for the momentous milestone that is my wonderful Granny’s eightieth birthday, as she sits alone in her house in Scotland, is a blessing. Of course, I would have loved to have seen her in person, but I am so bloody grateful that we can connect to her even if just through the airwaves.

Birthdays in May seem to be a common occurrence in my family, and this week saw my Mum’s birthday too. Again, there was a sense of loss that unsurprisingly, I couldn’t be with her due to coronavirus (a fact made worse by the fact I don’t think I’ve been with my Mum on her birthday for about five years), but we were also able to chat and videocall. And I was also able to go back through my photos, reflecting on wonderful times shared across the years.

(images, left to right) Looking back at memories with mum - as a child in a sling, on our trip to Sri Lanka in 2018, and at the exhibition opening of ‘Talking Sense’ where one of her sculptures was displayed at the Portico Library last year.

Access to computers and the internet, free time to sit and chill, and family who are safe and sound is not a privilege everyone shares. And I am so aware of that.

I continue to think of the inequalities this pandemic is highlighting, and the gaps it is widening. Access to the fundamental elements for a just and equitable life are basic human rights, and yet as BBC newsnight’s Emily Maitlis reminded us, 'The disease is not a great leveller'. If while I’m sitting this week, I can at least read, watch, learn and share ideas about how we can tackle these gaping inequalities, my sitting was perhaps not in vain.

As our fifteenth week on the road drew to a close, and looked ever less like life actually ‘on the road’, I decided to take on the task of subtitling The Hundred Miler.

Initially, the only motivation to create comprehensive subtitles for Broaden’s thirty minute documentary was so that we could enter foreign film fests. And even then, we’d have had it professionally subtitled if we weren’t looking for ways to save money!

And so I naively embarked on what was to become a two-day odyssey involving Artificial Intelligence transcript detection, manually correcting the script, learning about timecodes, downloading .srt files and working to integrate them with YouTube.

The long and short of it is that The Hundred Miler (which also hit a whopping 100,000 views this week) now has complete ‘closed caption’ subtitles which you can use and enjoy on YouTube! But more than that, through conversations with others I realised the importance of subtitles from an accessibility perspective, as a critical tool to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people, as well as those for whom English isn’t their mother tongue. It was a refreshing reminder that we exclude people without meaning to, but that we can also actively include them if we take certain measures.

So that’s it, Week 15 in all its mundane glory. To those of you who are still here, reading my reflections on these strange and tumultuous times, thank you. Maybe this week you’ve been cutting, calling, sticking, sitting and subtitling too, and for that, I salute you. 

[fresh-outta-jams]

Can You Hear Me?- Part 5

Johnny x Reader Author: MoRo

Prompt: Oooh okayy, I’d like to request some Johnny fluff please? Like maybe a soulmate au 

Summary: You were unconcerned about soulmate things because getting it was the end of your final year in collage and time was counting down until graduation. But what happens when your soulmate suddenly appears right before your finals exams and it turns out he’s been there for much longer than you knew? Having your soulmate in your head was not something you needed but the more you get to know him, the more you appreciate him being there. College!Johnny x reader

Note: ALMOST THERE EVERYONE!! Warnings: More flufffff Word Count: 1.7ish

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

"Finally..." You breathed out with a sigh of relief as the last exam leaves your fingertips.

Now it was finally break and not a moment too soon. You were bursting at the seams to see your soulmate.

"It's noon, you should be done with your exam by now. Soooo how did it go? Did you do amazing as always? I bet because you're basically a genius." Johnny bursts into your head talking a mile a minute.

Speak of the devil.

You laugh at him and stretch your arms as you walk back to your apartment to pack. "I dunno. I felt like I did decent but we'll see in a few days once grades get posted."

"Lemme know how you do?" He asks gently.

"Of course." You respond back. You found it really sweet how invested Johnny was in your education. He was like your own personal cheerleader, constantly rooting for you on the sidelines and always giving positive words of encouragement. Somedays you felt like you didn't deserve him.

You can feel the warmth of Johnny's smile as he says, "Thank you babe." Then he hops to the next topic. "Have you eaten yet?"

Reaching for your building's door knob, you twist it open. "No not yet. I was too nervous. But I'll eat after I pack with Maeve. I need to say goodbye to her before I leave for home." You let him know your plans before he can mother hen you for not eating. He was also VERY invested in your health, both physical and mental.

"Ahh okay good. Make sure you eat." He says in a caring tone before gasping. "Oh snap, my exam is in like 10 minutes. Gotta go babe. I'll talk to you after if you have time?"

You nod as you pull your suitcase out and begin to fold things to pack. "Of course, you know where I'll be. Good luck on your exam! Do great!" You send him a feeling of encouragement down the bond.

He chuckles softly. "Thanks baby. I love you." Then he's gone.

In two weeks you'll see Johnny. Johnny Seo. Your soulmate. Your boyfriend too technically. Two weeks. You couldn't wait.

Now that you didn't need to focus anymore for finals, your mind was all over the place never being still. You watched one of his YouTube videos every night and fell asleep with the image of his handsome face on your eyelids. You couldn't wait to hug him and touch him and kiss him.

Clutching the shirt to your chest, you squealed a little.

"Well someone is happy." A voice outside of your head makes you open your eyes. It was your best friend.

"Maeve! You're done with your exam already?" You try to change the subject as heat creeps into your cheeks and tips of your ears making you red.

Maeve laughs at your weak attempt. "Yeah, I finished early. It wasn't too hard." She gestures to your red cheeks. "Johnny say something?"

You laugh her comment and fold the shirt you were previously clutching to your chest. "No he's taking an exam right now. I'm excited because break is here and I can finally go see him." You smile brightly at your friend.

She shakes her head and smiles back at you. "My Lord you are head over heels for him." You can feel your cheeks heating back up.

"Is it that obvious?"

Maeve plops down on your bed, laughing as she messes up some of your folded piles. "Like the sun shining Y/N."

"This looks good on you though." She gestures at you with a hand. "You seem healthier actually. Like there's more color in your skin and you don't look dead everyday." Maeve squeals as you throw a shirt at her.

"Hey now! What's that supposed to mean!?" You tease her.

Shielding her face from another attack, Maeve speaks from the shelter of her arms. "I mean, like you look like you're eating regularly now and sleeping more." She throws the shirt back at you.

Catching it, "I guess you're right. He reminds me to eat and to sleep more when I get in those moods where I'm so focused. Johnny's kind of like an alarm clock in my head but like one I can't snooze or ignore." You explain while folding the shirt back up.

Maeve sits up and laughs. "Did you just call your soulmate an alarm clock?"

"I guess I did." You laugh with her. When she says it, it sounds funny.

Picking up a pile of clothes, you lay it down in your suitcase and repeat until the suitcase is full. Maeve stays the whole time updating you on her exams, her soulmate, and how much she's going to miss you over break.

After dinner with Maeve, you give her a hug goodbye and promise to text her when you get home. Then you pick up your bags and head home.

"Time to go home?" Your soulmate asks, munching on some fries at the other end of the bond.

"Yeah but I'm kind of sad." You admit to him.

Johnny nods on his side of the connection. "Yeah I know what you mean. You don't want to leave all your friends and your freedom at school but you are happy to go home and see everyone."

"Yeah exactly!" You plop down into the drivers seat of your car and turn the key in the ignition. Johnny always seems to know what to say too. He's uncannily good at reading people you've cone to find out.

"Oh love! How did you exam go? I completely forgot to ask you when you got done." That was another thing, he NEVER forgot. Which benefited you because with your bad memory you're surprised you remember the basic things, like breathing.

"That's alright, I knew you were with Maeve and I didn't want to interrupt. It gave me time to pack." He tells you. "But I think it went well, it was just presenting our final project to the class."

Plugging your phone into the aux, you clicked on your most recent favorite song and blasted it as you  pull out of the school parking lot and headed in the direction of home.

"Ah that's good then. I'm glad everything went well!" You tried to respond back to Johnny but you were jamming out too hard to the song to really pay close attention.

Then you hear laughing coming down the bond. Deep belly laughing. "What are you laughing at?" His laughter took your attention away from the song.

"You, you dork. I can hear you jamming out all the way over here. You must really like that song." Johnny continues to bust up laughing.  

"Oh my goodness really!?" You suddenly got self conscious. "What can you hear?"

"I can hear you singing the lyrics, like not singing singing but you thinking about the lyrics as you sing them. But I can also feel your happiness and excitement. Like it is just coming off the bond in full force." His deep laughter dies down to a soft chuckle as he tries to breathe.

"Oh my goodness I'm so sorry to just be invading like that." Now you felt bad about basically blasting the song at Johnny.

