#she asked me and a bunch of other friend artists to collaborate on a series of character portraits

[s7ven-art]

AND HEY, YOU, DON'T YOU THINK IT'S KINDA CUTE THAT I DIED RIGHT INSIDE YOUR ARMS TONIGHT

[chaifootsteps]

(Patreon anon) Here's the last of what I have of my QnA archive, I don't plan to repledge so cheers to whoever uses their money to snitch like me.

-HB season 1 takes place within one year

-Wally Wackford won't appear much in season 2 but will be important in the future.

-Vivzie would love more Wally merch but her merch lead doesn't feel confident in it selling well.

-Vivzie hasn't consider making pride merch because "It's the kind of thing that big corporations to try to appeal to a generation they're not normally involved in."

-Vivzie claims the whole show is a celebration of pride and doesn't feel the need to make pride merch but would be down to making if there's a demand for it. (With the amount of fan merch I've seen, there is)

-She claims to do general research for the HH character time period but doesn't integrate the history into their backstories as of now.

-Viv's open to oversea convention appearances and has been trying to get a booking agent to travel more for European conventions.

-Paimon's a big shapeshifter and is only an owl because that's what he needs to be.

-There was a time where Vivzie hated Zoophobia, saying if something doesn't work out, keep trying new projects that excite you.

-One hell year equals a lot of Earth years, so stolas existed well before 1985.

-Vivzie actually loves Mammon's design, she conceptualized it and had someone else finalize it. Sort of like how Oz was designed by someone on the team with Vivzie finalizing it.

-Vivzie wanted to show men can be abused too with Stolas

-Jeremy Jordan might join be cast by Vivzie since she knows him

-Stella may not want Stolas dead right away anymore, just at a later time. (This was asked pre-Western Energy)

-It's currently unclear when we'll get HH merch with their full series designs since they're owned by A24. (This was months before the recall of that Sir Pentious keychain that used the full series design)

-At the time, they were aiming for a three month wait period between HB episodes for season 2.

-Unlike HH, HB isn't considered a musical to Vivzie but will have elements to it in season 2.

-Vivzie doesn't remember what the golden feathers in epsiode 6 meant. Adam saids the artist come up with a bunch of ideas.

-Sinners technically don't need food and water to live, it's mostly out of habit and indulgence. Electronic sinners like Vox find a way through cartoon logic.

-Because of how long episode 8 was taking, Vivzie and Adam have started making HB comics of what happens between the episodes. They're still figuring it out with HH.

-If Oz ever met Valentino, he would hate him. The team jokes that Val would be very "notice me senpai" with him.

-Stolas is confirmed to be 8ft tall with Blitz at 5ft.

-Fights between an overlord and a goetia would barely happen so Vivzie wouldn't know which one would win.

-Tilla was removed as a sibling because Blitz's family was still in the early works, she's going to be renamed.

-Vivzie doesn't have a specific favorite villain archetypes, she enjoys ruthless mean girls and dramatic, and theatrical messed up villains like The Joker.

-Episode 6's collaboration was fun for Vivzie but complicated because she had to manage an entire second team, There were file issues and they had to go back and forth to make sure they were correct.

-Vivzie's interested in making more Zoophobia merch but doesn't wish to for other older projects. She mentions it'd be hard to convince her merch lead that anyone would want to buy anything from her older works.

-Stolas does have guilt with his affair and he has a lot of turmoil related to it.

-Leviathan will have a cameo in season 2

-Vivzie can't give specifics but Stolas doesn't have many friends who we might see them in the future. Stella has two friends who at the moment of that QnA don't have names.

-White marks on Imps are scars, and can be added for aesthetics (Unsure if she means design wise or in-universe cosmetics, possibly both with how Barbie looks)

-Stolas's job is to look into the skies of Earth and find prophecies in them and inform Hell of what's to come in the future, he doesn't do much other than that.

-Oz has a broad range of powers, there were too many to list in the timespan of the QnA.

-Octavia takes after Stolas in that she's socially unaware, Vivzie claims she also unaware of her parents's relationship because of Stolas trying hard to make it seem things are fine and does that to a "good extent".

-we'll see what Octavia and Stella's relationship is like later.

-Vivzie would like to release an artbook bigger than their con-exclusive one for HB after season 2 and when the team is free to organize the production art, she's unable to do one for HH at the moment.

-DHORK will return

-She's still figuring out the sins but don't want them to be fallen angels since it doesn't matter in HB, but it will for HH. So she wants to wait until HH to decide. (Possible they figured it out with HH season 1 done)

-She finds people saying the childhood friends trope with Stolitz being fanservice frustrating. (As seen with her recent rant of the overall story)

-Vivzie adopted Pixel a year and a half after she graduated SVA. She didn't explain how she got Honeybee and Nugget.

-full quote "There would be demons from the ring of Lust who would be asexual, and they will get to that in the future. But she generally imagines that lust demons wouldn't think it'd that much of a taboo. Lust demons would generally be confused by the concept, but they wouldn't have any hate.

Asmodeus would be an example of someone who wouldn't understand asexuality"

-She would like region-free dvds of HB but it would require re-negotiations with everyone who was involved with the show, if they do release it, it'll be difficult to make it region-free.

-Stolitz didn't interact at all between the 25 years apart.

-She put a lot of her life into Loo Loo Land, and yes...Viv's dad was openly horny in front of her and her sisters growing up, Viv found it funny but like I told Lemon...There was no mention of how her sisters felt about it.

-Viv put aspects of herself into Octavia but claims to not be a self-insert. Fizz has an aspect that is directly from Viv that we'll see in season 2 that she feels needs to be shown.

-HB was spun off because IMP was originally for HH, with Vivzie thinking they were better off as their own thing. HB's also about exploring Vivzie's hell like the demons that possess people.

-HB/HH was inspired by Batman and various musicals with the idea that she wanted a worlds with nothing but villains.

-The fan interpretations of Andrealphus were pretty close to what she's written for him.

-Vivzie's interpretation of Stolas's "I used to think that I was bold, I used to think that love was for fun" is meant that he's never gotten the chance to experience true love with him being gay and he had an arranged marriage.

-She wants Stolas and Stella's relationship to be something that's debated.

-The Von Eldritches will not appear in HH season 1

-question "How did Viv get to where she was? How did she get Hazbin and Helluva produced?"

answer: "She has reps who set her up with people very interested in her show. It was the producers who pitched their interest in her. This is what happened with Hazbin in that production companies showed what they would do for that show. When A24 showed interest in Hazbin, that's when she started pitching it to others (No mention of that those others are)"

-The certificate on Loona's adoption paper was signed by Beelzebub.

-HH will have the same level of NSFW and dark as HB is at the time of season 2's beginning, (I'm not sure why people are thinking it'll be even more if she has to obey S&P with a TV show) she admits to not having a good gauge of what's too extreme as she just does what she wants to do to tell her story. HH is new territory since it's more story based than HB.

-YT doesn't allow the use of the word "cunt" so Mammon will be heavily censored with the amount of time he saids it. There's also a scene in HB that a storyboard artist went too extreme on and Vivzie was afraid it would be rejected but turned out to be okay. (This ask was in September 2022, she didn't mention which scene but if I had to guess it might have been the dildo room)

-Oz is aware of Fizz being an imp, but Vivzie doesn't know if it's an open fact and she might use it as a story element someday.

-Rosie is an overlord, that's all Vivzie can say when asked what kind of demon she is.

-At the time Vivzie was still figuring out how time works in hell, Sinners are stuck at the age they died as while Hellborns do age.

-Stolas would have thought of Blitz a lot after their day together and has a problem separating fantasy from reality, Blitz would have never thought of him.

-Blitz's horse obsession started as an inside joke among the team

-Vivzie can't say if season 2 will have a Stolitz kiss

-Episode 6's collab started 4-5 months before the episode came out, There's no plans for season 2 to have one but Vivzie would love to do it again.

-When asked if any new characters will join IMP in season 2 Vivzie said "Not this season!"

-Stolas can transform into other things, but Vivzie is still deciding if it's something he can do on his own or needs the grimoire for it.

-Vivzie uses Google sheets to write and takes the complete draft to something called Final Draft to finish it

-That white cyclops guy that shows up in Cherri Bomb's segment of Addict is likely to change but that's all Vivzie can say.

-Striker was confirmed to be a hybrid hellborn.

-The client giving birth button in episode 1 was an oversight on Vivzie's part but did say that IMP had hellborn clients before

-Any remaining reveals of HH characters will be minor characters from the pilot, the final reveal will be a brand new character. (This was before the Adam reveal, so he could have been the final one)

-The thing about the sins being a pseudo-family with "nice and asshole" ones were accurate to what's been told to you, same with them technically being goetias, they're just in a different category.

-We'll see Oz and Mammon's relationship in the middle of season 2.

-A lot of material things have been made in the greed ring, it's very industrial, full of banks, smoggy and crime ridden like that was seen in the Chaz episode.

-HH and HB are planned out but said that there's "wiggle room' in that they figure out as the show goes by how they get to the events.

-Vivzie's still deciding what special powers Striker would have as a hybrid.

-If Vivzie had unlimited funds, she would love to make a movie for HH and HB and to speed up her production pipeline. she had issues in 2022 with her working more on HH.

-Claims that HH will definitely come out in 2023, but she also mentioned season 2 of HB will have a more consistent release schedule at the same time.

-Vivzie would like to make a height chart for the HB characters but claims the team doesn't need one because they know the size of them already.

> Vivzie hasn't consider making pride merch because "It's the kind of thing that big corporations to try to appeal to a generation they're not normally involved in."

Says Vivzie as she can't put out Sallie Mae merchandise fast enough, despite her having one speaking line and about five seconds of screen time.

> -HH and HB are planned out but said that there's "wiggle room' in that they figure out as the show goes by how they get to the events.

She's flip-flopped on how planned out the show is so many times it's not even funny anymore.

> Stolas does have guilt with his affair and he has a lot of turmoil related to it.

Figures this was before both scenes where he says he has zero guilt and would feel bad if he thought he did something wrong but doesn't.

> -Stolas would have thought of Blitz a lot after their day together and has a problem separating fantasy from reality, Blitz would have never thought of him.

What a fascinating character trait that we were all looking forward to seeing more of after Blitzo told him off in Ozzie's and popped his delusional bubble! What a shame it was downgraded to "Stolas, as always, did nothing wrong."

> -She wants Stolas and Stella's relationship to be something that's debated.

Liar.

> -She put a lot of her life into Loo Loo Land, and yes...Viv's dad was openly horny in front of her and her sisters growing up, Viv found it funny but like I told Lemon...There was no mention of how her sisters felt about it.

> -Vivzie doesn't remember what the golden feathers in epsiode 6 meant. Adam saids the artist come up with a bunch of ideas.

Remember when we all thought that was important? Oh Vivzie, you fucking hack.

Thank you so much for all of these, Patreon Anon. Hopefully someone else will step into your shoes but for now know that you're braver than any Marine.

[wherethefireliliesgrow]

(3) 1070 days: whisper grey

Myoui Mina x reader

Part of the series: Palette

Previous chapter: (2) 1446 days: ivory black

Another filler chapter, sorry please bear with me The next chapter picks up, I promise!

1070 days.  

Ryujin had successfully debuted with the girl-group ITZY and was considered one of the prodigies of the fourth generation of KPOP.

You were extremely proud of her for achieving her dreams, but you couldn't help missing your best friend. Living alone now, Ryujin had to stay in the JYP dorms with her bandmates, and you didn't get to see her that often as she was always busy.

Despite her promises to take you to her concerts, you never saw any colors appear. It was always the same haunting grey, and you were starting to lose hope. You would stand near the stage for every concert, and look down below at the sea of fans and see only a tinted grey version of the world.

However, your photography work blew up on the internet, and you landed a job at W Korea. People praised you for your exceptional talent in black-and-white portrait photography, describing your work as "chefs-d'oeuvre of the shadows". You were acclaimed as the shy but talented photographer who could see beyond color when, in reality, you were just a soulmate-less Wayward who had not managed to gain an ounce of color visibility back in the past two years.

Time was running out, and you were panicking. You had not managed to cross paths with your soulmate at all, and you would think they didn't exist if it weren't for the magnetic feeling in your veins.

"It's for the best," you tried to convince yourself, attempting to stop yourself from finding and interfering with the life of your soulmate. They deserved more than being tied down by a random person in the world.

“We’ll need all staff on hand for this shoot,” announced your manager, Seulgi, during your company’s weekly meeting.

"Why? I have my day off that day," drawled your coworker and close friend Karina, who sat next to you with her lips pursed in annoyance. The raven-haired photographer was definitely not a fan of working overtime.

"Because we will be having a photo shoot of all of JYP’s artists for the announcement of their world tour," explained Seulgi, who then walked over and patted Karina’s head as if she was petting a child. "I’ll give you guys an extra week off for this gig."

Karina harrumphed, trying to hide her satisfied smile.

"That sounds like fun!" squealed Danielle, "Do you think we can get free tickets to their concert? I had a blast during Twice’s concert last year. I can’t wait to see them again this time. Do you think they’ll collaborate with other groups? I think they'll probably have a collaborative stage with ITZY, and Nayeon will try to h-"

"Make her shut up, bro," groaned Minji, nudging Hanni.

"It’s too early for this."

Hanni quickly clamped her small hands over Danielle's mouth, shutting her up immediately.

"Thank you," Seulgi smiled gratefully at Hanni before continuing. "Since there are many groups in the line-up, we have arranged five days for the photoshoot. This includes group photos, individual shots, and all JYP groups together."

You groaned internally. Photoshoots like this often-meant extreme work schedules and lack of sleep. At least you’ll be able to hang out with Ryujin a bit during the shoot if you were lucky.

It was also a good thing that your team consisted of a bunch of funny weirdos who took their jobs seriously, making work a bit more bearable.

Seulgi was one of the most compassionate and understanding managers you could ever ask for and had a knack for calming down your icy CEO (and her soulmate), Irene.

Karina was a talented photographer and filmmaker with stunning visuals. She shared the same perspective on the soulmate connection and knew about your temporary colorblind situation.

"I'd rather live and love freely for five years and die happy," Karina would say when asked why she wasn't looking for her soulmate. You and Karina clicked immediately when you joined the team, and she reminded you of Ryujin, whom you've always wanted to introduce her to.

Minji, Hanni, and Danielle were the “kids” on the team. Despite their youth at only 18 years old, they were all exceptionally talented at their jobs. Minji, the serious and soft-spoken visual director, collaborated seamlessly with you and Karina and often kept the other two rowdy girls in check. Hanni, the lighting technician, boasted her ability to eat bread for a week straight without feeling sick. Danielle, the talkative and positive force of nature, put all artists at ease with her makeup skills and welcoming demeanor.

After the long meeting that seemed to drag on for hours, you took out your phone to text Ryujin.  

As you gazed at your phone, a faint smile crept onto your lips. Despite not understanding the reason, you felt an unusual sense of anticipation for the upcoming shoot - almost eager even. You told yourself that it was simply the prospect of seeing Ryujin again that excited you, but the faint prickling sensation of your tattoo hinted otherwise.

It seems that with the announcement of the shoot, the bleakness in your eyes gradually subsided, replaced by a subtle, soft grey hue. It was as if a glimmer of hope had entered your world, and the shadows had transformed into mere whispers of grey. Previous chapter Next Chapter

[swinterr]

fic rec vi ♡

hi!

this is a another new set of fic rec and i’ll probably do a compilation of genre (?) just like the first ones.

made some changes like tidying up a bit and adding summary, for those that doesn’t have any summary i’ll try my best to add my own summary (it will probably be shit tho, i ain’t making a smut summary guys, i’m not confident in my describing a fic ability but i’ll try my best. if its in italic it means i made the summary hehez )  if the summary is shit, i made it okay.

read and support the fic and authors here: the fic rec ♡

a for angst

f for fluff

s for smut

// for series or list

nct 

jeno

no title by @tyongf-nct | s

- smut blurb.

body guards and boyfriend by @pastelsicheng | f

-  sometimes the only way you can really get some alone time with your boyfriend is by making his job hard.

lipstick smears by @kopikokun | f

-  jeno never thought trying to get his makeup artist’s attention would be this hard.

jaehyun

[10:30] by @moonttaeil | 

- a lockdown moment.

[2:40] by @nct-jungjaehyun | f a

- cute quality fluff time with bf!jae with a dash of angst.

[11:41] by @jeongvision | f 

- family time with apples.

just like magic by @starryhyuck | f s

-  jung jaehyun’s body count is almost as high as yours. however, after yuta spreads a nasty rumor, you learn that jaehyun’s always imagined those girls to be you instead.

love to hate me by @moonctzeny | s a 

-  you and jaehyun meet as sm trainees, developing a friendship until he debuts and you decided to leave the company and pursue a solo career. when you reunite again in a music show and he acts like he barely knows you, you stubbornly begin a series of hate-brimmed sex rendez-vous. your touch-and-go relationship continues on, until a song collaboration will force you both to deal with all your repressed feelings for each other.

moving on by @ddeonghwaa | f a

- reader has been chasing jae for some time but when she moved on jae suddenly enter the picture.

sun&moon by @ppangjae | f a

-  asking jeong jaehyun to accompany you to your family’s 1-week christmas vacation as your boyfriend has its consequences. one can surely get through 1 week of pretending to be in love with an enemy, right?

snack run with a snack by @kopikokun | f 

-  on your usual movie night with the members, they assign you sudden snack collecting duty. you’re a little peeved, but at least jaehyun offers to tag along. Unfortunately for you, things really aren’t going in your favour tonight.

lover boy by @neoct-zen | f s

- bunch fics of lover boy jae and reader.

jungwoo

one more time, please by @haequarius | f s

-  you don’t know what you and Jungwoo are, but you are certainly weak for him.

jealous by @whiplashsan | s 

-  jungwoo is all smiles and sunshine until he gets jealous, and he just so happens to get jealous over the smallest things when it comes to you.

doyoung

sugar, spice and everything not nice by @alreadyblondenow | s

-  doyoung getting your ring size wrong, unprotected sex, kitchen sex, slight fingering, wedding tragedies.

no title by @ncteaxhoe | s

- dom!doyoung, rough? i need holy water.

the little one by @ethaeriyeol | f 

-  a gift of life; female reader x husband!Doyoung; fluff, light angst, married au

lucas

exquisite taste by @weishenkonbini | s f

- smut but with a fluffy ending.

for you always by @labyrinthsofyou | f

-  in which you surprise yukhei when he forgets about your date.

6:19 by @cozykpopblurbs | f

- a cute fluff ft kun and winwin.

10:18 pm by @nctsoftarchives | f

- reader supports lucas at his superm debut stage. 

16:47 by @sichengssmile | f s 

- a fluffy smut. lucas a big boi.

missed you by @tokyobts | a f

-  after you and yukhei broke up, yukhei still has feelings for you. he reaches out to you at school and tries to get you back. at first you avoid him but later his actions manage to make your heart flutter. you’ve come to a sudden conclusion that you maybe still want him in your life.

johnny

34 + 35 by @domjaehyun | s 

- you and your husband johnny decide to take your marriage to the next step.

i couldn’t wait a little longer by @alreadyblondenow | s f a

-  you two were never together longer than two days, but the feelings, oh the feelings that you have for each other is clear as the day. it was a never-ending try of making the relationship official. johnny tried, you tried but it never happens.

what happens in korea, not stays in korea by @alreadyblondenow | f s 

-  a week vacation in korea for your sister’s wedding became even more exciting when a famous dj had a crush on you. johnny was sure that it’s love at first sight. not putting both of your careers on the line, you two had no regrets when the time comes and you finally leave.

laundry day by @immabiteyou | s

- a domestic fluffy smut.

make a wish by @sluttyten | s f a

-  you’re jungwoo’s sister, and he’s made it clear he wants you and Johnny to have nothing to do with each other. so you and johnny start fake dating to piss him off.

want it all by @sluttyten | f s 

-  you are entirely innocent to the point of being naive. johnny is not innocent, but he loves that you are because it means he can teach you everything you don’t know.

sungchan

wish i was her by @softsungchan | f a 

-  you wished you were her, laying in Sungchan’s arms and feeling his warm breath on your neck, giggling about sweet nothings whispered into the starry night. You wished for it to be you, the girl he liked.

2:21 am by @the32ndbeat | f 

- sungchan being whipped, thru a text message.

haechan

14:52 by @ukiyoexo | f

- a cute haechan and reader ft the reader’s baby sister moment.

prince’s order by @nsheetee | f

-  prince haechan nurses you after you faint, and orders you to stay with him until you feel better.

sweet treat by @markresonates | s

-  haechan takes you for ice cream but all you can think about is sex with him.  when you act like a brat, eventually you end up in the bathroom. with no panties. 

clingy by @love-mi | f 

-  I’m not clingy! I just love your company and constantly want to be around you and have your full attention at all times

mark

hyuck is always right by @luvrenjun00 | f 

- ceo!mark x reader ft baby donghyuck. a tooth-rotting fluff.

taeyong

snow storm by @whereisten | f s 

- a fluffy smut whilst a snow storm.

1:59 by @smoll-tangerine | f

- reader and taeyong ft my favorite game (where i always die first) among us!

bts

taehyung

is this allowed 1 2 by @seokiie  | f s

- how were you supposed to know bts would be filming at your coffee shop today? how were you supposed to know a certain curly-haired boy would take a liking  to you?

cabin pressure | f by @jiminrings | f 

-  pilot!y/n who accidentally became famous bc of a viral post about her, best friend!jimin!, taehyung having a shy lil crush on you aND ot7 being meanies for a tad bit :((

art major!tae and biochem major!yn | f by @jiminrings | f

-  tae’s cold and probably needs a friend more than he needs a model, y/n feels this nEED to take care of him, a term of enderment then a dash of emotional constipation and a sprinkle of jealousy :D

gank mid lane by @kimtaehyunq | f s 

- gank / verb: (in a video game) use underhand means to defeat or kill (a less experienced opponent)

birthday surprise by @ephemeralkookie |

-  like every year, you prepare a little surprise for your boyfriend’s birthday, one that you’ve been preparing for days. and after a very tiring day, taehyung only wants to spend the night in your loving arms.

jungkook

cookies & cream | s by @1kook | f s 

-  jungkook will watch a thousand cheesy christmas movies if it meant making you happy. (and maybe having his dick sucked.)

unholy night | s by @ephemeralkookie | f s

-  after a christmas day passed with the Jeon’s family, Jungkook decides to transform the holy night into an unholy one.

