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b-lessings · 3 years

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10 lessons I learned from the first 10 days of Ramadan 🌙

(personal, subjective, and in no particular order)

1) It's a constant work and it doesn't get easier. This is the first thing that came into my mind. As a matter of fact, the daily routine of this month is no joke, whichever deeds you try to perform and incorporate in your deen from the 5 obligatory prayers, to the sunnah, to the nawafil, to the azkar, to the Qur'an recitation, to the daily x number of istighfar you promised yourself you'd achieve, it is a lot of work, especially if you have a family to take care of, a job or school to go to, or more critically, if your mental health is not at its best condition. Every day (or night), you get out of bed and you're back at square one, you have all this list of tasks to do, and it gets a lot some times, and you do feel exhausted (but if you are among the lucky ones, then it is the good kind of exhausted), and it's not like your prayers are gonna perform themselves, you have to ger up, you have to act. That's why you need to constantly remind yourself why you are doing this in the first place. What is the point of fasting and waking up in the middle of the night to pray and spending hours throughout the day just remembering Allah swt and reading his book, etc. You have to remind yourself of the ultimate purpose of this month, that we are sacrificing the worldly pleasures for the sake of Allah swt, to gain Taqwa, to be in a state of constante awareness and consciousness of Allah's presence, to get closer to Allah swt the most gracious the most merciful, and that if we don't actually put on some work and effort, we won't get to where we want to go, we won't achieve any of that. It is good to keep things in perspective. Be aware of what you are doing, where you are now, where do you wanna go and what it takes to get you there. If it's constant work and effort, then be it.

2) You can't achieve anything by yourself, your intentions are not enough, you need Allah's support. In fact, for the first couple of days I was so confused, I had to ask my sisters " If the devils are all locked away, why do I feel like I can't focus? " And I was constantly asking myself, if I have already prepared, downloaded the calendars and planners, put up a big board on my bedroom wall, etc., Why do I feel like my Iman is getting low?, AstaghfiruAllah. Aren't we supposed to feel on cloud nine? In a state of pure bliss? And then I came across a khutbah where the Sheikh may Allah swt bless him answered my question. He explained that even though Shaytan is locked away, he has already programmed us, for 11 months (he even made a joke that Shaytan deserves a month off because he has been working too hard for the rest of the year). Anyways, what I realized is even your will and your plans and your excitement about Ramadan and your promises to do so and so deeds is not enough if you don't ask Allah swt for support, for sabr, for guidance, for help, for strength to be able to fulfill those ibadat and carry out the plans you have made for this month. You need to constantly ask Allah swt because who else is our refuge? Who else is our source of strength and patience ? Who else will keep us steadfast on the straight path? And who else is gonna help us against the traps of Shaytan? No matter how willing or excited or determined you are to perform your prayers, finish reading the Qur'an, etc, you still need Allah swt to bless your deeds, every step of the way. Without Him, nothing can be achieved. So in your sujood, ask Him that He give you enough strength to finish that prayer in full Khushoo' and concentration, and after that prayer, ask him for sabr and strength to manage to perform the next one and the one after. Tell Him that you seek refuge in Him from the traps of Shaytan, from laziness and lethargy, from the disoriented heart and the distracted mind. Show Him that you are vulnerable and that even though you are trying to do this for Him, you actually can't do it without Him. SubhanAllah.

3) Forgive yourself when you fall short.

{يُرِيدُ اللَّهُ بِكُمُ الْيُسْرَ وَلَا يُرِيدُ بِكُمُ الْعُسْرَ}

{God intends for you ease and does not want hardship for you}

Allah swt literally said this in Surat Al Baqara (The Cow) when he prescribed Fasting upon us and introduced us to the holy month of Ramadan. Soz read it again. As simple as that, I am not gonna develop this idea further.

4) No matter how much you prepared before Ramadan came, you aren't prepared enough. Well, are you familiar with the saying that Ramadan is like a marathon and you have to prepare for it way before? That's actually true. And guess what? No matter how much you think you are prepared, there are still gonna be some moments when you'd still feel out of breath, where you wish you'd have prepared more. May Allah swt make us reach the end of this month smoothly and seamlessly. May Allah swt bless us and accept our deeds from beginning to end.

5) Our deeds don't get accepted because they're good enough, they get accepted because Allah is merciful. I heard this in a youtube khutba just last night and it resonated with me. Put this in your mind, learn it by heart, print it out on your forehead if necessary! No matter how perfect you think your deeds are, they won't get accepted because you're an amazing slave of Allah swt and you win at worship and ibadah. Don't get too confident, beware of arrogance, control your ego. Stay humble and know your place. The only reason why your deeds would be accepted is because Allah swt will have mercy on you, not because you are so good that your deeds would qualify you for forgiveness and acceptance. So pray that Allah swt accepts our deeds and pray that he encompasses us with His mercy.

6) Don't compare to others, don't get intimidated by others, we are not on the same journey. Walk your own rocky path. I can't stress this enough. I know a lot of brothers and sisters Mashaa'Allah, Allahuma barik, are overachievers, or they might just be out of our league. And sometimes, through social media, we see what they share (in their attempt to motivate us and share some tips and good deeds, spread the knowledge, May Allah swt bless them, accept their deeds and reward them), so we get intimidated. Sometimes it feels like what we are doing is not good enough because it doesn't even compare to what X or Y are doing. And we feel a bit scared that we are not good enough of slaves for Allah swt or that Allah swt wouldn't be pleased with us like He swt would be pleased with them, and we can even feel unworthy and get discouraged ( beware it's a shaytan trap). It is simple though, your path to Allah swt is very personal. What a brother or a sister does only get to inspire you not discourage you or intimidate you. When you see someone sharing something good or beneficial, make duaa for them and make duaa for yourself then leave it at that. Competition is taking over every aspect of our worldly life, we shouldn't let it mess with this sacred part as well. And remember, we are not all on the same journey to Allah swt. It is okay if you can't recite the Qur'an in such a beautiful way or if you can't pray 10 rakaas of Taraweeh, it is okay if you can't read in Arabic or if you don't learn any hadith by heart. Allah swt is patient enough and considerate enough. Scratch that, He swt is the most patient, the most considerate, the most gracious, the most generous, and He appreciates your effort. What matters for Him is your sincerity and the purity of your intentions.

7) The less food you take, the more energy you will have. FACTS. I mean, imagine the struggle of having to pray Ishaa and Taraweeh on a full stomach where every time you get down for sujood you feel like your soup is coming up :/ Allahu almusta'aan. This month is not about feasting. It is literally about giving up pleasures (food being one of them) to focus on Allah. So, Focus on what's important and set your priorities straight.

8) Don't overdue it. Beware of the ghost of Burnout. So yeah, like I already said earlier, it is a lot of work and it requires preparation and constant effort. The aim is to be at our best shape of health and Iman on the last 10 nights because they are the most sacred, the most important, the most blessed. You might wanna consider starting small with your deeds and building up slowly. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said, "Do good deeds properly, sincerely and moderately and know that your deeds will not make you enter Paradise, and that the most beloved deed to Allah is the most regular and constant even if it were little." [Al Bukhari]

9) Personalize your ibadat / plans. In other words, do what's best for you and what's beneficial for you. Define your weaknesses and the areas in which you want to improve. Don't just do this or that deed because everyone else is doing them. Do not follow blindly. What is good for you might not be the thing recommended or done by the others. And what you need on your faith journey is not what X or Y needs. You will be judged on your own deeds, your own journey. Have a purpose and a reason for what you are doing and why you are doing that. Also, the more you feel like your plan or your routine is personal, the more you can relate to it and connect with it, the more sincere you will be, the more excited and enthousiastic you will be, and the easier it will be for you to perform your ibadat in Shaa Allah.

10) Too much information can be poisonous. If ,like me, you got into a habit of watching lectures and videos of speakers this Ramadan, then breaking news: it might get confusing. I don't want you to feel lost and confused. Allahima barik the resources are countless and limitless. But also, you have to beware whom you listen to. There are different sects, different perspectives, different rulings on certain things. So, try not take things blindly. Take them with a pinch of salt and always try to do a background check. And eventually, when it gets too much, always choose what's best for your heart, because we are created with an innate sense of "right" , our fitrah is sane, Alhamdulillah. So, try to be critical. Allah swt even recommends that.

I hope this post can be beneficial. Tell me which part you related to the most, and if you have any extra tips, please share. May Allah swt accept our deeds and grant us forgiveness, amen. 🤍

#ramadan thoughts #tips #ramadan experience #islam #رمضان١٤٤٢ #شهر رمضان #رمضانيات #sabr #muslims on tumblr #muslims #Allah

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writing-prompts-for-friends · 4 years

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Notes on Robert McKee’s Story 31: How to Climax

☝ Guys, I have been reading this book for hundreds of pages and resisted giggling like a 13-year-old over the word “climax” but I just. couldn’t. take. it. anymore.

Story design is broken down into five essential parts: (Clicking on 1-3 will take you to my previous posts about them if you need a refresher.)

The Inciting Incident

Progressive Complications

Crisis

Climax

Resolution

“The Climax of the last act should be your greatest imaginative leap. Without it, you have no story. Until you have it, your characters wait like suffering patients praying for a cure.”

Climax is the fourth of the five-part structure. But the Climax doesn't have to be full of fights and action.

McKee states that a good Climax must meet the following criteria:

It has to full of meaning. MEANING: A revolution in values from positive to negative or negative to positive with or without irony—a value swing at maximum charge that’s absolute and irreversible. The meaning of that change moves the heart of the audience.

The action that creates this change must be "pure," self-evident, and requiring no explanation. If you need dialogue or narration to spell it out your audience, you've done it wrong.

The action must be appropriate to the needs of the story.

McKee seems to advocate coming up with the Climax and then working backwards to determine the rest of your story:

“Once the Climax is in hand, stories are in a significant way rewritten backward, not forward. The flow of life moves from cause to effect, but the flow of creativity often flows from effect to cause. An idea for the Climax pops unsupported into the imagination. Now we must work backward to support it in the fictional reality, supplying the hows and whys. We work back from the ending to make certain that by Idea and Counter-Idea every image, beat, action, or line of dialogue somehow relates to or sets up this grand payoff. All scenes must be thematically or structurally justified in the light of the Climax. If they can be cut without disturbing the impact of the ending, they must be cut.”

But actually, I'm not sure how I feel about this. Personally, I tend to come up with the Inciting Incident first, and then work out everything else later. There's only been once that I've come up with the Climax before everything else, and I'm struggling to find ways to build up to that Climax. I suppose everyone writes differently, though, and that's okay.

I also definitely agree with what McKee see says about cutting scenes. Some writers fall in love with their characters or the story world and they want to put every ounce of their love into the work, which is wonderful and really shines through in stories. However, if not kept in check, this can lead to unnecessary "fluff" that doesn't actually provide new, important information to the audience.

What About the Subplot Climaxes?

“If logic flows, climax subplots within the Central Plot’s Climax. This is a wonderful effect: one final action by the protagonist settles everything. When Rick puts Laszlo and Ilsa on the plane in Casablanca, he settles the Love Story main plot and the Political Drama subplot, converts Captain Renault to patriotism, kills Major Strasser, and, we feel, is the key to winning WWII… now that Rick is back in the fight.

If this multiplying effect is impossible, the least important subplots are best climaxed earliest, followed by the next most important, building overall to Climax of the Central Plot.”

Subverting Expectations

“The key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not the way it expects.” --William Goldman

I hesitated to title this section "subverting expectations" because it's got such a bad rap recently, but that's really what McKee is driving at in this section. Don't worry, though. He's not talking about the bullshit "kill the characters you like because fuck you" method of subverting expectations that has been all the rage recently.

☝ Pretty much sums up my feelings on GoT

Before you can subvert, you first need to know what your audience's expectations are. What does the audience want?

Many people would quickly say, "A happy ending."

But McKee has a great logic against that:

“A very provocative principle: First of all, what does the audience want? Many producers state without blinking that the audience wants a happy ending. They say this because up-ending films tend to make more money than down-ending films.

The reason for this is that a small percentage of the audience won’t go to any film that might give it an unpleasant experience. Generally their excuse is that they have enough tragedy in their lives. But if we were to look closely, we’d discover that they not only avoid negative emotions in movies, they avoid them in life. Such people think that happiness means never suffering, so they never feel anything deeply. The depth of our joy is in direct proportion to what we’ve suffered. Holocaust survivors, for example, don’t avoid dark films. They go because such stories resonate with their past and are deeply cathartic.

In fact, down-ending films are often huge commercial successes: Dangerous Liaisons, 80 million dollars; The War of the Roses, 150 million; The English Patient, 225 million. No one can count The Godfather, Part II’s money. For the vast majority doesn’t care if a film ends up or down. What the audience wants is emotional satisfaction—a Climax that fulfills anticipation. How should The Godfather, Part II end? Michael forgives Fredo, quits the mob, and moves to Boston with his family to sell insurance? The Climax of this magnificent film is truthful, beautiful, and very satisfying.”

Actually, a happy ending may not be fitting if it doesn't match the audience's expectations.

So then how do we, the writers, decide which particular emotion will satisfy the audience?

From the very beginning of the story, we are dropping little hints to the audience to expect an up-ending or down-ending or irony. Once we promise the audience these things, it would be disastrous if we didn't deliver. However, while we do give the audience what we promised, we do so in a way it does not expect.

“In Aristotle’s words, an ending must be both “inevitable and unexpected.” Inevitable in the sense that as the Inciting Incident occurs, everything and anything seems possible, but at Climax, as the audience looks back through the telling, it should seem that the path the telling took was the only path. Given the characters and their world as we’ve come to understand it, the Climax was inevitable and satisfying. But at the same time it must be unexpected, happening in a way the audience could not have anticipated.

Anyone can deliver a happy ending—just give the characters everything they want. Or a downer—just kill everybody. An artist gives us the motion he’s promised… but with a rush of unexpected insight that he’s withheld to a Turning Point within the Climax itself. So that as the protagonist improvises his final effort, he may or may not achieve his desire, but the flood of insight that pours from the gap delivers the hoped-for emotion but in a way we could never have foreseen.

The key to a great film ending, as Francois Truffaut put it, is to create a combination of “Spectacle and Truth.” When Truffaut says “Spectacle,” he doesn’t mean explosive effect. He means a Climax written, not for the ear, but for the eye. By “Truth” he means Controlling Idea. In other words, Truffaut is asking us to create the Key Image of the film—a single image that sums up and concentrates all meaning and emotion. Like the coda of a symphony, the Key Image within the climactic action echoes and resonates all that has gone before. It is an image that is so tuned to the telling that when it’s remembered the whole film comes back with a jolt.”

In Summary

When you design your climax, make sure that it:

Isn’t just lights and action, and has true meaning.

It is appropriate to the story you have built.

Provides the audience what they want, but not how they expected.

Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen, 1998. Print

#writing prompts for friends #writing advice #writing tips #writing resources #creative writing #writer #writing #write #writers block #writing inspiration #writing inspo #creative writing theory #robert mckee #writing fantasy #writing fiction #writing fanfiction #writeblr #writing prompts for friends notes on story

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mregalaphotos-blog · 5 years

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Assignment 2: Journal

I have decided to just keep a continuous log with thoughts and ideas and if I explore an artist or concept deeper, I will mention it and make a write up separately. I will post them all at the end. I have had issues with Tumblr deleting posts while I type that out or submit this so keeping them in a document makes sense to me. Apologies for what I assume will be an incredibly long post.

DART 1130 Journal

Monday, March 18: After presentation of our works, we got into discussion of Assignment 2, Make What Will Happen. We discussed multiple different aspects of making the photos unique. I was especially interested in double exposures as an approach. It would be a very difficult thing to do but could lead to interesting juxtapositions of images and ideas. I may explore that further in a deeper dive of the concept. An example of this using an outline to mix concepts is seen below in Andreas Lie’s work.