He laughs again. "Babe don't worry, I don't mind. Besides I like this song too. You have good taste, totally jam worth."

You laugh at that comment. Johnny may be smooth talker and know just what to say all the time but he's really just a giant dork. For someone who looks so cool, you can't believe how much of a big goofball he is.

It was another thing about him that you loved a lot.

The hours pass quickly with good music and Johnny. Soon you're pulling into your driveway and you turn the key off, shutting your car off.

"I'm home." You say to Johnny.

You shoot Maeve a quick text before climbing out of your car and popping open your trunk to grab your bags.

The front door swings open and your mom is standing there, smiling at you. "There's my baby!" She says from her place on the steps.

You smile back at her and close your trunk.

"Hey now, you're my baby. I'm not sharing." Johnny says, lurking in the corner of your mind. You roll your eyes at his comment despite your blushing cheeks.

"You're such a baby." You fire back at him. You hear his laughter again. "How did you even hear that?"

"I know, I'm just teasing. Oh I'm home now by the way." He checks in with you. "And honestly I'm not sure...I can sometimes hear things but they're like real far away and quiet. Most of the time I ignore them if I can hear them."

"Hmmm... that's odd. Oh and me too, as you heard." After hugging your mom, you drag your things to your room.

Johnny shrugs on his end. "I try not to think to hard about how it works, makes my brain hurt." He laughs and you laugh with him.

"Are you talking to someone?" Your mom appears in your doorway with clothes hangers in her hand.

You blush and stop what you're doing. You weren't doing anything bad but it feels weird to share your relationship outloud to someone other than Maeve.

Then your mom sees you don't have your phone out. "Ohhhh, was it Johnny?" She smiles and hands you the clothes hangers. You nod and take the hangers from her.

"You'll have to tell me more about him later. Oh and tell him I said hi." Then she gives you a wink before leaving your room.

"Uh Johnny, my mom says hi." You say down the bond, face still red.

"You'll have to tell her I said hi back." He responds, sounding distracted.

"Are you busy right now?"

He sighs. "No I'm just unpacking while mom is talking my ear off since I haven't been home in a while. She keeps getting irriated when I'm not paying attention. How about we check back in and talk before bed? That way you can tell your mom all about me and I can do the same." He says in a light teasing tone.

You roll your eyes at him and chuckle a little. "Okay, tell her I said hi then. I'll talk to you later then. I love you Johnny."

"I love you too Y/N." Then he's gone, leaving that empty spot that never feels right until he's back.

You finish unpacking and hanging things up and then head downstairs to see your family. 

[and-sometimes-i-draw]

Draw Everyday Challenge: 2019

This challenge was created by myself and @markiplieristoblame

The rules:

           The point of this challenge is to draw something at least once a day and document it to hold yourself accountable. The drawing can be a full illustration or a simple sketch the only rule is you must have shown some effort. Don’t just draw a smiley face or a stick man to get out of missing a day, draw a smiling stick man doing something. You are not limited to pencil and paper, draw every day sounded nice but painting, sculpting, textiles, etc. all count. Your work of art may have taken seconds or it may have taken hours but in accordance with the rules a work of art can only count for a single day. For example, posting a progress sketch of a larger illustration can count for one day but posting the final illustration a week later does not count for another day. Feel free to post and share more artwork than needed, but this challenge is meant to make you find something to draw and draw it each day whether the inspiration be from life or from your mind. The point of this challenge is to force you to look for things to draw even after you have exhausted your go to drawings. This will help you to draw outside your comfort zone, learn new shapes, and see more things that you want to draw in the world as well as give you practice to improve your drawing skill. From beginner to expert this challenge can encourage you to improve and for those, like myself, who struggle with motivation we have introduced a motivator. Punishments. Following are a list of punishments (hopefully you won’t need more but if you do feel free to get creative!) Life happens, and we all know that. Many of these punishments are harmless. If there are any that you cannot perform due to religious or cultural constraints, please replace them with your own. If you just really don’t want to do one, all the more reason to draw! Should you find yourself with an emergency, you are granted one free pass for every 30 days you draw in succession. This is all up to the honor code but I hope you will participate to the fullest of the rules as it will bring you the most satisfaction come 12/31/19 when the challenge comes to a close. Now, what is a punishment if you can just say you did it? For a punishment to be considered complete, you must record video proof of your completing it and post it to the same account you have been drawing on with a tag or description containing the day the punishment is replacing. This may all sound harsh, but it is because I have so much faith in you to succeed. If you are going to participate in this challenge please post these rules on your blog. Punishments must be completed in numerical order. Yes, there are some easier ones down the line but that is because if you miss that many days we figure you need a break. If you found this after the first of the year it is not too late. For the number of days you have missed since 1/1/19 you may draw 2 drawings a day to compensate without punishment. THIS IS THE ONLY TIME THAT DRAWING TWO IMAGES THE NEXT DAY WILL BAR YOU FROM THE PUNISHMENTS ACCORDING TO THE OFFICIAL RULES. If you are planning to participate and use this challenge as a baseline for your own rules, please reblog this with your changes to the rules so that we can consider those changes for the official rules should this challenge be hosted next year. I wish you all luck in your pursuits, now on to the punishments!

 Punishments:

1.    Publish an apology video

2.    Write “I will not miss another day” 50 times on any surface

3.    Do a piece of art in a medium you usually don’t

4.    Sing a song (karaoke is fine but no lip syncing)

5.    Dance on camera

6.    Caramelldansen (if you aren’t old enough to remember look it up)

7.    Show us your bedroom. Now!

8.    Do an exercise on video

9.    Walk a dog. If you don’t have a dog borrow one.

10. Review a product in your home

11.Go somewhere in your town that you have never been before

12.Go for a hike (complete the hike)

13.Make a collage of pictures of what matters most to you (minimum 5 pictures)

14.Attend a local class or function (school courses do not count this is an elective attendance)

15.Go to your local grocery store in a costume (this punishment must be completed at least a week before or after Halloween. Delay it if necessary.)

16.Find an instrument and play it as best you can in a video

17.Create a tutorial for a piece of art you feel confident in (if you are a new artist, follow a tutorial online and film that instead)

18.Cook something and film the process

19.Review the nearest red product to you (if you are colorblind or otherwise visually impaired reach out to your left without looking and review the third object you touch.)

20.Learn to say “I promise to try and do better” in another language and film yourself saying it.

21.Take a self-care day and post pictures and a list of your activities. You do not have to be in the pictures.

22.Call a relative over 50 years old and explain a meme they are not familiar with to them. (Obtain consent from the relative first if you plan to include their audio in the video.)

23.Go to the site nyan.cat (not sponsored) and listen for a minimum of 30 minutes.

24.Write “DRAW” on the back of your hand. (If you are prevented from doing this by occupational or otherwise binding restraints, write it on adhesive notes and stick one to either side of every door in your home)

25.Text a friend who in not aware of the challenge “art is shrek and skrek is <3 so art is life bro [eggplant emoji]” including the typos and lack of capitals. You cannot explain for a minimum of 10 minutes after they have read and/or responded.

26.Call the fifth contact in your phone without explaining why to them first. (Obtain consent from the person you called before posting any audio with their voice. If they do not consent and you do not have a way to remove that audio from your video, post a picture of your contacts showing just the names and then a picture showing them in your recent calls.)

27.Call your mom and explain the challenge to her and that you accepted it. Admit that you have missed 27 days so far and provide her with a link to where you are posting your art. (If your challenge has contained NSFW art just show her your punishments and at least 5 SFW drawings. Obtain your mother’s consent before including her in the video. If she does not consent post a video summarizing your experience with this punishment.)

28.Eat something you hate on camera.

29. Post a piece of art to Facebook for all your family to see. (If you or your family are not on Facebook, text the image of your art to at least 10 people.

30.Watch Nanalan’ for a minimum of 20 minutes. You can find it on YouTube.

The most important part of all of this is to have fun. This is meant to help you improve and stay accountable, not to be torture. Lets draw some stuff and have a great time. Feel free to suggest additional punishments to be added. If either @markiplieristoblame or I need additional punishments we will be sure to post a list here and on her blog.

[goghlaxyphotos]

Visual Exercise 3 - Great Inspiration

The next assignment we got - ‘Great Inspiration’, was about recreating images by recognized photographers, and this is why it was called that way. 

By first look, copying an image of a chair or just a single subject on a plain background seems easy peasy. BUT.