‘a short’ abstinence | s a by @seokiie | s a

-  maybe blue-balling you boyfriend (who has an insanely high sexual drive) wasn’t the best.

in which she’s done with him by @minstrivia | a

-  jungkook angst/fluff where he always pushes oc away (who confesses her feelings but was cruelly rejected) and insults her but she always comes back to take care of him when he’s drunk or picks him up from his one night stands and she finally decides to leave him alone.

bad influence by @noteguk | s 

-  in which you know jungkook is a bad influence on you, but you can’t avoid falling for him every time.

jock!jk and shy art major!yn by @jiminrings | f

-  established relationship ft. jock!jk and shy art major!y/n, y/n gets an unexpected pep talk and jungkook doubts himself, and either so much tears or so much dUST according to kook

special affair by @1oserjk | f

-  sugar daddy au except it’s just jk spoiling u thru animal crossing

fairy of shampoo by @ironicarmy | f s

-  sundays are for relaxation, house cleaning, and happiness.

abstract ft bob ross by @mimithings97 | f

-  paintbrush in one hand, joint in the other and you sitting on his dick is what jeongguk wants. and what jeongguk wants, jeongguk gets.

badboy!jungkook by @jungshookz | f 

- badboy!jungkook falls for good girl reader ft the boys and the reader’s apple. 

growing by @lesgetittkookie | f

- dad!jungkook teacher his daughter how to walk. super super cute family/domestic fluff.

quiet, baby by @bratkook | s 

- i don’t how to write a summary on smuts so imma just put this. reader and jungkook doing something in the subway.

still want that by @whatifyoulivelikethat | s

-  fucking min yoongi ex-girlfriend? a terrible idea. being hopelessly in love with her at the same time? an even worse idea. knowing he was being used and still doing it anyway? ah, Jeon Jungkook, what are you doing? part 2 of savage love.

desiderium by @jeonggukingdom | f s 

-  “we’ve been at it like rabbits, how are you still so horny?”. a newlyweds!au smut.

chapstick by @softyoongiionly | f s

- based on the time Jungkook said he needed someone to scold him so he’d remember to put lip balm on. or jungkook’s had a really long day and the only that can make it better, is seeing you. 

lover boy by @jingukk | f 

-  jungkook likes you. a lot.

unexpected confession by @sunkissedjk | f

-  you gathered up the courage to confess your feelings, but it seems everyone in school knows about it before you could even find him.

string attached by @ephemeralkookie | s

-  jungkook is what we can call your sexfriend. No strings attached, just you and him having fun and releasing the huge pressure and stress of being idols. But after spending an entire day together, you realize that maybe he’s not just your sexfriend.

no title by @himbojk | f s 

- dilf jk.

astro

eunwoo

ceo!eunwoo by @m0onbean

no title by @yutopiada | f

- a cute idol!reader and eunwoo moment at a music show.

disney by @bangchan-sonyeondan | f

- a cute date with eunwoo at disney. reader likes vintage things hence using a disposable camera.

baby, it’s cold outside by @fresh-outta-jams | f 

- a cute cold christmas fluff with eunwoo ft. the boys. reader went to the boys’ place for a sweater and cocoa gift exchange.

got7

yugyeom

cruel brothers by @imsarabum | f

-  jackson and jaebum have always acted as if they were your big, overprotective brothers. so when they both walk in on you and yugyeom in a very intimate position, things get a little tense!

txt

soobin

a special night by @gyuluster | f

-  an intimate insight on the first night of choi soobin’s wedding, consisting of kitchen floors, witches and an eternity of love.

boughs & branches by @jeogiyall | f 

-  decorating the tree with boyfriend! choi soobin from txt! fluffity fluff fluff with a lot of cute fluff thrown in and a dash of christmastime fluff. 

sleepy binnie by @immabiteyou | s

-  “i’ll let you do anything if you just touch me now. “ a sleepy soobin smut.

cake by @immabiteyou | s

- reading waiting for mc soobin with the guys. a cute fluffy smut moment.

kpop oc/s

seri by @ggukkiedae

anyway, thank you again for the writers please take care and be safe!

please free to recommend your favorite fic that i haven’t feature yet.

if the links won’t work and i labelled some fics wrong please let me know and i’ll try to fix it as soon as possible!

support the fic and the writers!

[mypearchive]

PHILIP ETTINGER
                                                                                     in HBO Series I Know This Much Is True


PHOTOGRAPHY Mark Squires FASHION EDITOR Deborah Ferguson 
Interview by Sydney Nash


Philip Ettinger is an American actor, whose credits include starring alongside Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried in “First Reformed” and “The Evening Hour,” which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Ettinger’s most recent project is HBO’s “I Know This Much is True,” helmed by director Derek Cianfrance and starring Mark Ruffalo. Based on Wally Lamb’s acclaimed novel by the same name, it tells the story of the complicated relationship of two brothers (twins), one of which lives with paranoid schizophrenia. Ruffalo stars as the older iteration of the twins, while Ettinger inhabits the two characters in their youth. ContentMode spoke to the actor about the limited series and arguably, his best performance yet. 


Q: Before we dive into questions about I Know This Much Is True, I must first say, bravo. This show is visceral, heart-wrenching, and achingly beautiful. It was a very emotional experience watching, I must say. I’m curious as to the type of feedback you’ve been hearing from viewers and the people around you about the show. 


A: Thanks for saying that. This project is so close to my heart. It felt super emotional shooting it… it’s been really special. You know we’re going through such a fucking crazy time right now. You make a thing and have that whole experience of shooting it, and then you never really know how it might connect in the time of when it’s finally released. When I’m working on something, I’m so much in the state of not even thinking of it as being a product. Then, when it’s time for it to come out, it’s a bit of a mind fuck and scary.  And this in particular was such a vulnerable experience. Everyone gave so much of their heart to it. It’s being released in a really crazy and heavy time, and the show deals with a lot of real and heavy things. But what’s been amazing is the people who have reached out to me to tell me how important it’s been to them. And how much of an emotional balm it’s been. People have vulnerably shared with me how this show has made them feel less alone in their own unique situations and emotions. Honestly, it’s been fucking beautiful to see how much we all can relate and share in the really difficult work of being a human being.


We’re all connected. It’s been a nice reminder for me personally in this isolating time of quarantine.


Q: Tell me about how this role came about. I know you’ve been a long admirer of Mark Ruffalo’s work, so this must have been a dream project.


A: The whole thing just feels kind of kismet. One day, I get a random email from a friend of mine who was going in to audition for young Dessa (younger Kathryn Hahn). This was before I really knew anything about it. She forwarded me her appointment with the script and said, “You should be young Dominick/Thomas.” All of young Dessa’s scenes were with young Dominick/Thomas, so I was able to see what it was like.


I’ve always looked up to Mark and have been compared to him in the past. I even wrote him a letter when I was in acting school and doing This Is Our Youth, which was the play he did in New York, and I expressed to him how much I connect to his work. He was doing Awake and Sing! on Broadway at the time and I went to see the play and gave him the letter. On top of that, I grew up with a brother who dealt with schizophrenic symptoms. I felt a really strong purpose to tell this story as real and accurately as possible. It’s rare when it happens, but sometimes things come along where it’s much deeper than it just being a job. The purpose for doing it is so strong and instinctual that I’m able to move through any fears or insecurities to do it. I went into this audition with a really strong sense that I was the person who was meant to help tell this story.


Q: Did you and Mark ever prep for the role together? I’ve read that you and him took a long walk around the Upper West Side before shooting started.


A: Yeah we did. The way it worked was Mark shot all of Dominick first and then took a month and a half off to gain about 50 pounds in order to play Thomas. During that time off is when I shot most of my stuff. We would text back and forth with ideas and before shooting began we hung out and read each other’s scenes together. Then Mark went off to shoot his Dominick side. Derek Cianfrance our director showed me a bunch of Mark’s dailies for me to kind of get a sense of what Mark was doing with Dominick, but when it came to Thomas, I was the first one to introduce what he’d be like. It was fucking scary because I wanted to be as instinctual as possible and to make my own unique choices. At the same time, I didn’t want to paint Mark into a corner because he’d have to evolve whatever I was doing into older Thomas.

About a week before I went to shoot, I met Mark on the Upper West Side at a diner. We talked for hours. I had been waiting in the wings for months, getting ready to take over when he took his break. I can be a pretty obsessive thinker, so at that point, I was pretty much bursting holding these two distinctly different characters inside of me, ready to express myself and let my Dominick and Thomas out. At the same time, I was absolutely terrified because the thing I’d been obsessing about and literally having intense symbolic dreams about was finally going to happen. Mark encouraged me to make it my own, and on the way out of the diner, I started to tell him about these crazy and intense dreams I was having that were kind of informing me who these guys were. He said, “I’ve been having dreams too. Let’s take a walk,” and then we just walked like 50 city blocks. We were just meshing our energies, ideas and physicalities, as well as sharing stories and quickly connecting on a really vulnerable level to each other. We were having very similar dreams. It was crazy and beautiful and a night I’ll always remember. Talking about it now makes me yearn to get back into more collaborative experiences again.


Q: If you don’t mind me asking, how emotionally intense was performing the roles of both Dominick and Thomas? Did you find one character more challenging than the other and were you able to separate the two performances, or were they always informing the other?

A: It’s hard to really describe it using words. The whole thing was one big instinctual and emotional experiment. It was kind of impossible to anticipate the best way to make it all work.

First day was completely trial and error. Mark shot each character separately with a lot of time apart, but I was having to do every scene going back and forth. The whole thing was very out of body and cathartic. Or more like in my body and out of my head.


It’s interesting, I’ve been doing therapy in quarantine and have worked a bit with childhood regression exercises and going back to a time when I was four or five. I’ll go back on impulse and really connect to the feelings I was feeling without too much awareness of social rules and insecurities and ideas of how I needed to be and act. Then, doing the same thing, but going back to the thirteen year old version of me, who at that point had been knocked around a bit and was very insecure and shut down and scared and had less trust and freedom of emotion. Both of them are very alive inside of me. Shooting every scene, I’d be Dominick and feel really repressed and kind of locked up and angry and insecure in my feelings. Then when I’d switch over to Thomas, I got to rip off the shield and filter that I’ve created to personally protect myself in my life and just feel my feelings and pain and fear and anger and fully be on my impulse in a safe environment. It was freeing and painful and blissful, and all of the feelings. I gave myself permission not to judge myself. Then, I’d go back into Dominick and the shield went back up. It was a lot of back and forth of that.


Honestly, it’s impossible to really explain it in retrospect. It was like one giant therapeutic experiment. It definitely changed me and gave me some different perspectives.


Q: Did you ever feel like your acting influenced Mark’s performance or vice versa?


A: It felt like one ongoing collaboration. We were taking from each other from the preparation through the shooting. But there was an ease to it all, which just shows how generous Mark is as a human being and artist. He didn’t have to invite me in the way he did. I’m very grateful for that.


Q: What was it like working with director Derek Cianfrance? Did Derek allow you to bring your own experiences and POV to your characters?


A: Derek is my emotional soul brother. The guy has so much fucking heart and just sets up an atmosphere of trust and love and challenges you to go deeper than any ideas you may have and to find the truth of every moment. He wants you to bring all of your heart and soul to the part. He’s done so much work and has thought so deeply about the characters and the scenes, but then challenges and almost expects you to surprise him. It’s all about, as he says, ‘trying to capture Halley’s Comet in every scene.’ Something that’s straight from impulse and truth and surprising and spontaneous and can never be exactly recreated. It’s all a big experiment and diving into the truth of every dynamic and relationship.

That’s exactly the way I love to work, so it was just a fucking dream to play like that.


But in order to work at that level, you need to have such trust in the leader and it needs to be such a safe environment. With Derek, I just felt so safe.


Q: Tell me a little bit about how filming two characters on-screen at the same time worked. How much of what the audience sees when Dominick and Thomas are together is CGI?


A: It’s crazy. The editing is incredible. Other than a few connecting shots, many of the scenes the two brothers are never in the same shot together. I think Derek wanted to make it feel as natural and un-CGI as possible, so he relied on the performances to connect the dots. The response has been that it feels pretty seamless and not a distraction, which is great to hear. We all definitely tried to avoid the trick of it all and really cared about making each brother his own three dimensional being.


Q: The show was shot on film as compared to digitally. What’s the difference that shooting on film makes to the final product and the audience experience?


A: It’s awesome. It was my first time shooting on film. There’s a heightened intensity to it all, because there’s a limited amount of time before the film rolls out. It’s exciting. I tend to work best and am able to commit more when adrenaline is a little higher and there’s a little more pressure. There’s also something more tactile about it all. It feels more activated and felt like we were shooting a movie instead of a TV show.


Q: I’ve read in other interviews where you’ve spoken about how your relationship with your own brother (who has a history with schizophrenic symptoms) influenced your performance. Can you tell me a little bit about this (if you don’t mind sharing)? How important was authenticity to you?


A: My brother is doing great now. It’s amazing. But there was a long time when I was growing up where he was suffering. I watched him struggle through a lot of thoughts and emotions inside of his head. On the flip side, he was probably the most honest, empathetic and connected-to-the-energy-around-him person that I knew. And has deeply affected how I see things in a really special way. I also watched my parents try and understand and protect and deal with it and help. And do the best that they possibly could under the circumstances. They were amazing. But I also watched them struggle and make questionable decisions in order to help in the only ways they knew how. I was also having my own experience.


What was so important to me about this show was to be able to express all sides of the situation and the nuance to it all. Often, when there’s mental illness in a family, everyone is doing the best that they can with the tools that they have. Sometimes the “crazy” one is the most tapped in and actually present and intuitive and available. Sometimes the ones, who on the surface have their shit together, have no idea what they are doing.


I think this was a way for me to express myself and better understand what repressed feelings I had having a brother with mental illness. One thing’s for certain: I don’t think anyone involved was interested in anything but navigating the truths and realities of these situations.


Q: Based on your own experiences with your brother, the director Derek added in a scene to one of the episodes. Can you elaborate on what this scene was?


A: Yeah, I told Derek a bunch of stories about me and my brother. There was a period of time when he was around 22 and in the midst of a mental break. I was around 9, and we shared a room. Some of the stories were scary, but a lot of them were really funny and beautiful. I observed my brother be so present and tapped in to the energy and people around him. Sometimes his thoughts would get away from him, but almost always, the impulse of the thought and the intuition he would have was so on point. It made me feel like he was often more present and truthful and sane than so many other people around me who seemed to be repressing, overlooking and complying to the rules of society and the pressures of fitting in and saying and doing the right and popular thing. I felt like he really took me in and saw me better than anyone else.


I told Derek about how often my brother’s energy felt so expansive and truthful to his feelings that it would be infectious to the people around him and magical to me. And then Derek added a scene in episode 4 where Thomas is feeling a lot of emotions and the best way he’s able to express himself is through unadulterated dance. It’s a moment that Dominick watches on and knows he’d never be able to be so free in his emotions to express himself like that. [Derek] told me he added that scene inspired by the stories I told him about my brother.


Q: At its core, the show is about the relationship between two brothers, but the show touches on so many different enduring themes. What about the story speaks most strongly to you?


A: We’re all trying to get through life in the best ways that we know how. We all have unique family situations, life expectations, and struggles and pains on different levels. The show and Wally Lamb’s novel just touches on what it’s like to be human and the possibility for growth and change when it may feel like it’s impossible. As he says, “But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears.” And another quote that seems to resonate more than ever: “With destructions comes renovations.”


Q: You must be very proud of this show and the reception it’s receiving. How did you feel seeing the finished product?


A: It feels a little surreal to watch. It’s hard for me to fully take in my own stuff or to judge it good and bad, but what I will say is that there’s so much heart in the show and I’m forever proud and grateful to be a part of it. And to watch Mark and Rosie and Kathryn and John and Melissa and Archie and everyone else and feel so connected to them. And to have my family watch it and have it inspire new conversations between us. It feels very healing in a lot of ways. 


Q: Moving forward, what types of roles are you hoping to pursue? What’s the most important aspect of a project to you?


A: I don’t really know. I want to continue to work with people who inspire me and to feel a purpose with what I’m doing beyond ego and expectation. And to keep doing stuff that really scares me and to ultimately just find things that will help me evolve and gain some different perspectives. To continue to do things that make me feel connected and out of my own head.

I’ve been lucky to be a part of a few things where everyone involved is connected and on the same page and doing it for the right reasons, and the material is strong and every once in a while, when all those stars are aligned you can have moments of transcendence absent of ego and fear and judgement and you’re just riding on your impulse and intuition and heart. I want to keep chasing that.


Q: With the world in the midst of a pandemic and social unrest, what are you most hopeful for?


A: How connected we all really are even though the world feels divided right now. There’s so much pain and fear and anger right now, but there’s also a lot of change happening. And beauty. If there’s any silver lining to all of this loss, pain and suffering, I think it’s that it’s forced us to be more present with our families and loved ones. And maybe break some habits that we’d never be able to break on our own. And slowed things down a bit. And forced us all to look inward and to take a pause from all the fast and constant external validation so many of us think we want or need. I’ve witnessed thousands of people coming together to support each other and to stand up to injustice. This time has been traumatic on many levels for everyone, and I’m sure there will be long term effects of that, but also I’m excited to see the positive effects and positive changes this time may cause. In a way, it felt like we needed a bit of a reset and recalibration to really make some changes.

Quick Qs


Q: If you weren’t an actor, what would you be?

A: Maybe a therapist? I’m endlessly fascinated in why people do what they do and how they do it. And don’t do things. And why. And the relationship between our conscious and unconscious bodies and minds. And the potential of evolving our thought patterns past or through our blocks and pain and traumas. I’ve also spent a lot of time working one-on-one with autistic kids and adults, so maybe that. Something to do with human behavior and connection and growth and expression. Or if I was taller and more athletically gifted, it would be pretty damn cool to be an NBA basketball player.


Q: Role model?


A: Literally anyone who’s able to get through life with continued kindness, open-heartedness, positivity and evolution.

Q: Pet peeve?

A: People giving advice to other people based on what they would want or how they would act or react, instead of taking in the other person’s perspective.

Q: Most slept-on movie?


A: This is not particularly slept on, but this conversation and question is making me think of The Devil and Daniel Johnston. 


Q: The last thing you binged?


A: I’m a novice TV watcher. This past year and during quarantine is the first time I’ve really caught up on shows. Recently I’ve gone through Mad Men, The Affair – Maura Tierney’s so good in that. I just watched Normal People. I thought Paul Mescal was such a subtle and good actor in that. Oh, and In Treatment. I love In Treatment. I just heard that they may be bringing it back, which is exciting to hear. The nuances of two people in a room talking for a long time really does it for me.


Q: Dream role?


A: Hamlet? Even though that scares the shit out of me and seems to be a cliche’d answer for an actor my age.

Q: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?


A: To try easier. It’s not necessarily the amount of time spent working, but more the quality and headspace of that time. 
Also, to stop trying to control the outcome of what and how I think I want something to go. Because guaranteed it won’t go exactly as planned and trying to force what I think is the best thing is quantifying and limiting the possibilities of what it could be. 
And something that I saved that Mark actually said to me:
  Hang tough, stay real, make your shots count when you get them and no matter what, keep moving. Just keep moving.


_______________________________________________


For remaining photographs from the Content Mode article, scroll down to the next post. 


(I am archiving this entire article here, because I have no idea whether or not the Content Mode site will continue to host the Ettinger interview in the future, as more is published there in time. No copyright infringement is intended.)

[anikaswiftie]

My journey of being a Swiftie

Everyone does kind of know since when they are fans of Taylor Swift. Since when they follow her journey in life and career. For me it’s a curve of ups and downs with only going up at the end. I am making this way too dramatic, but I have this feeling like I need to write this all down and make it public, like I need to justify my fangirling journey, so I can say “I have been a Taylor Swift fan since years”. This fandom is so massive. It is the biggest fandom I have ever been a part of (and that can be scary) and everyone became a fan in different parts of their own lives and in different parts of Taylor’s life. So here is my journey, no one asked for, but yet I still have the urge to put down. 

In 2012 I was first introduced to the name and music of Taylor Swift. I was about 11 at that time. Coming from Germany, not actively listening to music or caring about it at all at that age and just getting introduced to the world wide web, I was shown my probably very first YouTube video on a black iPad 3rd generation from my best friend. It was a video of Miss Taylor Swift, playing songs in a language I could not understand (with the exception of a few words) sitting with her guitar in front of a crowd which made themselves comfortable. It was the Red hangout and the performances of three songs of the album. I do not remember which ones I listened to, but I remember watching it and thinking Taylor was super cool! Then I sometimes heard songs of hers on the radio and really liked them, but I still had no clue about being a Swiftie.

In 2015 I went grocery shopping with my dad and they sold 1989 and I asked my dad if I could have the album. And he said YES. And I listened to that album so much! I really loved it!! And I still do. So much! I liked some edits of Taylor on WeHeartIt, the only social media I got back then. And I began watching her music videos on TV and became obsessed with the Blank Space music video and know that I tried uncountable times to recreate her eating the little candy heart as elegantly and smoothly as she did. I think I failed at that :D. As you do in middle school you also exchange your tastes in music and I started discovering my own taste, mixed with a bunch of influences of others. Spotify was the platform to be, but at that time Taylor Swift's catalog was fully taken off the side and I added only a blank space cover to my playlists. It never occurred to me to buy another album off of amazon or in a music store. What most of my friends back then listened to was trap or rap. I didn’t connect with that music and also did not really like it, but I listened to it in my free time, because I thought that was what I had to do, to fit in and to be cool enough. When I rediscovered 1989 in 2016 I told a friend of mine “I have a Taylor Swift CD I like to listen to right now” and she said “That really fits you, but it isn’t my kind of music.”. And somehow I took it up as something bad, that it would suit me, to listen to Taylor Swift, I felt like that meant “I don’t like her music and we cannot talk about that, you better listen to something else or we are not having a conversation about music anymore, because your taste is so completely different then mine.”, I know that is not what she meant. But I really felt the urge to accommodate my music taste to hers/theirs. 