Friday, March 22: For me, I think nature photography is once of the more interesting and beautiful parts of photography. When you get out into nature, you are no longer shaping the world but experiencing it. The only purely human element in the image and the experience is yourself and the camera you are taking the picture with. The only things you control are how you frame the picture and what parts you choose to capture. I will do a few deep dives into nature photographers and what they draw inspiration from and see if any of what they mention resonates with me and my past and present experiences.

Saturday, March 23: The first nature photographer I will explore is Ansel Adams. A deeper dive will be posted when I post this all, but Ansel Adams is a photographer well known for his images of National Parks in the United States that led to a greater conservation movement because of their profoundness. As someone who has spent much of their lives traveling and hiking the parks, I owe a lot to him.

Monday, March 25: This week is study week for the Paddington campus. I need to expose some images for next week’s class to get a start for the project and be better prepared to develop film. I am going on surf camp this weekend, which I think would be a great time to get some cool and unique pictures. I can capture the human elements with one of my favorite places in the world, the beach. As someone who has grown up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, it has played a major role life and why I decided to study abroad in Sydney. Another interesting thing that I am exciting to take pictures of is sunrise. For most of my life, I have been getting sunsets on beaches as I have lived on the west coast of Florida. On my first morning in Sydney I woke up early (mainly due to jetlag) and figured out the bus system in order to go to the beach and catch sunrise. In many ways it was symbolic of a dawn of a new experience that would be very different yet share some similarities with my past. This could be an interesting thing to explore as it explores my new environment and how it relates to me.

Wednesday, March 27: Discussion of sunrise and sunset made me think I should look at some photographers who take pictures of sunrise and sunset themselves. I will do a deep dive into a photographer and his work and post more on him. Tacita Dean, whose video on chasing the green flash was an interesting introduction to the topic but I want to look into another photographer… After looking around on the internet I have settled on award winning photographer Paul Reiffer. He tells of a similar story to me where he was up early due to jet lag and so took an amazing picture of the Sydney Harbor, as seen below.

Additionally, I went into the campus gallery and checked out what they had. There was an interesting exhibit that played with various shapes and was supposed to tell a story. I had difficulty following along but it seemed like a very interesting storytelling feature in a 3D environment. Another collection showed these black and white pictures that would be most similar to what we are working on class. However, it appears that the artist also used/recreated images from video games or other similar works to make their pictures. In the end they looked pretty demented, but their ability to invoke that kind of response in me was an interesting feature of the art.

Friday, March 29: A short update but I checked out a camera for the weekend. They gave me the Nikon rather than the Pentax K1000. I will see how it goes because it is different from the short introduction we had to the camera. I will take 36 pictures and see how they turn out on Monday. While at Paddington I did a little research for the library activity and looked at Zoe Leonard.

Monday, April 1 (pre-class): A little update on how the weekend went. I got a few candid photographs of some friends I made during surf camp. There are a bunch of good day time images of things like people, signs, birds, and the scenery. I was too exhausted from surfing to be up early enough for sunrise during camp. So, this morning I woke up early and bused down to Coogee and took some sunrise pictures at the beach and finish off the roll. I ran into some issues where it was very difficult to get the camera to wind a little over 20 images in. I rewound the roll a little and it seemed to fix whatever jam there was. Here is a picture from my digital camera from the morning.

There was a beautiful mixture of colors/lighting levels that I am interested to see how it turns out. I think I got some more of the sun in those photos compared to this one.

Monday, April 1 (post-class): In class we developed our pictures, and were supposed to create our proof sheet before the next week. I figured out why the camera lever was not working right when I was working on developing the pictures. I foolishly assumed that the roll of film was 36 frames, but it was actually 24. Therefore, the second half of the roll was double exposed at full exposure and was completely unusable. The reason I was not able to create the proof sheet was that I ran out of time. It took Maria and I a very long time with a lot of struggles to load our film in the complete darkness. By the time we were done we were quite behind the class. After all was said and done, I only had a few workable frames, all from surf camp. I think some got fogged while developing as well or there was some error or another.

Wednesday, April 3: I do not have much time to work on photography this week because I have major projects/presentation and an essay all due on Friday. However, I came into the photography lab to print the proof sheet so I was not completely behind for the coming week. A picture of it can be seen below. There are not many frames to work with and I am not sure I want to incorporate it into the final project but I will at least be able to use the pictures to learn the techniques involved in printing from negatives.

Saturday, April 6: With a little respite from projects I continued to think about interesting ideas and concepts to explore for the final project. While browsing on the internet I came across this photo of a long exposure of a departing train.

It was a very cool picture to me because it expressed this movement of light with a dark background. You can see each point of lights distinct path as it travels. This made me further interested in long exposures and how it can allow you to see interesting things. In having a think about that it led me to think about the many images of the night sky I have seen where the Milky Ways and other stars are incredibly visible and beautiful. These are captured with long exposures and so I thought it would be an interesting concept to explore. Because of that, I looked into Milky Way and long exposure photographers such as Dave Morrow. These kinds of pictures could be a potential thing to explore as I am currently planning a road trip in New Zealand where at night I would be camping in places with very little light pollution. The addition of a thinner ozone layer means I would get pictures I would be unable to get back home in the US.

Monday, April 8: In class I was able to print two negatives from the roll. These were both done using a filter of 2, the largest aperture, and an exposure time of 4 seconds.

Image 1: My thoughts on this are that it turned out much better than I imagined. The lettering on the sign is backwards which I think was interesting and added a little flair to it. The contrast and coloration of it turned out pretty well in my opinion. I really like how the border looks. It gives it an almost 3-dimensional look as if the picture is solid and its own thing.

Image 2: This image was a little bit rushed. It is not as in focus as it should be. The actual image itself was of a bird, which at the time I was exploring using different shutter speeds similar to what we had seen in the first lesson on using the cameras. In the end I don’t think this is really what I wanted to explore in the project.

In class Izabela talked about the piece of paper you use to determine the lighting conditions and camera setup for night time photography with me and Nicole. It is good to know that there is a tool like that to use.

Tuesday, April 9: I needed to go pick up more film so that I could get a better roll of negatives to work with and develop next week. I made sure to verify that this roll had 36 frames to work with. It was the same Ilford brand and ISO 400 that we had used previously so things should be relatively similar.

Friday, April 12: I had some spare time so I thought I would check out a camera and explore Paddington and take some pictures. Unlike the previous roll I had no issues with the camera, both with cocking the lever or rewinding the film. I took pictures of various subjects, ranging from trees and shrubbery to cool things I saw along wall surfaces especially related to lighting. I also got some pictures of streets and street signs similar to the sign I had printed earlier. There was a cute cat that walked up to me so I got some frames of her as well. I will hold on to the frames and see how they turn out on Monday.

Monday, April 15: We discussed an interesting concept in class, the dodging and burning. Using those to block out subjects or only focus on one is really interesting. It explains how some images I have seen such as the bear one from a few weeks back get their distinct outline. This technique could be a very useful tool when it comes to double exposures, where you could use something like the outline of a building and capture nature in the second exposure.

We also took a trip the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see Izabela’s works. I really loved the prints she had on the metal surface. It added an extra element to the work where each leaf in the work had this little shine on it like it was capturing the sunlight and reflecting it even though it was just a picture. Another very interesting takeaway from the work that I enjoyed was being able to see the grains in the picture. It was blown up to an incredible size and so the details didn’t come incredibly sharp but instead you can see the texture to which the medium applied to the work. I also really enjoyed the way the images were presented in a 3D space, with the folds distorting our view as I imagine the view was distorted due to diving and having limited light. A lot of thought was put into the presentation of the work and added to it greatly.

On a separate note I did not know that we would have class off next week and class the following weeks when I was planning on traveling. Due to this I will not be able to attend class in week 11 so all future interaction with this course will be outside the classroom.

Thursday, April 18: I am leaving for Cairns until Sunday. Due to the lending policy I cannot check out a camera for this trip as I would have to return it on Friday. So, instead I will take what photos I can with my digital camera and just reflect on them. I will be seeing some wildlife there and then scuba diving. Another limitation of the camera is I cannot take it underwater so there is really no reason to bring it.

I believe I know what I want to photograph for the final project. Izabela and I had discussed on Monday more about the self-reflection and relating the pictures to myself. I had previously talked about the sunrise and sunset and how they played a major role in my life and my trip to Sydney. So, I will try to capture sunrise in various places on various days with different subjects to illustrate my journeys and experiences with the first light of the day. I will get a long-term rental of a camera for New Zealand and try to photograph sunrises next week. I will bring two rolls of film and hopefully some of those 72 images will turn out well and I can help build a cohesive story around them.

Sunday, April 21: Just a few photos from the Cairns trip.

Monday, April 22: On Tuesday I will be leaving for New Zealand so I have just been preparing. I got an extended loan form singed from Izabela so I can check out a K1000 for a week. I went to Ted’s Photography and picked up two rolls of film to use, same brand.

Before I leave, I wanted to focus on a specific topic for once, which is how to take photos in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and have good compositions. A couple of rules, suggestions, and ideas will be shared in an accompanying post.

Hopefully I can use those rules to make more aesthetically pleasing photos.

Monday, April 29: Disaster has struck… For the past week I have been off the grid due to not having a phone plan while traveling and only being in a camper van during it so no Wifi. I ended up only taking one roll of photos while there due to a combination of sleeping in after exhausting days of travel as well as very poor weather preventing any picturesque sunrises. That would have been all good and fine and possible to work with but there was an issue unloading the film where it got fogged. I had pressed the release button and wound the film back up until it was loose like I had before. However, when I opened it up the film had not rolled up at all and the whole roll was a waste. There go all of those pictures from Wellington to Napier to Taupo to Waitomo to Tongariro to Wairarapa. I will attach some photos from my digital camera from the trip but obviously I cannot use those in the project. I had a lot riding on those so I am going to have to improvise and work fast to make up for the loss. I checked out a camera again to take more pictures. Here are some pictures from the trip that I took on my digital camera.

Tuesday, April 30: I woke up early to take the bus to Coogee beach to get some photos of sunrise. It was a beautiful morning to take pictures, with the lighting elements working out great and providing great layering and levels. I was really excited to use these photos. Sunrise had been a great decision to use for the project and I was excited to develop the photos and begin printing…

The same thing happened as before. I rolled it up, it got completely loose and so I was sure the film was ready to be taken out and of course no, it did not wind up and another roll was fogged. This was very frustrating.

So, I had to go to Ted’s again to buy more film. At this point I am running low on money and film is not cheap. I am also starting to run low on time as I was hoping to have had much more time for prints by then. I checked out a camera again because I am anything if not determined to get quality pictures of sunrise.

Wednesday, May 1: Taking pictures this morning was no issue at all. I had great pictures of sunrise, the cliffs and the waves and once again I was excited to develop pictures. Sunrise and its colors were even more beautiful than the day before and these pictures would turn out really well…

Everything changed when the light nation attacked. I had gotten back to the Paddington campus and everything was going well. Like always I was having difficulties loading the film into the reels. But I got it done and began the rest f the developing process. After the long time of doing so, the moment of truth came and I finally pulled them out of the container. They were all black. I don’t know when or how it happened but some light must have gotten on the film and ruined it. This was another day lost, but at least I had become even more cautious and I knew the routine. I could reasonably give myself Thursday to develop and get the first round of prints done and then Friday to reprint any with flaws.

As I was out of film, I was saved by Melvin who gave me a roll of his Kodak ISO 400. Tomorrow’s roll is realistically my last good chance.

Below is a picture of today’s sunrise.

Thursday, May 2: Things finally turned out much more positive. The bus I took ran late so I missed the best parts of sunrise but I still got some quality pictures. When I got to Paddington there were no issues developing the film. It was the best feeling I had in a while. So, I became very efficient in the dark room for the next couple of hours. I selected promising pictures from the proof sheet I made and started making prints. For the early sunrise photos I used a 2 filter for most of them as I already had some great contrast. When I got to later photos I found that that was not enough. I bumped it up to 3 and got much better variation in the blacks and whites. I was efficient and got many prints in.

At the end I checked the photos again and found little imperfections on the paper. They were minor marks that I wanted to rerun. It seemed like the paper was scratched at some point or perhaps the negatives had specks of dust on the. Either way I am going to rerun the prints tomorrow.

Another note and a point of concern was that as I ran my prints it was towards the end of the day. Those who had been printing earlier started saying that they noticed that the fixer was not quite working right and perhaps it had been used up or contaminated. It was changed by the resource center but not after I had run my prints. I will have to look at them tomorrow and see what I can do. Although not the greatest thing to happen, I am not extremely concerned as the slight pinkness may actually add to the images as they are of sunrise and those are the colors you typically see at the beginning of sunrise.

Friday, May 3: This is the last day I could print. I isolated 10 of the most promising photos from the day before and set out on reprinting those with the flaws I had noticed yesterday. I did see some slight pinkening from poor fixer so I will look at them later. Due to missing filters and interest in bumping up contrast even slightly more I went up by half for this days prints. Overall I was happy with they turned out. For those with better lighting there is great gradation and others with capture the essence of the first light show less of that and show more of the gray’s representative of their nature at that time.

Stylistically I like the slight pinks in the colors. They fit the theme well. Embracing the flaws is a good thing and letting them say something of the work helps add to it. Overall, I am happy with the reprints. I got a good effect of the sunlight on the water for parts of them

Now, with all of the prints done I need to focus on the presentation and putting them in a way where they relate great. I have quality images of sunrise and I have quality images of its effect on cliffs but the lighting looks very different because half is of the source and half is of the subject. Perhaps I will present them so as they are facing each other as they do in real life. The observers of the mare much like what I was in photographing them, as something in between them to see and interpret their interactions.

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snicketsleuth · 6 years

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Slackin’ with the Sleuth: Reviewing Netflix’s “The Austere Academy”

Writing a season opener is an ungrateful task: once you have recapped the previous year of plot and set up the precious exposition, there is usually not much left to enjoy. That being said, this installment could very well be the weakest double-episode so far: it struggles to start the running B-plot of the season to the point that it forgets to be an adaptation of a particular book, or even a basic episode of a streaming television series. It is, quite frankly, a mess with some fantastical bits. But the sum feels less worthy than the amount of its parts.

At this point the Netflix series has fundamentally changed the basic narrative structure which befits the story. It is strange to remember that the books closely follow the point of view of the Baudelaire orphans and never leave their side. Of course, this story is told by a tangential narrator who frequently interrupts the tale of the children to make allusions to his own life… but “allusions” remain the key word there. Daniel Handler even had to release supplementary materials (“The un-Authorized Autobiography”, “The Beatrice Letters”, etc.) to clear up parts of the plot which couldn’t have been included in the main series itself, as it needed to focus on its protagonists. And that is precisely what the Netflix adaptation loses here: focus. We are dealing with an ensemble cast off to its own particular adventures, its own separate plotlines. The camera moves from one protagonist to the next like a player over chess pieces, leaving little time for the characters to breathe.

And it is unfortunately for that reason that Duncan and Isadora become even more forgettable than they are in the books. Several key dialogs from the books, intended to work up their charm, were omitted (the initial confusion of the Baudelaire orphans over the twin/triplet controversy, Duncan’s pyrophobia, the wild dreams of the printing house: etc. Most of the charm of “The Austere Academy”, as a book, is the opportunity for the Baudelaire orphans to relate to another set of people who have fallen in similar circumstances, to find some manner of community. Its adaptation has no time to explore that. Given the importance of the triplets in later episodes, it is honestly dumbfounding that the writers didn’t take more time to establish them as characters. Especially considering the great work they did to develop more secondary players like Georgina, Babs or Hal, not to mention non-entities such as Gustav. The next episodes cannot make up for this as Duncan and Isadora are limited to a much stricter screen-time, because of plot constraints.