 From the first trial I painfully discovered it is terribly hard to imitate a picture with all the details, lights and shadows, position...  😅 I feel it is almost impossible to copy the exact way the original photo was taken. So, during this project I felt overwhelmed, stuck, desparate, confused... but after all I kept on trying and will keep on exploring photographers’ techniques because thus I learn a lot about the perspectives of light, the importance of it and what results its specific use and the arrangement, positioning and representation of an object can bring. In fact, during the process of trying to imitate pictures I myself created a few quite fair captures that may not be as similar to the originals but look good on their own.

 All in all, in a few posts I will share with you all my inspirations for work on the project and for further work I will keep on developing. I will also pluck up my courage to post some unsuccessful trials of the copycat and some separate photographs I have been taking while I have not been posting.

Here is a list of the photographers I researched before I started the recreation process. They were quite a lot and I collected a huge folder of photographs I desired to try redoing or just loved much and wanted to keep for my ‘ideas’ book. Quite a few of those grand artists (expectedly) just could not suit my capabilities of recreating such complicated images, which require skill, specific conditions, time and materials I could not afford.

Alexey Titarenko - ghostly vibes, ideas for creative use of exposures

Alma Haser - similar to Sylwia Kowalczyk’s work with crushed/folded paper and cut outs.

André Kertész - diverse work, different styles - new topographics, portraiture..

Arnold Newman

Bill Brandt

Cindy Sherman

Dan Dubowitz

David Hockney - at first I thought ‘oh, I like making collages, why not try redoing one of these joiners’... then I realized that these specific collages demand so much time and arrangement I could not do it before the deadline😅

Edward Weston - I tried recreating his nude portraits. Poses and shadows were extremely difficult. Still I am thinking of sharing some of the results.

Eugenio Recuenco

Fay Godwin

Gerhard Richter - paintings and photographs

Gregory Crewdson

Hannah Starkey

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Idris Khan

Irving Penn - new in my favourites. 

Johannes Vermeer

Pablo Zuleta Zahr - super originial and atypical work,  ✔️ to try list

Richard Kalvar - loved the humour; found works that will be useful for another project

Rineke Dijkstra

Robert Mapplethorpe - his work looked approachable because I had a male model available, but is also quite specific in terms of lighting and posing, only a professional could do it

Sarah Ann Loreth - love at first sight. Just clicked with my taste of images and love to fire. Her style is visible, noticable and memorable.

Sohrab Hura - genuinely pure and intriguing narrative photographer. Since she was one of the last artists I researched, I kept in mind continuing reading and reviewing her exhibitions.

Sugimoto - liked the abstract approach

Sylwia Kowalczyk - honestly, one of the strongest inspirations I found during this research in terms of style and type of art. I love constructed images. I could not manage to recreate one of hers for the project but started exploring the way I can do it and will soon finish a work inspired by this amazing woman.

Tacita Dean - unique use of film, yet I am not familiar how to work with it and could not include it in the project

Tom Hunter - loved his ‘Swan Songs’ 

Viveca Koh

William Eggleston

So, even though I could not recreate every artist’s image I definitely appreciated and enjoyed researching their art and saved a lot of ideas in my ‘ideas’ book to try. :) In fact, quite a few of them I will look up to again when it’s time for the final project (portraiture, I will hint nothing more:)). So research is always useful, especially a thorough one and followed by practice.  📸

The first photograph I tried copying was Gerhard Richter’s küchenstuhl (kitchen chair). I had to start from somewhere so I thought ‘okay, I have a chair and a wall, I can try this’. Yes, but no as we say in Bulgaria. I had the original picture printed so that I could look up to it and adjust the light and the angles. Yet, as I did it on my own it was difficult holding the source of light (flash), a reflector (to darken the floor), and the camera all by myself. I took about a hundred pictures, realizing a new thing with every other photo taken: at first I hadn’t noticed the chair should be captured a little from the side. Then I saw the floor should be dark and there should be hardly any shadows on it, and thus I kept on noticing details I had to pay attention to. I tried capturing this photo with daylight (from the window) and with curtains shut (with flash). Anyways, when I saw the pictures on my laptop I realized I’ve made too many mistakes and knowing that I should not fix them on Photoshop, I decided to redo the photoshoot. The second time I had stronger daylight available and could adjust the position of the chair so that I got the right shadows; I took a series with the flash again in order to compare them on the laptop which has come out closer to the original and after all I do not remember which case was the most successful one.

An interesting story behind this first copycat was that initially I chose to do it because I wanted to recreate a painting. Then after recreating it I researched the picture and its artist (G. Richter) more deeply and found out there was a photograph by which the painting was made. And pleasantly surprising, in the photograph there was a similar column on the right of the chair just like in mine (and initially I worried about it being there). So one more time, research turns out quite useful.

(second row, last photograph) ⬇

 The choice of picture for the second recreation was induced by my inspiration from the photographer who made it and the way the content is presented. I became a huge fan of Robert Mapplethorpe throughout this project, I enjoy his style very much and had quite a lot of his pictures in the recreation list. What drew me in to this exact photograph of his were the highlights and the way this part of the body, which is my favourite, is captured. I love looking at necks, jawbones, cheekbones - they are such an expressive part of a person’s look. And I think in this Mapplethorpe’s photograph they are depicted and emphasized through the shadows and highlights. The contrast, which I had problem with, plays a big role in the overall look of this image. When I printed mine it appeared flat, so I needed to strengthen the contrast between the whites and the blacks. So, if I am to recreate this picture again, I will use more sources of light to highlight the specific parts of the face and the neck. Overall, I am happy with the composition of my copy - I think this is the feature I’ve nailed in this recreation mostly.

The next photograph also originates from Robert Mapplethorpe’s collection -  Pictures/Self Portrait, 1977. Simple, and yet I had to recreate it twice because the first time I thought I have got the shadow right but in fact I had not. ➖ What I think I did not nail in this recreation: the position of the arm (left), the smooth edges of shadow and the small details highlighted on the hand (which can actually depend on the different body/hand). ➕ What I probably nailed: shirt, position of hand according to paper, text on paper, shape of shadow, angle of shoot.

All in all, I loved the simplicity in this picture and the way it clearly delivers a message: ‘Pictures.’. It may wrap up a person’s life, one’s hobby, passion, vision, anything. It makes you think. And the other version of this photograph kind of presents another side of the narrative, where the clothing plays a significant role in the reading of the picture. (shirt and a wrist watch (business) -> rocker gloves and a metal bracelet (rebel)). Everyone can be an artist.

  Last but not least, I chose to recreate a picture of Sohrab Hura’s ‘Life is Everywhere’ project. It grabbed me the moment I saw it because it radiates some kind of magic, an honour, the way the photograph is hold. And I love the idea of a photo inside the photo - it somehow reveals the meaning of the images or people’s attitude towards them. 

As long as I understood from Hura’s website, the story hidden behind this image of a hand holding a probably old photograph is about the mother of the photographer, who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia. If I have got it wrong about the picture at least I know it is from her work ‘Life is Everywhere’ that is inspired exactly by this tragedy in her life. The disease is not the reason why I wanted to recreate this image with the picture of my mother, thankfully. One reason is because I had her pocket picture I keep in my wallet and wanted to include her in my project. Reading the story, I found even more motivation and connection between the original and my recreation, so I was sure I was going to do it. Hura’s mother’s disease was believed to be caused by the break up with the father of the photographer. My mother went through a similar experience I am not going to elaborate on but I could relate to the story, excluding the severe psychologic disorder caused. Including her picture in my projects, holding it gently, honourably, I want to express my awe and admiration at her endurance and strong personality. She is my idol and I want to show it, so this is my interpretation of this copycat.

In terms of technical execution, I used a plain white wall as a background and had to move the hand away from it so that no shadow would appear on it. The hand was lit from above and a little on the right to achieve those highlights. I did not manage to get all the shadows and dark areas, but I think it is partially due to the lack of hair. I used a camera filter to get the vignette edges but they appeared a little too flat so obviously I had to strengthen them to achieve a similar look to the original.

In a nutshell, this project was a whole new experience to me which I did not expect to be so difficult for realization but after all I am happy with everything I learnt as for techniques, filters, lighting, photographers. I enriched my creativity and filled my ‘ideas’ book, doing my research, and thus have helped my next projects as well. Also I am glad I will have material to work on after this project is over and will now look at light in a different way and think more - how is this shadow achieved? where is this object lit from?...

🔦💡🕯📸🤔

💫📍📒

[glamourzombie]

My phone came back a few days ago. I've made myself the promise of not using it if I don't need it, as the days I didn’t have it did me nothing but good. And now, time for another review! Today's find is the Frau Grand Duchess Tarot, a deck that takes us to the times when detoxing from your smartphone was not a problem haha. Created by Jen Kruch, this full colour collage deck began with the purchase of a tall stack of green index cards and a small file box with alphabetized files. Isn't that great?