I only listened to 1989 at home on CD and then got caught up in a spiral of watching TV Shows and was first introduced to fandoms. I became a fan of numeros shows and began being a fangirl, also on the internet. In middle school I had a friend I would watch a show with and fangirl over it, after a while people asked us if we could not talk about something else. So we just talked about it rarely.

I began video editing and posting it on the internet and really got sucked into Instagram. I also really enjoyed The Hunger Games - Series and know that I rewinded the credits a bunch of times, because I loved Safe & Sound some much. That song I actually found on Spotify and was able to play it there as well and I loved listening to it while reading. Why didn't I listen to Eyes Open? I honestly don’t know. Maybe I did not notice it was on the soundtrack. So there I was, being a fan of a bunch of TV-Shows, starting to improve my English and thinking of music artists just as people who made music and not really got more into it.

When the music video to Look What You Made Me Do came out it was recommended to me on YouTube and I watched, fascinated by the visuals and the money that must’ve been put into this (which was a lot as I now know). After that I went back to my fangirling on Instagram. 

Then I joined stan twitter and became a fan of more and more things. Went to high school. Not being close to anyone there and just knowing two people. I started building my own personality. I was more confident, because I really wanted to meet new people and not be totally by myself. I met amazing people. Who cared and still care about me and my opinions. Who never made me feel uncomfortable for being a fan of something and encouraged me to embrace it, even though they might have nothing to do with it. They didn’t make me feel embarrassed or uneasy about it. And I am beyond thankful for that. Thank you!<3

I also had conversations in high school with people about music. And one of my classmates liked Panic! At the Disco. I began listening to a bunch of their stuff after having a meme of This is gospel on my for you page and became a fan. This was at the end of 2018. For the first time in my life I entwined in a fandom which was related to music. Around half a year later Taylor Swift released the first single of her new album, which we would later find out would be named Lover. The single was called ME! and it was a collaboration with Panic! At the Disco’s Brendon Urie. After that single dropped and I re-watched the music video many many times and watched multiple videos on it and it’s easter eggs. Followed the first Swiftie - accounts on stan twitter and then finally the legend herself.

I’ve been wanting to write an essay about this for a while now. Without listening to her other albums before finishing it. Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now and Red are waiting for me. I’ve only listened to the ones which have music videos or which she covered on tour or some bits from edits I saw over the years (her songs make GREAT audios for couple video edits;)).

I am a proud Swiftie now and so proud of her! 

And yeah, I have some great albums to get to.

[falcongumba]

Lesley Mok

Photo by Luke Marantz 

Lesley Mok is an immensely creative drummer, percussionist and composer who works in a wide variety of collaborative ensembles as well as writing music for her own projects. She is also part of Polyfold Musical Arts Collective, a really wonderful group of musicians who have been curating a concert series for musicians to present new works of music as well as running a small record label that already has a sizable catalog.

I’ve only known Lesley for a couple of years, but we have played together a few times in informal sessions and I always admired her original drumming and her strong voice as a composer.

In this discussion we talked about her entire trajectory as a musician as well as some of her upcoming projects and plans.

JT: You’ve told me before that you are originally from the Bay Area but I’m a bit curious about your family’s background. Where are your parents from? What did they do?

LM: Neither of my parents are creative professionals, though I'd consider both of them creative people. I'm a first-generation American, and like many immigrants at the time, both of them had an intense desire to climb the social ladder and make it for themselves in the United States. I think uprooting one's life and moving to an unfamiliar place takes a different kind of creativity--figuring out which bus to take, what to eat, how to communicate...they're cultural challenges that require creative thinking.

JT: And, were they the first ones to steer you into getting music lessons? Or was that something that you wanted on your own?

LM: My mom forced me to take piano lessons, but drum lessons were something I asked for.

JT: Before we get onto the drums. I read on your bio that you also played the flute, correct?

LM: Yes! In my elementary and middle school concert bands.

JT: I imagine studying flute and piano was likely helpful, no? You write a lot of music now.

LM: Definitely - it gave me a  good sense of tonal harmony, or at least what it sounded like and how it might move. It wasn't until recently that I started writing music,  but taking lessons at a young age gave me a lot to work from. It's like learning a language at a young age..you can't really forget it.

JT: That’s amazing! So how did you arrive at the drums originally?

LM: I don't really remember, to be honest, but I took lessons for a few years before joining the middle school jazz band. I would invite friends over to work on songs we learned in school. I was terrified of soloing and I remember wanting to work on trading 4’s so I wouldn’t embarrass myself during rehearsal.

JT: And was it already pretty geared toward a jazz thing? Or were you playing other kinds of music?

LM: I was drawn to jazz from the beginning - it always felt like the music I wanted to play. I wanted to be in a backing band for a singer - my favorite records were with Ella, Billie Holiday, and Nancy Wilson.

JT: What kind of form did that listening take?

LM: One of the first drummers I met, Scott Lowrie, introduced me to a bunch of records like Sonny Rollins Quartet, Sarah Vaughan with Basie, Miles Davis’ First Quintet...He would point out certain things that captured him, like how swinging Philly Joe’s ride cymbal was, or the vibrato in Sarah’s voice, or how relaxed Paul Chamber’s beat was. He would sing along to the drum solos and try to figure out what sticking Philly Joe would more likely play. He introduced to me a listening culture that made me more interested in the music.

JT: What was the transition to Berklee like?

LM: I had started to meet a bunch of other high school musicians in my junior year of high school through programs like the Stanford Jazz Workshop. Everyone could really play, and it inspired me to know that people my age were already so committed to music. I remember Cory Cox and Caili O’Doherty were mentors at the program at the time, and just hearing them play encouraged me to apply to music school.

JT: That’s cool because that's kind of a common thread for a lot of people that I know from the Bay Area. There were all these music camps, and a lot of people went and even if a lot of them didn't end up playing music professionally, they still would end up playing an instrument pretty well and having a really strong appreciation for music.

LM: Yeah, I studied with Akira Tana at the time and I remember he even recommended that I not go to music school; he was like “you should check out these other things”.

I think a lot of my hesitation about going to music school didn't have to do with music itself but how to make a living in music. At that time, coming from a more traditionally minded family, music wasn’t a legitimate practice or career. It wasn’t until college when I built up more confidence and commitment to music.

JT: I remember you telling me that you had a pretty good experience at Berklee.

LM: The first two years at Berklee were a little unstructured and I was sort of confused about how to move forward. I felt lucky to play in a few ensembles that I really enjoyed, including Jason Palmer’s ensemble (my first foray into odd meters and original music) and Ralph Peterson’s Art Blakey ensemble, but I didn’t have high enough ratings to get into some other ensembles. (Those of you who are familiar with Berklee’s rating system can maybe empathize!). I felt a bit discouraged with navigating what felt like a bureaucratic system.

In my third year, I applied to this program called the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, led by Danilo Perez and Marco Pignataro. I didn't get in my first time around, but then I think it was in my sixth semester or something I auditioned again and got in. That program was really significant for me.

Global gave me some clarity in my practice and I was able to prioritize my learning. It was also during this time when I started to think about bigger questions, not just how to play the drums and music, but you know...how to play music in a culturally and socially informed way.

JT: And what were some of the breakthroughs? Was there a teacher that was particularly empowering? Or was it just the benefit of being in the program?

LM: The program itself was very empowering, but Danilo, Terri Lynne Carrington and Ben Street were the three teachers that really influenced me. Bob Gullotti was also enormously influential as a teacher. We would work on playing Bird heads around the drums. He was so thorough with the way he thought about dynamics, articulation, and tambor, and if he didn’t feel like you played the essence of the melody, he would ask you to work on the same thing for the following week. I hadn’t thought much about drumming outside of a rhythmic and linguistic context up until that point so those lessons were super transformative. Bob would play every Monday night at the Fringe--I remember hearing him take a solo on sticks on a ballad at like 40bpm, and being like, “Holy shit, I want to be able to do that.” Bob passed away just last year--he was a completely dedicated teacher and I will always treasure our time together.

JT: When did you move to NY?

LM: I moved in September of 2017.

JT: Okay. And did you move because you felt that New York was a center for this music? Or was there another reason?

LM: There was never much doubt in my mind about moving to New York after school. I travelled between Boston and New York pretty often while I was in school to take lessons or see shows, so after I finished my final year at Berklee I moved here.

JT: There's usually all these logistical and life challenges moving here the first year. How did that affect you? Were you able to get to music right away? Or was there an adjustment period?

LM: It was a tremendous life change. I applied for a bunch of jobs the first week I moved here, and ended up working at a small entertainment law firm for about four months..that's how long I lasted! (Haha) It was super gruesome and I was pretty miserable. I was in the office for nine hours a day, and would head to my studio every day at 6pm and practice until 10pm or so. I would plan sessions on weekends or weeknights after work. Oddly enough, I think I practiced the most when I had that job just because I knew I had to structure my time really well.

It was an emotionally tough time, but it really made me question what was important to me. I think I was scared of what it meant to be a working musician but after working at the law firm, I knew it wasn't something I could do--my body and mind just rejected it. After I quit my job I felt like I had control over my own time and free will, and it was then that I really started pursuing music more fearlessly.

JT: Yeah, I feel like there’s a huge character building that happens in that first year and then the following years almost get easier by contrast or something.

LM: I’m definitely less stressed out than I was that first year. There are always challenges and self-doubt, but I feel like I can return to familiar rooms in my mind and trust that I’ll overcome the moment.

That said, I still worry all the time if my music’s any good, if anyone resonates with it, and if other people like playing with me, etc. (Haha)

JT: And in those first couple of years were you already able to find some people to play with or did it take some time?

LM: I was playing with a lot of really great musicians, but the more I questioned my own artistic values, the more I was able to also find a community of people I resonated with emotionally and artistically. I also moved to Bushwick in November 2018 and started playing with people with completely different value systems. To be honest, I couldn’t relate at first. I heard Weasel Walter for the first time and remember thinking how weird and overwhelmed and intrigued I felt. There’s a record he’s on with Mary Halvorson and Peter Evans, and there are long stretches of time where he doesn’t play anything I can identify as a sound from the drum set. Hearing him along with other musicians like Brandon Lopez and Matteo Liberatore made me think consciously about all the musical choices I can make in any given moment. My first year living in Bushwick felt like everything I had known and felt about music was flipped upside down. I had to learn to engage with creative music beyond the ride cymbal being the main timbral focus...beyond jazz.

JT: I remember you telling me that you didn't start writing your own compositions right away.

LM: Yeah, I didn't really start writing until the end of 2018 with my band The Living Collection. It's funny to think that my first foray into writing was for a large chamber-like ensemble because I feel like I still have huge gaps in my knowledge of harmony and traditional compositional methods.

But it's something that also I think freed me from thinking I had to do a certain thing or compose in a certain way. I learned so much through trial and error...I'd have the flute in one octave and then have bass clarinet in another octave only to realize that the flute was barely audible. I had random mistakes in my chart, or very inconvenient ways of writing things, or literally impossible parts to play, so it was really trial by fire. But I think I learned through having a supportive group of friends for a band who would share their thoughts with me, and criticisms as well.

JT: I think I listened to everything there is currently available from that band. The music is really beautiful. I was wondering what is your concept for the music of the group?

LM: I think it's changed a lot. Some of the first compositions we played had many independent, moving parts. I was drawing a lot of inspiration from Henry Threadgill at that time. I was writing entirely notated music at one point, after listening to more contemporary classical composers like [Helmut] Lachenmann. Recently I’ve been thinking more about the idea of musical democracy and non-hierarchical ways of playing, improvisation being a vehicle for these social-cultural processes involved: spirituality, community-as-oneness, and communal joy. I hope to establish a context in which everyone can participate in music as a necessary ritualistic function.

JT: That brings me to the work that you've been doing with Polyfold Musical Arts Collective. How did it come about and how did you all start fleshing out these ideas?

LM: Well, I'm the newest member of Polyfold. The collective originally started in Detroit and consisted of 20-something musicians. It took on a new shape when a few of its members moved to Brooklyn in 2017, so the current membership includes myself, Yuma Uesaka, Alex Levine, and Ben Rolston. The idea is basically to expand opportunities for improvisers to create original music. That usually takes the form of a monthly concert series, something we call Polyfold Presents, but we’ve also put together these “Sunday Salons,” informal workshops where people can bring their music or share ideas they’re exploring. The idea comes from something Geri Allen used to do with her students. We recently have been working on our record label...your record was actually the first we put out in awhile! So thank you for all your work on that.

*Lesley adds: (Juanma’s band was originally scheduled to perform at the April concert series, but when COVID hit, we commissioned him along with the other artists that we scheduled to perform, to perform a creative work of any kind. He ended up recording four full-length compositions remotely with his band. It was so well recorded and the process was so representative of the moment that we decided to put it out on the label. Check it out - ‘Folklore’ by Juanma Trujillo.)

JT: How, would you describe the role that you have in the collective?

LM: It's hard to say, the structure and the nature of the organization has changed over time, our roles kind of shift as we go. I just worked on writing the last grant. Trying to put into words what exactly is it we do and making sure we're holding ourselves accountable for those things.

JT: Has being part of this initiative been rewarding in a way that you didn't expect? Has it helped you see things in a different way?

LM: Yeah, for sure. It’s made me realize how important and powerful organizing is for the improvised music community and how we all sort of depend on each other.

JT: Yeah, I think I wanted to get your input on that because I’ve been kind of pleasantly surprised to see that you guys as a group of artists who are already playing together and are good friends are also welcoming people from outside your circle. In my time living here I can confidently say that this is somewhat rare.

LM: Yeah..I hope it becomes less rare. I've met some people that have really made it feel like home here.

I think it’s hard to feel a sense of community in a place like New York, where artists-entrepreneurs are constantly up against so many things. It seems like everyone’s competing for the same opportunities.

I think community building starts on a personal level...who you hang out with or talk to, who’s in your band, what kind of bills you’re curating if you’re a bandleader. All of these things are part of what makes a community. The 501c3 is just a status.

JT: So we’ve talked about your main projects, but I can also see that you're doing quite a bit of one off gigs with people just improvising. How has that been helpful in your development?

LM: I often feel like there's a lot of pressure to play written music or to present something really polished, which I also enjoy, but it’s nice to get to know someone intimately without the pressure of following a specific musical format. It’s really invigorating getting to know their musical perspective in an open space and forming a connection.

Depending on the improvisational context, I sometimes feel that there’s nothing I wish to contribute on the drum set. It’s encouraged me to work on different techniques that might produce different sounds and timbres and to search for percussion instruments that might give me a broader range of expression. My dream is to build a drum cage like the one in that iconic photo with Roscoe Mitchell!

JT: Are there any of the other projects that you have that you would like to talk about or mention any other experiences that have been meaningful to you recently?

LM: I recently spent two weeks in Newton, MA with my good friends Maya and Akiva. We had no agenda other than to play music if we felt like it. It was one of the more intimate and spiritually fulfilling experiences I’ve had in awhile. The music felt like an extension of our cooking together, our swims in the lake, our humming. I listened back to some of the recordings we made a few days ago...it feels both personal and non-precious. It reminds me of these words by Nicole Mitchell--

“If you practice your connection to the stars enough, you can go anytime you please. The Dogon mastered it, but the shoebox architects sold kids on rap videos over stargazing. Doesn’t matter how much pollution, or how many ceilings or drones are flying above, the stars are there. I promise. No wonder Lightin’ Hopkins, Jeff Parker, Jimi Hendrix and all the bluesmen made their own vessel guitars to communicate here. And ever better, I’m tellin’ you, there are no consequences, no punishments and no side effects except joy and more strength. Can you imagine? I’m thinking, maybe we can build a bridge from pain to hope and insight and take all our families there.”

JT: Thank you Lesley!

LM: Yeah, thanks so much for doing this.

You can learn more about Lesley on her website: https://www.lesleymok.com/

Lesley has all her releases available on: https://lesleymok.bandcamp.com/

[be-ready-when-i-say-go]

A Family of Five- Part 8: Full House

Calum and Harlowe’s marriage hasn’t always been easy, but it has always been filled with love. This is a collaborative experience with In Sorrow and In Joy. Dad!Calum. Black OC.

CW: Over the course of this series, there are mentions of pregnancy, therapy, and postpartum depression. There is also 18+ Content (Smut)

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No one has my permission to repost my work of fiction. This includes translations as well. 

_______________________

Esha passes by his room. Pepper walks past her before settling at the foot of his bed, pulling at the blanket he always kept, but never actually used to drape over herself. It’s impossible to avoid this room. It’s right next to hers. The poster’s still remain. His bedspread is the same navy blue, grey and red. His bookshelf is only partially full, most of his creations now decorating his other room. It’s a temporary place she knows. She knows that her brother will return. But it just feels empty. Not even a week and the ache still cuts her pretty deep. “Esha! C’mon, dinner’s ready!” Harlowe bellows. 

Esha stares at the white door, the dent from she and Te Koha tried to batterram the door like they had seen on the TV. Admittedly now, it was her idea and Te Koha said that maybe it wasn’t the best idea. But she nudged him, said he knew he was just as curious as she was. He was, and they tried it. They weren’t big enough nor smart enough to actually concote anything to break the door. They did put a sizeable dent in the center of the door. 

Te Koha on his own, she knows, would’ve never thought of something like that. How she managed to coax Te Koha into it is besides her, even now all these years later. She runs her fingers over the dent, smiling to herself before carrying down the stairs. 

The seating order is now different. “Well, now everything’s just out of place,” she huffs, throwing her arms up. 

Her mother releases a small tuft of laughter. “No one to steal all those rolls from.”

Esha gasps. She knew her mother knew. No one can hide a thing from her mother. But she always had a way of pretending like she didn’t, of letting some things go on as they were rather and disrupting them. “You knew?”

“Mother’s know all,” Harlowe teases, eyes widening for a brief moment before she plops the second roll onto Esha’s plate.

“One day I’ll become a mother and I will learn all your secrets.”

“When you become a mother, I will teach you my secrets.”

Nikau already seated, laughs at his sister and mother. “Can we eat? I’m hungry.” Esha sits where Calum normally would. But he’s gone too. His festival shows and Te Koha moving out lined up just perfectly enough that he could help move Te Koha into his dorm before having to leave for his shows. 

The table’s clearly shrunken. All of them are use to one missing piece, just not two. Harlowe keeps things up as normal, asking about their days. She even lets her attention fall to Jack that comes pittering over and watches as Esha splits her roll and giving half to Nikau. They’ll gain some sense of normalcy for the coming three weeks. She makes a promise of it to herself. 

After dinner, and after cleaning up the dishes, Nikau presses himself into Harlowe’s side. “Can we watch a movie? There’s not enough noise.”

Esha pauses on the steps before turning to face her mother. “Actually, that would be a great idea. I’d be so in.”

Harlowe nods. “Smores too?”

“You’re the bestest mother ever!” Nikau screeches. 

She grins, playing at his curls. “Thank you. I try. Now, go grab the blankets and you two decide on a movie. I’ll start the S’mores.”

Nikaua bounces up the stairs, even beating Esha to the top of the stairs. Harlowe digs around the pantry pulling down the graham crackers. The house is entirely too quiet she thinks. Without Calum’s bass strumming, or Te Koha working in the garage on some project, the normal level of noise is just deafening. Harlowe’s accustomed to Esha’s music competing with a saw. She’s so used to Nikau curled up in her side, begging for at least one of them to quiet, begging for their quiet time to start. Harlowe had to instill quiet times, just to keep sanity for herself, but most definitely for the littlest one. After a certain time in the evening, usually an hour after dinner, all loud noises had to cease. Headphones could be used for some, a work around for Calum of course. But he tried not to work too much at home anyway. 

The quiet times definitely helped with the structure of the house, with three kids. It was a definite time that all milling about had to stop and homework and schoolwork had be begin. While Harlowe could work through the house, she knew it was best for the kids to have peace to work. When Harlowe had papers to grade and assignments to read over, Calum took over as the parent to call for help with homework. He did the best he could, but sometimes it was needed to Harlowe stepped in to help. But the quiet times definitely helped and now it was beginning to feel like quiet times were to starting too early.

While it was summer now and schoolwork was not a concern for them, the house definitely needed some sort of noise. “Please not another musical,” Nikau huffs.

“I’ll have you know this is a classic--” Esha starts. 

“I know, I know, I know,” he interrupts. “You say it every time. Please, can we go with explosions?”

“Sure thing, kid.”

Piled onto the couch, Nik settles onto Harlowe’s lap and Esha reclines into her side. They make sure to turn the volume up as loud as their ears can handle.  

____ Te Koha looks around his room. His orientation occurred earlier in the summer and after moving in there were couple days of some hall activities and a presentation for the entire incoming freshman class. Classes have started. But they’re nothing crazy just yet His roommate is cool. They have vaguely similar interests, enjoying rugby and football. They’re both active and workout regularly. 

It’s just not home. His sister is not blasting god knows what new indie artist who’s trying to sing too hard in their lower register and his brother is not bouncing a ball, in an attempt to see how long he can keep the ball in the air without using his hands. His mother isn’t sitting at their counter. She’s not laughing at some student’s story. His dad isn’t knocking on his door to check up on him. 

It’s just him. In a dorm room. On his laptop with the damned cursor blinking at him to finish this bullshit one page reading response. But he can’t. His brain is listening for every sound. Every shuffle of his roommate’s papers, every stomp of the person passing by his door. His brain wants noise and for the life of him, there is nothing by goddam silence. His picks up his phone, keys and his student ID card before slipping on his slides. A small graduation gift Esha got him after she destroyed his old ones with paint. 