It is natural that the writers would fall in love with characters/relationships they essentially created or introduced for the show… but a line must be drawn when it comes at the expanse of preexisting characters. What, indeed, did the actions of the V.F.D. supervisors amount to? There is not much point to Olivia Caliban’s character in this episode, and even then, little which could not have been accomplished just as well by the character of Jacquelyn Scieszka. Larry’s quest is ultimately pointless as the Baudelaire orphans never really get to browse the contents of the book he’s trying to deliver. Jacques Snicket’s earlier introduction is, however, a welcome and even necessary invention. His death in the books has shock value yet nothing else, as the reader knows nothing about him. The Netflix show instead sets him up as likeable support primed for heartbreak.

Lemony’s monologue in his brother’s car is admittedly the best scene in “The Austere Academy”. Patrick Warburton delivers the perfect emotional cues without breaking from his usual flair. His admission of how much he misses Jacques, who we can still hear whistling nonchalantly, goes down as one of the most emotional scene in the adaptation. A perfect testament to the narration of the books. The talent of the writing team never leaves the screen for a second, it’s just… misdirected.

Speaking of characters, it’s about time we address the real star of this episode… And as strange as it may seem, sometimes an actor can be too good. Kitana Turnbull is adorably obnoxious and obnoxiously adorable as the infamous Carmelita Spats, but at what cost? She acts Malina Weissman and Louis Hynes under the table. Baudelaires and Quagmires look stiff and awkward next to her. Even her singing sounds too harmonious. We should NOT be looking forward to the sound of Carmelita’s voice, she’s supposed to be annoying! The writers even felt obligated to have Violet begrudgingly admit her recitals are “improving”. That being said, two hours of “The Carmelita show (starring those cakesniffing orphans)” is far from an unpleasant experience. Although Carmelita only becomes Olaf’s sith-in-training much later in the series, introducing their dynamic right off the bat is a great idea. The show even suggests a possible etymology for the word “cakesniffer”, whose exact meaning remains a mystery in the books. The answer is both blunt and traumatizing.

We should also not forget Roger Bart’s performance as Vice Principal Nero, which deserves just as much praise. The secondary players of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” are tricky parts, as they rely so much on caricature. Finding some warmth, some internal struggle to sell the character as more than a bland cardboard cut-out is no easy task, but Bart undoubtedly succeeds. It is only while watching the episode that I understood the point of Nero’s character in the books; he is very much Daniel Handler’s dark alter-ego, a somber reminder of the bitter maniac he could have become had he not succeeded as a writer. You have to give credits to the writing team for trying to expand on these characters while retaining as much of their original lines as possible.

As usual Neil Patrick Harris expanded Olaf’s disguise-of-the-week in interesting ways, and Coach Genghis could perhaps be the most ambitious yet. He retooled the character persona as a mix of Hitlerian youth leader and self-actualization guru, all in the name of “school spirit”. The end result is strikingly similar to several criticisms made on the education system in other books (“The Basic Eight”, “Why We Broke Up”, etc.). The social satire of the original series lost nothing of its bite. If anything, it’s coming back with a vengeance. Putting Genghis’ arrival at Prufrock as the mid-episode ending was definitely a mistake, however. Olaf has already come back to torment the Baudelaire orphans under three disguises at this point, therefore the revelation of a new one is not much to fuss about.

And if we have to really put our cards on the table, I suppose I should once again speak of the worst, most damageable aspect of the Netflix series: its music. No, scratch that; its sound design. The series is extremely fast-paced and dialogue-heavy. With Lemony’s narration already commenting on everything, putting so much music into every single scene is the worst possible choice the directors could have made. It drowns out the lines of dialog, which become difficult to follow, and every scene feels, looks and sounds the same: accordion and klezmer everywhere. There is, to put it simply, no pacing and no ambiance. It’s heartbreaking to see so much money wasted on expensive sets when you know it’s going to get ruined by the same cursed accordion notes.

On that regard, there were clearly some budget accommodations made on this episode. The director of “The Miserable Mill” simply made Prufrock Prep way too big: its exterior layout makes it look big enough to house a thousand students, but we only ever see a hundred of them at the pep rally… And the cafeteria can only seat two dozens.

More new musical themes could have helped. It’s really more of a general complaint, but it’s especially bad in “The Austere Academy”. Nero’s terrible recitals actually act as welcomed pauses in the pacing, since they require silence in the background. But the worst offender has to be that final scene before the midway point: as Genghis is about to introduce himself on stage, the Quagmires cry out to the Baudelaires, who can’t hear them because of how much noise the crowd is making. But we don’t even really hear the crowd making a ruckus: the accordion music is louder, it just sounds and feels exactly like every other scene, noisy environment or not. Therefore the viewer can’t really understand why the Baudelaires and Quagmires can’t communicate. It’s a painful and spectacular failure of sound mixing.

The entire ordeal is a cacophonic catastrophic in that it robs several key scenes of their intended emotional resonance. The Quagmire’s final capture is but one many dark and dramatic moments in the plot on which the Netflix adaptation fails to capitalize. It’s nowhere near as bad as the humorous trombone played over Josephine Anwhistle’s death scene, but it’s getting close. So far “The Austere Academy” retains too much of the original books’ contents, and understands them too well, to deliver anything but great television… but it succeeds in the details rather than the big picture. If only it could be the other way around!

#review #ASoUE #a series of unfortunate events #Lemony Snicket #asoue netflix #netflix #count olaf #violet baudelaire #klaus baudelaire #Sunny Baudelaire #neil patrick harris #0535

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shantelemile · 6 years

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Hollywood Case Study: Madea: Everyone’s Favorite Grandma

Tyler Perry is an American actor, screenwriter, and comedian. He is well known for his renowned role of Mabel Simmons or simply known as Madea. Madea was introduced to the public in 1999 in his play I Can Do Bad All by Myself. Tyler Perry has created an anthology of Madea films and plays since her first introduction. His best-selling movie was Madea Goes to Jail, which made over $90 million in the box office and was produced on a $17.5 million budget.

Perry has stated Madea’s characteristics were derived from his mother and other people he met in his life. Madea’s character is very vulgar, quick tempered, and vindictive at times. These qualities are used to mask her true nature; she is a very godly, a helpful woman, and she is constantly giving advice to those in need and help them find a way out of a bad situation. This character is also used as comedic relief when the film gets heavy, she constantly uses anecdotes of her past which include stories of robberies and strippers.

Since the beginning of Tyler Perry’s career his target audience was the black community. He shows the problems that happen within the African American/Black community and how they cope and resolve their problems. There has been a debate over whether Perry’s films are doing more harm than good to the black community, even director Spike Lee spoke out about this. “A lot of stuff that's on today is coonery and buffoonery, and I know it's making a lot of money and breaking records, but we can do better.” Spike Lee’s films are known to be of the top tier and classics, his films have changed the game for black people (ex. Do the Right Thing). He is stressing that we can do better on creating the image of black people that we show to the public through the big screen. “...Perry frames them as (1) materialistic and status-obsessed, (2) dysfunctional and abusive, and (3) disdainful of working- and lower-class Blacks. We also argue that he is creating new controlling images like the “Emasculated Black Gentleman.” In these ways, Perry’s images may have detrimental consequences including perpetuating Black stereotypes, reinforcing existing class and gender tensions in Black America, and impeding the life chances of middle-class Blacks by suggesting that they are unsuitable for assimilation and integration.” (Harris and Tassie, The Cinematic Incarnation of Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie: Tyler Perry's Black Middle-Class).

African Americans/Blacks have been subjected to a variety of stereotypical roles from the Uncle Tom's, to enraged black [wo]men, or poverty-stricken families. James Baldwin touches on this in I Am Not Your Negro, “To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are.” Because Americans believe everything they see on television or the idea of something becomes more normalized once on television, is why the black community cannot progress and push themselves beyond the stereotypes.

Even if this is true, the stereotypes and characters Tyler Perry created is the gives a sense of familiarity to the community. This familiarity and the life lessons his character teaches is what brings his fans together and allows them to make jokes out of the stereotypes. Madea’s character is relatable because in black families we have a strong authoritative figure that can set anyone straight. Her language (the use of Ebonics and southern accent) and references to god are all characteristics we can see in an elderly person like a grandmother. “Madea, the gun-toting grandmother I love to hate, has won me over. She reminds me of my maternal grandmother, who also toted a gun and talked a bunch of smack.” (Lewis, Madea’s Old School Ways). Madea has impacted African American/Black culture because we see someone we know, and love represented on the big screen as the main character.

Since Madea has such a prominent role on screen her fans created tributes to her online. On Facebook there is a page dedicated to Madea fans. They post about funny scenes from the movies, the plays and they share memes. This is an example of what a fandom is. A fandom is a group that expresses their love and dedication to something in a creative form of art (writing, cosplay, memes, videos, etc.). Fans are allowed to creatively express their love without being judged.

The fandom surrounding the Madea franchise is a racial and an emotionally driven one. “…environment surrounded by a vast group of like-minded people at an event that could have well resonated with his value system.” (Duffet, Mark Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the study of Media and Fan Culture). Because Madea films are targeted to black people and it incorporates things that they could only understand, majority enjoy and support Tyler Perry’s works. This leads the fandom to become protective of what they have deemed as their own. Perry created an all-white cast show aired on TLC, Too Close to Home(but is now cancelled) and he received criticism from black people. They were outraged that Perry who is notoriously known for black television switched and did an all-white show. The black community felt betrayed. Tyler Perry was there for them first and is supposed to represent African Americans in films. In an interview he stated, “That’s totally reverse racism, because it was coming from African-American people.” Because of this backlash it has spurred conversation about who can and cannot enjoy Tyler Perry’s works.

I personally enjoy Tyler Perry’s Madea films, I have watched them multiple times. I do not feel like her character is harming the image of black people today. I know that he probably exaggerates her character for comedic reasons, I also know that everything you see on TV isn’t true. Even if Madea’s character is giving a negative outlook on our community that can be debunked if we look at all the successful African Americans and the accomplishments our race has made compared to the past. Madea is culturally important because she makes us never forget our roots, our religion, and our families. We can use the Madea films to mark our progress as we move away from those stereotypes.

Works Cited

Duffett, Mark. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print.

Harris, Cherise, and A. Tassie. "The Cinematic Incarnation of Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie: Tyler

Perry's Black Middle-Class." Journal of African American Studies 16.2 (2012): 321-44. Web.

“I Am Not Your Negro.”Rauol Peck. 02 May 2017. Film.

Lewis, Gregory. “Madea's Old School ways.” Sun-Sentinel.com, 27 Apr. 2016. Web.

Press, Associated. "Tyler Perry: Criticism of 'Too Close to Home' Cast Is 'reverse Racism'." Page Six. Page Six, 30 Dec. 2016. Web.

“Tyler Perry.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 8 Sept. 2017. Web.

“War Of Words: Tyler Perry Vs. Spike Lee.” NPR, NPR, 21 Apr. 2011. Web.

#madea #funny #case study #fandom

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charlieharry1 · 4 years

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Raising the cost and fairness of three worldwide oil & gasoline companies

At merchant, our digital advertising know-how spans more than a few sectors, from commodities and logistics, to travel, fitness and construction. In reality, you best should look at our case research page to see the sort of customers we've got worked with over the past 36 years in business. From massive names in journey and transport, to companies turning over billions of dollars in revenue annually, we have had the pride of branding and digitally transforming a number of the arena’s most influential organizations. Applying our team's expertise in search engine optimization, website design, and lead era (among many other tremendous talents) to ensuring our clients present themselves professionally, at the same time as persevering with to stay digitally applicable. One such vicinity we've got received a wealth of revel in in is the oil and fuel industry. Having labored with clients inclusive of oil spill response limited, bg group and trolex, our expertise of the oil and gas panorama, and the specific challenges going through those working inside its market, offers us an aspect over other agencies. In fact, our 5 years working with bg group on extra than four hundred initiatives, became instrumental inside the agency securing its remaining $fifty three billion (£42 billion) buyout by way of shell returned in 2015. A takeover that hit headline information the world over and nonetheless remains one of the highest-cost bids in united kingdom corporate records these days. Bg group oil and gas tankers

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helping oil spill reaction restrained centralise its operation

any other example of where our final results-pushed marketing fee shines via is inside the work we've produced for oil spill response confined (osrl). The agency is an enterprise-funded cooperative, installed in 1985 through the sector's most responsible oil and fuel groups, to respond to grease spills anywhere they occur within the global. Thirty years on, representatives from petronas, bp shipping, shell and the global affiliation of oil and fuel producers are the various non-govt directors on osrl's board, and the cooperative has firmly mounted itself as a global chief in the fight against oil spills in our oceans. At the time we have been engaged to paintings with osrl, the company became accomplishing its operations across several man or woman microsites, dividing out special aspects of its enterprise. However finding out to change tack and centralise its operation, osrl desired to pool its separate sites collectively into one all-encompassing new internet site, thereby strengthening its logo. However this wasn't the best big alternate the oil spill cooperative wanted us to put into effect. In addition to consolidating the statistics contained throughout its exceptional microsites, osrl also wanted to introduce a brand new characteristic to its internet site, a member portal to control its schooling programmes. This technical requirement for an in-constructed intuitive personalized enjoy become one we had to take into careful attention while auditing the content control systems available to us. Ultimately, it changed into this issue of the quick that predominantly guided our development architects' decision to apply the goldvision crm device, on which to construct our bespoke new oil spill response internet site. New oil spill reaction homepage shown on pc screen web site design by means of merchant digital organization

adding price for osrl members

for oil spill reaction restricted the authorized schooling it affords to the ones seeking to advance their profession in the oil and gas zone is as essential to the future of oil spill prevention, as the global clean-up response carrier the company offers. It's for this reason that osrl wanted its schooling portal to be an embedded function of its newly made over on line domestic. So we evolved a unique hub that permits osrl members the potential to autonomously manage their personal training necessities online. Dubbed myosrl, the portal has its own devoted page, available from osrl's internet site burger menu, and once signed in, registered myosrl users can personalize their very own customized dashboard, alongside locating and booking training activities taking location in their location, and tracking the progress of any education they're venture. Additionally we made it feasible for individuals to additionally acquire applicable news and signals thru their myosrl page, together with the capability to download and keep any training certificates they have got been provided for secure keeping. To make it smooth for osrl to manage the portal long-term we additionally constructed within the functionality for all training route content to be updated robotically, each time new information is brought, or present substances amended. Website construct oil spill reaction homepage shown on tablet

putting life-saving engineering into context for trolex

the capability to personalise an experience within the manner we had for oil spill response constrained, become additionally a demand of a short we had been tasked with by way of another innovative enterprise working inside the gasoline and oil market. Trolex is a technical engineering organisation that, amongst other things, specialises in creating existence-saving detection devices for the industrial gas and mining sector. The company applies years of studies and improvement into each generation it manufactures, and an industry-huge reputation for excellence has caused its products being followed in over a hundred nations global. However despite the fact that widely mentioned as being precise in its method, trolex isn't the only manufacturer of the kinds of state-of-the-art detection and tracking effectively solutions it develops. And a upward thrust in market opposition resulted in the emblem drawing close us to reconsider the way in which it marketed its technology to stakeholders. Our venture was to mastermind and execute a new advertising and marketing marketing campaign, which might help reposition trolex's products in the oil and gasoline technology market. Inspiring purchasers and ability adopters to look each revolutionary trolex generation in an entirely new mild. Internet site build oil spill response homepage proven on tablet

how we humanised trolex's technological innovations

to upward push to the project of permitting trolex's products to be perceived otherwise, we had to present them in another way, and this supposed moving far from a traditional b2b campaign. Instead, we checked out every generation thru the eyes of a patron, drawing near the brief within the equal way we might if it turned into focused on a b2c target audience. While the masterful engineering behind trolex's merchandise were widely promoted as its usp up till this factor, we knew that to get the emblem to resonate with its target audience in another way, we would ought to inject a relatable element into the product provide. For us, this supposed guidance faraway from the technical capability of each innovation, and focussing at the price it gives you its users as an alternative. An approach the emblem hadn't undertaken formerly. To create our new advantage-led marketing campaign, two matters were straight away important. One, we had to create particular tailored messaging for every of trolex's products. Two, we needed to develop the photography belongings that might be the marketing campaign's important visible identification. We started with the messaging first, as this would be the anchor of our marketing campaign, with the pictures actually supporting to boost those statements. Product marketing campaign for trolex engineering branding instance

trolex had been express in the reality it wanted each product in its variety to be for my part highlighted, in essence, the problem of its personal mini-campaign. The opposite key deliverable of the marketing campaign could be conveying the research and innovation that trolex invests into growing each of its technology. Focussing on each product one by one, we started out by way of figuring out the main takeaway of each technology, i. E. The outcome it achieves. We then evolved this in addition, introducing an emotive element, which humanised each product, and created a relatable context that emphasised the benefit of investing in trolex's improvements. The end result turned into a marketing campaign message that left its audience in no question as to the very actual difference trolex's merchandise make everyday inside the lives in their adopters. A message we enforced via contextual images that showcased each generation at paintings in a real-existence state of affairs. The campaign became so a hit, it now not simplest captured the Digital Marketing Agency in Sheffield attention of trolex's goal b2b target market, it additionally secured the corporation effective editorial insurance in their key alternate media. Loose exposure, on a mass-scale, that only helped to boost the marketing campaign's attain, with the added gain of generating en-masse fine publicity for trolex. Trolex engineering print brochure example for product marketing campaign