In fact, Jen tells us "At first I just made small drawings mixed with collage and notes to myself and categorized them by the idea or a word in the text. As I poured over piles of old magazines like Post, Teen, Popular Mechanics, and Good Housekeeping, I began ripping out pictures that reminded me of my tarot cards. Before I fully realized what was happening, I began making my first tarot card deck". I think that this is amazing: she was picking almost unconsciously those images that related to the symbols that have been established by traditional decks, and sort of filtering them through two different time frames: the one in which the magazines were published, and her own.

The result? A deck that feels timeless despite having vintage images. The mix of different pictures (or pieces of them), the contrast of colour and black and white images, and the careful composition of the cards proves to be super fun. But at the same time, the power of the images (with their undeniable historical background) permeates the insight that these cards can offer, prompting very interesting ideas. I love that the green background is seen on the cards (aside from the borders) and not completely covered, as it is a very peculiar characteristic that reminds me of the deck story every time I use it. It is very easy to create a bond with this deck, let me tell you that.

The backs are cream coloured and have a repeated white crochet pattern on them. The custom tuckbox has a simple design, but it has its reasoning behind it. Jen mentions that it stemmed from her experience at the grocery store as a kid: "We had this isle that was all no-brand food. I think it was before large supermarkets did their own brands. It was kind of creepy but also beautiful to walk down because it was so stark. I had never created a tarot deck before, and I knew no one would know who I was, so I made the box as a sort of homage to that idea of having no brand". The companion 30 page booklet features keywords for each card (in both upright and reversed positions) and a spread.

The Frau Grand Duchess Tarot deck is a quirky and beautifully unique deck with images that create a lasting impact when you work with them. The retro vibe, rather than hindering it from becoming timeless, adds to the need of zooming out during meditations, making it great for any moment and occasion. Jen Kruch has made a great work with this deck, so be sure to check it out, as well as her site, where you can find more of her work as an illustrator!

[hannahlouillustration]

Art Director week

This week we were tasked to be art directors. we were paired up and one had to choose an article for the other and vice versa.

Illustrator’s POV

I was partnered with my friend Amara, and she gave me an article to create an editorial illustration for from The New Yorker Magazine titled “ Returning to Storm King”

The text went as follows:

“Few installations at the Hudson Valley sculpture park are new, but in this pandemic summer the park’s breeze, changing light, and theatre of clouds are novelty enough.

What’s with the metal-band-worthy name of Storm King, the marvellous sculpture park—or, better, landscape with sculptures in it—about fifty miles north of Manhattan, in Cornwall, New York? I’ve just spent some happy hours there, sprung from months of art deprivation, on the occasion of the Storm King Art Center’s reopening to visitors with timed tickets. The setting is thundery enough, under the mighty brow of one of the highest mountains of the Hudson Highlands, in a valley of variegated hills, lawns, meadows, forest, and waters, along with elegant alterations that include arboreal allées and plantings with deference to native flora—some five hundred acres hosting roughly a hundred art works. I hadn’t known, until I was told during my visit, that the park’s name owes its provenance to the Romantic exasperation of a writer who, in 1853, pressed locals to rebrand their principal mountain Storm King from—get ready—Butter Hill. That nineteenth-century embrace of the hyperbolic anticipated the moxie, in 1960, of two art-loving businessmen, Ralph E. Ogden and his son-in-law H. Peter Stern, who gradually acquired much of the valley. They founded the park as a nonprofit entity, made a museum of an existing château on a hilltop, and pondered the ambient possibilities of the terrain.

In 1967, Ogden bought thirteen works from the estate of America’s greatest sculptor, David Smith. Mostly made of welded steel, they deploy a repertoire of shapes, from the surreally animate to the nobly abstract, gracing dancerly postures with lyrical drawings in space. A suite of eight of them, currently installed under cathedralesque oak and black-walnut trees, is modestly scaled. Not so the vista-dominating, gestural arrays of mostly steel elements by a favorite of the collectors since 1968, Mark di Suvero, which at times suggest playground facilities for giants. Nine of those were supplemented last year by a three-year loan of “E=mc²” (1996-97)—a tower, more than ninety-two feet high, whose converging I-beam legs are topped by flaring forms in stainless steel that grab at the sky. Also monumental are two maximum-sized stabiles by art’s foremost bejeweller of air, indoors or out, Alexander Calder. There are major works, as well, by Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy, and, most recently, Maya Lin, whose earthwork “Storm King Wavefield” (2007-08) represents a vast expanse of mid-ocean waves, up to fifteen feet high, with grassy undulations.

Sculpture parks proliferated, worldwide, in the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of an identity crisis for large three-dimensional art. Modernist austerity had stripped sculpture of its traditional architectural and civic functions: there were no more integrated niches and pedestals, few new formal gardens, and an epochal apathy regarding statues—until lately! (We are now practically neo-Victorian in our awakenings—rude, for the most part—to symbolism in statuary.) Never mind the odd plaza-plunked, vaguely humanist Henry Moore. Where could one put outsized works that were almost invariably abstract—modernism’s universalist ideals persisting—to give them a chance of seeming to mean something? In nature! Conjoining the made with the unmade, gratifying both. Sculpture parks emerged as game preserves and laboratories for big art. Storm King’s early concentration of works by relevant artists of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies includes some formulaic banalities, tending to presume a surefire magic in embowered angular geometry, but even there you may savor the zest of a moment when sculpture jumped into nature’s lap. The history is complicated and obscured, in the art world, by the contemporaneous development, in the sixties, of Minimalism, which, by engaging the physical presence of viewers, shrugs off its surroundings. (The park’s chastely white modular piece by Sol LeWitt doesn’t mind a bucolic site one way or another.) As a consequence, Minimalism sidelined poetic potencies that prove their lasting worth at Storm King.

Prior visitors won’t be kept away by learning that few installations in this pandemic summer are new. The park’s changing light, breezes, and theatre of clouds will do for novelty. The best recent addition, on view until November 9th, is “River Light” (2019), a ring of nine high-flying cyan-blue silk flags that Kiki Smith derived from a sun-sparkled film she made on a walk along the East River. Wind stirs the fabric to rippling, soft applause. The ensemble suggests a rallying point for angels. Also new is “A stone that thinks of Enceladus” (2020), a piece by a young New York-based artist, Martha Tuttle, which consists of a mowed field studded with boulders and cairns and rather hectically festooned with carved rocks and molded glass stones. Close by, propped on an island in a pond, is a startling curio, the hull of an America’s Cup-grade racing boat that, in 1994, was prettily decorated with a mermaid motif by Roy Lichtenstein. Its abrupt presence, which you may less look at than gawk at, invokes the metaphysical truth that everything has to be somewhere. Storm King’s prevalent rectitude might serve as a foil for other sorts of interesting shocks, within appropriate limits.”

The images needed to be 1980 x 2560 pixels and my art director wanted me to capture the hudson valley landscape in the image. 

I did some research of the sculpture park and sent my roughs in:

The third image was approved. 

I tried a new technique with this piece that I have been meaning to try for a while. I used Watercolour and coloured pencils to introduce some textures in my work and I drew the background and foreground seperately so that the image could have a collage-inspired feel to it. The collage style didn’t end up as I was hoping but I think that what it ended up looking like was just as interesting. 

I then used photoshop to merge them together (which was a lot more of a hassel than I was expecting as the drawings were bigger than my scanner at home so I had to scan the images in parts and photomerge them together on photoshop). I also added some extra details digitally (the clouds, leaves and ground) to create this final piece:

The art director was very happy with the image and had no major changes. 

I was also incredibly happy with this piece. The new medium really worked for me and I really feel as though this piece could be a turning point in my artwork.

Art Directors POV

I found a good article on Country Living magazine that I thought Amara would enjoy illustrating, as I know from her previous work that she enjoys drawing people and animals. For this task I pretended to be an art director for Country Living magazine in an attempt to make my emails as realistic as possible. 

The first email was as follows.

Hello,

I am an art dierctor for Country living Magazine, I came across your work and I would like you to create an illustration to accompany an upcoming article for our magazine.

The image would need to be full colour and 1280x720 pixels at 300 dpi

The article is as follows:

​

​Country Living Magazine

Dogs are our oldest and closest companions, new DNA has confirmed

Pups were domesticated before any other known species

We know that dogs are man's best friend, but new DNA has confirmed that they are in fact our oldest and closest companions, too.

The study, which was conducted at London's Crick Institute, found that dogs were domesticated before any other known species. Interestingly, it discovered that humans have had pet dogs for around 11,000 years, showing just how far back our love for them really goes.