Te Koha didn’t care. He still wore them, but she refused to send him off to school without a new pair. He’s unsure how she afforded them, or if she convinced their mother to get them. She was the more empathetic one of his parents and she would understand Esha’s sentiment. As the door closes with a thud behind him, Koha unlocks his phone, dodging a hallmate fresh out of the shower. They exchange the silent acknowledgement glimpse of eye contact. 

As he climbs down the stairs, refusing to use the cursed elevator, he taps on Mom with the blue, purple and pink heart emojis, complete only with the crown as well. The summer air is still dry as he steps out into the settling evening. He figures, now that it’s summer, quiet times won’t be that strict of a rule. So who knows if she’ll even hear the phone ringing. But when the picture loads, Nikau beaming up at him, with his mother behind him and Esha poking her head just into frame, he breathes a little easier. 

“Hey, Ma,” Te Koha smiles. 

“Hi, baby. How are classes?”

“It’s still syllabus week really. Nothing crazy.”

“The calm before the storm.” 

Koha nods. “Yeah. It sounds quiet over there. You sure I’m calling the right people?”

“We’re watching a movie! Bunch of explosions. Plenty of noise,” Nikau laughs. 

“Sounds like you guys are lucky.”

“Has Davon been by yet?” Esha asks. 

“He’s coming this weekend.” He can feel his own smile as he mentions it. He’s never officially come out to his parents. He never felt the need. But introducing Davon officially to his parents seemed fitting enough. Harlowe says something to Nikau and Esha and Nik climbs off her lap. She starts to walk to another part of the house. He notices the kitchen growing smaller behind her. Darkness swallows her before a light flicks on and then his mother is staring back at him with a small lilt of her head. 

She doesn’t have to speak. Koha is sure that his face said it all. “It’s just strange, Ma. It’s not home.”

She nods. “I know, baby. But it’s okay. You’ll make friends. It will become a home. Just not home home.”

“I miss you guys.”

“We miss you too, baby.”

“Has Dad called home yet?”

“No, he hasn’t. The show’s just starting, I think? He’s still in our time zone for now. I think next week he’s moving overseas. When he calls, I’ll be sure to tell him to give you a ring.”

Koha nods. He could text or call now and he knows Calum would return it within the second he saw it. But it feels weird to be this old, this far into his life and still somehow miss home. He’s been away from home. That’s nothing new. But this is completely new, wholly new in a way he hasn’t grasped just yet. “Thank, Ma. Love you. Give Esha and Nik a hug for me please?”

“Of course. Call me whenever. I’ll answer.”

“I know you will. Take care of yourself. I’m not there to yell at you.”

She laughs, eyes watering. “I will, son, I will.”

As the calls ends, Te Koha looks into the setting sun and exhales. One tear, and just one, falls down his cheek. This is not home, but he can make it homey. 

____ Esha is not as subtle as Te Koha. She tosses the bottle to her mother. There’s usually a rattle before the toss comes. A warning for Harlowe to be on her toes. It happens every morning without fail as Harlowe gathers the last of her papers for her class. “Gotta load up,” she grins. Harlowe pops the top, shakes a pill from the bottle and takes it with the start of her liter water bottle. It’s much needed when talking for hours on end in lecture. 

“Am I good doc?”

Esha gives her a glance over. The fitted jeans, her famous rolled sleeves blouse and flats. The heels only make an occasional appearance. Esha slides off the seat, fixes a curl for Harlowe. With hands on her hips, she gris at her mother. “Looks good to me.”

Next week Esha and Nikau will be starting school but for now, Esha’s holding down the house while Harlowe goes to work. Thankfully, her classes are in the late morning and early afternoon. She can be back home by five at the latest. 

“Please don’t worry too much about me. You should be enjoying these last few days of summer.”

Esha takes a moment to study her mother. The moles strategically located across her face. The skin that still looks all too young for someone to be a mother of three. But her mother’s eyes aren’t as bright. “I’m worried. Dad’s gone and so is Te Koha. I know it’s gotta be a little stressful on you. I don’t want anything to happen.”

Harlowe is used to this with Te Koha. Just not Esha. There’s nothing to say, no words to console. So Harlowe brings Esha into her side. She presses a kiss to Esha’s temple. There’s a little bit of berry lipstick on her skin. “You’re still a kid. Besides, Papa Bear calls me three times a day.”

“Three? Jesus. If that’s what love is, I don’t want it.”

“I’m his wife, thank you very much! He’s supposed to love me.” 

The two girls laugh. Esha rests her head into her mother’s chest. “He does love you. He calls me too. Every day.”

“See! He loves you too.” Another kiss is placed to the top of Esha’s head. Her hair now a tad longer. The dreads are staring to take more shape. “Call me if you need anything.”

“I never call,” Esha retorts as her mother starts for the door. 

“But you will one of these days!”

____

Soon some normalcy is restored. Calum returns from the short festival run. He gets in about mid morning on a Tuesday. Harlowe unfortunately couldn’t meet him due an important meeting that was scheduled by the department heads.  The house is dead quiet except for the click of paws running towards him. Pepper beats Jack and Sissy, but they are close behind to get in on the head and belly rubs.

 He rolls his suitcase to the laundry room and immediately starts a load. Finding time to do laundry on the road can be tough and nearly nonexistent. So it’s always the first order of business when he gets home. No matter how tired he is. His plan is to nap for a little bit and then pick Esha and Nikau up from school. It’ll be a nice surprise he figures after being away for so long. It used to be tradition, but the band stopped touring for awhile and he hasn’t really ever had a reason to surprise them with his own return. 

His quick nap alarm sounds seemingly all too soon and he pulls his body out from the couch with a groan. He should probably grab a quick bite to eat and then grab Nikau from school. It’ll be a little early but that’s okay. Out of habit, he opens the fridge doors and spies a plate with a note on top. It’s definitely Esha’s handwriting. We saved a little treat for you, Dad. Welcome home E&N. Lifting the tinfoil, he spies the last slice of pie wrapped up carefully for him. Definitely not what he should be eating, but he happily takes the slice as a snack. 

 Calum sends a quick text to Harlowe before leaving the house. Grabbing Nik and Esha up from school early. Don’t call the authorities. Just as he climbs down the steps of the porch Harlowe’s car rolls into the driveway. Followed behind her is another car. It takes him a moment to recognize it until he spots Te Koha in the driver seat and Davon next to him. He laughs as Nikau bolts from the car. “Dad!”

His chest cracks, he’s sure of it, as he kneels to pick up his youngest. Nik’s much larger than he remembers and it takes more effort than before to lift him, but Calum doesn’t care. Not in the slightest. “Hey. You’ve gotten so big!”

“Had a growth spurt! Coach says I’m the biggest on the team now.”

The beam on Nikau’s face is contagious. Esha comes up next, wrapping both Nik and Calum up in a hug. She’s at a loss for words, just utterly consumed with the relief to have her dad back home. As Te Koha approaches, Calum sets Nikau down. He feels like he’s missed so much, that somehow Koha’s lived a whole lifetime away from him. But it’s only been a couple of months at most. 

They embrace, a tight and soul crushing but soul reviving hug as they sway side to side a little. It’s always been like this between them. Silent exchanges, a whole language that does not need tangible words, just feeling. Calum is now realizing just how taller Te Koha is than them. “Good God, when did you surpass me?” Calum laughs. 

“It’s been happening for a while now, Dad,” Esha retorts. “You just noticed now.”

“You are your mother’s daughter,” Calum laughs. 

Harlowe huffs. “I am right here. And you will be sleeping on the couch tonight, Mister.” Her sentence, though it sounds threatening, is hollow. She stands with her hands on her hips. As Calum holds his arms out for her, she shakes her head. “Uh, no. No, you’re not getting away with that that easy.”

Davon laughs. “You’ve done it now Mr. Hood.”

“It appears so. But she always comes around.” Calum and Davon hug briefly, before Davon joins Koha on the porch. Esha’s opened the door and the dogs have seized the moment to lay out in the autumn breeze for just a second before being ushered back inside. 

Harlowe walks around the cars. “I cancelled two classes. Called Davon to come get Koha, which is a hike in of itself. Te Koha skipped a class to drive Davon’s car down. I pulled Nik and Esha out of school early all for you to insult me.”

Calum kisses her, knowing she’ll ramble far too long, laying the guilt on that is not needed. It’s not serious, but still. She can go on if given the chance. “But I love you.”

With a small huff and roll of her eyes, she kisses him in return, humming just a little. “I love you too.”

_____

Harlowe’s just about down with the stack of poems for tomorrow’s class, writing down one last note about the refrain on the student’s piece. Calum’s working with Nikau in the backyard. Esha’s in her room, half paying attention to her work, half buried in her phone talking to a friend from class that she has a crush on. They sit next to her and the pair have slowly gotten to know as the year has progressed.

Her phone buzzes and she eyes it, seeing it’s Koha. She punctuates that sentence and then looks at the message. Are you busy? Her brain is telling her not to panic, but her gut knows this is not good. 

She replies, No. Not busy. Call me if need be. She doesn’t want to push Koha. But she also doesn’t want to make it seem like she doesn’t care. Pushing up from the counter, she opens up the back door. Sissy follows behind her. Pepper and Jack took up camp with Calum and Nikau. She watches her phone. Koha has definitely seemed a little stressed about things. But finals are nearing. She just assumed it was that. She hopes it not anymore more serious. That she hasn’t been neglecting her boy. 

The shake happens before the screen blurs to reveal Te Koha’s name. She answers, settling onto the porch steps. “Hey, Koha.” Her poor boy. The stress is written all over his face. But there is something underneath it. 

“Hey, Ma.”

“Talk to me.”

“I’m okay. Just finals. And I started hanging out at the neon shop near campus. A guy saw some of my work. On my Instagram.”

“That’s awesome.” 

Koha nods. But he looks away from her. “Yeah he has a project he wants me to do. But juggling time between that and school. It’s hard.” 

It’s not just hard. Koha hates school. He gave it a shot because he thought maybe the engineering track would be more his speed. It’s quickly proving not to be. The stress culture is insane. The only things people do are complain about how stressed they are and brag about who stayed up the latest and who procrastinated the most. It’s eating away at him. In all honesty, Te Koha does most of his work at the neon shop near campus and takes study breaks to work on little side projects here and there. “What if school isn’t my thing?” he asks. 

Harlowe shrugs. “Then it’s not your thing, baby.” 

Could it be that easy to break the news to his mother? “I want to learn a trade.”

“Then learn a trade.”

“You and Dad have already put in a lot of money for this semester, the whole savings for us. I feel like I’m wasting it.”

“You’d be wasting it if you studied for four years being miserable the whole time. Talk to the registar’s office and the Dean about leaving. Finish this semester, apply for a trade school during the spring semester. You’ve got an impressive portfolio.”

Calum, catching bits of the conversation, takes a quick timeout running drills with Nikau and walks over to the deck. “What’s this I hear about learning a trade?”

Harlowe hands him the phone. She can only hear Te Koha’s comment, “Looks like I took after you in more ways that one.”

Calum laughs. “Leave school. Learn that trade. Don’t worry about the money or the time. You’ve gotta find yourself in this life. You only got one shot at it. Why waste it doing things you hate?”

Harlowe grins at Nik, putting her hands up for the ball, letting Calum and Te Koha have their moment. “No hands, Mommy. You know that,” Nikau laughs. 

“Mommy’s old. Gotta remind her of these things.”

Nik kicks the ball, not hard, towards her and she stands, kicking it back to him. It’s silent for a moment but Nikau speaks, watching Harlowe bounce the ball on her knee a few times before sending it back to him. “Dad teach you that?”

She nods. “Yeah, shocked I’ve still got it.”

“Why all the flowers, Mommy?” He dribbles the ball down towards her, gets it between her legs and then dribbles back to his spot. The backyard has always been full of some sort of plant. Nikau enjoys it, but having to help out in the yard sometimes is not his favorite. He’d rather do anything else some Saturdays than sit next to Harlowe and pluck weeds. 

“They’re pretty. They help the bees. I like them. There are a lot of reasons why I planted all those flowers.”

“They must do something. For you.”

“You can do some things just because you like them. Just because they’re fun or pretty.” They do benefit her for sure in some ways. The flowers help her feel productive on days when all else feels impossible. The flowers are a motivator to get outside, even for just a few minutes that she can’t hole herself up inside all day. But he doesn’t need to know that. 

“Like tattoos?”

“Yeah, like tattoos.”

“I want a tattoo. A big dragon. Or a snake.”

Harlowe laughs, managing to steal the ball in his day dreaming. He shouts, a loud ‘hey!’ but laughs all the same just like her. “You get whatever you want when you’re old enough. Just don’t do it drunk.”

“Or do. You’ll be an adult then,” Calum interjects. His grin splits his cheeks before Harlowe can even roll her eyes. “Listen to Mum though. She knows best.”

“Don’t. That’s final, Nikau.” Harlowe wags a finger at Calum, daring him to refute her a second time. 

Nikau shakes his head at his parents. Only them, only his parents to bicker like this. Harlowe kicks him the ball before retreating back up the steps. Her phone buzzes another text from Koha. Love you guys. Thanks for always understanding. 

Love you too. 

The door creaks open. Esha escorting Pepper with her. There’s a moment as Esha joins in on the drills, still more athletic even for all her theatre desires, that Harlowe realizes her nest will be full again. Not ever. Just a moment. And soon Te Koha will be off again to bigger things. Esha will be gone next. Even tough Nikau is the youngest, he too will find his dreams. She has no clue what to do with an empty house. She’ll have to fill it with something.

[paperish-main]

Sarah J Maas Transcript (1/3)

Finished this last night and posting it before I go to a fair!

This is a transcript for the parts I recorder of the Manchester Sarah J Maas event. The video just isn’t working with me, so here. The visuals weren’t good anyways xD. I didn’t record from the start, heads-up. Also, I wouldn’t super-analyse every word she says because, again, she was talking on stage and that won’t translate smoothly to a write up. There were a lot of ‘uh’s and ‘like’s that I cut out and a lot more laughing.

UPDATE: Next one has been posted!

SJM: I’ve said before, so I can say it now: the wall scene… is in this book [laughs as audience screams]. I had a lot of fun writing writng that – um, if you don’t know what I’m talking about –

Charlie Bowater: Where have you been?

SJM: (laughs) I hope for the parents that have no idea what I’m talking about… you don’t wanna know. [audience laughter]. A Court of Frost and Starlight – ACOFAS, or ACOfaus as you Brits would say – that’s coming out in May.

Talking about the planning of things – with these novellas, I always wanted them to be something you had to read before the last Throne of Glass book. So I knew some big, big things that would go on in this, but then when I wrote it there were actually some surprises – and again, no spoilers – that I didn’t see coming, and they were actually things that I had planted the seeds for earlier in the books. Then I got to this moment and I had this idea and I literally looked back – combed through the books – and I was like, holy. Effing. Shit.

[audience laughter]

And it sounds kind of insane – like, I’m the writer, I’m in control of this world but then my subconcious does plant things and does it throughout the books… only it will take me five books to realise what my mind has been telling me I’m going on this whole time. And I live for moments like that, when it literally feels like magic. So this book was a combination of very intense planning and then “Surprise!” things that blew my mind.

I know it sounds so weird, because it should all be up here, but when it aligns it’s a bit like a solar eclipse. [She laughs with the audience] I’m so cheesy, I know.

Interviewer: So you briefly mentioned ACOTAR before and, of course, A Court of Wings and Ruin was out this year. What was it like to wrap up – well, not completely wrap up – that arc of Feyre and Rhy’s story?

Sarah J Maas: I mean, I knew… I knew there were going to be these spin-off books coming out and I didn’t have to say goobye, and those spin-off books were actually because before I started writing ACOWAR, I got really bummed out that the series would end after three books –

Interviewer: We were all, too.

Sarah J Maas: (laughs) I was literally like, this isn’t enough time with the Inner Circle – especially the Illyrian warriors and their wingspans. [audience cheers]. Can I tell you guys this random story? On my US tour for Tower of Dawn, this girl came up during the signing and she was about fourteen years old and she was wearing this t-shirt that said “it’s all about the winspan”. [audience laughs] I was like, oh my god, your shirt is amazing.

And she went, let me show you the back … and she turned around and it had a pair of wings with a ruler [gasps mixed with laughter] underneath. I was like, does your mother know what you’re wearing? And she was like, (smug voice) no. I went, you’re my hero. I want to be your friend.

[more laughter]

So, I was bummed that this world and this series were ending and just for fun I began writing what happens after ACOWAR… and I would up writing about two-hundred and fifty pages of about what will be the first full spin-off book, which I cannot tell you yet what it will be about. When you read ACOFAS in spring, you’ll know what it’ll be about for sure.

And then I wrote probably the first half of ACOFAS which mostly just started off as a bunch of smut scenes [laughter] just for fun –

Charlie Bowater: Just for warm up.

Sarah J Maas: Just to warm up, get my heart pumpin’ a bit (laughs). And then I really started to look ahead to what happens to these characters after ACOWAR and I realised that I wanted to really, really write those stories. These characters had more to do and to say and to grow. And it actually helped me write ACOWAR, because I was able to plant seeds in ACOWAR for all the fun stuff that’s coming in these spin-off books.

So in some ways, it was still very emotional for me to write ACOWAR – it’s very emotional for me to write every book, really. I definitely sobbed when I wrote the last scene between Feyre and Rhys, but I also knew like, the gang is coming back!

Like, ask me this question when I write the last book of that series but – will I ever close the door? To any of these worlds? I don’t think so. I don’t know. I have separation anxiety, you guys [laughter]

Interviewer: That’s a good sign! So Charlie, you contributed a lot to the ACOTAR colouring book and the Throne of Glass colouring book, as well as your incredible drawings of the Inner Circle, which hopefully some of you guys have seen. What is like kind of drawing from those characters and – do you visualise what they look like in your head or do you just sort of follow your pencil?

Charlie Bowater: (started to raise her miscrophone before the interviewer was finished) I just have to say, I can’t take credit for the throne of glass colouring book because I didn’t do anything there.

Interviewer: Oh, sorry!

SJM: You were their in spirit.

CB: It was a very interesting process because, obviously, I’ve read the books inside-out, back-to-front, multiple times. And so, clearly I’ve got this strong image in my head of how I picture it and it was just like this really nice, collaborative process where I got to work with Sarah and Bloomsbury. They kind of put forward the scenes that they wanted included in the colouring book, and it was kind of up to me how I sketched it – how I imagined it, how I pictured the scene – and that was really collaborative and not like, this is the scene. Draw it.

I think I was originally supposed to draw eight scenes for the book, and end up drawing… I think it was 19? [audience laughs] I think, by the end. So it just kept going and going and going and going… and I will always remember the day that I found out – or rather, the day that I was asked if I wanted to work on the colouring book.

I was in a club in London – which doesn’t happen very often, by the way, I’m usually at home reading [laughter] – and I read the email and I literally just had to scream in this toilet cubicle just because I was so psyched about working on the book. And just in general, these books and Sarah have… changed my life. It was amazing to work on it.

Interviewer: You guys are the dream team. It must be said.

SJM: You were so – like, easy to work with on the coloruing book? All the other artists were great, but Charlie was… I feel like I never had of send you any real notes. Not to bad-mouth any of the other artists because they’re very, very talented but, like I don’t think some were… (struggles) fans of the… books? Just they way that, like –

CB: I think that’s the biggest difference between me working on this work for different books and series and like all this stuff, but there’s this special kind of magic when you get to do it for a series you love and you already know and you’ve got those feelings to work with, rather than doing it from a blanck slate. It’s like, you’ve got the passion for it already.

SJM: You were like – you were like a dream. Like, one of the artists was actually pretty sick. She fell pretty ill at one point and literally couldn’t get to some of the drawings, and like, we asked Charlie, is it too many drawings at this point? And she just, knocked it out of the park.

And there were some drawing where the other illustrators, again, very talented, but they didn’t like… get it? They didn’t quite get the placement of the characters and the emotion in the scene.

One of them was like, the cauldron scene – Nesta coming out of the cauldron – and like, I can’t tell you how many drafts we went through with one of the artists on that scene and I was like no, no, no – not to sound like a diva. I was pretty involved in the process where, from the very start, I worked with bloomsbury to select all the scenes and we sent the artist who was in each scene and what each scene should include, and they would send us the sketches, and we would give feedback.

I had phone calls with my editor every day about the sketches. The poor UPS man came to my house, like, non-stop delivering new batches of artwork. It was like this really, really intense process but with this one scene this artist just didn’t get it – didn’t get what was going on, the body positioning. Then we sent it over to Charlie and like, one sketch. Done.

[laughter] It was like a mic drop, holy shit. You just… get it.

CB: Thank you.

Sarah J Maas: Like, your artwork is just… so amazing. My phone back screen is one of the earliest pieces of Feyre-Rhys fan art that you ever did with them. She’s in the dress that she… wears on the ACOWAR cover. I don’t know if you guys know this, but the dress on the cover of ACOWAR – Charlie designed that dress.

When we made the cover for ACOWAR, they were like what dress should we put her in? And I was like, there was only one dress. [laughter] There’s only one dress that Charlie designed.

CB: That meant a lot to me.

Sarah J Maas: And we’re still grateful that you allowed us to use your concept. And I’m just, like (laughs) the biggest fangirl. You did this modern Sailor Moon piece – it was like – I loved it.

CB: (points to herself) Love Sailor Moon!

That’s Part One out of Two for the first big video. After this she talks about her Grandmother’s pretty inspirational story about growing up and WW2 as a Jew, which I’ll probably write up. Then, she goes back to talking about the books. Those videos are short enough to post, so I’ll do it now.    

[redscullyrevival]

2011: Tiger & Bunny

For me, 2011 was an amazing year for anime. So many of my favorite shows popped out of this one year it’s kind of disgusting.

Mahou Shojo Madoka Magica, Hanasaku Iroha, Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, No. 6, From Up on Poppy Hill, Wandering Son, Nichijou, my sweet baby Mawaru Penguindrum! What Am I to do?! Well. I don’t even know how to begin talking about Nichijou and I’ve talked plenty on Penguindrum so lets give another equally loved show the spotlight today!