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merchant: marketing hobby that makes a measurable difference

the ways wherein we brought value for trolex, oil spill response restricted and bg institution are just a handful of the customer fulfillment testimonies we've performed over our 36 years at service provider. As an award-winning, final results-driven organisation our power lies in knowing the proper pastime to enforce to obtain the consequences our customers need. Whether or not it is an uptake in offerings, an boom in income, or a great boost in market retail value ahead of a prime corporate acquisition. In reality, it's our potential to supply value and roi for our customers this is been instrumental in a number of the arena's most iconic manufacturers contracting our services, and the purpose we turn out to be the lengthy-time period advertising associate for a few of the customers who have interaction Digital Marketing Company Sheffield our services. From our 5-12 months collaboration with bg organization, prior to its sale to shell for $fifty three billion (£42 billion), to our 10-yr settlement with somerset county council to ease traffic congestion on its roads. Now not forgetting our ongoing month-to-month retainer with british groundworks & civil engineering dealer mackoy ltd. To see a number of the other methods we've helped to definitely reposition leading organisations within the fields of transport, construction, telecoms and healthcare, take a look at our case research.

#Digital Marketing Agencies in Sheffield

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yesnickkern-blog · 6 years

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The Night Sea

Chapter 1

“I cannot tell you how deeply, truly, sorry I am” said the man dressed in black,

“but I guess we know he’s in a better place now.” He looked into my eyes as though I was to have some clarity with his statement — as though I hadn’t been told the exact same thing three-hundred times that day. He turned away from me, touched the casket gently, and then walked on down the line of family members to shake another one’s hand. Another person came along and gave me their condolences for my dead relative, though this one through far more tears.

“It…it’s so shocking…I can’t even explain how sad it is for him to be gone,” said the old lady.

“It’s been quite hard, yes,” I replied with as empathetic of a face and tone I could muster to a complete stranger. “How did you know my grandfather?”

“I was his mail lady five years back. Oh! How he loved getting letters from you!” she replied, dabbing a cloth on her eyes and then wiping it on her forehead. I was taken back a little by the relation she had to him. She was crying as though he had spent every day with her, bought her a house, and rescued her cat; not that they ran into each other occasionally due to vocation and the package system. I also never sent him letters.

“Well,” she said through a crying stutter, “we know he’s in a better place now.” She smiled at me as though I was to have some clarity with this statement — as though I hadn’t been told the exact same thing three-hundred and one times. She moved on and started sobbing to my family members. Death is an unusual thing despite its rather common occurrence in humanity. I imagine loosing a loved one is somewhat like loosing a thumb. You remember what it felt like to have a thumb, and you remember all the good times you enjoyed whilst having a thumb, but the moment you reach for your coffee cup, the nubby side of your hand reminds you life won’t be the same. I do not mean to offend any of the thumbless reading this, only to say that a part of reality one once had is gone. But when one looses a thumb one does not remark “at least I know it’s in a better place.” I’d imagine one would remark something along the lines on “Ouch! My thumb! How am I supposed to open jars?” before passing out. A grandfather is not a thumb, but one should comfort the grandfather-less the same as the thumbless, not convince them that their thumb is off getting a manicure waiting for the other four digits to join it. There’s a fifty percent chance, I thought, that there is a better place for my grandfather to be in. And there’s a fifty percent chance that if there’s a good place, he could have ended up in a not so good place. But there’s a one-hundred percent chance telling that to me at that moment was the wrong thing to say entirely. As far as I was concerned, reality was becoming less and less real. Dealing with grief is hard enough without strangers piling existential questions onto the matter. With that thought I turned to my mom.

“I’m going to catch a breath of air outside for a moment.” I said.

“Alright. There’s a funnel cake cart down the way a bit if you want some.” She gave me a smile and her puffy, red eyes crinkled. I pushed my way through the mass of black-cladded people and down the sanctuary hall. When I opened the door to the cathedral, cool sea air rushed past me to fill the stuffy room. The view was opposite to the one behind me: open and endless. The Cathedral sat behind a boardwalk with vendors and some restaurants. Behind the cathedral were the rising buildings of the City. The smaller size and slate facade of the church made it stand out from the tan and brown art deco buildings. But it also stood out from the cerulean sea that lapped the side of the boardwalk. It existed sad and alone.

I walked down the boardwalk, inspecting the shops and vendors. The smell of the salty sea danced with that of sweet fried dough. I passed a trinket shop full of little statues that looked like Chthulu or some other kneeling octopus character. Why one would fill an entire shop with such things was beyond me. It must have been an accidental online order. No reasonable person thinks to themselves “I rather think this City would benefit from a shop of tiny carved creatures.” But who am I to judge? A reasonable person, I thought to myself. But then again I did just appear from a slate-clad building full of people in black surrounding a dead body. Who’s to say that’s reasonable? The next vendor I passed was a newspaper stand with a striped red and cream awning. I read a few of the headlines in bold print which were basically yelling at passerby’s to get their attention. “MORGENSTERN ADDRESSES PRESIDENTIAL RUN,” screamed the paper in deafening print. I usually was not one for politics, but this news peaked my interest. Lance Morgenstern had been my role model since I was four. No, make that five. Whenever it was, he had just come up with a planned fusion device. Of course it didn’t work in the end, but the idea added to his name. My friends would all be focused on fiction and fantasy, while I would entranced by Morgenstern’s interviews. He was a terrible public speaker. Absolutely the worst public speaker who has gotten that much attention. But I liked that. His nervousness and occasional off track comments made him human to me. His slight western European accent given to him by his mother made one stay entranced by what he was saying: as if his words were magic. And so when I discovered the buzz about his potential presidential campaign, I was both intrigued and repulsed. Of course the idea of having a competent man, with theories on global warming and extraterrestrial life, would be lovely as president, but if he were truly pursuing presidency he would be less human to me. Politicians are beasts on earth. I wanted my idol to be authentic. In a way, it made me feel more authentic. I went up to the newspaper stand — with some embarrassment I might add, having lost the battle against against an attention catching headline — and bought the newspaper with money I was going to spend on funnel cake. I shuffled through the paper like a young person, not knowing how to properly unfold one, until I had all the news on the presidency. My eyes rushed over the globs of black text until I found what I was looking for:

“Morgenstern has refused to campaign for presidency regardless of public pressure in order to continue to pursue extraterrestrial research and maintain his scientific research positions at the UN.”

I breathed a sigh of relief strong enough to ruffle the hair on the newspaper stand salesperson. That was good news. Best news of the day, really. I then became sad remembering my grandfather’s respect for Morgenstern. How he had ignited my interest in the scientist. At least on this day, his funeral, Morgenstern’s news would have been appreciated by him. I guess it’s what you call synchronicity. I dumped the paper down on the ledge of the vendor’s booth. By the look on the salesman’s face most people read more than one article before throwing a paper away. But I didn’t want to read about global warming. I didn’t want to read about the famine. I didn’t want to read about the middle east. One stressful headline was enough for that day. Maybe my grandfather was in a better place. At least I was sure wherever he was didn’t have tabloids.

I turned and noticed a figure sitting on a bench not fifteen feet down from me. He was antiquarian, for lack of a better word. He wore a dusty, old trench coat — the type I had seen in movies from the 1940s — and wrote in a peculiar journal as he gazed into the sky. His skin was leathery like that of a sailor and his hair was hoar., I stared at him for a while: an unnatural amount of time, in fact.

I looked away for a second, not wanting to draw attention, but quickly looked back as if I didn’t have a choice. He was odd to say the least. But not in a bad way. More like one would become if they lived an incredibly lonely life. Well, I decided I couldn’t continue to stare, and as I was all out of money for funnel cake and had nothing pressing to do, I walked over to the bench and sat on the opposite side. I didn’t want to be awkwardly sitting by him on the rather small bench, so one of my legs was off the side to make room: as though I was just sitting for a moment. We sat in silence for a while however.

“He’s not running, is he?” said the man to me. I looked around to make sure he was talking to me.

“Who?”

“Morgenstern. He isn’t running for office, is he?” he said in a wheezy but resonant voice.

“No. Luckily.”

“You wouldn’t have wanted him to run? He would surely win.” The man was surprised but not offended.

“I respect him. I couldn’t do that if he were a politician”

“Ah.” the man said. And we sat in silence some more.

“Would you be for his running.” I enquired. He sat quiet for a moment, but his mind was obviously turning around thoughts.

“I don’t respect him either way.” he finally said.

“Ah.” I mumbled. Again we sat in silence.

“Have you ever had the feeling” he started, “that reality is less real than it should be?” I was surprised at this statement. I had, but I chalked that up to the passing of my grandfather.

“I’ve just had a death in my family, so I can’t say grief has let me believe anything much recently.”

“Death will do that.” He replied, there was sympathy in his voice although not in his words. “Something not unlike death is happening. I think we all feel it.” I immediately regretted sitting down. I knew from a distance he was mentally ill. I let my own curiosity get the best of me.

“I have a family I have to get back to.” I said, forcing a soft tone in order not to appear disturbed. He grunted a bit.

“Be safe,” he said.

“I’ll try my best.” I quipped walking away from him hurriedly. He was right, of course. Something like death was happening.

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uptightcitizensbrigade · 7 years

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Annie Clark is not where she’s supposed to be. At the last minute, the artist known as St. Vincent decided that instead of trekking to a country store as planned, she wanted to stick closer to her studio in the hills of Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon. When I arrive at our new meeting spot, breathless from a steep climb, the first thing I notice is that neither of us is dressed appropriately for a rendezvous in the domesticated wilderness. Of course, in Clark’s case, this means looking pretty damn cool, in a sky-blue duster, gray sweatshirt, and leopard-print shorts, her trademark curly dark hair (which took a silvery lavender turn last album cycle) pin-straight and tucked under a Duran Duran cap. We make our way to a picnic table in the middle of a hiking trail that apparently enjoys more use as a bird lavatory. “Is this OK?” she asks, straddling the bench and setting down her mug of Yogi tea. It is. Anything to stop moving vertically.

“Up,” however, is a fitting direction for the 34-year-old Clark. Over the past decade, she has evolved from a clever multi-instrumentalist to critical darling to indie icon—her last record, 2014’s St. Vincent, took home the Grammy for Best Alternative Album. She’s a road warrior (with the bed bug stories to prove it), having toured for much of her life, beginning as a teenager when she was the tour manager for her uncle’s jazz duo, Tuck & Patti. And her latest album, MASSEDUCTION, is most definitely a career summit. It’s her Lemonade, her OK Computer—whatever reference conveys the urgency with which it demands to be listened to when it drops on October 13. “This one’s better,” she says of her fifth solo effort, nodding. “I was focused on writing the best songs I’d ever written.”

That goal comes at a cost, or so Clark’s body language seems to say on this late-August evening. She stifles a yawn, and cradles her tea. For the last couple of months, she’s been celibate and sober. Some of the monasticism she favors during recording stuck: An illness last March prompted her to quit alcohol altogether. “I loved my white wine,” she says. “But I just can’t stand the smell anymore.”

She is also insanely busy, still recuperating from yesterday’s flight home from Australia for press, not to mention the whirlwind trip to Tokyo that preceded it, where she performed at Summer Sonic (and shot this cover). And while it’s been three and a half years since she released an album, Clark’s been working on it all the while. “I’ve just been collecting things, bowerbird-style, and making elaborate plumage,” she says. Meanwhile, she’s been flexing her creative muscles: A week ago, Lionsgate announced that the Dallas native would be helming its female-led adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Clark made her directorial debut earlier this year with a short called “The Birthday Party” for the female-driven horror anthology XX.)

She’s also spent a good part of the last year getting over her breakup from 25-year-old British supermodel and actress Cara Delevingne. The pair dated for 18 months, thrusting Clark into a tabloid existence she’d never known before. You won’t find her in any formal pictures from (the old) Taylor Swift’s last Fourth of July bonanza in 2016, but she and her soon-to-be ex were captured by paparazzi in a private embrace. “It was really bizarre,” she says. “No joke, I’ve been in high-speed chases in London with at least five cars and six motorcycles following me and Cara. You’re going to kill someone, and for what? A photo of a sweet girl?”

The last thing she wants to talk about is how much of this album was informed by that relationship. She’s baffled by such inquiries—she only just recently admitted that 2011’s Strange Mercy was partly about her father being sent to prison for investment fraud. “I never think, ‘If I only knew who Kate Bush was singing about in “Running Up That Hill,” I could enjoy the song,’” she says, shooing a mosquito off my shirt. “I do not wonder who or what songs are about. And the Texan in me is like, ‘It’s none of your goddamned business.’” I ask whether she cleared the disclosure of her dad’s incarceration with him beforehand. “Is it OK with me that he’s in prison?” she responds dryly, but quickly adds, “I’ve only ever spoken highly of my father.”

Clark is a vivid storyteller whose knack for relating tales of dirty policemen or down-on-their-luck friends would make her the most popular guest at a dinner party. On MASSEDUCTION’s first single, “New York,” which debuted last June, she sings along to a plangent piano about “the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me.” While the song’s grief over lost heroes could easily apply to David Bowie or Prince, as Clark has suggested, it’s the identity of the “motherfucker” that piqued curiosity. “I totally understand it, I do,” she says, and frowns thoughtfully. “But the point is for the song to mean whatever it means to somebody else. Some people have a real hang-up about being misunderstood. I don’t care.” She stops to clarify this point: “I would be concerned if someone was like, ‘Wow, she seems like a Holocaust denier.’ But racism, sexism, or homophobia aside? I’m happy to be misunderstood.”

In the past, Clark’s music was more often respected than adored, like Love This Giant, her 2012 album with Talking Heads savant David Byrne. She is a masterful guitarist, a performance artist unafraid of experimentation. Artificial sounds, brass sections, unhurried choruses? All play a part in her eclectic repertoire, and she rarely stays monogamous to any one genre or rhythm.

“A lot of people are skilled at bending notes, but I think she actually bends the parameters of what guitar is,” says longtime friend Carrie Brownstein, whose prowess on the same instrument helped usher Sleater-Kinney to stardom. “She doesn’t approach it in a traditionally worshipful way. While she’s playing guitar, she seems to be destroying the very concept of it, which I think is very exciting.”

The opening track of her last album famously depicted Clark running naked from a rattlesnake. MASSEDUCTION (pronounced “mass seduction” on the title track) somehow finds her even more exposed. Clark says “New York” was the first time she ever wrote something and thought, “This could be somebody’s favorite song.” The same could be said of many tracks on the album, which, taken as a whole, sounds like Clark violating her own sense of privacy in order to grant access to her vulnerability. “I’m not eschewing any of the work I’ve done in the past,” says Clark. “But I was less concerned [here] about doing a lot of musical tricks that to me are intellectually interesting. The point of the record was to go, like, mainline to the heart.”