Shining light on the "inextricable bond between dogs and humans", the study is based on DNA from 27 ancient canine specimens from around Europe, Siberia and the Near East.

"Dogs are our oldest and closest animal partner. Using DNA from ancient dogs is showing us just how far back our shared history goes and will ultimately help us understand when and where this deep relationship began," Greger Larson, a co-author from the University of Oxford, told BBC News.

Elsewhere in the research, they also found that the genetic patterns of dogs were fairly similar to that of humans. This is because when humans adopted dogs, they took them with them wherever they moved and shifted, strengthening their bond.

Anders Bergström, lead author and post-doctoral researcher at the Crick, also added: "If we look back more than four or five thousand years ago, we can see that Europe was a very diverse place when it came to dogs. Although the European dogs we see today come in such an extraordinary array of shapes and forms, genetically they derive from only a very narrow subset of the diversity that used to exist."

Just another reason to adopt one of your own...

Many thanks,

Hannah Jones

Art director for Country Living Magazine.

The same day, I heard back from her with attatched roughs. 

I liked the second one best as the concept was clever and the composition was very nice. 

After a short while she came back with two different options of the image. 

One without hands and one with hands, I prefered the image with hands as it showed the human connection with dogs more, which is what the article is all about. 

Overall, I was happy with the finished image so I approved it. I think she did a really good job.

You can follow Amara’s fantastic work at https://www.instagram.com/apiple_art/

[robertogreco]

Strict Forms

This is a thread from last month that I've been thinking about ever since, but never got around to posting here. It starts with a series of tweets from Guillermo del Toro:

Tweets on why I am interviewing Michael Mann and George Miller (2 weeks each) about their films this Sabbatical year.

I sometimes feel that great films are made / shown at a pace that does not allow them to "land" in their proper weight or formal / artisitic importance...

As a result, often, these films get discussed in "all aspects" at once. But mostly, plot and character- anecdote and flow, become the point of discussion. Formal appreciation and technique become secondary and the specifics of narrative technique only passingly address[ed]

I would love to commemorate their technical choices and their audiovisual tools. I would love to dissect the narrative importance and impact of color, light, movement, wardrobe and set design. As Mann once put it: "Everything tells you something"

I think we owe it to these (and a handful of filmmakers) to have their formal choices commemorated, the way one can appreciatethe voigour and thickness and precision of a brushtroke when you stand in front of an original painting.

Aaron Stewart-Ahn responds, in particular to the final paragraph above:

Our media literacy about movies tends to prioritize text over subtext, emotion, and sound vision & time, and it has sadly sunk into audiences' minds. I'd say some movies are even worth a handful of shots / sounds they build up to.

To which I added:

Our education system prioritizes text. Deviation from text is discouraged.

“To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity.”

“Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power; together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order.”

That comes from “Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box,” by Trinh T. Minh-Ha in Woman, Native, Other (via):

Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-convention-language of “clarity.” (”A wholesome, clear, and direct language” is said to be “the fulcrum to move the mass or to sanctify it.”) Clear expression, often equated with correct expression, has long been the criterion set forth in treatises on rhetoric, whose aim was to order discourse so as to persuade. The language of Taoism and Zen, for example, which is perfectly accessible but rife with paradox does not qualify as “clear” (paradox is “illogical” and “nonsensical” to many Westerners), for its intent lies outside the realm of persuasion. The same holds true for vernacular speech, which is not acquired through institutions — schools, churches, professions, etc. — and therefore not repressed by either grammatical rules, technical terms, or key words. Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save — at any rate to mean and to send out an unambiguous message. Writing thus reduced to a mere vehicle of thought may be used to orient toward a goal or to sustain an act, but it does not constitute an act in itself. This is how the division between the writer/the intellectual and the activists/the masses becomes possible. To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train. Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power; together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order. Let us not forget that writers who advocate the instrumentality of language are often those who cannot or choose not to see the suchness of things — a language as language — and therefore, continue to preach conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing: principles of composition, style, genre, correction, and improvement. To write “clearly,” one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify; in other words, practice what may be called an “ablution of language” (Roland Barthes).

See also Keguro Macharia on strict academic forms (and various other posts on linearity and academia):

Proposals for radical ideas in strict academic forms. Radical thinking requires radical forms. It’s an elementary lesson. Perhaps more academically inclined people should co-edit with poets. Figure out why form matters. I am most blocked when I resist the forms ideas need to emerge.

Update [7 January 2018]: To go with the above, I think it makes sense to add this passage from Ryan Brown’s “Fred Moten: A look at Duke's preeminent poet”:

As for how he thinks of his own writing, Moten explained to the literary journal Callaloo that he doesn’t see poems as neatly wrapped ideas or images. Instead, he believes that “poetry is what happens… on the outskirts of sense.” What do you think?

This unorthodox approach to writing extends beyond Moten’s own projects, spilling over into his teaching philosophy. In a Fred Moten English class, a standard essay on a piece of literature might be replaced by a sound collage or a piece of creative writing reacting to the reading. It’s an attempt, he said, to get his students to write like they actually want to write—not the way they think they need to for a class. What do you think?

“School makes it so that you write to show evidence of having done some work, so that you can be properly evaluated and tracked,” he said. “To me that degrades writing, so I’m trying to figure out how to detach the importance of writing from these structures of evaluation.” What do you think?

Second year English Ph.D student Damien Adia-Marassa said this means that Moten’s classes are never the same. Last Spring, Marassa worked as a “teaching apprentice” in one of Moten’s undergraduate courses, “Experimental Black Poetry,” for which he said there was never a fixed syllabus. What do you think?

“He just told us the texts he wanted to study and invited us all to participate in thinking about how we might study them,” Marassa said. What do you think?

But is Professor Moten ever worried that students will take advantage of his flexibility with structure and content? What do you think?

Actually, he said, he doesn’t care if students take his courses because they think they will be easy. What do you think?

“I think it’s good to find things in your life that are easy for you,” he said. “If someone signs up for my class because they think it will come naturally to them and it won’t be something they have to agonize over, those are all good things in my book.” What do you think?

In the Spring, Moten will switch gears as a professor, teaching his first creative writing course since arriving at Duke—Introduction to Writing Poetry. But whatever the course title may imply, he won’t be trying to teach his students how to write, he said. Instead, he hops they’ll come away from his class better at noticing the world around them. What do you think?

And he hopes to teach them to that, in order to write, you first have to fiercely love to read. That’s a skill he learned a long time ago, out in the flat Nevada desert, when he first picked up a book of poems and started to read, not knowing where it would take him.

Update [23 February 2018]: Here come several more passages that fit with this theme of breaking forms.

First, Fanta Sylla on “Metrograph Celebrates the Inventive Truth-Telling of St. Clair Bourne”:

Let the Church is so free of form and spirit that, presented without context, it could easily be seen as a fictional piece. It is not clear how much the scenes are staged, or, indeed, whether they are staged at all. Right from the first interaction, in which what seems to be a religious teacher laboriously explains the purpose of a sermon, there is a distance with the people filmed (broken on occasion by extreme zooming and direct address), as well as a writtenness and theatricality in the dialogue that can be delightfully confusing. What one learns while watching Bourne is that there are many ways to enter a subject, and one mustn’t refrain from exploring them, especially not in the name of nonfiction convention.

And now “Hilton Als on Writing,” in an interview with T. Cole Rachel:

T. Cole Rachel: Your essays frequently defy traditional genre. You play around with the notions of what an essay can be, what criticism can be, or how we are supposed to think and write about our own lives.

Hilton Als: You don’t have to do it any one way. You can just invent a way. Also, who’s to tell you how to write anything? It’s like that wonderful thing Virginia Woolf said. She was just writing one day and she said, “I can write anything.” And you really can. It’s such a remarkable thing to remind yourself of. If you’re listening to any other voice than your own, then you’re doing it wrong. And don’t.

The way that I write is because of the way my brain works. I couldn’t fit it into fiction; I couldn’t fit it into non-fiction. I just had to kind of mix up the genres because of who I was. I myself was a mixture of things, too. Right? I just never had those partitions in my brain, and I think I would’ve been a much more fiscally successful person if could do it that way. But I don’t know how to do it any other way, so I’m not a fiscally successful person. [laughs]

[…]

I believe that one reason I began writing essays—a form without a form, until you make it—was this: you didn’t have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story. In an essay, your story could include your actual story and even more stories; you could collapse time and chronology and introduce other voices. In short, the essay is not about the empirical “I” but about the collective—all the voices that made your “I.”