Who is down for some Kamen Rider meets slice-of-life-lessons mixed with a healthy dose of X-Men and NASCAR racing?  

I was on board with Tiger & Bunny the day it was announced as a project. My boy Masakazu Katsura on character design? A live action script writer named Masafumi Nishida being brought in? Big O king himself Keiichi Sato directing? I was signed up! I was ready! And I was not at all disappointed.

Tiger & Bunny is about reality star superheroes who gain points for their heroics during Live TV broadcasts and who vie for funding and resources from sponsors. The supers’ costumes are plastered with the logos of (real world) corporations and are dominantly featured in the show’s openings (which can make for an odd experience if you’re watching the censored versions on Netflix) and the characters often find themselves at odds with what kind of hero they’d like to be verse the kind their sponsors and TV producers want them to be.

It’s a good fuckin’ set up isn’t it?! Oh my god.

A older hero (Kotetsu Kaburagi AKA Wild Tiger) and a rookie hero (Barnaby Brooks Jr. AKA “Bunny”) are teamed up by their sponsors and the two have to learn to compromise and collaborate while saving the day, the efforts of which start to carry over into their private lives as they grow as people.

Kotetsu is a veteran of Hero TV who holds old fashioned notions on the superhero lifestyle but possesses a well balanced moral center due to his years of service. He is the “old man” but has a solid grasp on why he does what he does as his days of doubt have already come and gone, but Kotetsu’s glory days are increasingly getting behind him.  

Barnaby is Batman if Batman were blonde and a much more stable individual although still, you know, pretty jacked up. Barnaby is emotionally closed off and simply does the hero thing as a means to an end; finding his parents murderer. Through his partnership with Kotetsu Barnaby begins to open up and truly consider for the first time what kind of person (and hero) he wants to be.

I cannot stress enough how wonderful it is that Tiger & Bunny is a show that has adult characters who grow and that they do so through a mutual give-and-take mentorship, friendship, and if you ask me romantic relationship. And that’s just the two main characters!

Tiger & Bunny has one of my absolutely favorite extend cast of characters in anime; they’re a diverse, layered, sympathetic bunch whose interactions and relationships as co-workers, competitors, friends, and found-family is the foundation the show rests on. Another key aspect of the series is that every character’s superhero identity relies on outward stereotypes (their superhero identities are crafted by corporations afterall) which are simplified reflections of the characters actual identities.

I’ll do my best to explain as Tiger & Bunny doesn’t draw a hard line with it, but this is a series that dips in and out of the the personalities and lives of the heroes as filtered though the simplistic picture TV captures and then their real lives and personalities.

For example, the sexy hero Blue Rose is sponsored by Pepsi NEXT because they want to capitalize on the association of her ice powers in reminding folks how tasty a nice cold Pepsi can be. Blue Rose is instructed to act cold and dominatrixy so as to fit into Pepsi’s campaign and we see that off camera she is also a bit cold - but we learn that’s because of conflict within herself.

Karina’s dream is to be a singer so she took the superhero gig because she was told she needed to make a platform for herself, build a fanbase, and put in some company time before being trusted with the budget of a true artist. As Blue Rose Karina gets to sing the closing theme to Hero TV and have mini concerts, but while she does her best to please the sponsors her full heart and attention isn’t exactly in being a hero. She complains about her catch phrase and is a teenager who is very aware of how the camera roams over her corporate designed costume. She misses out on time with her friends and her family doesn’t entirely understand her choices even as they support her in her goal.

Karina Lyle, like all the cast members, works through her problems while the audience comes to understand that there are parts of her that are similar to her hero persona but that her persona isn’t a complete representation of who she is.

This duality is pushed even further to the point where it is built into the literal presentation of the series.

When the characters are suited up, logos polished and on display, the series takes on the camera work and focus of what a show like Hero TV would probably actually be like but will drop out of that style mid fight to highlight characters real feelings and concerns - only to slip back into that heightened style once again. It’s hard to describe and it isn’t something the series does only when literally showing us things through the show-in-the-show, Hero TV.

Tiger & Bunny fluctuates between two kinds of Visual and Tonal Coding™: The structured posturing of what superhero media is like and what we all expect and then the wavering hesitant nature of being a human being with responsibilities and an inner understanding of oneself.

I have plenty of other things I want to talk about but if you watch the first three episodes of Tiger & Bunny you’ll start to get a feel for what I mean! It’s a very clever, subtle, tactic the series uses to compare and contrast it’s many characters with their superhero personas and is what gives the show such an enjoyable dynamic feel.

Because of this show’s characters and their wonderful duality this is the first and only time I’ll make this kind of comment: I do not suggest the dub of Tiger & Bunny and not because it isn’t good (it’s well cast and acted) but because the English script ignores the nuances of how characters address themselves because English can’t help it and the official translations don’t address any of it. 

Nathan Seymour (AKA the hero Fire Emblem) uses the gender neutral I/me pronoun "watashi" and informal feminine "atashi" for themselves which is hard to express in an English script as English doesn’t have gendered I/me pronouns. For those watching a sub there is still a lot of guess work if you even have the ear to pick out how Nathan refers to themselves because the character absolutely displays Japanese media stereotypes and as such Nathan can be seen to fall into the onee category with their dialogue being onee kotoba.  

I could get into this but I’ll just say again that this is a series where stereotypes are pitted against people who can fall into them but are shown to be more than them and Nathan is absolutely a part of that. The most thrilling and moving aspect of the second Tiger & Bunny film, and I’d argue of the entire franchise, is when the story goes into Nathan’s history and shares a considerate journey with identity - but what if you never make it there?    

At the end of the day who you are and what you know is going to define whether Nathan Seymour is a believable agender queer POC character or a strange flat stereotype - which isn’t anything special as that’s how all characters from everything are experienced and defined.  

If you want to get deep into this kind of conversation I suggest starting with Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People by Shigeko Okamoto and Janet S. Shibamoto Smith. And if anything at all has caught your interest about Tiger & Bunny I full heartedly endorse giving this series a watch.

[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + The Divine Christmas Annual #1

Spoilers, obv.

There's a backbone of Specials which I consider essential to WicDiv's plot. This is one of the main reasons we've ended up putting the Specials trade into the schedule before the last trade in the series rather than after it – as fractally as WicDiv is structured, this is information you should know before the end rather than after it.

They also work off a weird time-switched aspect – so they're read at the time of publication (for single readers) and also at the latter point in the story (for trade readers). In other words, they're revealing different information and to different import depending on whether you read them as they're released or as they're collected.

Which is an interesting challenge.

The Christmas Annual is the first Special which doesn't work like this. Looking at the schedule, we thought it healthier to add an extra month to the gap between arcs. The next arc is six issues, as is the one after that. We decided to add another special, and then saw what would be fun to do.

This was a boon for me. The problem is never not having enough material, y'know? The difference between something I'd like to do and something that is essential I do is narrow. Jamie had the idea of going back to periods we skipped and showing some of their key moments. I initially kicked against it a little, but when the thing I was trying proved too hard to make work, it seemed the simplest thing to do for me, and seemed a cute gift to the fans in a year that's been pretty fucking brutal.

(That we rarely get happier than bittersweet speaks to me, really. All happiness is tinged with sadness. “I love you” is married to “and one day we will all be dead”.)

But it was also a fun time. We got a gang of our favourite people together and did a bunch of short stories. Most of all, I got to write a bunch of people I haven't written for a while. I've missed them.

How were the stories chosen? Rapidly! The main limitation was not choosing anything which would spoil anything in Imperial Phase: Part Two. The Specials are designed to be spoiler-free for any trade which isn't released when it's released. We also wanted to show a bunch of kissing and similar social activities, as for a book which has as much emotional and sexual stuff driving the characters, there's relatively little on panel.

I wrote 'em, showed them to the gang, and then we worked out who we could ask to draw them. I was expecting I would remove several of them, but they all ended up going in, with tweaks in some cases in the story's focus. In terms of the characters selected, I definitely paid attention to characters who had relatively little screen time – so, Lucifer, Inanna and Tara.

Jamie's Cover

Using a bought Photoshop filter, this actually a lot more work than Jamie was expecting. It is wonderful though. It is to my eternal regret we never actually arranged it as a Christmas Merchandise thing. This is a delight to me. Really, we're aware that Jamie doesn't do many playful covers, so this was an opportunity we grasped with both hands. For all the iconic drama, there's also a playfulness to WicDiv that doesn't always show up on the covers.

Kris Anka's Cover

It's a Christmas Annual in the mode of a British Annual – in that these are annuals released at Christmas rather than having Christmas as a major theme per se. Anyway, despite all that, Inanna and Baal in hot make-out beneath the mistletoe is an absolute joy. I am pleased we get to do this.

IFC

The main editorial note to Designer Sergio was “Tackier! Tackier!”

The photo was taken in North London cocktail bar “Every Cloud.” Jamie is probably drinking some manner of Old Fashioned. I think I'm drinking some kind of Buttered Rum-containing cocktail. Chrissy draped the only decorations she could find over our heads.

1-6

Kris Anka! Jen Bartel helped out on inks on this as well, due to time constraints. Kris is currently on a Marvel Exclusive, so we had to get permission to do this story. Marvel said yes, so thanks to them enormously.

Yes, if you examine the timeline, Valhalla was certainly erected quickly. And yes, “Erected quickly” is a major theme in this story.

It's one of the lighter stories in the issue – obviously delineating what we know about Baal to this moment says a lot, and the same for Inanna.

I tried to write the scripts to the artists, but I also was interested in leaving it open for them to express things in their own ways. Generally speaking, I let the artists choose how to show the characters in a sex scene, as I want to see their own interpretation. It was a delight to see Kris go as far as he did here.

We did wonder whether we'd be okay with showing hard cocks. We're told that hard cocks are fine, but ejaculation is the problematic limit. I'm glad it's not an issue. This is a hot scene, but it's primarily a romantic one.

I love what Matt is doing with the panel on page 5 – the pinks and purples of Inanna here.

Baals expression on the first panel is very funny, as is the confidence in panel 3 of it.

7-8-9-10

There's seven stories, but several were just two pages. We realised the best way to do it would be to group the shorter of the long ones with the short ones so all collaborators get 5-6 pages each. This makes it much easier with trade royalties down the line, and organising 5 artists (plus colourists and flatters) is a significantly easier one than organising 7 (and their associated collaborators).

This is the first of the stories coloured by Tamra Bonvillain. I've never worked with Tamra before, but we loved her work, approached her, and she said yes. Thanks for joining us on this journey.

The artist here is Rachael Stott, who is probably best known for her Doctor Who work, but is about to do Motherland for Vertigo with Si Spurrier, which looks excellent.

There was quite a lot of careful balloon work here, to try and guide the eye and provide the necessary exposition (or really, reminders – all this is building upon or just showing events that have been alluded to earlier.) The eye-guiding is key – for example, due to a minor quirk of the first two panels, the Shard is hidden by the column which means that the view in the second panel feels instantly wrong. We end up disguising the shard with the dialogue so it's far less noticeable.

This event is alluded to by Lucifer in issue 3 of WicDiv.

The penthouse is the one we see in issue 1, which I presume is rented by the Pantheon for their purposes.

Writing Lucifer after all this time was a pleasure. Well, pleasure may be the wrong word. She's herself, and she's always very able to show bits of herself. Lucifer says things that no one else in the cast does, which is obviously one of her huge problems.

Yes, the first panel of page 9 did make me think of an OBJECTION! style WicDiv Phoenix-Wright-esque game.

The panel is also a place where we really had to do the work to put this in continuity – the obvious assumption would be that Baal is pissed off about Lucifer sleeping with Sakhmet, which is only really a minor cause of WTF-ness.

That Lucifer explicitly fucked with Baal and Inanna was hinted at early in WicDiv and made explicit in WicDiv 23. Inanna didn't consider the relationship exclusive, as he doesn't see why anyone would automatically assume a romantic relationship is exclusive. Inanna's great weakness is not always realising that everyone is like him.

The “You're a bad person” ties off why Lucifer and Sakhmet never slept together many times, also mentioned in issue 3. Sakhmet, I suspect, just doesn't like the complications and drama. She is deeply averse to complications.

The last three panels are classic comedy steady-angle shots. That the sprinklers aren't visible led to adding an alarm sound at lettering, to avoid the possible assumption that Baal made it rain indoors or something.

Reading this I find myself thinking about Lucifer in the Special versus Lucifer in the Annual – in the sense that we're seeing her much more humanly, which is leaning into what makes her comic (and awful). The last three panels are not ones you could imagine in The Faust Act, as seen through Laura's star eyes. Nice fucked off expression in the last panel from Rachael.

11-12-13-14-15

Chynna Clugston Flores is just one of my indie comic crushes. Blue Monday is basically one of those key links between 90s and 00s comics. Bryan Lee O'Malley pitched Scott Pilgrim as Blue Monday meets Dragon Ball Z. We pitched Phonogram and Blue Monday meets Hellblazer. She's a wonder.

As such, writing for her was a dream, and I was explicitly writing for her. While this is much more rigid in terms of panel shapes than Chynna would write for herself (the steady angle on the two people in the front seat is very much me trying to write a sort of claustrophobic talking heads kind of set-up) but I'm really exploring a very Chynna type place.

I've been thinking of Dionysus as a “Umar” for a while. When thinking up Dio, the image of writer Umar Ditta leading the Thought Bubble dancefloor was definitely in my mind, and I thought it'd be fun if they share a name, despite being very different dudes. (Not least that Umar could bench Dionysus now.) I asked Umar, and he said yes, so Umar he is. His first comic Untethered has just come out, and is well worth your attention.

This is the second sort of story in the special. One is just showing some key things which impacted the rest of the book, which were usually sexy funtimes. The other was showing some key relationships in the pre-pantheon lives. We've said that Dio was a friend of Baph and Morrigan, but never actually showed what that meant. It was good to get it here.

For those studying the timeline, this is the same day as Hazel become Amaterasu. It would also be the same day Dio takes a photo of Morrigan, and Cameron sits in the tunnel waiting for Morrigan. Busy day!

If I call out my fave Chynna moments, we're going to be here forever. Cameron with his sign on the rain is a joy. Honestly, this is such an odd thing – it makes me imagine what a Blue Monday set in the Midlands would be like.

There was a panic when page 12 arrived and I thought that Chynna had (for some reason) reversed all the seating orders in the car and had the car riding on the wrong side of the road. This is obviously a disaster, because the only way this story works is the characters' speaking order is based upon where they're sitting. But then we realised that the page had been flipped in the dropbox for some reason. Phew.

The quote is from Young Avengers 13, which came out a week or two before this arrived. Yes, I know.

(The question who wrote YA13 in this universe, when Kieron Gillen's career ended with Phonogram: Rue Britannia, is open.)

Page 13 was designed to be a mood break of the lived-in autobio, and Chynna really goes for it, in terms of the leaves and the panel breaking. Not using techniques in the whole piece makes them especially meaningful when they turn up. Tamra also did wonders in the colouring, going for the spooky autumnal reds, teals and purples.

(Tamra and Matt basically split the issue near 50:50.)

This is definitely a more Morrigan way of publicising gigs rather than standing outside shitty clubs and passing out flyers.

The WHAT!? panel is everything I could have hoped for.

The “Oh god. He puns. Morrigan fucked a punner. A wet punner's in my car.” immediately made me feel that I'm trying to channel a Warren Ellis character.

The off-panel MOTHERFUCKER is also a delight.

16-17-18

Emma's one of my favourite people, but I haven't worked with her since a B-side in the second issue of Phonogram: The Singles Club, with a Kate Bush short story. (EDIT: Plus in the Young Avengers Afterparty, which I’d blanked. This is the second time that’s happened to an artist from that. Which, given the time period I was writing that, is unsurprising). So it's lovely to get back with her, and she does some of my favourite work in the Special. Do go and have a look at her Breaks, which she draws and co-writes.

When Tara has had so little panel time, trying to work out how to approach her is key – and Emma manages to find a place which is clearly her, but also informed by Tula's iconic take. Matt also brings us much of those choices to the page in the colours.

It's useful, as this story almost acts as a prequel to issue 13. It's essentially the first time Tara pitches what she wants to do to Ananke, a moment which is at least alluded to in 13.

I wrote the story originally as two pages – specifically, the last two pages. I talked about it with Editorial Assistant Katie, and she noted it's a shame we never actually see Tara happy ever. Which struck me as true, and a problem – at least in part this Special is about showing different sorts and times of happiness. So I added the first page, which is my best pitch for Tara at her most positive. This is the unspoken stuff that's under the surface in issue 13, and Tara talking about the drive is one of her main bits of happiness. I talk about how the cast are all me in different ways? Tara definitely includes the part of me which never feels better than after having written something I think is good. I've certainly done the “if get a disease which means I have six months to live, have I got time to finish writing WicDiv?” maths.

Much like issue 13, I wrote considerably more captions than are used on the first page. You write it like a diary entry and then edit to the core.

I always say that an artist can make the script their own, and that I try to write to the minimum number of panels. Of all the artists in the script, Emma's the one who added most panels. This looks great, and is very much a part of her style.

Quick call-out to Clayton in the second panel of page 17: that tiny string of notes positioned either side of those captions is beyond perfect.

The last page is all kinds of sad. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm pleased with how the masks work on the page.

19-20

Second Rachael story. She's an enormous Lucifer fan, so was very excited to do this.

This is as simple as the stories get, in terms of a tiny yet meaningful continuity insert. This was there already, but I felt underlining it and reminding people of it at this point in the narrative is meaningful for obvious reasons.

(I had things I wanted to do in Imperial Phase II which I never found space for – or when I did find space, felt off and wrong.)

Writing Laura captions again after all this time was definitely a thing which took a while to find again. But I liked it.

(Spangly New Thing has captions to the fore again, for various reasons, so them as a formalist element is certainly on my mind.)

21-22-23-24-25-26

This absolutely was formative Indie Crush mode. Carla Speed McNeil's Finder was one of my initial loves when I came into comics in the early 00s. It's just astounding stuff. I'd suggest starting with Mystery Story, I suspect, but there's two big omnibuses of it, and I'd recommend just getting them. She's continuing doing other Finder stories alongside her work elsewhere.

It was originally 5 pages, but Carla suggested an extra page. I'd deliberately left an extra page space in the issue, in case anyone wanted more space... and Carla grabbed it. Good work.

When writing this, I was thinking of Carla's storytelling... but I also realised that a part of Carla's storytelling is to warp and make her own. Seeing what she would do with my script was a big part. I wanted the Carla magic applied, and she did – the extra page is a big part of that.

Notice how Tamra uses the palettes to distinguish the two different settings. Eleanor in the dark and Hazel in the light seems pretty useful, right?

That Lucifer and Amaterasu were friends and knew each other were one of the elements of the background I never had a chance to really run with, for obvious reasons. In the same way as I wanted to do some Dio/Baph pre-scenes, doing a Lucifer/Amaterasu: The Early Years appealed.

H's fanart was mentioned in issue 15, I believe.

As much as it's a dual story, it's really more about Lucifer. Amaterasu may not even appear to really aware of how much she's been slighted in the story. Or maybe she is? It is Eleanor's perspective. This is also the first dialogue we've ever had as Eleanor, rather than Lucifer reporting Eleanor. The resentment and anger is so much cleaner, the saying the unsayable aspect with less glitter.

Hazel is right. Eleanor is mean.

Adding a page appealed for various reasons, but at least part of it was that it's the only in-story chance to see a Lucifer performance. There was an alternate cover in the first arc, but it's not the same – though it's probably the same performance. We've talked about her Brixton performances before, and this is there. This would be a gig that Laura saw, as previously referenced.

The last page (and final panel of page 5) is a take on a scene that's already on canon – specifically, the story as reported in the WicDiv Magazine Special.

The last-minute panic of the issue was Jamie realising we'd forgotten to have Amaterasu’s facepaint on her in the final panel, so that was a quick patch from Tamra. Phew.

The “I'm sorry” panel is A+.

As an example of the Carla Speed McNeil of it all, the last montage of shots is her addition, which brings a visual closure to the sequence.

27-28

Back with Emma Viceli, with a missing scene after issue 8. The actual core details were alluded to in issue 10, but this actually takes us there. If you remember, at this point Inanna and Baal are no longer in any way romantically involved, but fucking the best friend of someone you were with is almost always drama. The purple and red colouring seems to make that be the subtext there.

We checked Laura's age here repeatedly, to ensure she was 18 in these images. It would be actively illegal if we messed up.

Clearly my fave thing is the call back to issue 4's PLAY IT COOL gag.

This issue's structure came after all the art started coming in. It's a mix-tape curation – in terms of what's the best order to take people on a journey. Things like Kris' story being first seemed obvious – his was the alternative cover after all, featuring Inanna and Baal, which makes it a de facto lead story. That this story is furthest along in the timeline made it a suitable end, plus that we open with Inanna/Baal. The real thing is that it's a story which ends with something resembling a concluding beat. “This is going to be complicated” feels like something that ends an issue in the way that many of the stories don't. I suspect the only other credible option was Chynna's story, with Dio/Baph riding off down a motorway. What feels like it could be an ending? What feels like Closure?

IBC

The titles were all added in the last minute, when we realised the best way to actually discern which story was which for the credits was to actually give them a title.  

SUMER LOVING was miscorrected to SUMMER LOVING at every stage of production, and had to be changed back every time. There is no love for Sumerian humour in the modern comic market place.

Anyway – off for the season now. The Imperial Phase II trade drops in January, followed by The Wicked + The Divine 1923 special in February and the new arc in March.

Thanks for reading.