For this, Clark enlisted co-producer Jack Antonoff. Through his work with Lorde and Taylor Swift, as well as his own band Bleachers, Antonoff has developed a reputation for channeling ideas and emotions into their most approximate, frequently synth-driven expressions. “Jack changed my life for the better,” says Clark. “He makes you feel like anything is possible. We were merciless, trying to push all these songs past the finish line to accept the gold medal.”

None of which is to suggest that Clark has sacrificed any virtuosity or ambition. Several of the best songs break off into their own compelling codas. “How could anybody have you and lose you and not lose their mind, too?” moans Clark on “Los Ageless,” backed by an aggressive beat that would not be out of place at an adults-only club, before dissolving, like a film melt, into a series of bleary synths and barely audible whispers.

The theme of Clark’s last record was “near-future cult leader.” Here, having traded in those wild lavender-platinum curls for an austere black bob, “It’s dominatrix at the mental institution,” she says. “I knew I needed to write about power—the fiction of power and the power of fiction.” The concept is at its most powerful on the more adrenalized songs, like “Pills,” whose opening lines function like a Valley of the Dolls reboot: “Pills to wake/ Pills to sleep/ Pills, pills, pills every day of the week.” The words are delivered by Delevingne in a demented, cheerfully vacant chant.

“You mean Kid Monkey, obscure DJ,” says Clark, gamely referencing her ex’s pseudonym. “It needed to be a posh British voice. I was like, ‘Cara, wake up. I need you to sing on this song.’ And she’s kind of grumpy. And I’m like, ‘Please. It sounds so good. One more time.’” That song, too, starts with a blinking alertness but finishes drowsily, like Pink Floyd at the planetarium. Clark says the inspiration came to her after popping a sleeping pill on tour, and speaks to larger issues of opioid addiction that have affected people she cares about.

But the song that’s most likely to be picked over lyrically, for obvious reasons, is “Young Lover.” It’s set in Paris, where gossip rags once reported that Delevingne, proposed to Clark. The relationship described in the song suffers as a result of the titular subject’s hard-partying ways. “Did I have experiences that emotionally resonated in the way they do for that character? Abso-fucking-lutely,” says Clark, who’s also been linked briefly to Kristen Stewart. “But did that exact scenario happen? No!” She makes a dismissive face.

Clark didn’t grow up feasting on the sordid details of celebrity coupledom, though she admits to a fascination with Kate Moss, Shalom Harlow, and the early-’90s supermodel set. (The musician has recently done some modeling herself as one of the new faces of Tiffany & Co.) Her parents divorced young, and Clark lived with her social worker mother and two older sisters. “I was free to be a wild card, because the other roles were spoken for,” she says. A breeze kicks up and she rubs her legs as they prickle with goosebumps.

A tiny part of her early musical education includes a crate of CDs that fell off a truck in front of their house. “It was good taste for someone in the suburbs of Dallas,” she says, citing Nine Inch Nails and Pet Shop Boys. Clark started playing guitar at 12, and was encouraged by her maternal uncle, who hired her as a tour manager for his jazz duo when she was a teenager.

Eventually, her family swelled to include eight siblings, with whom she is close. A younger brother now works as her assistant. “We grew up hearing my dad talk business on the phone, and it was ‘motherfucker’ this and ‘fucking cocksucker’ that,” she says, laughing. In part, this informed her curse word of choice on “New York.” “If people don’t curse at all, I always think they’re hiding something,” she says.

The next day, Clark is filming a video for MASSEDUCTION’s as-yet-unannounced second single at a soundstage in Hollywood. She spends more time on the West Coast now that she has built a studio here, but still keeps properties in New York and Texas. She hesitates to use the word bicoastal, which feels “kind of douchey,” she says.

The video set changes from a Pepto-Bismol pink beauty salon, where the pedicure tubs are filled with green slime, to a yoga studio. Clark is dressed in a cheetah-print leotard with an open-face hood. She’s been bending over for 15 minutes straight in order for director Willo Perron to get a dolly shot of her face hanging between her legs. I marvel at her stamina. “Are you really asking me how I’m good at bending over?” she says, wryly. She rests between takes, curling up on the yoga mat like a cat in a sunbeam.

Clark wasn’t involved with the concept for the video. Back in Laurel Canyon, she admitted to being preoccupied with Dorian Gray, working with Elle screenwriter David Birke and rereading the book for the first time since high school. “I jumped at the chance to explore themes of transgression, narcissism, youth, beauty, queerness, but through a female protagonist,” says Clark, who’s currently considering a cast for the project. She’s new to this milieu, but credits Tuck & Patti with teaching her the rigors of knowing her shit. “They really were the coach in Rocky,” she says of her uncle’s duo. “I learned how to be professional. It’s not as if I need to be a camera expert in order to direct something, but you have to have the respect of the crew. This is not a vanity project. This is something I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Melanie Lynskey, who starred in Clark’s XX short, was pleasantly surprised by the musician’s command of the set. “It was like working with someone who had been doing it a very long time,” she says. “She’s so smart and she had such a clear idea of what she wanted, but gave me all the room in the world to come up with ideas and collaborate.”

In the meantime, Clark is also preparing for this fall’s Fear the Future Tour. As we slowly make our way down the hill, clutching at branches to steady ourselves, she says there won’t be as much postmodern dancing this time around. “The record is full of sorrow, but the visual aspect of it is really absurd,” she says. “I take the piss out of myself. The last tour I sat atop a pink throne, looking very imperious.” She kindly helps me down the last step. “This one will let people see that I have a sense of humor.”

#Annie Clark #St Vincent #Fear the Future #MASSEDUCTION #interview

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wewererogue · 5 years

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Notes on “The Last Days of Jack Sheppard”: Capital Crimes and Paper Claims

[by Benedict Seymour / Mute]

Introduction by Rogue: This film was an art project originally screened at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, in 2009. From the artists’ site: “The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is based on the inferred prison encounters between the 18th century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe, ghostwriter of Sheppard’s ‘autobiography’. Set in the wake of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, Britain’s first financial crisis, the film is a critical costume drama constructed from a patchwork of historical, literary, and popular sources. It traces the connections between representation, speculation and the discourses of high and low culture that emerged in the early 18th century and remain resonant today.”

There were no commercial screenings, it has no IMDB entry, and as far as I can tell it can’t be downloaded, legally or otherwise. So I’m reposting here the review of a film/art installation that I haven’t seen and probably never will, and that YOU haven’t seen and probably never will, because it’s a damn interesting story. Also, long post.

The Last Days of Jack Sheppard (2009), directed by Anja Kirschner and David Panos, retells the story of a proletarian hero of the early 18th Century who ending his days at the gallows – ‘the triple tree’ – in Tyburn in 1724, was executed for theft at the dawn of financialisation.

Jack Sheppard wasn’t much of a thief. Serially incarcerated during his short life, he won fame for his ingenuity and implacable dedication to getting out of gaol. This is years before Houdini, with his spectacularised escape artistry and proto-Fordist routinised liberation. It is years before David Blaine, who inverted the trope of getting free into feats of hyper-visible confinement endured. Jack’s very public demise is furthest from but for us also closest to the telematic death and redemption of Jade Goody, a working class woman who, like Jack, also found fame in dissolution.

Unlike Jade, however, Jack stood for a certain resistance to commodification and the intrusion of the State into one’s intimate processes of self-reproduction.1 Like her he rose to fame in the wake of a suddenly deflated financial bubble. The Last Days of Jack Sheppard plays on the interconnections between his acts of criminal reappropriation and the speculative adventures of the wealthy during the South Sea Bubble of 1720. As much as anything, Jack’s notoriety was about the contrast his crimes made with the legally sanctioned scams of his social superiors; his bravery, fortitude, skill and cunning versus his superiors’ petty self-aggrandisement and greed. Jack also remained independent of corrupting tendencies within his own class and refused to join in the rackets of Jonathan Wild, self-appointed ‘thief-taker general’.

For these and other reasons we will come to, Jack was one of the first heroes of popular culture. His ghost-written biographical Narrative appears as an early act of proletarian public speech. A posthumous publication, the Narrative is based on the words of a man condemned to death; a man escaped and recaptured who is given the right of representation only when he has nowhere left to run.

Near the beginning and end of the film the notorious housebreaker and escapologist (four times escaped from prison, four times recaptured) invokes his right to speak. He holds up the manuscript of his memoirs to the crowd as he stands before the gallows, a dialectical image of the decisive forces of his age. The scene brings everything together – capital and capital punishment, money and representation, the mob and their hero. Jack steps up onto the platform to have the last word, to give his own account and put right earlier misrepresentations. However, the film sardonically notes that this last gesture of self-assertion is already, also, a piece of advertising. Jack’s publisher Mr Applebee is at hand to tout the completed Narrative – ‘available for 6 pence only from Applebee’s’. In the background, as we shall see, there is the anonymous ghost-writer of the text, Daniel Defoe.

It may be considered a moment of resistance, a claim to rights that were not supposed to be issued to people of Jack’s class. As such it is also an attempt to use the bourgeois representational apparatus to get something material back – control over his own history and a legacy for his mother. This last raid on the emerging finance/culture nexus is carried out within the terms of the law and of the market. Like the stocks and bonds of the bankrupted stockjobbers glimpsed in the wreckage of the South Sea Scheme at the beginning of the film, Jack’s Narrative is itself a kind of ‘paper claim’ on value. Behind it lies a contract, and a title to sales revenue, but in itself the Narrative is a fiction, a projection of what his life will have meant. Furthermore, Jack is not the real, or at least the sole, author. The film’s diegesis continues and exacerbates the logic of displacement by putting into his mouth words that others would only have read on the printed page, pointing up the artificiality of the mise-en-scene and, by extension, of the public sphere.

Jack’s moment of free and direct expression, of the right to tell one’s story and give one’s own account of one’s self, is also the moment of commodification. Destitution recapitulated. Alienation consolidated by claims of complete transparency (Defoe’s vanishing mediation). The moment of truth is the moment of fiction, of a constitutive falsehood analogous to the wage labour contract in that it is both ‘authentic’, legally recognised and a kind of betrayal of at least one of the consenting parties. Jack becomes a virtual player in a textual construct, enabling us to retell and rework his story, but objectifying and distorting his necessarily open-ended subjectivity. Death launches him on the literary market. Analogies to paper money and credit here are not accidental: representation opens up the possibility of derivatives, variants, meta-fictions.

The act of representing one’s self – as the film explores – depends on just such objectifications, a process of displacements and substitutions which put the speaker’s identity and status (living/dead, rich/poor, etc.) in doubt. Jack breaks through the social repressions of his day to speak up for himself and, by extension, his class, but he is also spoken for. His words are put to work. The future development of working class struggle to escape from capitalism is foreshadowed here. The question is implicit throughout – how does the subject/object of history, neck in the noose and facing extinction (or perhaps the mutual ruin of the contending classes), get out of this one?

As in life, he had to alienate his considerable skills as a carpenter in the service of others’ accumulation of capital, so in death Jack’s voice is ventriloquised and exploited by Messers Applebee and Defoe for their own ends. Equality is the very form of inequality; the contract guarantees the subordination of the economically dependent and the reproduction of their alienation. Jack makes history, or at least his history, but not in conditions of his own making. And what will history make of him? The film is hyper-conscious of the potential and risks of myth making, yet in order to pose the question of Jack’s legacy, of his contemporary significance and indeed the future of his class, it is necessary to put him in the frame; the film has to borrow and trade on his legend.

The early 18th century represented here is an age of ‘projections’, of new financial abstractions, schemes and scams, exerting an increasingly autonomous force in social life. Jack’s story, at once a critique of the self-contained world of the stock exchange, the Mansion House and the coffee house, is itself a highly mediated claim to authenticity, a work constructed by Daniel Defoe giving the illusion of a first person account. However, true to Jack’s own language and history, it is necessarily a work of (real) abstraction. For a growing market, Jack’s life has become a kind of ‘structured investment vehicle’, a spectacular commodity with an existence independent of the unruly mob who flocked to his hanging. In death, his social mobility is potentiated.

Jack’s rebirth (or undeath) as a literary figment and popular hero, like the floating of a new concern, is a hostage to the market and to the stories people will construct as derivatives of his ‘authentic’ paper representation. Once written down, he is no longer free to determine his story. The film itself is one such derivative, taking as its premise a hypothetical struggle between the Narrative’s two authors – the ghost writer and ghost-written, Defoe and Sheppard – over the content of the biography. By positing this ur-narrative or pre-textual struggle the film is able to reopen what the Narrative tried to close. It is a narrative back-projection which underlies and echoes the film’s other projections, its allegorical/art historical décor made up of prints, paintings, drawings and other artefacts from the period.

Long ago, Frederic Jameson identified postmodern culture’s ‘renarrativisation of the fragment’ as a kind of recycling, reinscription and domestication of modernist practices of disjunction. What distinguishes The Last Days use of parody from this form of blank referentiality is its heightened awareness of the economic determination of and struggle over signs. Where Jameson sees in postmodern culture’s abstraction and reflexivity an analogy to finance capital’s attempt to defer and get around the underlying tendency to crisis in capitalist production by proliferating virtual capital, this particular art work turns the logic of cultural looting in on itself. The result is an emphasis on the perpetual presence of economic relations of domination in capitalist culture tout court. The struggle between Jack and his literary representative is not a mere conceit by means of which to squeeze a new work out of an old one, an ‘exotic literary instrument’ that yields a domesticated and carefully captioned blast from the past. Instead it pushes renarrativisation into overdrive, offering a web of analogies and historical allegories.

By enquiring into the effectivity of signs, the performative power of fictions – economic, literary, biographical – the film is also alert to the way ‘paper claims’ function primarily as ways of appropriating the (rest of the) material world. Money is essentially a title to future value, a ‘licence to loot’ insofar as the paper titles to capital which capitalists deal in always project ahead of the world, ahead of existing value, through the process of capitalisation. Signs, however apparently free-floating and autonomous, tend to intersect in the most brutal ways with processes of accumulation, equivalent and non-equivalent exchange. Paper claims exact work and life from the labouring bodies they command. In the case of the film, the key moment being the separation of peasants from the land and the production of the urban proletariat of whom Jack is a part. Money, State and the banking system are results and, it should be stressed, products of the (perpetually renewed) dispossession of the poor from all independent means of subsistence. Paper claims are worthless without the State to back them up, and the projections of the financial elite are likewise predicated on a brutal ‘framing’ of the poor.

This brings us back to the triple tree. Execution is the most profound form of recognition which the ruling class can offer one such as Sheppard. It’s also, however, a way of negating identity completely. Capital punishment makes the criminal at once particular and equivalent. Use of the gallows was calibrated around the price of commodities, and hence the socially necessary labour time reappropriated by the malefactor and unreliably echoed in the (jurors’) estimate of the prices of the stolen commodities.2 But the gallows were indifferent to the arguments and aphorisms that a proto-literary figure like Jack was capable of (‘One file is worth all the bibles in the world’). Jack’s (illicit) claims are answered by his definitive transformation from subject to object – the inversion on which capitalism runs made horribly explicit. The ‘moment of [his] dissolution’ is the moment of his complete reification, and, with the help of Defoe and Applebee, the moment at which he gains access to the official means of representation, becoming the subject of a new kind of separation, a second order of (linguistic) enclosure. His death sentence and its execution opens up the space of representation, the dimension of fiction, fantasy, financial projections and speculative futures. Indeed, as we have said, Jack is ‘floated’ as much as hanged and his Narrative becomes the stuff of, or rather for, Legend. A story is born with the death of its protagonist, the Narrator (in the manner of a film noir such as D.O.A.) is already posthumous. Like Jade who survived to read her own obituary, there is something zombie-like about the public proletarian, not lacking in wit, far from wordless, but at the same time, as Applebee puts it, ‘doomed’. The sympathy of the public sphere for marked men and women is already, at this historical moment, the most suspicious thing about it.