From a profile of Lorna Simpson, by Dodie Kazanjian:

Lorna graduated early from SVA and was doing graphic-design work for a travel company when she met Carrie Mae Weems, a graduate art student at the University of California, San Diego. Weems suggested she come out to graduate school in California. “It was a rainy, icy New York evening, and that sounded really good to me,” Simpson says. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into.” She knew she’d had enough of documentary street photography. Conceptual art ruled at UCSD, and in her two years there, from 1983 to 1985, Lorna found her signature voice, combining photographs and text to address issues that confront African American women. “I loved writing poetry and stories, but at school, that was a separate activity from photography,” she says. “I thought, Why not merge those two things?”

Arthur Chiaravalli in “It’s Time We Hold Accountability Accountable”:

Author and writing professor John Warner points out how this kind of accountability, standardization, and routinization short-circuits students’ pursuit of forms “defined by the rhetorical situation” and values “rooted in audience needs.”

What we are measuring when we are accountable, then, is something other than the core values of writing. Ironically, the very act of accounting for student progress in writing almost guarantees that we will receive only a poor counterfeit, one emptied of its essence.

“How to Teach Art to Kids, According to Mark Rothko”:

“Unconscious of any difficulties, they chop their way and surmount obstacles that might turn an adult grey, and presto!” Rothko describes. “Soon their ideas become visible in a clearly intelligent form.” With this flexibility, his students developed their own unique artistic styles, from the detail-oriented to the wildly expressive. And for Rothko, the ability to channel one’s interior world into art was much more valuable than the mastery of academic techniques. “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing,” he once wrote.

Update [10 July 2018]: Here’s a great thread from Dr. Lucia Lorenzi on form in academia, but also on the value of silence and pause.

I have two academic articles currently under consideration, and hope that they'll be accepted. I'm proud of them. But after those two, I am not going to write for academic journals anymore. I feel this visceral, skin-splitting need to write differently about my research.

It just doesn't FEEL right. When I think about the projects I'm interested in (and I have things I want desperately to write about), but I think about writing them for an academic journal, I feel anxious and trapped. I've published academic work. It's not a matter of capability.

I think I've interpreted my building anxiety as some sort of "maybe I can't really do it, I'm not good at this" kind of impostor syndrome. But I know in my bones it's not that, because I'm a very capable academic writer. I know how to do that work. I've been trained to do it.

This is a question of form. It is a question of audience, too. The "what" and the "why" of my research has always been clear to me. The "how," the "where," and the "who," much less so. Or at the very least, I've been pushing aside the how/where/who I think best honours the work.

In my SSHRC proposal, I even said that I wanted to write for publications like The Walrus or The Atlantic or GUTS Magazine, etc. because this work feels like it needs to be very public-facing right now, so that's what I'm going to do. No more academic journal articles for now.

With all the immobilizing anxiety I've felt about "zomg my CV! zomg academic cred!" do you know how many stories I could have pitched in the past year alone? SO MANY. How much research and thinking I could have distilled into creative non-fiction or long-form journalistic pieces?

It's not like I haven't also been very clear about the fact that I probably won't continue in academia, so why spend the last year of my postdoc doing the MOST and feeling the WORST doing my research in a certain way just for what...a job I might not get or even want? Nah.

Whew. I feel better having typed all that out, and also for having made the decision to do the work in the way I originally wanted to do it, because I have been struggling so much that every single day for months I've wanted to just quit the postdoc entirely. Just up and leave.

In the end, I don't think my work will shift THAT much, you know? And I've learned and am learning SO much from fellow academics who are doing and thinking and writing differently. But I think that "no more scholarly journal submissions" is a big step for me.

I also feel like this might actually make me feel less terrified of reading academic work. Not wanting to WRITE academic articles/books has made me equally afraid of reading them, which, uh, isn't helpful. But now I can read them and just write in my own way.

I don't want to not have the great joy of sitting down and reading brilliant work because I'm so caught up in my own fears of my response having to replicate or mirror those forms. That ain't a conversation. I'm not listening if I'm already lost in thinking about how to answer.

That's what's so shitty about thinking as a process that is taught in academia. We teach everyone to be so hyper-focused on what they have to say that we don't let people just sit back and listen for a goddamn moment without feeling like they need to produce a certain response.

And we wonder why our students get anxious about their assignments? The idea that the only valid form of learning is having something to say in response, and in this way that is so limited, and so performative, is, quite frankly, coercive and gross.

As John Cage said, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it." When it comes to academic publications, I am saying that no longer have anything to say. I do, however, have things to say in other places to say them.

My dissertation was on silence. In the conclusion, I pointed out that the text didn't necessarily show all the silences/gaps I had in my years of thinking. I'd wanted to put in lots of blank space between paragraphs, sections, to make those silences visible, audible.

According to the formatting standards for theses at UBC, you cannot have any blank pages in your dissertation. You cannot just breathe or pause. Our C.V.s are also meant not to have any breaths or pauses in them, no turns away, no changes in course.

I am making a course change!

Update [7 March 2019]: Maya Weeks makes this point on Twitter:

i'm so over the fetishization of language!!!! not every1 is ~good~ at formulating thoughts thru words & we need systems that reflect ppls' various strengths! prioritizing work done in words (rather than literally any other action, like dance, or organizing) is elitist as hell!!!

u might think i'm kidding about this but i'm a professional writer with 2 degrees in language (linguistics & creative writing); i have been thinking about this for 12 years

[farsouthproject]

The Decay of the Angel:

Yukio Mishima and Paul Schrader on the Body, Death, Suicide, Sexuality and the Nature of Evil

Being a reworking of three previous blog posts into one essay.

On a hot day after Christmas, in a second-hand bookshop in Newcastle, New South Wales, I came across The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima. It was one of those books that resonates immediately at some visceral level without even having to open the cover: the book as fetish object. On beginning to read in the shady basement where I was staying, one of the first impressions the book made on me was that the title, in English, seemed to be a mistranslation. The decay referred to pertains to a dimension dreamed by a rich old man, Shigekuni Honda, one of the novel’s main characters. The name of this dimension has been more often translated into English (from many and various Asian Buddhist texts) as the ‘God Realms.’ So the ‘angel’ who loses her wings would belong to a pantheon of gods and goddesses rather than a host like the seraphim.

A closer translation into English might have resonated with Wagner’s Götterdämerung (Twilight of the Gods), that I suspect may have been in Mishima’s mind when he wrote it. One strand of narrative traces Honda’s reconciliation to a less simplistic Buddhist world view than that with which he begins in the book. Could Mishima also be alluding to Nietzsche’s death of god? The allusion to decadence is still there. Despite the questionable title, The Decay of the Angel has been rendered in beautiful translated prose that evokes the sea, the ships, the industrial harbour of Yokohama, Honda’s dreams, and his obsession with a sixteen-year-old boy, whom he takes for a reincarnation of others he has followed in his life, all of whom have died young. Both Honda and the boy Tōru seek to destroy each other in a web of evil that ultimately threatens to destroy them both.

It was after completing the writing of this book, which Mishima considered to be his masterpiece, the last of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, that he committed seppuku, planned as a grand theatrical staging of a ritual suicide at a headquarters garrison of the Japanese Self Defence Force, or the army by any other name. Mishima is considered by many to be a proto-fascist but the truth seems to be far more complex. Paul Schrader’s film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, takes on the complexities of Mishima’s entire life as art; another resonance with Nietzsche’s idea of life as a constant act of creation: an expression of the will to power.

In an interview about his Mishima film, Schrader says, ‘I do believe that the life is his final work and I believe that Mishima saw it that way, too. He saw all his output as a whole, from the tacky semi-nude photographs to the Chinese poetry to the Dostoyevskian novels to his private army – it was all Mishima.’ (Schrader on Schrader, Faber and Faber.)

The film has never been distributed in Japan. Schrader says, ‘Mishima has become a non-subject. People read about him but there is no official viewpoint, so that if you’re at a dinner party and his name comes up there’s just silence. Now, that atmosphere of cultural discomfort is amplified by the fact that one of the precepts of the Japanese psyche is that outsiders really can’t understand them… So if (the Japanese) don’t understand Mishima, how can a foreigner possibly hope to?’

It’s true that when reading writers of other cultures, or writing about them, or making films about them, inevitably the maker creates his or her imaginary versions of that culture that those who are born into it may not share at all and resent the intrusion on the shared cultural construction of those born in place.

Schrader – as does Mishima’s biographer John Norton – sees Mishima’s suicide as the ultimate theatrical expression of a man who wanted to reconcile art and political action in real life. The film builds toward this climax in a collage of ‘present-time,’ flashback, and novel-dramatization, each with its particular filmic ‘look’ that draws on Costa Gavras, the black and white of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, and the present day theatricality of the set designer Eiko Ishioka. 