[bleederziine]

“I’m Compelled To Do It”; an Interview w/Lisa Jane Persky, Photographer, Writer, and Artist

In high school I was going to move to New York and grab the city by its throat. I was going to have at least 500 friends, own a punky couture boutique, and hold gothic open mics there every night and maybe date a Stroke for a few months. My imagination was like an entire universe of different identities, with tiny planets for NYC, Paris, 90s Seattle, 20s Greenwich Village. My favorite magazine was Pitchfork Review, and when I read Lisa Jane Persky’s piece, “X Offenders: A Typical Day in the Life of an NYC Proto Punk”, I got really jealous of her and then I got over that and wanted to know more. So I sent her a pouring my heart out email about how boring my neighborhood was, and how her story gave me hope for my own “New York story.” Sappy, right? Also, it was likely the truest thing I had ever written, before or since. As an over emotional messy artist, I’ve learned that the only way for me to get anything done is to rip open my heart and be as (healthily!) vulnerable as I can. In my experience, this has led me to knit a sweater for my favorite lead singer (Luke of the Walters) throw pads at Mario of the Orwells, and interview one of the coolest people I know.

Hi Lisa! How are you?

Lisa Jane Persky: I’m fine, just doing so many things at once! How are you?

I’m good! What are you working on right now?

LJP: I’m going to do a ten-day residency in London in June with my friends at Underground, a subculture inspired brand that makes some cool favorite stuff of mine. We found each other in 2015 and have been plotting something to do together ever since. June is Music Month in the UK and the residency will first of all be a show of my early photography, mostly of the Blondie days, and CBGB's time, really early, like 74-75. Along with that I’m programming various events, so different artists will come, DJs, musicians, underground comic book illustrators, all along the lines of subculture and music.

What made you want to photograph Blondie, since you were already familiar with them as friends?

LJP: Mostly it was access to a camera! I had a camera my dad used to use, and the band was just so cool looking, and I was going out with Gary Valentine at the time. Chris and Debbie were living in my friends loft, which is now known as the Blondie loft on the Bowery, where the band also rehearsed, and up there on the fourth floor was a big, torn white backdrop for portraits. It all started with an *official* session where I took 5 rolls of film in the loft, and those were pretty cool so I just kept going.

What is a good picture to you?

LJP: I like looking at people, studying them and observing what they do. When I shoot portraits we create an atmosphere together. I try to make a comfortable space for the subject to play, to be who they are with me, in spite of my lens I really enjoy seeing that, and the collaboration of it. It has to mean

something to me and I try to frame in the camera, and not edit it later. My eyes really were the frame then. Everyone looks so beautiful, was so young. When you’re young, you think, “we’re all so that!” And they were. Debbie’s a beautiful woman. She makes a picture look good, without much effort. I’m all

about making Instagram a place for my work right now. I like the shooting for that square shape. I love seeing other people’s photography evolve there.

Who were some of your other musical subjects?

LJP: I photographed Martin Rev of Suicide, I did a series on keyboard players, Cherry Vanilla’s, Zecca, and Richard Sohl, Patti Smith’s keyboard player, Kristian Hoffman of the Mumps, Lance Loud and the other Mumps, The Fast, mostly my friends and mostly portraits. I prefer to see live music rather than photograph it.

Yeah! I photograph shows sometimes and I prefer to ask to take pictures of the band after because I feel like the subject will give me more than when they’re thinking I’m just an anonymous photographer. What motivates you as an artist?

LJP: I’m compelled to do it, I want to do it. That said, writing is harder for me than all the other things I do. I’m not really sure why. I think it’s because there’s a loneliness to it that the others don’t have. Even when I’m out photographing my landscapes, which I call Lonescapes because there are no people in them, I never feel lonely. But there’s some kind of foreboding loneliness in writing that keeps me away from it. But I love having written, which is how most people probably feel.

”The picture of me is a photo booth pic. I’m wearing an Eagle’s Nest T-Shirt. The Eagle’s Nest was a gay hardcore leather bar in the Meatpacking District (no girls allowed) and their symbol was that Eagle on the shirt, which is the eagle that in part inspired Arturo Vega to design the Ramones Eagle. There are all kinds of other stories out there about Arturo's art but he loved America and being in it, had a great sense of humor about its hypocrisies. The Bicentennial was coming up and that was a very big deal in New York City with sailors from the fancy wooden Tall Ships arriving and all. Anyway, I thought you might like to see that and know about it. The Eagle's Nest is now called The Eagle and it has moved uptown from its old location.”

What do you get out of making art?

LJP: The most important thing is what connects me to different people. I like being able to be in the world with others to share stories with people who aren’t necessarily like myself. Each of these things I do connects me to others in different ways. I value that, making and having friends and exploring the world through art and music together more than anything. But I also have no idea what else I’d do. I really don’t.

So the way we met online was through me reading your piece in Pitchfork; what made you want to write that?

LJP: Every year my husband and I go to a conference that highlights music writing of all types, a very eclectic mix of people and papers, and I one year presented a paper on my interview with the Ramones, which I did the day after their first record came out. And then I wanted to write another paper, since everyone had been asking me, “what was it like back then?” And I had read something Tommy Dean (Mills), who owned Max’s at that time in the 70s had said in an interview. He said that all the girls who came to the club with or to see the bands back then were either hookers or groupies. And I read that and it made me really mad, because all of us had been working our tails off, we were not hookers or groupies! Not that there is anything wrong with being a hooker or groupie, it’s just that way he characterized all the women. It said more about him than us but that quote coupled with people asking what it was like, made me decide to write what it was like for me. So I wrote that and presented it at the conference, and used photos I had or had taken or found that went with the text, so people could get a three dimensional look at what a day in the life in downtown New York back then was like.

What was writing for the New York Rocker like?

LJP: Well, that is why I was interested in what you’re doing, because it’s very similar. It was just a bunch of us going to these shows. Early on there was hardly anyone going, just us, the people in the bands and the neighborhood, other artists, our friends and then Alan Betrock. He was older and always a superfan of rock music, especially pop and girl groups. He had a zine before there were zines. I don't know what you'd call them but it was amateur publishing by smart people and he and others like Greg Shaw would

write to each other about records newsletter style sometimes on mimeograph paper because they didn’t even have Xerox machines then and they’d snail-mail it around because it was the only way. So he showed up and we knew he was a kind of force and then it was like “Lets have a newspaper!” and he gave birth to New York Rocker with us as his staff and we wrote about each other and it was much more representative of the downtown music scene in the early '70s than PUNK magazine was. PUNK magazine was great but was its own more specific world.

What do you think was the most interesting thing one of these musicians said to you?

LJP: One of my favorite answers, when I asked the Ramones in July of 1976 what they liked to do when they weren’t making music, they all agreed, and I think it was Johnny who said it, “we like to hang out in stairwells.” And he wasn’t kidding; they liked to hang out in stairwells in Queens. One of the things that was good about being there and these early interviews was you got an idea of who everyone was in an unguarded way except for Patti Smith who always seemed strategic and cautious. It was before anyone else there was famous or known, and no one knew whether they were going to be anyone or not. We were all hanging out with our pants down, there was no hiding going on.

What do you think were punk’s biggest inspirations back then?

LJP: In the beginning, they were all pop bands, really. Everyone really liked pop, and everyone was a fan of real rock n roll, and what we heard on the radio was more like Bread and yacht rock before it was called that, and it didn’t feel like what we grew up with and times were tough and a lot of us were just furious, had a ton of energy that needed an outlet. And then, too, we all liked glam. These things, the pop sensibility, the love of glam and the performative aspects of that and the furious energy was the most visible, in many of the Max's and CBGB'S bands 74-76. In 76 the Sex Pistols who had been influenced by The Ramones but had their own kind of fury and other UK bands started to have an effect. There was a lot of discussion, which I wrote about in the New York Rocker and the LA Weekly, about whether our New York music was punk. And we didn’t think so. We were, most of us, a bunch of punk kids but Punk wasn’t a good moniker for most NY bands.

A lot of your Pitchfork article was also about your acting career. How did you get into acting?

LJP: Yeah, that article was about the time when you could still get an apartment for $65 a month in Greenwich Village. There was a lot of experimental theater in the neighborhood, and this guy who lived in my building was a wonderful, known playwright and all around character in The Village named Harry (H.M. Koutoukas), and he came up to me on the street one day and said, “Darling I've written a play for you. Rehearsals start on Sunday. The pay is $25 a week. I’m sending someone to pick you up.” And I didn’t really have anything better to do, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. It was right after I graduated from high school. The guy he sent to pick me up, came to my apartment, walked me from there to the East Village to La Mama Experimental Theater Club and we started rehearsals, and that got my career started. I was enthusiastic and had a passion for it and even more important, I got laughs. The guy who picked me up and walked me to the first rehearsal of the play was the same person who let Chris and Debbie move into the loft on the Bowery with him. The theaters I worked in were right around the corner from CBGB’s so it was convenient to go to shows after I’d perform. The acting part of my career went on until about 2005. I haven’t done much of it since then but I'd welcome the opportunity to play some juicy part with fun people.

What was your favorite acting role? LJP: Well, that’s a hard question to answer because I’d almost always think, “this is the best job, this is the most fun I’ve ever had!” I loved the film The Big Easy, because I had worked with the director Jim McBride before, and we knew each other pretty well. And there was a preponderance of male characters in that script and I said to him, “you should make one of these detectives a woman. It would be so much more interesting.” We had to convince the producer, and we did, and I basically got to write my own role. And you were in the Golden Girls! What was that like? LJP: Well, those ladies are pretty amazing and admirable, as you might imagine. Bea didn’t like to talk very much. She would come in every morning and say “good morning everyone” and not really talk to anyone all day, unless she had a note for you about your performance. It was quite odd. It was fun, but there were more fun jobs. It was more fun to watch them work. What music/art/other stuff do you like today? LJP: Theres a band called Shame that’s from the UK, and they just put out a record called Songs of Praise. I’ve seen them live and they’re fantastic. They have the spirit that I saw back then, in the mid 70s from all the punk bands that we didn’t call punk. I love Mary Epworth who is putting her own unique ethereal spin on psychedelia. She has a beautiful voice. I love so many artists and musicians that I don’t know where to start listing but I’ll tell you this, at any given time you might find me listening to Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio Is My Life! I’ve been listening to Simple Minds again lately. I like Orwells, who I learned about from you. When I was growing up I was the only girl that I knew who had a record player and records. My father worked at a newspaper, so I got a lot of free records. My stepfather was a violinist and he would buy me more experimental music. I always liked noise and I was the only girl I knew who liked prog, and I still like prog. I love Steven Wilson, from Porcupine Tree--but not Porcupine Tree. I like his prog band which goes by his name. I like his work in part because he writes interesting songs about women. No one’s really paid enough attention to that. Prog is leaving behind it’s reputation as a masculine ghetto. Someone needs to write about it. Maybe me, but I haven’t gotten around to that.

Interview by Chloe Graham

All Images Courtesy of Lisa Jane Persky

[the-master-cylinder]

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Greg Cannom Ozzy Osbourne ”Bark at the Moon” In 1980, Ozzy Osbourne signed as a solo act by Epic Records; at his first meeting with the company’s top brass, the Ozz pulled a dead pigeon out of a paper bag, and bit its head off. Supposedly the record execs were quite shocked, and ready to terminate Osbourne’s contract then and there. It’s said that his manager had to do a lot of managing to smooth things over with the record honchos.

The story of the rocker’s geek-like behavior got out to the rock press, and it didn’t seem to hurt Osbourne’s image any. If anything, it seemed to cement his reputation as a “real showman” one who would do anything to give his audience a rise. Then, during a concert in Des Moines in 1982, a member of the audience threw something on stage. To Osbourne, it looked like a toy-a rubber bird. It seemed a good idea to play along with the gag, so the Ozz picked it up and bit into it.

Instead of getting a mouthful of rubber, Osbourne again felt the sickening crunch of tiny bones as he bit off the head of a dead bat. Again, this time by accident he’d played the geek. And, again, the story got played up by the rock press, though most reporters neglected to mention that the incident had been accidental; as far as they were concerned, it was just old Ozzy, the madman of rock, playing that role to the hilt. It didn’t feel that way to Osbourne, though, who had to endure a painful series of rabies shots for his error.

During his 1983 tour of the U.S. Osbourne found his concerts were the target of a pressure campaign by church and parents’ groups, who perceived the Ozzas some form of human devil. Animal Cruelty and satanism were regarded by these groups as a regular part of his act, which of course they had never seen. Robert Hilburn of the L.A. Times reported on a meeting of one such group, which had Seen Osbourne’s act after they had failed to stop it.

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The next morning, several of the concerned ministers gathered to hear a report on the show. “You know what bothered me the most?”one pastor asked. “He said ‘God bless you.’ That’s blasphemy.”

Osbourne, a sincere Christian in his private life, was more than a little upset by these attacks by the clergy.” At first, all this satanic business was funny,” he told Hilburn. It brought me a lot of publicity when I needed it… But it has become like a nightmare. It’s like an LSD trip. You take a tablet and it’s fun at first, but you can’t turn it off.

“To me, it’s like American Werewolf in London or something, just a put on… Why are these people picking on me? Why don’t they picket Vincent Price? He must have been in 90 films with all kinds of satanic references.”

The Ozz made it pretty clear in all of his interviews of the period that he was ready for a change. That change arrived this year, when he appeared, on the Bark at the Moon (1983) album cover and in the video for the title track, as a werewolf. Osbourne’s logic here is pretty clear-if no one believed he was play-acting as a satanist, maybe they will finally recognize Ozzy the Werewolf as a creation of the purest fantasy.

Because Ozzy, like Michael Jackson, is a huge fan of John Landis’ An American Werewolf, Rick Baker was the first artist approached; but Baker was determined to take a hiatus from makeup work. Osbourne and company began combing the country in search of the right makeup man for the job, when one of their contacts recommended Greg Cannom, who had cut his teeth, lycanthropically speaking, as a key crewmember on The Howling. “They told me they needed this werewolf makeup in one week,” says Cannom.

  There were actually two Cannom werewolves involved, the first to be done for the album cover photo session, and a second for the Bark at the Moon video. “In a way, I viewed the album cover shoot as a test; for the video, we had more time, and made a few changes that made it much more to my liking.”

Cannom’s involvement in the video has convinced him that the music business is even crazier than the movie business, though he found the project, overall, a fun assignment. Initially, Cannom was put off a bit by Ozzy’s “madman” reputation; that changed, however, when he met Osbourne. “His wife said to me, ‘I want to see how you’re going to get Ozzy to sit still for five hours,” Cannom recalls. “But he did it, no problems, and he wore the contacts with no problems.”

True fans know that Ozzy’s personality is more puppy dog than Satanist, and Cannom’s design reflects this with a more doglike countenance. A chief difficulty in the design of prostheses was the requirement that Osbourne’s tattoos, on his knuckles, chest and arms, should show through. This required the laying of very fine hair.

Two continents collaborated to get the work done within schedule. We were surprised to learn that in the U.S., Cannom’s chief assistant was Kevin Yagher. The hair for Ozzy’s wig was laid by Hollywood’s leading hairmeister, Josephine Turner. In England, Janice Barnes tied the individual hairs to lace hairpieces for Osbourne’s body, which she also applied.

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Mark Mayling served as Cannom’s assistant at Shepperton Studios for the album cover shoot, and on location for the video. Cannom is particularly pleased with the skill and the speed displayed by Turner and Barnes on the exacting hair work. “It was amazing, just plain incredible, that they were able to come through in that amount of time.

https://dailymotion.com/video/x1ihlz9

“The video was shot at Northampton County Sanatorium, which was built for rich people in the early 1900’s; they closed it down just a few years ago. It was one of the most spectacular buildings I’ve ever seen, and one of the scariest. Hundreds and hundreds of vast, empty rooms and vaulting hallways. I’d hate to be in there at night. One of my main disappointments with the video was that they really didn’t make very good use of that fabulous building…I was also disappointed that they didn’t show the makeup up close, after all the effort that went into it.”

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John Carl Buechler on the Ronnie James Dio’s Last in Line (1984) In 1984, Ronnie James Dio’s eponymic band followed up the success of Holy Diver with their second album, The Last in Line. The title track was accompanied by a completely bizarre music video directed by Don Coscarelli, who also brought us the horror flick Phantasm.

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The Ramones Psycho Therapy Video Shostrom’s entry into the wide world of rock video makeup came while he was working at an L.A. prop house; at the time, he was molding various nefarious devices to be used by the intergalactic buccaneers in the forthcoming film Ice Pirates. “Frank Delia, the producer of the Psycho Therapy (1983) video, knew John Varris, the vice president of the company,” Shostrom says. “John came in one day and said, ‘I know a lot of you guys have weird portfolios, a friend of mine is producing a rock video, and if you bring in your portfolios tomorrow, you can show him your stuff.'” The next day, Delia looked over the portfolios of the crew members; Shostrom and Showe were picked for the job.

Delia was far more open to input by the makeup artists than most film producers. “I don’t think Frank had worked with special effects of this sort before,” says Shostrom, “and, considering the weird situations portrayed in the video they’d planned, he was more inclined to be open, allowing us to toss in some ideas.

“Frank played the song for us, gave us copies of the lyrics, explained the basic idea of the psychoward and asked us if we had any ideas. We threw the ball around for several hours, and came up with the scenario of the Teenage Dope Fiend-the TDF, as Frank liked to call him-on the table about to be given a lobotomy, when his head splits open and this ‘alter ego emerges.”

This effect was accomplished “dry that is, without unpleasant gore, slime or other viscous substances, though a more graphic approach was considered. “But even before filming, there were many people at Warner Brothers and MTV who let Frank know they were against it,” says Shostrom. “Frank fought them, though we didn’t go with any blood. It was still too gory for a lot of people; when they screened it for MTV, people walked out and said there was no way they could show it.

“All of the work has done in eleven arduous days—the lifecast of the actor, Robert Dennis, who played the TDF, his splitting head, the creature puppet, the corpse apparition of the psychiatrist, and one other thing that you can barely see at all in the video, a breathing desktop-a slight Videodrome ripoff. If you look carefully when the corpse-psychiatrist is on, you can see a bulge rising in one corner. And there was also a brief cutaway for the operation scene, where the surgical team is a bunch of rotted corpses. The work for that consisted mostly of taking some old heads off my shelf and throwing some shit on them.”

The puppet, a caricatured likeness of actor Dennis, was built onto a cast of Shostrom’s arm. For actual shooting, Shostrom manipulated the puppet while Showe worked the cables that opened Dennis’ head. Their only assistant was Miles Liptak, who helped with the casting.

“Unfortunately, we never got to meet the Ramones,” laments Shostrom, who has performed as a rock musician himself. “They shot it over a three day period; the first two days they shot with the Ramones, while we continued work in the shop the last day was just pickups and effects, so the Ramones were gone.”

Music Video Work Shostrom, who has recently finished working on a second rock video, for Blue Oyster Cult, expects special makeups to be an increasing part of the rock video phenomenon. “It’s good for the artist,” he says, “because you’re not tied into a script, and it’s clear that they need your ideas and input. Also, it’s a very small proportion of films that can use or require special makeup. Rock videos, just by the nature of the music, have great possibilities for visuals of all kinds, including makeup.”

It’s long been known that one factor that draws rock fans to auditoriums is the chance to hear their favorite hit tune performed live. Taking the rock video phenomenon to its logical conclusion, it probably won’t be long before groups start attempting to re-create their hit videos, live on stage. Imagine, for instance, the Rolling Stones interrupting a performance of Undercover of the Night to engage in a heated on-stage gun battle!

For close to a decade, rock’s leading dramatic troupe has been none other than The Tubes, a musical ensemble composed primarily of former art students. Though the group successfully entered the mainstream of recorded rock with their 1983 hit “She’s a Beauty,” in the mid-70’s their live stage shows were viewed by many as the leading edge of rock’s avante garde.

The elaborately staged Tubes concerts as preserved for posterity on Thorn-EMI’s cassette, Tubes Video, have always been enormously expensive to mount. Early on, the group found a bargain in Rick Lazzarini, a 15-year-old makeup enthusiast. “My brother knew a guy, Tim Mazonk, who was doing pyrotechnics for them,” recalls Lazzarini, “and that was how I hooked up with them.” For one segment of the show, Lazzarini transformed lead singer Fee Waybill into the ultimate punk rocker” by festooning his face with razor blades and other sharp objects. Another character, glitter rock king Quay Lewd, sported 13-inch platform shoes built by Lazzarini (these are still in the act). In a sequence that anticipated Videodrome, Waybill would ram headfirst into a Lazzarini-built TV set, coming up with the set stuck on his head, distorting and magnifying his features. On special occasions, Lazzarini would join the group onstage during the finale, to dance about in his own “anatomically correct” complete with genitals apesuit.

Lazzarini’s otherwise normal teenage lifestyle prevented him from touring nationally with the group, but he worked with them throughout the state of California, where the group enjoyed its greatest popularity. “It was a great thrill,” Lazzerini recalls,” ’cause here I was a kid from a hick town south of San Francisco, reading every copy of Famous Monsters and running out into the street with blood all over me like your readers do, so it was great to have the chance to do these really bizarre things.”

At 17, Lazzarini began touring with KISS as a pyrotechnician, designing various stage effects, and preparing and cuing the on-stage explosions that accompanied their high-decibel rock. His makeup skills were later called into play, however, for such tasks as finding a formula for stage blood that would meet the high standards set by Gene Simmons. “He wanted something that would be healthy if you swallowed it.” Lazzerini recalls. “We wound up using a mixture of egg whites, some flour to thicken it, and red food coloring. It had to be warmed a bit, too, because he didn’t want to take it cold.”

Simmons had a unique method for maintaining discipline among the pyrotechnics crew. A quantity of mouthwash was kept on-stage so that Simmons could clear his throat after performing fire-breathing stunts; when any of the pyro crew missed an effects cue, they could expect to be sprayed with a mouthful of Lavoris. Lazzerini apparently didn’t find Simmons’ methods too unreasonable, however, later, when working for the Hollywood Wax Museum, the makeup artist arranged for the group to be immortalized as one of the museum’s most popular exhibits.

Around the same time, Lazzarini and John Watkins (who would later succeed him as pyrotechnician for KISS) organized a group called the B.E.M.’s (Booger Eating Morons). The group lasted for only one concert hall appearance before becoming a San Francisco Bay rock legend. Suffice to say that their act featured on-stage gunplay, blood pumps, smashed guitars and the microwave massacre pictured above.