There is something rather ‘aesthetic’ about this final instant, then. To quote one of the newspapers of the day, Sheppard was hung up and ‘dangled in the Sheriff’s picture frame’ for 15 minutes. ‘The sheriff’s picture frame’ makes clear the tacit connections between artistic and literary representation and the State’s repressive apparatus. Beyond any Warholian undertones, the link between execution and celebrity is not just via the struggles over the body of the malefactor, the crowd’s identification with the victim or the ballad sellers’ narration of their life and times. In fact, the gallows are aesthetic insofar as it constitutes a crude means for communicating a message to those that can read Jack’s broken body. The State itself requires notoriety to get its point across. This is spectacular language aimed at the (mostly illiterate) early proletariat. Not for them Jack’s ghost written Narrative.

The message is the imposition of work. Commodification uses death to communicate its imperatives to the living through the mediation of exemplary delinquents. As the film presents it, Jack is an escape artist captured first by the fascinated artists of the aristocracy (Thornhill paints Jack’s portrait while the felon is chained up in Newgate, shades of Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends, here) and then definitively by the art of the State. As Peter Linebaugh frames it in his great book The London Hanged, the triple tree was not so much the final stage for disposal of society’s ne’er do wells, as one of the foundations of the economy. Capital punishment was a part of the production and reproduction of the poor as workers, it was there to teach people a very definite lesson. Founded on the originary violence of primitive accumulation – the separation of people from their collectively held property through the enclosures – early capitalism attempted to instil in those that produced its wealth the necessity of toil. Those who refused to submit to the imperative of making their living by taking what they needed to subsist – or like Jack, flaunting a desire for luxury deemed out of his social reach, luxury beyond reason or measure – would be made an example of. The triple tree was the most important prop in a theatre in which the insubordinate were turned into the unfortunate protagonists of a cautionary tale.

But the State did not have complete control over this stage or the stories told about it; both the criminals and the mob were given an opportunity by the very public nature of the spectacle. Jack’s speech in the film sums up the way in which the stage of instruction was being turned into a site of contestation, a place in which the poor might talk back and challenge the ongoing process of separation by which work was imposed.

Revolts at the points of instruction, punishment and incarceration were in turn providing the raw materials for goods in the literary market place, another node in the production and circulation of commodities. The spiral continues, from enclosure to escape, re-enclosure to re-escape, re-escape to re-enclosure. Remorseless, and contingent, one recalls Marx’s famous formula for the mutation of money into more money: ‘M-C-M’. Capital wants it to continue in a seamless cycle, but in reality there are many obstacles to valorisation – Jack is just one example.

During the course of the film the dialectic of representation gets turned around one way then the other. Defoe may have tried to make an example of Jack, a lesson that crime doesn’t pay, that corrupting influences lead him astray, or, more subtly and presciently, that within even the worst criminal there is a kernel of industrious ingenuity that, carefully harnessed, can and should be put to work for expanded accumulation. The film shows Defoe struggling to impose his sense of Jack’s story, to tell something more than a simple morality tale, or rather to invent a new morality able to move on from the dizzying loss of balance produced by the South Sea Bubble. Defoe is straining forward to something like Adam Smith’s conception of civil society, but remains confused and disoriented by the financially-accelerated rise of his own class – not to mention Jack’s. The film makes this drama perhaps even more central than Jack’s own (circular) narrative of incarceration and escape. If he could redeem the whore Moll Flanders and turn her into a kind of self-made woman, perhaps Defoe can reconfigure Jack as a post-Bubble figure of mis-directed industry.

Half the time Defoe is winning, half the time Jack. The film leaves the struggle open, but history suggests that Defoe’s successors did find a way to put Jack’s drive to exit (not to mention his right to a voice) to work. Defoe anticipates Adam Smith and Smith, both Marx and Keynes. All that’s solid melts into air, says a Frenchman surveying the ruin after the collapse of the bubble at the start of the film. But this ‘dissolution’ produced the new financial instruments, the perfection of the division of labour, the growth of industrial capitalism and the rationalisation of the working class, with the Socialist movement the most ambitious and contradictory form of integration. Today, both the bubble and the bureaucrats are in a state of collapse, yet, as the film’s less than exuberant mood implies, the proletariat has not yet found a way to get back on (and/or, off) the stage of history. Instead, they have a gallows look about them.

In this respect, Sheppard is a salutary reminder of the potential of working class insubordination, its ability to posit itself as a ‘self-subsisting positive’, not the negation of the bourgeois negation reproduced by the socialist movement. On the other hand, once one grants a certain autonomy to the working class, one has to acknowledge that capital, in our era, has been only too keen to leave the poor increasingly to their own devices. (At least when it comes to welfare provision; when it comes to surveillance, it’s another matter).

As Peter Linebaugh tells it in The London Hanged, Jack’s popular appeal was based on a shared experience as much if not more than symbolising some utopian return to a life before, let alone beyond, capitalism. Jack stood not only for the possibility of turning the tables on the owners of capital but for the daily escapology that the poor needed to practise in order to survive. According to economic historians of the period, the poor’s ability to subsist at all remains a mystery. Crime was not so much a deviation from the path of righteousness as an essential part of the daily journey of self-reproduction. Jack’s may be a story of freedom, as Peter Linebaugh says, but it is also about the way in which proletarian escape can and must itself become a part of capitalism’s continuation. One recalls Mike Davis writing in Planet of Slums about the contemporary form of this ‘wage puzzle’:

With even formal-sector urban wages in Africa so low that economists can’t figure out how workers survive (the so-called low-wage puzzle), the informal tertiary sector has become an arena of extreme Darwinian competition among the poor.

To put it another way, the ongoing attempt to break the law of value, to live more than is allowed, is from the beginning, and again today, an increasingly central part of capital’s calculus. Rather than honouring the principle of equivalence on which commodity exchange is founded, from the beginning capital has depended on short changing those that produce and constitute value. Jack may have taken more than was deemed his due, breaking the principle of equivalence by running away with the means of production or stealing a silver spoon destined for the unproductive consumption of his betters, but capital also assumed – one could say it insisted – that people would find ways to exist and to labour on less than they were owed.

The film proposes a rhyme or homology between this early period of capitalism in which the wage was barely operative, before the stable establishment of capital’s rules, and our present moment in which the rules appear irreparably bent and in which a second financial revolution is collapsing into a crisis of unprecedented proportions. The process of financialisation is presented as co-existent with that of primitive accumulation, mutually reinforcing.

Jack’s birth as a fictional character coincides with a generalised fictionalisation of identity and a simultaneous dematerialisation and reification of its physical and linguistic props. As money replaces land and wealth is dissolved into economic representations, gold is displaced by coin and in turn paper, and ready money by public credit, the subject is (forcibly) liberated from the continuities and fixities of feudal society. As the film suggests, this involves the transformation of ‘character’ into ‘mere’ writing; myths of depth and substance are under attack, the self as a performance or improvised script comes to the fore. Finance itself is positioned as one of the key, possibly the key, solvent of feudal social relations. Those that today call for a return to a healthy, productive capitalism purged of speculation overlook not only the constitutive place of finance capital in any capitalism whatsoever, but also the way in which speculation is a necessary condition not only for modern thought but for modern praxis tout court. To be precise, for that material praxis which Marx identifies some 130 years after Jack’s pioneering efforts in excarceration. The apprehension that humans are the source of the value/s they live by, and that the reproduction of the world in its totality is down to our sensuous activity is the dangerous secret behind commodities such as Jack.

Thus, fictitious capital is an agent that not only produces a new fictitiousness and fluidity of identities but also, potentially, contributes to the volatility of social relations that makes possible the creation of new forms of life. The aristocracy grabbed the opportunities (and took the risks) which came from the rise in capital by mortgaging their land and creating a sort of trangenerational stipend, which was a life saver for a class in decline. The poor, however, were brutally separated from their own communal holdings of land and had to take back what they could through a process of imposed improvisation. Jack is a figure for the unmanageable excess generated in the process, an unforeseen by-product of a society governed by the imperative of capital accumulation. As such, his primitive challenge to capital is not so much a residue of the feudal era but a brand new product, yet to be mastered and, today, no longer subject to the dismantled and decaying apparatus of labour representation.

Capital has been dependent on breaking its own law of value in both eras, pushing to impose its terms of exchange and to hold workers to written and unwritten contracts while finding ever new ways to get around the iron equation between value and the socially necessary labour time for its reproduction. Corruption is not only the source of innovation (pace Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Giovanni Arrighi and Antonio Negri) it can also be a sign of a system’s decadence. While corruption was the talk of the whole nation for much of the post-South Sea Bubble era, up to and including the appearance of Jack on the scene, the grotesqueries of non-equivalent exchange were only fully perceptible against the intimations of equality emanating from the very logic of the market. The aristocratic critics of capitalist greed deployed a feudal morality which they themselves found increasingly impossible to inhabit, while satirists such as Swift already noted the unfairness and cruelty of the new society, even as they hankered for a restoration of more stable forms of domination. In Jack’s day the dissolution of a stable hierarchical social order based on landed property is the most obvious and the most encouraging, result of the rise of financial and mercantile capital. Power was becoming visible, status and influence could be bought, privileges were being transmuted into more nakedly economic forms of domination.

Corruption, and the financial crisis released by the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, would become part of the movement toward expanded social reproduction which capitalists themselves (think of Thomas Malthus’ gloomy anticipation of death by horseshit) could hardly comprehend at this point. For all its intrinsic brutality, the imposition of the form of abstract labour on work just beginning in Jack’s day. This would see not only the rationalisation and disenchantment of social existence in its totality but the creation of the material conditions for hitherto unknown self-determination and abundance – given that the dispossessed reappropriate and transform the forces and relations of production. In our day, corruption and delegitimation seem to have undermined fixed authority and ensured the reproduction of a decadent system; both capital and its social democratic opposition (‘the left wing of devalorisation’) are discredited but the working class have suffered greatly through the concomitant process of non-reproduction.

Defoe’s scheming to imagine a way of putting Jack’s exuberance to work points toward both a new form of enclosure – from industrial production down to Fordist devalorisation through the supervision of every aspect of the workers’ reproduction — and a more rational form of social existence. By contrast those writing the working class’s scripts today are rarely capable of imagining a better world even in their own meagre terms. As such Jack’s moment rebukes our own; the social imagination fired by his escapes needs to be reawakened through modern day excarcerations. Although these may have to take apparently Blaine-like forms: occupations, refusals to move, the assertion of our rights in parts of the social factory that capital is now trying hastily to dismantle. Again, these rights will not necessarily be enshrined in law, and will involve workers crossing the line. Jack’s opportunism is also salutary. One can use the law, protect oneself where necessary, know the law better than one’s lawyers. But one will also need to keep alive a healthy sense of the law’s fictitiousness, its paper claims to a justice which can only be material.

The paradoxical message of Jack Sheppard’s fugitive art in an age of faltering globalisation and desiccating liquidity is that fixity and self-enclosure can be a tool of liberation; a first, if necessarily transient, step toward a greater excarceration. In the year of the Lyndsey and Visteon workers’ struggles, we are returned to the ambiguous legacy of the integration of the proletariat into structures of representation with a vengeance.3 While some dismiss any concern with the fate of the residual industrial working class as chauvinistic or narrowly sectarian, a fetish for manual labour or racist preference for defending the struggles of those with something rather than nothing to lose, it is worth considering how – like Jack on the gallows, facing death – the almost-posthumous workers of the world can also send out insurrectionary signals when they refuse to go gently into the lousy night. The Last Days of Jack Sheppard traces the implications of a valediction without reconciliation, the power of refusal in extremis as the beginning as well as the end of something.

Footnotes

1 It could be that what was truly representative about Jade’s death was that it was an avoidable tragedy resulting from neoliberalised UK health care’s growing focus on policing behaviour over the treatment of illness. If her cancer had received the same attention as her subsequent demise (not to mention the ongoing saga regarding her moral status, etc.) there would have been no life-affirming, emotional franchise, no fictitious capitalisation on her death. Some would rather see the death-fest as a sign of our emotional evolution and progress (as with the manic mourn-in for Princess Diana) rather than an index of social decadence. However, though Jade’s death put cervical cancer check-ups back on the agenda for younger women, one should ask why they weren’t making regular trips to the doctor in the first place. Responsibility is shifted onto the patient and away from the ‘service’ provider/public-private State. The flip side of this contraction of social reproduction is a corresponding financialisation of death. Max Keyser notes that with the rise of entertainment futures trading there is now a corresponding spate of death rumours and death threats circulating as a result of ‘death speculation’ and ‘death pools’, as traders attempt to sell short Hollywood actors and other A(AA?) list stars. Market manipulation is spreading from the stock exchange to the entertainment industry as the crisis deepens.

2 ‘We observe a relationship between 10d. and a whipping, between 4s. 10d. and a branded hand, and between large sums of money and a hanging … they are only imagined figures of account [… but …] the consequences of these sums upon the bodies of the offenders were very real.’ In Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, Verso, 2003, p. 82.

3 As so often, union representatives have played an at best ambivalent role in the current conjuncture. Though union members and shop stewards made much of the running, particularly in the mobilisations around the Lyndsey refinery wildcat strikes, union convenors and bureaucrats acted largely as a break on the development of struggle at the occupied Ford-Visteon plants. Indeed, in a manner analogous to the British State’s cocktail of negligence and interference when it comes to welfare provision, ‘representation’ here meant supplying unreliable legal advice to union members and fear-mongering about the repercussions of stepping beyond the law whilst failing to provide material support and funds. For an excellent account and analysis of the struggle by workers at the Ford-Visteon plant in Enfield earlier this year see Ret Marut’s, ‘A Post-Fordist Struggle: Report and reflections on the UK Ford-Visteon dispute 2009’, June 9 2009 (8)

#long post #Benedict Seymour #Jack Sheppard #Daniel Defoe #The Last Days of Jack Sheppard #analysis #big thief little thief #the phantom of liberty #swinging from the gallows tree #the right to be lazy #trs

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cgpaints · 7 years

Photo

Monthly Review, June 2017

Hi everyone!

I have been (and still am) a little hesitant to post an monthly review thing this month because to be perfectly honest there just is not much to show as much as actual work is concerned. Most of my freelance work is under NDA and there was not too much time left for personal work and/or studies because as I mentioned last month me and my girlfriend finally moved into our new appartment and have been insanely busy setting everything up.

During the move something happend though, that I wanted to talk about. In a way my thoughts tend to spiral down quickly into the „aaah whats the point -realm“ when it comes to writing these long texts. I was debating myself if I should actually do this privately or if I should write it down and share it publicly but as the thought of sharing it has been spinning around in my head for three days now I figured that I might as well just write it down and try to get it out of my head that way. Maybe this resonates with someone, and maybe someone might even feel motivated to share his/her own views on and experience with this.

The thing I want to talk about is my experience of self worth and how it relates to my work, my attitude towards my work that is in turn resulting from that, maybe even my view on painting and drawing in the widest sense (as it relates to me personaly) and at last about how this might have started to change a little bit during the last few days in particular AND how aaaaaall that relates to the picture at the top of this post.

BUT first things first.

As I already mentioned we moved into a new appartment. It‘s large, it‘s cool, it‘s expensive and thus scary as fuck for a struggling freelancer like me, but that shall not really be the point here, maybe next month once the situation has settled in a little bit.

What‘s important here is that in this new appartment I do have an entire room just for myself, a REAL grown up person‘s office basically. Up until now all I had was a tiny tiny room that I could barely fit a desk in and for the past six months when my girlfriend and I moved around a little bit from Airbnb to Aribnb while she was tryting to get a fulltime office job I did not even have that. A simple desk had to to do during that time.

So now I have this biiig room with more than enough room to have all my drawing and painting supply out at the same time, ready to go whenever I want and it is great!