Purity, the Emperor and Suicide

A red rising sun opens the film and the image is underscored by Wagnerian echoes in the extraordinary music composed by Philip Glass. The music quickly transforms into a military snare tapping a march, as Mishima vests himself in the dress uniform of his private militia, the Shield Society. The film begins on the day when Mishima sets out with four cadets from the Shield Society, ostensibly to instigate a military coup but with the intention of committing seppuku because he knows that the coup will inevitably fail.

The end of the mission is foreshadowed in the film’s dramatization of Mishima’s novel The Runaway Horses. A group of military cadets plot a coup. Their leader, Isao, says to his followers: ‘The Emperor’s face is not pleased. Japan is losing its soul. In a single stroke, we’ll assassinate the leaders of capitalism. Burn the Bank of Japan… At dawn we’ll commit seppuku.’ To his military superior he says of the plot: ‘Japan will be purified. We’ll only use swords. Our best weapon is purity.’

In a telling interrogation, the police detective, who has arrested the young plot leader, says: ‘You’re still too young and pure. You will learn to tone down your feelings.’ Isao answers: ‘If purity is toned down it is no longer purity.’ And the detective: ‘Total purity is not possible in this world.’ And Isao’s reply: ‘Yes, it is… if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.’

As a young man though, it appears that Mishima’s resolve of purity and oneness with the spirit of Bushido was undermined. Schrader’s film depicts Mishima in his late teens where he claims that his dream is to be a soldier and fight for the Emperor and Japan. The young Mishima is mortified when he exaggerates his physical weakness at his army medical and is discharged as unfit for service. In the film’s voiceover, the adult Mishima character says, ‘I always said I wanted to die on the battlefield. But my words were lies, I never really wanted to die.’

Schrader uses this moment as a turning point where the character of Mishima resolves to perfect his body, the better to embody the spirit of the Samurai. And this worship of the perfect body resonates with Mishima’s sense of his sexuality.

The Body and Sexuality

Schrader was stopped from using Forbidden Colours – Mishima’s most overtly gay novel – by Mishima’s widow who wished to play down her husband’s sexuality. Schrader got around this by basing some scenes on Mishima’s semi-autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask. He introduces the writer’s sexual orientation as he deals with the writer’s childhood. In the movie’s first chapter, entitled Beauty, at the age of twelve, Mishima is taken to the theatre by his grandmother and through an open door, he sees three Kabuki actors, all of them men, one of whom is playing the part of a woman, the others in effeminate make-up. Schrader’s shots of the boy and the actors creates a palpable sexual tension. At school, the boy is ridiculed by his classmates for being a poet. When the boy Mishima sees a picture of St Sebastian pierced by arrows it arouses him to masturbate.

During the black and white flashback sections of the film, Mishima is dancing with another man in a gay bar. He’s upset when his dance partner jokes that Mishima is too flabby. Mishima takes up bodybuilding to improve his physique.

In voiceover, Mishima says, ‘My life is in many ways like that of an actor. I always wear a mask. I play a role. When he looks in the mirror the homosexual, like the actor, sees what he fears most, the decay of the body.’

In the second chapter of the film, entitled Art, Schrader develops the character’s sexuality using a dramatization of Mishima’s novel Kyoko’s House. The actor in the story takes up bodybuilding as he fantasizes having the physique of a matador so that his body will be as beautiful as his face.

There follows a long voiceover soliloquy as Mishima, lauded in Japan, respected abroad, goes on a journey across the world.

‘As the ship approached Hawaii I felt as if I emerged from a cave and shook hands with the sun. I’d always suffered under a monstrous sensitivity, what I lacked was health, a healthy body, a physical presence. Words had separated me from my body. The sun released me. Greece cured my self-hatred and awoke a will to health. I saw that beauty and ethics were one and the same, creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical. I attained physical health after becoming an adult. Such people are different from those born healthy, we feel we have the right to be insensitive to trivial concerns. The loss of self through sex gives us little satisfaction. I was married in 1958, my daughter was born in 1959 and my son in 1961.’

In the dramatization of Kyoko’s House the bodybuilding actor gets into an argument with a visual artist. The actor says, ‘The human body is the work of art. It doesn’t need artists.’ But the artist replies: ‘Okay, let’s say you’re right. What good does your sweating and grunting do. Even the most beautiful body is destroyed by age. Where is beauty then? Only art makes human beauty endure. You must devise an artist’s scheme to preserve it. You must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.’

The actor signs a sadomasochistic pact with an older woman libertine who cuts and burns the actor’s beautiful body before they commit suicide together.

Evil as Aesthetic in De Sade, Genet and Mishima

In The Decay of the Angel, the old man, Shigekuni Honda steals a glance at the young Tōru ‘and felt that he was seeing in that glance his own life… The evil suffusing that life had been self-awareness. A self-awareness that knew nothing of love, that slaughtered without raising a hand, that relished death as it composed noble condolences, that invited the world to destruction while seeking the last possible moment for itself… his own inclinations all through his long life had been to make the world over into emptiness, to lead men to nothing – complete destruction and finality.’

Honda wants to cultivate Tōru’s evil potential. The evil in The Decay of the Angel is all on the level of personal betrayal. The aesthetic is similar to that of Jean Genet who gives himself over to sordid betrayal and punishment. He makes Evil into Good, or more than that: into holiness and sanctity; hence Sartre’s essay Saint Genet.

In Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille points out that in Sartre’s essay on Jean Genet: ‘It seems to me that the whole question of Good and Evil revolves around one main theme – what Sade called irregularity. Sade realised that irregularity was the basis of sexual excitement. The law (the rule) is a good one, it is Good itself (Good, the means by which the being ensures its existence), but a value, Evil, depends on the possibility of breaking the rule. Infraction is frightening – like death: and yet it is attractive, as though the being only wanted to survive out of weakness, as though exuberance inspired that contempt for death which is necessary once the rule has been broken.’

Just as Honda wants ‘to lead men to nothing – complete destruction and finality’, Sade in Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome imagined as many ways as possible to destroy human beings singularly and collectively. Bataille says: ‘In the solitude of prison Sade was the first man to give a rational expression to those uncontrollable desires, on the basis of which consciousness has based the social structure and the very image of man… Indeed this book is the only one in which the mind of man is shown as it really is. The language of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome is that of a universe which degrades gradually and systematically, which tortures and destroys the totality of the beings which it presents… Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome without feeling sick.’

Sade spent time in jail because he acted out to some extent the frenzies to which he was driven. He did cut a female beggar, Rose Keller, with a penknife and pour wax into her wounds. He did organise orgies at the castle of Lacoste though not to the extent of acting out the fantasies he wrote of in Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, but for sure, women and men were badly hurt. In comparison with characters in the writings of Genet and Sade, the evil of Honda, or of Georges Bataille’s characters, is a little tamer. Honda, as we see, holds back at ‘the last possible moment.’

And Honda’s female friend, Keiko, tells Honda’s protégé, Tōru: ‘You’re a mean, cunning little country boy of the sort we see sprawled all over the place. You want to get your hands on your father’s money, and so you arrange to have him declared incompetent… your sort of evil is a legal sort of evil. All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think you have seen the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon… You’re a clever boy, no more.’

Whereas Sade and Genet pushed their criminality in waking life to extremes beyond ‘decency,’ they pulled back at the last moment from death, and left that ultimate ‘expression of freedom’, if it can be called that, to their literature. Mishima did not go so far in his literature as Sade or Genet, or even Bataille, in their portrayals of sexuality. And Mishima is the better writer for it.

Finally, Mishima didn’t pull back – as Honda and Tōru do – in his life or his death. He was determined to unify his actions and his art. It’s Mishima’s obsession with the body and beauty and its connection to his sexuality and ideas of purity that creates the complex psychology that foreshadows his death by suicide and how he made that theatrical performance of seppuku the union of action and art.

In Schrader’s film, in voiceover Mishima says: ‘The average age for men in the bronze age was eighteen, in the Roman era, twenty-two. Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful. When a man reaches forty he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live.’

But Mishima already was losing the desire to live. Again, in voiceover, the adult Mishima says: ‘A writer is a voyeur par excellence. I came to detest this position. I sought not only to be the seer but also the seen. Men wear masks to make themselves beautiful. But unlike a woman’s, a man’s determination to become beautiful is always a desire for death.’