Lazzarini subsequently resumed his college education. “I was taking film courses,” he says, “and also courses in business, law and computer science-I decided I wanted to be a rich makeup effects artist, not just a makeup effects artist.” While pursuing his education, Lazzarini referred any major assignments he was offered to friends, though he contributed additional stage effects designs for a subsequent KISS tour.

Lazzerini’s return as a rock’n’roll makeup maestro came with the making of the Jeopardy video featuring Greg Kihn. As head of makeup effects, Lazzerini was in charge of zombie-izing 30 people, attendees at a wedding of the dead, and sculpted a 6-foot-long Octopus tentacle (adapted to greater length by the video crew) which engages Kihn in mortal battle. Assisting with the zombie makeups was a young makeup artist with the singular name Syd Terror; Terror also provided the connective tissue for a strange pair of Siamese Twins seen in the video, and “Martha,” the video’s zombie bride.

The resultant video was one of four nominees in the best effects category of Heavy Metal magazine’s rock video awards last year, and the only nominee that did not rely heavily on opticals for its razzle-dazzle. Just recently, Lazzarini and Mark Shostrom worked together on a brand-new video for Blue Oyster Cult, produced by Frank Delia of Psychotherapy fame. The video, called Shooting Shark, features two ravishing and scantily clad models wearing custom masks designed by the pair. Lazzarini built the iguana head, and contributed mechanicals to Shostrom’s jackal head that allow it to snarl. Unfortunately, the ravishing models are not featured in the video as prominently as are the less-than attractive faces of BOC’s members.

“Working with Frank, you find that he doesn’t know what he wants, but he knows what he doesn’t want-and that leads to numerous changes and headaches,” says Lazzerini. “But it also gives you an opportunity to offer your ideas, which is always good, So there you have it a natural combination: fast, loud music and special makeup effects. When there’s more to report in this burgeoning field, we’ll be reporting it. In the meantime, just remember the wise words of Sleepy LaBeef: It ain’t what you do, It’s the way how you do it And it ain’t what you eat It’s the way how you chew it.

Stan Winston sculpts Mr. Roboto (1982) for a Styx music video, the character would become one of the most iconic pop-culture figures of the 1980’s.

Ed French/”Torture” The Jacksons I got a phone call from a woman saying, “We need a character with a leering, toothy grin from ear to ear (literally, a hand with a human eyeball growing out of its paim, a rock with a human face and three people singing… without faces (all features blank, smooth except for mouths). Are you the person who does this sort of thing?” “Yes,” replied, “I’m that kind of guy. “We’ll need you next week if you’re available. That was producer Kathy Dougherty on the phone two days before the Jacksons were to begin shooting the “Torture” video from their Victory album.

Very shortly after that I was sitting with director Jeff Stein in the dining hall at Astoria Studios, I found out that Jeff had directed videos for the Cars (“You Might Think”, Billy Idol (“Rebel Yell”) and Hall and Oates (“Out of Touch). His laid-back demeanor, I later realized, were quite necessary to his survival during the uninterrupted 24 and 48 hour stretches of filming and editing that would take place during the next two weeks.

Since the final effect of the video would be more of a “fun-house” experience than a “chamber of horrors’ a la “Thriller”, we agreed that the artistic effects would be slanted toward the surreal. Art director Bryce Walmsley was coming up with a wall composed of oversized moveable plastic eyes, so we decided that, in an atmosphere like this, my Gahan Wilson-inspired “Mixed-up Face mask (a.k.a. “The Geek” appearing in Geek Maggot Bingo) would be right at home in cameo appearance.

While repairing, retouching and restoring “The Geek to his original ghastly splendor, I was also sculpting a dental nightmare in clay on a stone life-cast of my face. Having just completed an exhausting stint on Larry Cohen’s new epic The Stuff, my death-like appearance probably inspired Jeff to cast me as the video’s leering “Phantom of the Opera” character. Although leff had those abominables, Phibes and Sardonicus, in mind for the shrouded, ear-to-ear grin figure at the high-tech pipe organ, my immediate inspiration for the prosthetic leer was that gooney Hirschfield caricature of Jerry Lewis I was seeing all over town in the adverts for the Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon.

The monstrous grin was sculpted and the two-piece mold completed in about four hours. The only other prosthetic appliance that could be pre-fabricated was for the bit in which the eye peeks through the skin in Jackie Jackson’s hand. Using a negative hand mold, close to the size of Jackie’s hand, created a thin latex rubber skin that I would adhere over a semi-spherical glass eye l had attached in the palm of Jackie’s real hand When the hand opened, a pre-cut slit pulled apart and the eye pushed through the “skin” The faceless singers were supposed to be three of Jackie’s brothers and the immediate makeup solution was to use prosthetic adhesive to glue nylon stocking over their heads, exposing only their mouths and ears, “seal” the material with liquid latex, make it up with rubber-mask grease paint and, lastly, add wigs. Even considering the total absence of pre-production time, I thought these things could be effective.

It turned out to be overly optimistic to think that “Torture could be shot in four days. The Jacksons would shoot their scenes for the first three days (Tuesday through Thursday and many effects scenes would be shot on Friday featuring Jackie. The shooting schedule actually expanded in to a marathon seven days and nights, which was still remarkably short, considering that every shot had some special effects in it. Steve Kershoff, whom I had met on Exterminator Il and who had recommended me for this job created smoke effects, whips that cracked explosively and other pyrotechnic goodies. Louise de Teliga provided dancers with spider costumes containing extra arms and, in a nifty visual pun, Peter Wallach animated break-dancing skeletons, (built by Bill de Paulo) that really broke!

The alien-landscape set of flat terrain, with the occasional black papier mache rock Sprouting up from terra-burlap, took up fully one third of the huge Studio H floor and included a beautifully air brushed cyclorama of star filled heavens with very agreeable looking pastel colored “cosmic dust.” While “The Geek’s fleeting appearance was being enormously enhanced by the camera work of Tony Mitchell, the “Forbidding Fortress set was being constructed only a few yards away, complete with sliding doors, dungeon and a pipe organ that rolled like a train down tracks which disappeared at the end of a corridor. This was where I would do my leering Lon Chaney routine while a dozen or more plastic-clawed dancers clutched at Jackie’s stunt double through bars in their floor prison.

Test estimated that the leering-face makeup would take three hours to complete, so I started at 3:00 am by waxing down my beard, In the past, I’ve prepared for roles by cutting my hair short and even shaving my scalp to alter my hairline. If a role has required a beard, and there was time to grow it, I grew it. If I had a beard and it had to go, I shaved it without a second. This time I experimented with applying the piece over the beard. At 4:00 am I had completed the application of the unpainted appliance and took a little walk through the Carpentry shop and out onto Studio H where the crew was still working the kinks out of the set’s moveable parts. Hoping that the completion of my makeup would coincide with that of the set, I took three more hours with the painting, assisted by a fabulous West Coast makeup artist, named Sally Childs and we were still ready too soon.

I took a little nap in the makeup chair until l was awakened, “1984” style, with the Jens of a camera about six inches away from my face. It was 8:00 am and a video crew was documenting the making of “Torture.” pointed to my face and shook my head “no” to indicate that I couldn’t talk under the monstrous mouth. After a quick trip to wardrobe, I took my place at the organ. It’s not easy playing the pipe organ in a shroud, especially if you’re miming it to a Jacksons hit while your mouth is glued shut at 8:30 in the morning. On top of that, while listening to my directions, (“Get down”, “Play that muthal”, “Get funky, Ed” screamed Jeff Stein) manfully attempted to stay aboard a speeding pipe organ, that could have used a seat belt, when it abruptly reached the end of its runway. I had been in makeup about 10 hours when the 40-second sequence, that took five hours to shoot, finally wrapped.

Aside from my good fortune to work with the Jacksons, that week was also special because I moved to my new 2500-square foot living and working space. “Torture” continued shooting and in between trips in a moving van between Manhattan and Brooklyn I found myself sitting on the floor of one empty living room or the other, talking on the phone with Sally Childs or Jeff Stein in Studio H in order to keep tabs on when I would be needed for Jackie’s third eye bit. The action of the scene had Jackie backing into the wall of eyes and inadvertently sticking his hand through one of the orbs and then retracting the hand now covered with dripping goo. He would then open his wet hand to reveal the eye staring at him. Sally told me, “They need the eye goo standing by!” and I suggested picking up a few jars of pink Dippity Doo setting gel, which is exactly what we used when the scene was shot on the following Tuesday. Although fatigued from being on call most of the night and obviously not having the easiest time of it, injured Jackie cheerfully climbed into a canvas chair so that makeup could begin. A few feet away the wall of eyes was being lit. It was Jackie’s final scene and when Jeff yelled “Cut” everyone gave him a well-deserved round of applause.

It looked like that pretty much wrapped up my work on “Torture”, too, but two days later, I was contacted about the pick-up shots that would be filmed in a photography studio in Manhattan. One of the shots was to be that trio of faceless singers and I was feeling a litt anxious about the effect as we were not able to use the same marvelous cameraman. I was very pleasantly surprised and relieved when I walked into the studio Saturday morning to find that Dave Greene was to be Tony’s replacement. Greene’s photography and canny suggestions had been a great help to me when we worked together on Sleepaway Camp

The three brothers.. actually, three volunteers were supposed to simply turn to the camera and reveal their blank faces. I suggested that we not have them move at all, but rather simply have them wear the trademark.

Jackson shades and simultaneously remove them on cue. (You never see these guys without them on, right?) Our Jacksons surrogates were extraordinarily patient, especially when you realize the makeup totally abscured their vision for three hours. Now, part of my job became that of escorting these guys to the bathroom and making sure they didn’t incinerate themselves or anything else while they were smoking. When the nylon edges around the mouths started to work loose, due to the wear and tear or repeated takes of lipsynching the song, I not only reglued them but hit upon the idea of concealing the now obvious edges with quickly improvised mustaches. The three of them appear on the video for one freaky second you might miss them if you blink.

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY rollingstone revolvermag Fangoria#35 Gorezone#04 Fangoria#42 Fangoria#41

1980’s Music Videos & Make Up Effects Greg Cannom Ozzy Osbourne ”Bark at the Moon” In 1980, Ozzy Osbourne signed as a solo act by Epic Records; at his first meeting with the company's top brass, the Ozz pulled a dead pigeon out of a paper bag, and bit its head off.

[fallenloverecords]

Interview: Pickle Darling

Hi lovers! Here at Fallen Love headquarters we periodically interview people that we adore in order to shine a spotlight on our wonderful pop planet. We post all those interviews right here for your education and enjoyment.

Pickle Darling is the bedroom pop of Lukas Mayo from Christchurch, New Zealand. Fallen Love head Harley interviewed Lukas through a 16-hour time zone warp on a Sunday/Monday. Fallen Love Records: Who is Lukas Mayo? How did Pickle Darling come to be? Lukas: Lukas Mayo is some insecure loser from Christchurch, New Zealand. Pickle Darling is me taking my innermost insecurities and making dumb redemptive pop songs out of them. It feels more "me" than Lukas Mayo does. I'd been in a few bands and collaborations growing up which were all fruitful but ultimately incredibly hard. I think I was way too self-indulgent at those times and I was terrible at compromise. I would rather have had something suck but be true to me than be "good" and not be a great representation of myself. Since then I've grown as a person and I think I'd be a much better collaborator now. FLR: This past April you released your first EP of original songs, Spring Onion Pancakes. How did the track listing come about? L: I've been writing songs for as long as I can remember and those were kind of just the six most recent! I was also in a five-year relationship which had just suddenly ended and the EP kept me out of wallowing in self-pity. It's upbeat and colourful because I wanted to make sure that all my songs were full of love and humour and kindness and friendship. It's still a sad EP to me but I'm super glad that people don't think of my music as sad music. Most of it was written when I was in class though which is probably why all the lyrics are basically "I suck and I'm a loser" 'cause that's how I generally felt at Polytech. lol FLR: What are spring onion pancakes like? My research says it's a traditional Chinese dish. L: Oh yeah, I've only actually had them once. The bus station in town has a place that makes them. I was with my friends Heather, Isaac, and Nico and we had just watched a movie and then got spring onion pancakes together. My hands were all greasy on the bus ride home, though. (Sorry, Christchurch Metro Bus services.) My EP is so hard to search for on Google 'cause you have to wade through three pages of recipes. FLR: Does anyone make spring onion pancakes with pickles? That would be a search engine nightmare. L: There's some weird stuff when you google Pickle Darling. There's another Facebook page which is just a cat called Pickle Darling. I'm hoping if I get a Pitchfork feature one day, they accidentally get in touch with whoever runs that page and they do an interview on my behalf. It would probably be more interesting than me, to be honest. FLR: I'm actually interviewing the other Pickle Darling tomorrow. It's part of a dueling interview series I'm doing. Like when I interviewed Kevin Shields and the director of the slasher movie My Bloody Valentine. L: lmao I avoided My Bloody Valentine for years thinking they were Bullet For My Valentine. FLR: On the topic of your hometown, what is the music scene like in Christchurch? I can't say I really hear any Dunedin sound in your music. L: I don't feel hugely involved in the Christchurch music scene. I haven't done many gigs and kinda bypassed it and went straight to the internet. That sounds kind of douchey of me. I have mad love for a lot of Christchurch artists. There are heaps of super talented people here who make amazing music and people have reached out to me and shown me so much kindness but I spend most nights by myself just going for walks around Opawa or watching films or reading. I'm not a super regular gig attendee. I go to maybe one a month and I'm always the least cool person there. It's cool, though, I enjoy it when I do go. And I'm slowly feeling more and more involved in the Christchurch music scene as people become a bit more aware of what I do. I feel like locals will see me on the internet and be like "Hey, that's that dweeb I see walking around town all the time. Weird." FLR: You only played live for the first time this year, right? How has that side of things been? L: I feel like such a fraud 'cause I've had such great opportunities handed to me right off the bat. My first gig was in a library for NZ Music Month and we were playing with my friend Luke's band EgoValve. That was fun and super low-key and about five people were there and they were all under the age of nine. Richard from Glass Vaults (great guy and great band) heard my Radio NZ interview and got in touch with me and our second gig was opening for Glass Vaults. My third gig was opening for Kane Strang, who I have so much love for. During sound check I was just like "Oh my god, are you Kane Strang? Is your real name actually Kane Strang? I love you, Kane Strang. Your album is great, Kane Strang. Oh my god, you are really Kane Strang. Hi, I'm Lukas. Oh my god, you are Kane Strang." Those two shows were sold out and I had my friends Isaac, Nico, Marcus, and Cameron in my band and they were just fun, positive nights. My fourth gig is going to be at Nostalgia Festival, which also has Connan Mockasin and The Chills. I'm so incredibly blessed with all this stuff.

FLR: For the EP you did a run of cassettes through Slovakian label Z Tapes and a limited run of lathe cut seven-inches on your own. Is having a physical product important to you? Some artists are content to just toss their songs online for streaming and downloading and call it a day. L: I want to be the most working class bedroom pop star out. I love the idea of just sitting in my room making stuff myself and packaging stuff myself and getting my fingerprints on everything and having a merch table with things I've made on it. I just want to make things. Z Tapes did all the tapes, though, which was such a relief and such an honour. Filip is really a hero of Bandcamp. He believed in me from the very start and now they're doing a second run of my EP on tape and it's great. The lathe cuts look cool. I'm super proud of them. My friends Heather Reid Van Gerwen and Noah Mead handled the art side of things, which is why they look so beautiful. I'm always going to want to make a physical thing. I mean all physical media is outdated now so if you're going to do physicals, do something fun and creative with it. Also I'm doing a Christmas tape with Heather and she's painting little pictures to go with them. FLR: What's the most exciting location you've received an order from so far? L: I get a lot of orders from Japan, which is so cool, as well as heaps from the States. It's exciting that the majority of the orders are from outside of New Zealand. It's not just my friends buying my stuff out of pity. There are actual people out there that are listening to my stuff and willing to spend money on it. I'm super grateful for them. I really want to be able to play in those places one day. FLR: I feel you. My label almost never gets any orders from within Canada but I've got a handful of regular customers in Germany and Spain. Each of those orders keeps me going and makes me feel like this is all worth it. L: Definitely! It makes it feel so real, right? FLR: Switching topics: what's your favorite film that hasn't had a Criterion DVD release but totally deserves one? L: Ooh I love this question. Hmm... Oddly enough one of my goals (actually my only goal 'cause I hate goals) is to be successful enough to get invited into the Criterion closet. But hmmm... These are probably pleb picks but I'd love: Happy Together (1997) or just more Wong Kar-Wai in general; Synecdoche, New York (2008); Quiet City (2007); Careful (1992); and Funny Ha Ha (2002) in the collection. Also some Barry Jenkins! These are probably pleb picks, though. Also, shout out to my friends Martin (who directed my video) and Julia who give me good film recommendations. Joe Swanberg is a big influence on my work ethic. He made, like, 30 films in seven years or something. If anyone reads this interview, please send me film recommendations on Twitter! FLR: My top rec is Marty (1955) starring Ernest Borgnine. He's a lonely 34 year-old butcher who lives with his mother and is afraid he'll never fall in love. It's basically the film equivalent of a bedroom pop song. L: Dude, I'm totally going to check that one out! I haven't heard of that one! I reckon my film equivalent of a bedroom pop song is Hannah Takes The Stairs. I sampled that on my EP. My friend Julia recommended that one to me actually. I put that movie on all the time just to listen to. I don't even watch it now. I just put it on while I'm doing housework to listen to Greta Gerwig's dialogue. I love how that film sounds. I love their voices. FLR: What's one question you've never been asked in an interview that you would love to be asked someday? L: An interview question I'd love to be asked is "Hi, I'm Evan from Pinegrove. Do you want to open for my band?" and the answer would be "Yes, Evan from Pinegrove." Actually I'd love to be asked what I'm listening to at the moment. FLR: And finally, what does 2018 look like for Pickle Darling? I hear your first album is nearly finished. L: 2018 will be big for me personally but small for my fans. What I mean by that is I'm going to be working on a lot of stuff but probably not releasing a huge amount until it's all done. I'm doing an album. It's ten tracks and it's going to be awesome. There's a song called "Nicolas Cage" and I think it's my best song. My friend Josiah has a feature on it. Matt Gunn is helping out with the production and I think he is a literal angel from heaven. I'm going to do a bunch of music videos too. I want to tour. I want to do bigger physicals like vinyl and CD's and stuff like that. I just want to make more stuff. Pickle Darling on Facebook Pickle Darling on Twitter

[twistednuns]

June 2019

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”   

A (very) sunny day in London. Seeing a seal in the Thames, right under the Tower Bridge. Walking through St. James’s Park, eating ice-cream. Taking a beautiful picture of Laura in Covent Garden. Finally getting out of the underground. A tiny rainbow reflection in the sky over Greenwich.

Playing badminton in the evening with Frank. Sitting by the river, making new friends (duckies).

Micha. Meeting in Thalkirchen after I had just seen a half dead mouse. Walking along the river, finding a nice spot across from the zoo with a bunch of musical hippies playing the drums on the other bank. We got drunk on Toro Loco and Grasovka in ice hockey cups until he kissed me in the middle of a sentence. It took quite a while until I noticed I was just kissing my first man with a tongue piercing. At some point I re-erected a knocked over portable toilet (does drunk me have superhuman powers?) and we walked to the subway together. Such a gentle weirdo.

Making breakfast for someone other than me. Sharing an apple. Eating out of the same bowl.

IKEA has veggie hot dogs now. Excellent. I also got a new cutting board. And that’s ALL I got. I’m virtually patting myself on the shoulder right now.

Christoph and Lauren’s wedding was pretty chill. We squeezed into a car, went up a very steep hill to attend the ceremony and spent the rest of the day around a camp fire drinking gin and tonics or dancing to very bad music. I loved getting to know Michael’s boyfriend of 4 years. I always received gay vibes from him… good to know that my gaydar isn’t broken.

Taking polaroid pictures in the beautiful afternoon light. I also loved Christian’s outtakes of the theme music quiz. One of them honestly looks as if I’d just won a beauty pageant - we have a host, two ladies with jealous side glances and me, all excited, open mouth, in front of the mic, waiting for her tiara…

Spending a few hours in my mum’s garden. Doing dangerous yoga exercises in the grass. Walking barefoot. Marveling at the lush roses everywhere. Watching a blackbird taking a bath under the cherry tree. Very entertaining.

I want to learn Spanish and this video gives me hope - apparently I can heavily rely on my French vocabulary.

Why the men I like usually look the same.

Hanging out with Martina, Tobi and Diego the dog at the Thalkirchen campsite. Watching the rafts go by (horrible music), driving them home with their car right before the apocalyptic thunderstorm.

The perfect dessert: berries or peaches with fresh cream. The perfect dinner: Truffle pasta.

The concept of eclecticism.

Spending the afternoon with Franzi at Maria Einsiedel. Meeting baby Elise for the first time. Hopping into the Eiskanal, turning my body into a freezer for five minutes. Eating tiny lemon ice-cream and galia melon.

Meeting Catrin and Andreas at Brillengalerie in Altheim. Really good cappuccino (he’s an optician AND a latte artist). I loved trying on those gorgeous glasses and talking to Catrin about the Latte Art championships and rude customers.

Our trip to the Bavarian Forest to make a cake tree for the wedding. We visited Lena’s uncle who turned a tree trunk into a three-tiered cake stand with his chainsaw. We helped. I really want to get a chainsaw license now.

Once again: roses. They are incredibly lush this year. I don’t know why exactly but climate change seems to have one tiny upside.

Drawing. Portrait practice. Filling my sketchbook from idee. Polychromos coloured pencils.

Using Instagram’s story feature for the first time. I love editing pictures and adding gifs and colours. Immature and tacky but fun.

Looking trough old analogue pictures. Finding lots of my dad looking like the perfect Millennial. 90s fashion really IS back. I still loathe fanny packs though.

I found someone who’s coming to India with me!! I’m going to travel with Bibi this summer. So excited!