A few days ago after we got all our stuff into the new place I was sitting in my chair looking aorund the office trying to figure out what to hang on my walls, I just needed something up there, the room was too empty to feel comfortable.

I sat there thinking about all the awesome art from all the different artists I admire that I would like to decorate my walls with but the issue was that I don‘t own any prints not to mention originals here and just printing something out seemed kind of lame.

Being a little bummed out about that I proceeded to go through all my stuff when I found all my marker and watercolor drawings I did last year during „maysketchaday“. I looked through them and I noticed „ hey these are kind of fun!“. Moreover I noticed that they immediately sparked the desire to just grab my markers and get to painting again. I remembered the fun I had trying out a new medium last year and this just got me going. Weirdly enough I did not have this feeling for YEARS. Even during the time I painted these, sure it was kind of enjoyable but it all had this „o well, it‘s a drawing I guess“ feeling to it.

And then something hit me, and this is the thing I want to talk about here.

While feeling kind of excited about getting to drawing right away after rediscovering these tiny things actually feeling good about them I immediately remembered that I used to beat the SHIT out of me „emotionally“ after each one of these, sucking the joy out of the process I have just felt minutes before. I would be bummed out that the drawing did not come out the way I wanted, that I was not improving( which wasn‘t even true) and that I am not even close to anything „all the other artists“ are capable of. I took the drawings, put them in a drawer and would be happy to not have to look at them again.

Remembering all this I kept thinking about it and quickly noticed that I am doing this all the time, I beat myself down after each and every drawing and painting I do. I do this subconciously afer every single drawing I finish. I do this based on the work others do and even based on the response I get from it on social media, stupid shit like that. I am not talking about a healthy mentality that made me realizy my shortcomings and motivated me to do better next time, I am talking about being resentful and downright hateful towards my own work and to be frank to myself as a person.

Thoughts like „ I‘ve been doing this for years now, I should be better“, „others have started drawing later than me and have surpassed me by miles, why am I still so bad at this?“ „is talent actually relevant afteral, or am I simply not intelligent enough to see the flaws and to be able to improve on them?“ were my daily routine. To a degree they still are, I just started conciously noticing this days ago.

I realized what I have been doing this for a period of years and it almost seems comical to me now that I was actually wondering why I was getting kind of depressive and resentful towards my work and myself even. All I do all day is trying to improve my skills with all that I have and after each time I decide to punish myself for that. What is supposed to happen if one keeps that up for years and even turns it into a subconcious routine?

Obviously you stop at least liking what you are doing, hell you might even get scared to do it, which is definitely what I experienced.

It feels a little weird to write this down in a rather short way (although for a simple blog entry this sure looks enormous) because this way of thinking has becomce such a huge part of me.

Measured on the time I spent doing if for the last 10 years I think it is obvious that drawing and painting has been the most important aspect of my life. During that time it has acutally become a part of me. I as a human am defined a lot through it. There just is not much left of me when one takes the drawing and painting aspect away from me, it is not just what I do for work. It‘s another topic to decide if this fact alone is actually good or bad, what I am trying to say is that this thing „painting“ has a lot of power over me. My personal well being as a human is highly dependant on the way I handle my relationship towards painting. If this relationship is compromised by constant self hate and punishment it‘s only obvious that all this bleeds into the rest of my personality. I feel like as a result of all this I have been kind of desolving into this unhealthy spiral of self doubt and resentment towards myself.

Its also another story to go into of when I think all of this has started, all I know for now is that this is something that HAPPENED, it has not been that way from the beginning. At some point something switched and drawing which was this huge and exciting unbeatable but beautiful and POSITIVE mountain of a thing became this dreadful chaotic monster that one can not get a handle on no matter what.

I can‘t really tell why all this dawned on me as soon as I held these drawings of dead people in my hands but it sure did. I also tend to be rather scepticals towards these moments of „revelation“ but I felt this so strongly and clearly at that moment and I still do that I decied to act on it and to ultimately write about it.

I decided to take all of them and hang them on my wall and to just have them there as a reminder that this is actually what I do and that no matter how these turned out these were the best things I could do at that time and that I don‘t have to be ashamed for or angry about them but that I am actually allowed to like them for what they are.

Now are they the best drawings ever? Hell no, they aren‘t even „professional quality“ (whatever that means) and I am not trying to trick myself into thinking that they are. But they are a part of me in some way, I painted them, I gave it my all when I painted them and this is a good thing. They have a right to be pinned on that wall. They remind me where I was a year ago, they show me where I should improve on, they motivate me to do better and they make me want to get to painting as soon as I enter the room. What‘s bad about that?

The impulse to just lock them up in a drawer and hating myself for having created it is so utterly destructive and stupid, sitting here right now writing this makes me realize that even more.

As a matter of fact I came up with a plan out of all of this.

There is still a ton of free space on my walls, I am going to use it. Whenever I paint or draw something that I think turned out okay, or god forbid even „good“ I will pin it on the wall. One day sooner or later the wall will be filled with no room left, that‘s when I will start swapping out drawings one at the time. The new „best“ drawing will replace the current „worst“ one on the wall. I think I will also divide the wall into sections I want to improve upon like „watercolors“ „oilpaintings“ „anatomy“ „design“ and so on. I want this to feel exciting again and I want to actually see my progress rather than just feeling like sinking into a swamp of „o well I hope I am going to end up somewhere sometime“

There it is, I think I poured my heart out, I don‘t really know what to say anymore.

So what‘s the point of this text in addition of just allowing me to sort out my thoughs on that topic?

I think that if you belong to the kind of artists (or people in general) who tend to go down the path of self loathing for trying to do something thats arguably hard to do, no matter if conciously or unconciously you might want to start looking at what you are doing selfhate wise and try to figure out a strategy for yourself to get out of that. As I already said I have been thinking about this for the past week or so so nothing I say is really worthy of being called „founded advice“ or anything like that but there are very personal lessons that I think I am learning right now which feel right and more importantly feel like a good means of proceeding into the future with a healthy mindset to improve and enjoy whatever this all is.

Don‘t be ashamed for what you are doing and incourage yourself like you would incourage a person you care about. Not being the best at something should feel interesting and exciting, it does not mean that you suck as a person. You are your own benchmark, do your best, try to improve on your weaknesses and be thankful for your wins and losses on that path.

Don‘t be an asshole towards yourself!

Talk to you next month!

#art #drawing #painting #illustration #freelance #self help #artist #commcercialart #motivation #depression #encouragement #gameart

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mshort-theword · 5 years

Text

WEEK ONE

First Engagement: Painting

The first art memory that I can think of is painting as a child. The tiny circular pots with solid primary colours inside become watery drools of pastel colour once the water hits. Despite being such low-quality paint that seeped through the thin paper, the excitement it brought me was thrilling. Knowing that I could paint whatever I wanted by dabbing into these colours made my youthful imagination go wild. Using the thick, hard bristled paint brush I would make huge, wispy lines and swirls across the page, not caring if the brush fell off. That was the joy of painting so young, there were no lines to stay in, no perfect circles to create. Your mind could just be free, making shapes and figures that look nothing like the way they're supposed to, but in your mind it was perfect. I had a sense of pride when I completed my paintings, thinking it was the best thing I had made until I went on to make the next one that I thought was even better. By the end, there was a massive pile of what some would see as a mess, but I saw it as a masterpiece.

ROBIN KINROSS: What is a Typeface?

· As designers, we use typefaces all the time, and even more so as readers, reading books, newspapers, magazines, website articles, etc.

· Simple question yet once thought about, quite complex.

· Dictionary definition: Typeface: the design of or the image produced by, the surface of a printing type

· This definition separates the type from the face, thought to be simple

· Word most commonly used to describe this set of images (type) is a font

· Font comes from when molten metal was poured into adjustable molds in type foundries.

· Keeping word font but loosening its definition to ‘the complete set of characters of a particular face’.

· When getting consumed by determining terminology, we need to remember that not everyone uses English as their language and that there are other terms used to describe the concept of a typeface.

· Example, in Dutch the word lettertype is currently used. This sounds the same as typeface if assuming the word type still means visual images

· But if the deeper meaning of type is remembered as a pattern or model then lettertype makes sense, if letter means any alphabetic sign then lettertype is describing them for printed reproduction.

· In German the word ‘Schrift’ is used similarly, it encompasses both writing and printing

· In French, the word ‘catactere’ is used similarly, as it can refer to both written forms and those designed for composition.

· Typefaces in relation to human faces. We all have part of our faces that are recognisable to all, such are the eyes, ears, mouth, nose. They all have their formal properties that distinguish each part, and more, in particular, we can usually establish an individuals mouth. This means that we can establish a ‘g’ and in particular, we can establish, for example, a Univers ‘g’ as we know its properties.

· Faces look like families like daughters look like mothers, distance relatives may resemble some similarities to one another.

· This can relate to variants of different typefaces and their groups, such as Univers and the different variants within the family and how they relate.

· Bold typefaces came in the 19thcentury for differentiation and emphasis within text sets, now became a medium weight.

· Initially bold letters were a different typeface instead of a thicker letter of the same typeface

· First italic letters were done to recreate the handwriting of contemporary humanist scholars.

· Concept of a type family is a systematic overhaul, eg: Univers is the type face and univers medium, medium condensed, etc are the variants.

· Identifying a letter: an argument started by Meta-Font, is what does an ‘A’ need in order to be seen as an ‘A’?

· If a typeface is to work In every size it should consist of variants of the variants (bold, italic and so on)

· Throughout the history of printing, typefaces have never been stable entitles (bold and italic).

Reflection on text:

Initially, when I would think of the word typeface, I would just assume it meant a different type of fonts. But after some thought and reading the article by Robin Kinross, I can see that really the term is much more complex than that. Typefaces are used all the time in everyday life, we see it in books, magazines, newspapers and on websites and so on. Despite this, it is something that I haven’t necessarily taken a lot of thought into looking at, as I read the content rather than the letters themselves. Firstly, I took the dictionary definition that was written in the Kinross reading that says “Typeface: the design of or the image produced by, the surface of a printing type”. This is a good start as it has separated the type from the face, giving two points to look at.

I would always resonate typeface as another word for font because I assumed it only meant the different types of font styles available when really this isn’t the case. Although it is the word most commonly used to describe a set of images (type), I’ve realised that the meaning is actually a lot broader then I realised. In the Kinross text, the definition of the font was loosened to say ‘the complete set of characters of a particular face’ which I found interesting as I interpreted it as meaning that font is only the whole selection, as in every letter of a certain face, and not just text.

There were many parts of this reading that I found interesting, one being how different countries interpret the term ‘typeface’ and their words to describe it, as not everyone uses English as their language to describe it, which was something I previously never took into consideration. In Dutch ‘letterface’ is the term used, when looked at it would appear to have the same meaning as typeface, but when further looked into, because if letter means any alphabetic sign then the term is, in fact, describing the printing of the letters, rather then the letters itself. There are also other countries including Germany and France that use other words to describe the type and although they hold similarities, they aren’t the same.

I also found the relations used between the human face and a typeface interesting as it gave me a lot to think about. Most if not all humans, look at the mouth, nose, eyes, etc of a human and can instantly identify what they are, as they all have formal properties that distinguish what they are, most people can even go as far as identifying particular features to an individual. When comparing this to typefaces it brings up a good point of how we should look at this the same way we look at human faces. If we can determine what a ‘k’ is let’s say, then we should also be able to establish the ‘k’ of a certain typeface, such as ‘Univers’, the same way we would for a human. After reading this information a lot began to fall into place about what type actually is and how it should be seen, as it really is such a broad term that can be hard to grasp when thought about.

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sheilacwall · 5 years

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Velvet Negroni is Trying to Make Music That’s Built to Last in an Ethereal Digital Age

When we chat his most recent record, NEON BROWN (via 4AD), has been out for less than a full week. But it’s already beginning to add layers to an increasingly mythological narrative. It’s not just Nutzman’s background being gradually woven together with each new review and published blurb, but it’s also the behind-the-scenes contributions that penetrate larger swaths of popular culture. The track “Waves” from Velvet Negroni’s previous release T.C.O.D. was played by Justin Vernon at Kanye West’s famously rural writing camp in Wyoming, resulting in a contribution to opening track “Feel the Love” on Kanye and Kid Cudi’s collaboration album, Kids See Ghosts. More recently, he’s lent vocals on both “iMi” and “Sh’Diah” from Bon Iver’s new album, i,i.

READ: First Look Friday: Meet Donavon — the Soul of the Algorithm & Disciple of D’Angelo

These high-profile contributions aren’t just Wiki-friendly Easter eggs and fine print liner notes; they’re a clear indicator that both Nutzman’s voice and creative direction possess a unique resonance that is parting the seas of an oft-impenetrable musical kingdom.

NEON BROWN offers an accessible entry-point to hear Jeremy Nutzman’s evolving artistry at work. Album highlight “Wine Green” is an instantly recitable, dancehall-esque anthem awash in peppy adlibs and ascending jabs of bass. “Poster Child” showcases a catchy, iridescent love-song-hook that glows vividly while the downtempo “Feel Let” spins out soft, palatable utterances that feel as if they’re being belted from a woozy, late-night cab ride home.

We talked with Velvet Negroni to explore the album, his creative inspiration, and a rapidly changing music landscape.

Title: Girboix Carmelo Artist: Velvet Negroni

Can you walk me through your contributions on Bon Iver’s album and Kids See Ghosts?

Justin Vernon played [Kanye West and Kid Cudi] “Waves” and it was the first thing that perked their ears that day so they got into it a little bit. There’s a part of the song that goes, “I can feel it in my bones!” I think it was basically just that little snippet that they just took that energy and vibe into “Feel the Love.”

So the inspiration was more cadence than lyrics or production?

Yeah, there wasn’t a sample. While Justin was in Wyoming, I was at his crib working, I was there rehearsing to perform a couple of dates with him. He had helped to work on the record a little bit previously.

How did you two originally link?

I play in a band with a couple of cats that he grew up with essentially and so that’s how that intro went long ago. It was kind of fun. We were just around sometimes, and we got to know each other a little bit. And then my friend Ryan Olsen had played what I had so far of the record for him, he was really excited by it and the next time he saw me he kind of just opened up his place as a base, like “If you need somewhere to finish this or work on it you should come out.”

Source: Artist

Can you tell me about the recording process and what went into your new album, NEON BROWN?

A lot of different things but mostly just good vibes, a good schedule and good hours. We would at least kind of sketch out one or two tracks, at least two things every day. Then after a little bit of that, circle back to one that we had worked on previously. The ones with real potential kind of just flowed out of the fucking mess and felt kind of obvious-ish, I guess. It’s like sifting for gold, eventually you keep whittling it down into a body of work that’s ready.

How do you feel now that it’s out?

It’s just exciting that people are listening to it. The album has been done for a pretty sizable chunk of time, that happened long ago it feels like, but now it’s just, knowing that people can listen to it…that’s exciting.

There’s a wide range of sounds on the album, some heady and stirring but also lighter notes. It’s interesting to see you do both.

It’s a natural thing in the songwriting process. Especially when I’m working with Elliott (Tickle Torture) and Simon (Psymun), there’s no off-limits. There’s that many more influences, like each person has a toolbox. Then there’s that added onto the writing process. So, we’re taking from a pretty wide range of shit just in everybody’s own mind and then putting them together. I don’t think any of us think about the style of the song as it relates to the album until after the fact.

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What new artists inspire you right now?

I’ve been excited about Yves Tumor on Warp and listening to this cat Mk.Gee. I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head that I’ve really been jacked on. I’m kind of just stepping back into remembering that I can listen to other people’s music you know, like on my own, really just listen to music. Usually, I’m just in such a creative mode in my headspace, or I’m not listening to anything, or I’m working on my shit.

When you were first discovering music at an early age, finding discarded records on a neighbor’s lawn, which albums were especially formative for you?

In that pack of CDs that I found, I remember some 311, Soundgarden, some Metallica, Lords of Acid. I think there was a Crime Mob CD, some Tupac and even Marilyn Manson. Those were my youngest memories of having music that wasn’t church music.