Politics

In the third Chapter of Schrader’s film, entitled Action, Mishima, as writer, has reached the height of his fame, and has perfected his body to the point of narcissistic infatuation. He poses for photographs as a samurai, as St Sebastian, as the successful artist beside Greek sculptures. He founds a private militia, complete with uniforms designed by himself and the tailor to General Charles De Gaulle. He names his militia the Shield Society, a spiritual army to protect the Emperor and the pure spirit of Japan. He is aware of the ridiculousness of his position. In a speech to gathered dignitaries of the theatre world of Japan and the West he states: ‘Some people have called us toy soldiers. But our goal is to restore the noble tradition of the Way of the Samurai. I have always supported the tradition of elegant beauty in Japanese literature. I cannot stop striving to unite these two great traditions.’

When Mishima is invited to speak on campus at a university protest occupation in the sixties, there is something absurd in his facing the vociferous students. They accuse him of being illogical in his purist stance. He says: ‘Having got to this position out of sheer pride, I’m not going to become logical now. We all want to improve Japan. We’ve all played the same cards, but I have the Joker. I have the Emperor.’

In voiceover, he says of the moment where he faced the students: ‘For a moment I felt I was entering the realm where art and action converge, for a moment I was alive.’

Seppuku

Chapter Four of Schrader’s movie is entitled The harmony of pen and sword. Mishima says in voiceover: ‘The harmony of pen and sword. This samurai motto used to be a way of life. Now it’s forgotten. Can art and action still be united? Today this harmony can only occur in a brief flash. A single moment.’

He dedicates more of his life to the Shield Society.

‘Running in the early mist with the members of the Shield Society I felt something emerging as slowly as my sweat. The ultimate verification of my existence… Our members were allowed to train in the facilities of the regular army. I flew in a combat fighter. These privileges were granted to us because of the symbolic significance of our society. Even in its present weakened condition the army represented the ancient code of the Samurai. It was here, on the stage of Japanese tradition, I would conduct my action. Having come to my solution I never wavered. Who knows what others will make of this? There would be no more rehearsals.

‘Body and spirit had never blended. Never in physical action had I discovered the chilling satisfaction of words. Never in words had I experienced the hot darkness of action. Somewhere there must be a higher principle that reconciles art and action. That principle it occurred to me was death. The vast upper atmosphere where there is no oxygen is surrounded with death. To survive in this atmosphere, man, like an actor, must wear a mask. Flying at 45,000 feet, the silver phallus of the fuselage floated in sunlight, my mind was at ease, my thought process lively, no movement, no sound, no memories. The closed cockpit and outer space were like the spirit and body of the same being. Here I saw the outcome of my final action. In this stillness was a beauty beyond words, no more body or spirit, pen or sword, male or female. Then I saw a giant circle coiled around the earth, a ring that resolved all contradictions, a ring vaster than death, more fragrant than any scent I have ever known. Here was the moment I’d always been seeking…’

The final act of the film and of Mishima’s life in politics and art took place on November 25th 1970. Allowed into the barracks of the Japanese Self-Defense Force with his four cadets, and welcomed into the commander’s office, Mishima took the general hostage and demanded that the soldiers of the garrison be commanded to assemble in front of the building in order to hear his speech. The general acceded to his demands. Mishima stepped out onto the balcony and addressed the soldiers. He exhorted them to rise up in the spirit of Bushido and to install the Emperor as the rightful ruler, and to protect the pure spirit of Japan from Western military and economic occupiers. Ridiculed as much by the soldiers as he had been by the university students, Mishima realized that the soldiers had hardly heard a word of his cry for resistance.

Mishima stepped off the balcony from where he had delivered his final address. In the office of the commander of the barracks, he knelt to disembowel himself. He botched the ritual. One of his cadets was supposed to behead him with a sword. The chosen one made a mess of it and another cadet had to take over while the first cadet committed suicide. Tastefully, Schrader doesn’t show the acts of self-butchery. The film closes with a poetic vision of the rising sun and the poetic lines of transcendence  that describe the final moments of Mishima’s character Isao from The Runaway Horses…

What is it in Mishima and in Schrader’s biographical account of his life that holds such a fascination for me?

On an aesthetic level, Schrader is a Western artist who is trying to understand an artist of the East who is a fanatic in his pursuit of perfection. This essay (in the French sense of essayer) became an obsession for me: another way of understanding my attraction to the idea of a pure and unattainable perfection whether in literature or spirituality.

Mishima, as symbol, embodies for me all those weaknesses of systems that strive for such purity of spirit; that are inevitably an expression of the egotism of wanting to be a master – of oneself or of others; combined with the whole traditional set-up of sensei and disciples, that finds its ultimate expression in the blindness or delusion of an inner group convinced of its rightness and purity: the fanaticism of seeking purity in the spirit or in art that inevitably collapses into messy and tragic farce.

Schrader’s film plays this out on screen: Mishima played it out in his life and art. It’s not that Mishima didn’t produced great works of literature. He did. But the extremes that literature permits us to explore belong to art, to cinema, to writing…

De Sade belonged in jail. Genet was happy to end up in jail. Mishima was happy to die as he did. Their literature permits us to go to imaginative extremes, to liberate ourselves of concepts that stop us being internally free; to face up to the dark side of the psyche, to the fascination with the scatological.

Bataille kept his excesses to the literary and the consensual for which it’s possible to have far more respect. Baudelaire, too, to some degree. As a writer who regards commitment to literature and the political to be crucial to life, I can’t help but mention Samuel Beckett. Beckett didn’t shirk his responsibilities to the political world: he risked his life in the French Resistance against the Nazis. At the same time, he had a total commitment to literature.

How much saner, or for me more enviable, is Beckett’s approach than that of Mishima, or De Sade, or Genet? ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Bataille says that ‘Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome without feeling sick.’ There were moments in writing this essay where I felt something similar in confronting Mishima’s outlook and embracing Schrader’s interpretation of his life. No doubt, the subject touches something terrifying in the darkness of my own psyche.

At a physical level, Mishima’s choice to die at forty-five when at the peak of one’s power is ridiculous: there is so much more living to do. It’s easier to understand Hemingway’s decision at the age of sixty-two. With mind and body passing sixty, there is a sense of fearing death less than facing mental and physical deterioration and incapacity.

In 2016, I lost my brother to early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Even without such a tragic and heartbreaking illness, at the moment, I’m aware that my physical and mental capacities must inevitably diminish. Having witnessed in another, so close to me by blood, and more, the ravages of such a debilitating illness, the engagement with Yukio Mishima’s writing and Paul Schrader’s film of his life, makes this essay a direct confrontation of my own fears of old age, sickness and death. No matter how much the idea of death as less frightening than physical and mental deterioration, I take solace in Nietzsche’s understanding of our constant becoming as an irrepressible expression of the creative will, aware that there is a part of me, no matter how deep the moments of desperation, that still insists on its expression in life.

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One of my individual petty inconveniences in digital photography is when the horizon boundary in a picture is uneven. In some cases if we are taken up in the minute, this standard regulation is forgotten but the bright side is that editing your images with the photo editor Windows 10 to make them grade is also extremely basic. Adjusting the video camera on the corner of the boat dock suggested that the picture was not degree that is especially notable to the vision when the picture has a plainly identified horizon line, just like the lake. This leveling tool becomes part of the output device, and also you can just revolve the photograph to fit. A grid will turn out to help you obtain the arrangement proper as soon as you utilize the photo editor. Pointing an image is a truly simple job this will certainly get just a couple of ticking, leading to a lot more aesthetically wowing photograph. Sometimes when we take a photo, components of the photo may finish up being actually shadier than we like. I describe the less colored parts of the shot as darkness, as well as the brilliant spots of the shot as high light. Compare is actually about accentuating the distinction in between the light fixture and dark parts of the image. Increasing the contrast of a photograph can dramatically boost the graphical effect in which has, by creating the borders in between these dark as well as light areas clearer. Color scheme adjusting is an additional crucial part related to the photo editor Windows 10. We can easily readjust photo color scheme in every kind of means, starting with transforming the whole warmness of the picture such as how yellow and blue it looks, to separately altering the tone and also saturation of certain shades within an image. We just want to cover some really helpful color scheme variations anyone can easily utilize to make your photos simply a little bit more creatively highly effective. The fastest way to regulate the color related to a picture is definitely with the saturation method from the photo editor Windows 10. This transforms the appeal of every single color in a photograph to help make it essentially saturated. Just like numerous modify, the trick is definitely to locate an ideal harmony also much shading the pictures have a tendency to look rather not naturally made. Shading photography can be actually really useful, as well as of training course black as well as white color is an exceptional selection for almost all type of situations, particularly, family portraits, and particular garden scenes. Additional hints about saturate a picture and photo color adjustment with the photo editor Windows 10 download or functional photo editor for Computer to enhance a picture or simple batch processing. Edit a photo is very simple with the photo editor Windows 10. Free download photo editor for experts and edit pictures software to rotate photos or automatic corrections.

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