Unfortunately: the Solitaire app on my phone. Unhealthy obsession. You know you’ve got a problem when you’re getting REALLY good…

The smell of dill pickles reminds evokes vivid memories of my grandma. She used to make them herself, in heavy stoneware next to the wash room in the cellar.

Spending the evening with Bibi at Kulturdachgarten (having Ginger Spritz as a sundowner in the late afternoon sun), eating Israeli mezze at NANA in Haidhausen and seeing Rocketman at Rio cinema. My colleague works there so we got discount tickets and free ice-cream. Taron Egerton is a fabulous actor. If I had to describe the film in one word it’d be flamboyant. Also, I’d have loved to be the costume designer for this.

Iglo veggie love frozen meals. With Hela curry ketchup. Nom.

Extremely cute new rockery plants (who will have to do with regular potting soil I’m afraid).

Meeting Andre at Thalkirchen. Spending the evening on an Isar gravel bank, drinking the beer Martina brought from Croatia. Joining the… eh, what’s the Mile High Club for people who prefer water to air travel? Catching the last train home. Taking dinky photobooth pictures because we still had ten minutes to spare. That fake photo strip makes me happy instantly whenever I look at it.

Getting better at asking for what I want.

The character Moe in the Netflix series Trinkets. To me, she’s so much more attractive than Tabitha. And I love her attitude. And her hookup in episode seven. What a pretty man.

Manu making me realise how much I look like my dad. “At least jawwise!”

Spending the evening with Tom. Pre-theatre Spritz, Melancholia at Kammerspiele, Isar-beer near Müllersches Volksbad. Talking about our insights and issues.

It’s fascinating to see the lupin in front of my balcony door open it’s blossoms gradually from bottom to top. This plant has such an interesting structure and geometry.

Salad season. Somehow I only like salads in the summer but then I eat them passionately. With strawberries, Black Forest tofu, peaches, blueberries, mangoes, olives. Those nice, firm Roma tomatoes you only get during the summer months. I made a huge bowl of Tabouleh the other day and had it for breakfast, lunch an dinner.

Going home in the morning, smelling of another person.

Booking flights to India. 5 weeks. I’ve never been gone for so long and then I chose India of all places… I feel a mild panic attack coming but I’m also super excited.

Artificial cherry flavour.

A day trip with Lexi. She brought crisps and a fun Mexican dice game which we played on the train. Spending the whole afternoon soaking in the warm water at Therme Bad Aibling. Discovering the amazing acoustics in the various domes. Making a new duckie friend. Weird mirror selfies with hairdryers. Dinner at a Bavarian restaurant in Rosenheim. Teaching le Sash some obscure Bavarian words.

The word obscure, come to think of it. Uncanny is a close second.

Jupiter being so bright in the night sky. I always notice it first as soon as it’s dark.

Librarians are secretly the funnest people alive.

So many things, really. I’m feeling quite happy at the moment. My only problem is that I keep gaining weight. Somehow enjoying myself is adverse to the strict regime I need in order to stay perfectly healthy.

Random things: Schweppes Fruity citrus and orange lemonade. Tomato sandwiches with fresh basil on olive ciabatta. That squirrel running over the garage roof in the morning. Dreaming of ferry rides through US rivers. And intercourse with a panther. The Garner Ambre Soleil natural bronzer spray with coconut oil. Nice colour, good smell, minimal chipmunk effect. And of course me regular Garnier sun oil. It’s the bottled essence of summer.

Filling in for someone in the Natural 20s pub quiz team. Being invited to a pen and paper round with feline characters only. Meeting Sophia who, I realised later, played Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern?) at Entity Theatre’s production of Hamlet last year.

My complete and utter obsession with Phil Collins’ version of You Can’t Hurry Love. I think it’s going to be my next karaoke song.

A desire and drive to be creative. Making collages out of dried leftover paint. Drawing on the window panes. Getting out gouache, pastel chalks, oil pastels, those weird 3-in-1 coloured pencils which create such a nice texture. Drawing first thing in the morning. Spending hours drawing owls for the coffee roasters. Using coloured pencils to draw portraits of all the cool girls of Instagram.

Oh, speaking of art. I don’t want to jinx it but I might get the chance to write a book soon! I met an editor who works at a publishing house for lifestyle books and needs someone to make a book about portrait drawing/painting for her. So. Excited. They’re also looking for a trainee in the graphic design department. I really hope I get to collaborate with them in one way or another.

Cute summer outfits. Good colour combinations. Accessorizing. Wearing pretty clothes with a creative twist. Actually putting some thought into putting together an outfit can be a lot of fun. After all it’s just another way of making a collage.

Polarized sunglasses providing me with the bluest skies and rainbow-tinted tram windows.

The Croatian man who sat down next to a visibly pregnant Bavarian woman on the subway and started telling her about his daughter Persephone and the abduction myth connected with her. I keep reading and hearing about Demeter and Persephone lately, for example about Baubo and the vulva presentations / Demeter worship.

Carmen Rohrbach’s Unterwegs sein ist mein Leben. I was very impressed by how much she has seen and experienced. How much she knows about nature and animals. I mean, she’s a biologist, too. Reading this book made my days a little more special because it gave me a sense of how much more there is to discover on this planet.

Eating vegan ice-cream (pumpkin seed and ginger-turmeric) with Micha. Sitting on the balustrade in front of the Art Academy. Staring into these insanely pretty blue eyes all the time. Looking for the toilets, roaming through the hallways. I love the architecture of that building.

A ladybug escaping the subway train through an open door. Freedom!

I love how the characters resemble each other so much in the different generations in the TV-series Dark. Uncanny. And they feature very nice colour contrasts, too. I guess I like their production designer / cinematographer.

Late-night Isar strolls. Drinking red wine, lying down, watching the stars surrounded by fireflies! (which are quite rare where I live so I was lucky - the strangest thing is that I had drawn a firefly into my sketchbook earlier that day, feels like I manifested it)

Tollwood gin and tonics, forgetting to go home, ending up in a gay club at 3am. Nice Thursday.

Making up for the lack of sleep on Friday afternoon. Waking up late. Releasing my inner Julia Child at 2am by making sushi rolls, taboulé and Bergsteigerbrot, something like super tasty vegan granola bars with lots of nuts and honey.

A little bike tour with Frank along the river. Pseudo-meditating on a log, eating some snacks I brought. Floating with the current. His alliterations (“further fodder for future followers”).

[acehotel]

“Probably Ten Thousand Likes” : AN INTERVIEW with CORY ARCANGEL & OLIA LIALINA

It’s been over a decade since Russian-based net art pioneer Olia Lialina wrote “A Vernacular Web,” the first in her series of essays that detail elements of the World Wide Web and its relationship to ordinary users. Lialina has continued to write and produce work about the slow decline of user agency on the Internet over time. As a medium for free self-expression, the web, as a platform, has become increasingly pervasive and uncannily static, as we swipe easily from friendships to followers and abandon the former.

Today, the whole gamut of human exploration online has been observed by a slew of creatives — sifting through accumulations of digital culture, finding nuggets of truth amongst discarded cellphones, virtually extinct wallpapers, glittery gifs and homepages. One of the foremost among them is self-professed Internet lurker and post-conceptual artist Cory Arcangel, whose work speaks as much to the Atari generation as it does to the Post-Internet generation.

Cory and Olia met on the evening before Y2K, and have since continued to collaborate, tweet, text and email one another cool links. They each seem to contend with obsolescence as a subject in their practices, using appropriation as a form of preservation. We caught up with them during the installation of their latest exhibition, Asymmetrical Response, to talk about the Internet and marvel at their cross-genre artworks from wallpapers, to LCD screens, to pool noodles. 

Olia: We’ll start with the carpet and the wallpaper.

Cory: The carpet is a work of mine called Diamond Plate and it is this repeated diamond plate pattern. Diamond plate is usually kind of metallic. In fact the elevator of The Kitchen is coated with it (see below). This is part of a series of works that I started a couple of years ago, noticing that often carpets come in the same repeated patterns that were once popular on the Internet for people to put on the background of their websites. So diamond plate was once a very popular web background, and it was actually the background of my first website.

The Kitchen’s elevator, in diamond plate.

Ace: Your homepage?

C: Right, my homepage. So that’s what this is, and it’s just a ready-made. It was ordered from some carpet company.

O: [gestures] And what you see on the walls are also backgrounds of what one can say now, are early web pages. But it’s not that early, it’s 1999 — when Yahoo bought Geocities, and then they started to bring order into everything. So they said that if you have a dog, and you’re making a webpage for your dog, then use this template: “Meet My Dog.” If you’re making a personal website, “Personal Page Blue” is the best template. It also existed in other colors —green, pink, and something else — but the blue one was used the most. So people really tried to fit themselves into this format.

Olia Lialina, MeetMyDog (detail), 2016

Ace: That seems pretty consistent with Facebook today.

O: Yes. And later, when Facebook came along, it was also blue with the line on the top. But this was in ’99, 5 years or so beforehand. And it was one of the first attempts, really, online, to say how things should look. To say “don’t make this, make that.” This template here is for fan pages — so this was a suggestion for a page about Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls or Britney Spears.

Give me time/This page is no more (2015), an installation of two classic slide projectors

O: In each of these projects there are slides of websites. Here are sites where people promise that they will make the website soon. This is people promising, or asking for more time. Not just sites under construction, but I collected more sophisticated sites, where people really promise, or really ask for something. It’s very narrative.

Here are eighty slides where people say “no, I am not interested in making this website anymore. I’m not a Hanson fan anymore,” or “school just started, so I am done with my page.” So these are very clear statements, and that is quite rare. Usually they are not so spectacular, these pages, but they are very clear messages. And when you see them next to each other it can be very powerful.

Ace: I’m also very interested in this web page “visits counter”, or ticker. It’s sort of like the early “like” notification that produces a little bit of dopamine when you receive them.

C: I’ve never thought about that actually — just a page visit is a “like”.

O: We can’t see it now because it’s just a screenshot, but this is a fake counter. It’s a joke about counters because it’s constantly rotating. The websites are quite different themselves, but I chose them based on the text. I selected the sites where people promise they will make the website soon— and sometimes they say exactly when. My research shows that most commonly people say it will be two weeks. I don’t know what this hope or deadline means.

And these are pages are from ‘95, and the dates are from 2000.

Ace: And you’ve archived these from Geocities?

O: Yes, and actually everybody can see them on the tumblr, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, but I’m selecting them to show as slides. On One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, there is one screenshot uploaded every twenty minutes — and right now it’s on Christmas of 2000.

Ace: Wasn’t that around when you two met? Around Y2K? Can you tell me a little about how you’ve collaborated over the years since then?

C: Well, our first time meeting was in Munich in 2001, in the fall. Olia was doing Make World, a festival and poltical art and concert series in Munich and invited me and my friends — we had a band — to play, and also exhibit. I had to get a passport for it, I remember. So that’s when we met and we stayed in contact since then. We’ve shown together a bunch —

O: But not intentionally.

C: Oh, not collaboratively, yeah.

Ace: Is this your first two-person exhibition with one another?

C: Yes. And we are in constant contact on twitter.

O: on WhatsApp…

C: on email…

Ace: Just sort of exchanging ideas?

C: Yeah actually, the show came out of…Olia was trying to print out an easyJet pass.

O: Boarding passes. And they didn’t work. I had three failures, and the fourth one worked.

C: So she tweeted about it as a joke saying, “I’m trying to print this boarding pass” and I tweeted back that I’d love to have those for my collection. So we had a back and forth.

O: We started to talk about what he would give me in return — and then it started to become about these responses we have with each other, and that work is what’s visible here.

C: Because I just said “I have something similar,” and she said “I have something similar to that,” and the great part of this story, is that the boarding pass piece has turned into a sculpture and it’ll be in the show. And the sculpture that I made in response is in the show too. 

Ace: So it’s come full circle.

O: And of course the title is Asymmetrical Response, so it has this kind of personal connotation. But when we started to conceptualize all this, one and a half years ago, it was very clear that the situation in the world is getting more and more similar to when we were kids — like the Cold War.

C: And when we started talking it wasn’t even on the radar, but all of a sudden we’re back to it.

O: And “Asymmetrical Response” is also a diplomatic term [correlating to power dynamics between nations]. 

Ace: A lot of the remains of the early web have shifted from being seen as merely nostalgic or amateur. Today, they are looked at as forms of “required digital heritage” or important archival ephemera. Can you speak a little bit about that shift?

O: I started to collect early web elements long before the hype, long before it came back around, just to show students how things looked a year, or a few years ago. That was around the start of Web 2.0, when it became clear that there was another part of the web now — with social networks and an exact place for everything — it became clear, like a cut, that there was the web of the 90s, and then the web of the 2000s. I think around that time, all of these earlier elements had another sort of great moment. A lot of work was made around it. But for me, it has nothing to do with nostalgia. I am still absolutely convinced that it remains a web that is made for people, and by people themselves, and it is still possible that it will come back to that.

Ace: Possible that people can kind of regain control and agency over the web?

O: Exactly. And these elements are symbols for this control — of the presentation, of the sort of modular culture. It’s not about the animation of the .gif, it’s about seeing that you can take this file and put it somewhere on the page yourself. You can decide if it’s on the bottom, if it’s on the top, if it appears three times.

Ace: Rather than just posting it?

O: Yes. These are signs of a web that belongs to the people.

Ace: A lot of operating system upgrades lend themselves to seamlessness or user-friendliness. It’s like they want users to forget about the interface, forget the cable, and maintain very close, quasi-relationships with these products that record our every digital move in some distant cloud. I wondered if you have any other ideas, like putting a gif anywhere on a page, about ways to disrupt that sort of mediation? 

C: I was always against upgrading. I wouldn’t upgrade until finally, something, that I needed didn’t work. That’s been my policy for twenty years. Only recently, in the past few months, you can’t do that anymore. Because your computer will ask you every day. My computer’s like, “Do you want to upgrade right now, or in two hours? We’ll totally do it in the middle of the night, between 2 and 4, when it’s plugged in…” There’s been a huge shift, and it’s exhausting. My iPhone is exhausting me right now: “Oh, we saw that you weren’t plugged in last night. Totally cool, just plug it in tonight…” 

O: In 2012, I actually started this User Rights Campaign, and one of the suggestions was “the right not to update” and there was quite some discussion there. I came back to this idea some days ago, when Samsung said that they are now running this update for their Galaxy 7 — the one that explodes. 93% of all these phones were returned, and for the remaining 7%, what they will do now is an update that won’t allow you to call anyone, or to charge the battery. It’s not a situation that you could say “oh, evil corporations” yeah? they are doing it for good, but it makes you think of how it all functions. It’s just a software update, but it can make it all obsolete. Even this battery. It’s all controlled.

C: What is the phrase? Everything phones home now. All devices.

O: But what we see now, Cory’s Lakes: that is an example of a work that is made on a computer that does not update. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible. The snow here, you can’t see it on the browser anymore. Because it doesn’t support Java Applet.

Cory Arcangel (L to R): Imgres (2016), 100 Raves (2016), Krugman / Lakes (2016). 

Ace: So do you have a computer that allows you to insert those effects?

C: Yeah, we have one computer in the office that Java works on. And we just don’t touch it and pray that it doesn’t break. So we have a time capsule in the office, that I make these on.

Installation view

Ace: How does humor come to play in each of your individual practices? Do you think it provides a sense of relief from our hyper mediated lives, or does it instead make it more apparent, or uneasy?

O: I can’t say that I’m trying to make something humorous, ever. Interestingly, quite often I am criticized by my colleagues who say that everything’s too playful. But it’s because people often think that if something, like this .gif, is animated, or if there’s glitter, that it’s humorous. But it’s not. Everything here is rather…not sad, but melancholic.

C: Yeah melancholic would be an okay term.

O: But it’s not nostalgic.

C: I’m in a similar position where my work is always seen as playful. For me, humor can work in a lot of different ways, and it doesn’t have to be an “lol” kind of humor. Humor is a different way to communicate, basically. It’s a different structure of communication. It’s about expectation; at the last second you take a right or left turn, and it shifts people’s perception. My work, because it’s not “lol” humorous, where your perception is shifted in a split second — maybe it works more on our time. It’s a lot slower. Again, humor doesn’t mean that the work is funny. It’s just a type of communication. So what each work is communicating could be different, but the work is most often melancholic.

Ace: So it’s about that play on expectation.

O: It’s so often that we take things that many see as funny, or ridiculous, but we take them very seriously. I have web design manuals from the 90s, from my collection, but it’s not a collection of funny books. It’s my library that I studied. I did not take it seriously in the 90s, I would never read it at the time. But now I see that sometimes, they are the only source to see how the web looked at that time, because these are things that were not saved by archives or by anybody. 

There, you can see those precious screenshots. Or you can see how great minds, at that time, suggested that the rest of us make web pages. So I really read and re-read these books now, not just to laugh at how they used to make web pages.

Ace: It’s the only way to conceive of how the web used to be approached, as an innovative, or utopian, space. This also reminds me of the patents that technology companies have for different screenic gestures today, like the movement of your fingers across an interface, a pinch to zoom, and apple's new "force touch." I wonder, what do those documents look like, and what will they look like to us in ten, twenty years?

C: Oh my god.

O: Have you ever seen those documents?

Ace: I’ve seen some renderings but I’m sure they’re pretty well concealed. It’s not humorous, it’s absolutely serious actually. Because what you’re talking about is human gestures being patented. Do you want to talk a bit more about the pool noodles, Cory?

Installation view

C: Oh, that series of work started just a few years ago. The series is called Screen-agers, Tall Boys and Whales, and they are simply pool floaties which have been accessorized. Actually, they come in three categories, “Screen-agers,” which are teenagers (this show has teenagers), “Tall Boys” which I like to describe as kind of like Kid Rock — so camo and American Flags and Miller Beer Cans —

Ace: So there aren’t any Tall Boys in this show?

C: I brought some tall boys but they didn’t make it into this show. Although the Hooters one is getting into tall boys territory. And then there’s this whole subset of “Whales,” which are sort of like Wall Street Guys, who play around with big money.

Ace: Like a finance dude.

C: Yes. There are also no Whales in this show. But to me, they are sort of like portraits of different tribes of people. So we put them in this show as a response to Olia’s piece on the large LED screen that takes place at a sort of EDM concert. We wanted a group of people that would be at the concert.

Ace: So there’s an exchange there too.

C: Right. I’ve also made a new one that’s a webmaster. So that’s a new category.

Ace: I love it.

O: I’ve made clothes too, my collection is called Webmaster Summer.

C: Yeah so we both have these clothing lines — Olia’s is Webmaster Summer and mine is called Arcangel Surfware. Mine is for relaxing at home. It’s clothes that are comfortable for computing at home. And Olia’s are work clothes. So the locker represents the transition there. And the one noodle has my first collection – Arcangel Surfware. The bedsheets are also from the first collection.

Olia Lialina’s Webmaster Summer Collection

O: For this show, we aren’t just collecting things we have that rhyme with each other but we’re responding to each other, in position and in selection. On this table are new sculptures — it’s like the Cold War table, with the iron curtain allegories.

Ace: The title, Asymmetrical Response, engages the topic of power dynamics of the Internet over time. After its start as the ARPANET, which had somewhat of a military focus?

C: Well it’s in the news, again, as a military focus. Not in the same way.

Ace: Yes there’s this seizure of control of the web that relates back to its original function.

O: There’s an old Nintendo game from the 80s. When I was a teenager in the late 80s, we had this one portable Soviet game, and we always thought that it was our Soviet game. But you can see here that it’s been — not stolen, but... what’s the word for it?

Ace: Re-appropriated?

O: Yes, what you can see on the Nintendo screen, it’s Mickey Mouse. They rebuild it, but it looks the same, it just says Nintendo on one, and Electronica on the other.

Ace: It’s the same game?

O: Yes. There is this Iron Curtain right? But this is the Liquid Crystal Curtain. And this is something I really didn’t know when I was a child. I thought it was our great game.

Olia Lialina, Liquid Crystal Curtain, 2016

C: This is displayed on the table, like it would be at a cell phone store. These are running on Nintendo Emulators. So this is a work I made in 2005 called Mig 29 Soviet Fighter Plane. It was a modified Nintendo Game where I clearly just took the plane out of the game. It was a bootleg Nintendo game where you were a Soviet fighter bombing the Middle East. It was a game that existed when I was younger. I made the work ten years ago but I didn’t play this game, I played Top Gun.

Ace: Its reciprocal.

C: Yeah. I mean, I clearly remember standing at the Top Gun arcade machine at the pizza place, bombing Russia.

Ace: So there are these different narratives being driven…

C: Yeah there was this whole scene of bootleg Nintendo games!

Cory Arcangel’s Mig 29 Soviet Fighter Plane, Clouds, and Android

Ace: As the art world sort of relies more and more on social media platforms like Instagram to promote and share work, how can we move beyond a generation of likes? Do you feel that people are really engaging with these images?

O: I don’t know how to answer this in relation to the art world. I have a personal answer. I am not on Facebook. On twitter, I would never click ‘like’. I either respond, send a direct message or write an email. It’s really to keep myself conscious. Because I’m afraid that I will degrade. And I’m not on Instagram because I am afraid that I will not be able to write even 140 characters/words. So I stay on twitter to at least make something.

C: I’m asymmetrical. I have a problem. I’m compulsive about liking tweets. If you look at my account there are more likes than anything–probably ten thousand likes. I think the way people understand images on Instagram is a new way to understand images. It’s a new type of communication.

Ace: What is your favorite website right now? It doesn’t have to be your most visited…

O: I spend most of my time on One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. It’s my own site, but it’s not my own, because I see websites from other people. It’s like going to the Internet for me.

C: That’s a very hard question for me, I might have to get back to you. Where do I spend a lot of my time?

O: If you can call it a website.

C: What are websites?

Cory and Olia’s exhibition Assymetrical Response continues at The Kitchen through February 18. Ace Hotel New York is proud to be The Kitchen’s hotel sponsor. If you’re coming westward for the exhibit, you can book a room with us using the code KITCHEN for a limited-time friendly rate.