That was huge for me. But I was so young that when I was playing music, I wasn’t coming at it from a composing aspect at all. It was beyond me how you could even make something like that. I didn’t have any of the experiences that I have now to desensitize me to the wonderment of music in general.

Photo Credit: Rachel Kauffman for Okayplayer

What was the original intention of keeping you from being exposed to that music?

I mean those were just my parents’ rules. They were religious and didn’t think that anything else was worthwhile except for Christian music. I was practicing playing piano for at least one hour every single day and my mom would sit on the bench next to me, there was no getting out of it really.

We’re now living in a totally digital age. How do you feel the streaming era is changing music?

Oversaturation is a real thing, but there’s also so much more of a platform. I think that, eventually, for the most part, good stuff will be discovered. Like there’s too many people listening, seeing and talking amongst themselves deep in the Internet at all times that I think that the good stuff, the truth will prevail. It’s just a different style with music in general, because it used to be the furthest thing away to just go to a bedroom somewhere and record. Most people couldn’t afford to even rent studio time, let alone rent a studio and then then take their time writing songs in the studio as they go. People used to write a song, arrange a song, figure it out, get really good at it and then go record it. Now, it’s pretty much the norm to write a song as you’re playing and then you have the ability to manipulate audio. It changed the format.

When I first got into recording on my own, an amazing feature of it was that it moved so fast and I found myself making a couple of happy accidents. It was really exciting. Like, wow, what happened there? It went from writing songs and then finding happy accidents to just showing up and relying on happy accidents, rather than really spending time with the chord progression of the arrangement ahead of time.

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I think from the critic or audience’s perspective, you also have less time to win over an audience with a shrinking attention span. Not everyone is even really around for a full album to listen from front to back.

That’s huge, yes. You can grab your albums out of thin air. There was no way to pirate an album unless you stole it from a store. So, it was physical, and I think it meant more just inherently then. It meant more on a tangible level. Like, I paid eleven bucks for this album, I’m not sure if I like it yet, but I’m gonna listen to it and keep listening.

The attention span is so fast that I think there’s more people trying to just jump on a wave or catch a wave and make stuff that’s relevant right then, instead of thinking like a whole album. Instead of maybe making a piece of work that is supposed to stand the test of time.

What’s it like to be a musician in 2019? Especially considering it’s increasingly rare to make a living off your art.

You’re correct with that being a rarity, it also depends on what one person’s definition of living and what you’re satisfied with. I’ve been making music for a real long time, but only recently have I even taken into consideration, oh yeah, I guess there’s a chance I could make some money from this. Really. I can only try and imagine what it was like doing what I’m trying to do right now when the Internet wasn’t the Supreme Being.

Photo Credit: Tim Saccenti

Adam Isaac Itkoff is a freelance writer living in New York City. You can follow him (and us!) on Twitter.

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djgblogger-blog · 6 years

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What the Nazis driving people from homes taught philosopher Hannah Arendt about the rights of refugees

http://bit.ly/2lWprUD

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Facing a political revolt over immigration policies from the Christian Social Union partner in her coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to a compromise, which would create “transit zones” or refugee camps along Germany’s southern border.

Under the agreement, migrants would be housed in designated transit areas, until German authorities determined their eligibility. If found to have registered in another EU country, immigrants would be turned back, assuming that country would accept them.

Merkel had earlier opposed this step, fearing it would trigger border closures. Already, Italy and Austria have refused to accept returnees. And these are not the only ones. In the United States, in Hungary, and in Italy, governments are justifying policies of expulsion and restrictive immigration. Inflammatory language is often being used to defend policies aimed against the most vulnerable peoples.

That millions of refugees exist in legal limbo, sadly, is not a new story. The twentieth century Jewish political theorist, Hannah Arendt, analyzed refugees’ plight in the period between and after the two world wars. As a scholar of Arendt’s political thought, I believe her writing is relevant to understanding today’s refugee crisis and their lack of rights.

Who was Hannah Arendt?

Born in Hanover, Germany in 1906, Hannah Arendt studied theology and philosophy during her university years. The explosion of anti-Semitism in the late 1920s led Arendt to turn her attention to politics and questions of human rights.

Hannah Arendt. Ryohei Noda, CC BY

A few months after the Nazis gained power in 1933, they deprived certain German citizens, particularly Jews and Communists, of basic rights, subjecting many to detention in prisons. Becoming stateless, Arendt fled to France, where she worked for Jewish causes. When France declared war on Germany in September 1939, the French government began ordering refugees to internment camps. In May 1940, Arendt was sent to a concentration camp in Gurs, France, along with thousands of other Jewish women considered to be “enemy aliens.”

Taking advantage of imperfect security at the camp, Arendt escaped. Helped by the American journalist, Varion Fry, who secured asylum for several thousand people in danger of being turned over to the Nazis, Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher, immigrated to the United States in 1941.

History of suppressed rights

In 1943 – two years after she arrived in New York – Arendt wrote “We Refugees,” an essay expressing her outrage at the existential crisis her people faced.

Driven from one country to another not because of anything they’d done, but simply because of who they were, she explained how Jews had been forced to seek refuge wherever they could find it in a world increasingly hostile to their existence. Seven years later, in her monumental work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt pursued the question of refugees’ rights further.

If human rights were inalienable, she asked, why hadn’t those rights protected asylum-seekers or precluded Jewish expulsion and extermination throughout Europe?

To Arendt, the answer lay in breakdown of the delicate balance between state and nation resulting in national interest taking priority over law.

Following World War I, European states redrew their boundaries, breaking up empires, such as czarist Russia and Austria-Hungary, into single nation-states populated by a dominant ethnic group, identified as citizen nationals or “state peoples.” Several minority groups also resided in the same territory, but lacked the same rights.

In these new states, minority rights were supposed to be protected through Minority Treaties guaranteed by the League of Nations, an organization established after World War I to foster international cooperation and prevent further conflict. Yet, increasingly in the 1920s, these treaties proved unenforceable, leaving millions subject to national governments arbitrarily denying minorities their rights. The treaties, along with the League, collapsed with the outbreak of World War II.

Minorities in newly formed states, such as Ukrainians and Jews in Poland and Croatians in Yugoslavia, lacked equal rights. At the same time, growing numbers of stateless peoples, deported or otherwise forced from their countries of origin as a result of civil wars or other conflicts, such as the Armenians in Turkey, were dispersed throughout Europe and the Middle East in this same period.

Greek and Armenian refugee children in barracks near Athens, 1923. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Arendt identified statelessness with the refugee question or the “existence of ever-growing new people … who live outside the pale of law.” She explained how these new refugees were persecuted “because of what they unchangeably were – born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind of class or drafted by the wrong kind of government.”

Without legally enforceable rights they were treated as less than human, forced to live under what Arendt called conditions of “absolute lawlessness.” Even if they were fed, clothed and housed by some public or private agency, their lives were being prolonged by charity, not rights. No law existed that could have forced the nations of the world to feed or house them.

The right to have rights

The postwar presence of growing numbers of stateless refugees, who lacked the legal right to residence in countries to which they had been sent or sought to enter, brought into sharper relief a fundamental conflict at the heart of international law.

States had long recognized the right of someone persecuted in her home country to seek asylum in another country. Yet, these same states asserted the right to sovereign control over nationality, immigration and expulsion.

Arendt identified this conflict as a paradox at the heart of the long-held belief that human rights were inalienable. In the absence of enforceable laws mandating states accept asylum-seekers, refugees remained at the mercy of the receiving authority, which established its own rules governing who, if any, would be allowed to stay within its national borders.

Without legal residence, refugees lack basic rights long considered intrinsic to being human.

In reality, Arendt argued, human rights, supposedly independent of citizenship and nationality, are guaranteed only as the rights of citizens or, most restrictively, as the right of nationals of a “folk” or ethnic identity.

Thinking about the stateless led Arendt to identify something more fundamental than the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She called it “the right to have rights,” or the right to belong fully to a political community, even if it was not one’s native land. She said,

“[T]he right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible…[because] the present sphere of international law… still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states.”

Arendt’s resonance today

People protesting against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies outside Downing Street in London. Alisdare Hickson, CC BY-SA

Indeed, there are international laws related to refugee protection. These laws and treaties create “exceptions” to a state’s sovereign right to control which “noncitizens” can enter and remain within its territory. In some case, they could grant at least temporary asylum to refugees.

However, no legal means currently exist that could require sovereign states to comply with international conventions and rules. Individual states, thus, retain the power to deny parts of humanity “the right to have rights” simply by asserting national sovereignty.

This is evident when far-right political parties in Germany, Austria, Italy and Hungary, along with the current administration in Washington, call for harsher, draconian border policies to prevent refugees from seeking asylum.

With the precarious conditions that are affecting ever-growing populations of minorities and the economically vulnerable refugees across the globe, Arendt’s words matter more than ever today.

The idea of humanity, excluding no one, Arendt wrote, “is the only guarantee we have that one ‘superior race’ after another may not feel obligated to follow the ‘natural law’ of the right of the powerful, and exterminate ‘inferior races unworthy of survival.’” As she herself witnessed, the first steps are the abrogation of minority rights and the refusal of asylum to refugees.

Kathleen B. Jones received funding from The National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a registered Democrat and member of the ACLU.

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readingsweetblueflowers · 7 years

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Reviews of Sweet Blue Flowers omnibus volume 1

UPDATE 2018/03/18: Corrected the attribution on the Geekly Grind review. (The site was apparently moved and/or renamed.)

UPDATE 2017/12/09: Added two more reviews, from TheOASG and Otaku USA.

UPDATE 2017/11/03: Added two more reviews, from More Bedside Books and Experiments in Manga.

Now that I’ve finished my own comments on omnibus volume 1 of Sweet Blue Flowers, let’s take a look at what other people thought of it. Here’s a not-quite-comprehensive list of reviews of volume 1 that I found online. (I ignored reviews on YouTube since I’m allergic to watching video reviews.) I’ve listed the reviews in rough order based on the prominence of the reviewer and the insightfulness of their comments.

Erica Friedman at Okazu. Friedman is one of the most well-known promoters and reviewers of yuri manga and anime, and hers is the single most authoritative site in English for yuri-related news. She also did previous reviews of volume 1 and volume 2 of the Japanese edition of Sweet Blue Flowers (Aoi Hana), which together cover the material in omnibus volume 1. In this review she rated omnibus volume 1 as 8 out of 10 overall, with art and characters at 8 and story and “yuri” at 7.

Summary: “... although the opening and the ending are—in my opinion —very weak, the rest of the story is excellent. It’s got surprising depth and breadth. Characters that surround Fumi and Akira are as well-developed as they and as interesting. ... This is the version we all wanted. There’s no excuse not to buy it and support the author and folks at the publishing companies that brought it to us!”

My take: Friedman has been a big fan of Sweet Blue Flowers both in manga and anime form, and I think her judgements are generally sound. In particular I agree with her characterization of Sweet Blue Flowers as a modernized “Story A” and “[class] S for a new generation.” I also share her opinion regarding the weakness of the opening, although our reasons may differ slightly. (Based on other reviews I’ve read of hers, the “ending” she’s referring to is the ending of the entire series; I’ll comment on that when the time comes.)

Rose Bridges at Anime News Network. ANN is the most prominent anime news and review site; they also do a fair number of manga reviews. Bridges gave Sweet Blue Flowers an overall B+ grade, with a B for story and an A for art.

Summary: “Overall, this release is an excellent way to dive into a yuri manga that's a cut above the rest. Sweet Blue Flowers still has plenty of its genre’s trappings, but also enough bite for those seeking something more realistic.”

My take: As with Friedman, I basically agree with Bridges’s review, and think she has some useful things to highlight about the work thus far.

Amelia Cook at Otaku USA. Otaku USA is a print and online magazine covering anime and manga; Cook is also the founder of the Anime Feminist web site. Her review is favorable. She particularly calls out the depiction of the four main characters (Akira, Fumi, Yasuko, and Kyoko) as being realistic and nuanced. She rated Sweet Blue Flowers as “recommended”.

Summary: “Sweet Blue Flowers [paints] a picture of everyday life with complicated young women going through important formative experiences. You’ll end the 400-page volume rooting for them all to have a happy ending.”

My take: I found it interesting that Cook’s is the only review I’ve linked to thus far that calls out and (in my opinion, rightly) criticizes the inclusion of the subplot involving Akira’s brother. My only minor (and somewhat self-serving) quibble with Cook’s review is her claim that “The overwhelming impression is that this is yuri predominantly for queer women.” I agree that Shimura did not (and does not) write for the male gaze and goes beyond standard yuri tropes, and thus Sweet Blue Flowers would likely resonate more with queer women than many other yuri works. However I think the publishing history of the manga points toward it being intended for a mixed audience of both women and men, both queer and straight.

Helen at TheOASG. TheOASG is a group anime/manga blog. This is a generally favorable review, albeit with some concerns expressed about the use of yuri tropes, possible queer-baiting, and the reaction by Yasuko’s family to her and Fumi’s relationship being unrealistic. She rated Sweet Blue Flowers at 3 out of 5.

Summary: “Sweet Blue Flowers ... treats its characters as people, not characters created for the reader’s gaze but real teenaged girls dealing with the always overly-complicated world of high school. But it still remains to be seen just how many times these girls have their hearts broken and mended by the time they graduate.”

My take: I can understand Helen’s confusion about exactly what type of story Sweet Blue Flowers is supposed to be: cute schoolgirl yuri or a realistic depiction of a teenaged lesbian? As I’ve written previously, I think that ambiguity is actually deliberate on Shimura’s part. I’ll also note a minor error in the review: she mentions both schools as having active drama clubs, but this is true only of Fujigaya; the club at Matsuoka is in danger of being disbanded.

@livresdechevet at More Bedside Books. A generally favorable review that focuses in particular on translation issues and changes from previous digital releases of volume 1.

Summary: “All in all Sweet Blue Flowers is an enduring series about maturing and girls in love with other girls finally receiving print treatment in English. ... Whether someone is familiar with the genre and history or not it’s a story with characters that can reach out to teenagers as well as older readers.”

My take: Her point regarding the translation of Fumi’s interior thoughts regarding Chizu is a good reminder of the potential pitfalls of interpreting a work solely through a translation of it.

Ash Brown at Experiments in Manga. A generally favorable review that highlights Shimura’s artwork and its relation to theatrical performance, as well as the realism of character actions and interactions.

Summary: “Sweet Blue Flowers is a wonderful series. The manga is emotionally resonate, with a realistic portrayal of the experiences of young women who love other young women. The characterizations and character development in Sweet Blue Flowers in particular are marvelous. ... Sweet Blue Flowers is a relatively quiet story, but the emotional drama is powerful and the manga conveys a compelling sense of authenticity and honesty.”

My take: Brown makes a good point, that Shimura’s relatively simple artwork “is reminiscent of intentionally minimal set design used in some theatrical performances”. I also agree with Brown’s contention that “the characters’ involvement with the play [Wuthering Heights] is an important part of the series both aesthetically and thematically.” I hope to write more about this general point more in the future.

Eric Cline at AIPT. A generally favorable review. Cline liked the characters and how they were handled, and thought the artwork stood out. One criticism he voiced was regarding a lack of clarity in some scenes in terms of who was talking, and where the scenes fit in the overall timeline. He also questions the exact relevance of one character (apparently Kyoko) to the story.

Summary: “Overall, Sweet Blue Flowers Vol. 1 is a solid start for the series. The characters are likable and well introduced, and the artwork throughout is beautiful. With that said, none of the volume’s more emotional moments are very memorably so. This is a volume that shows promise and generates enough interest to warrant giving the next installment a look, but it doesn’t quite reach greatness as is. I would recommend it, but not enthusiastically so.”

My take: Cline is spot-on about Shimura’s narrative sometimes being difficult to follow; she often makes scene transitions without warning between two panels on the same page. I also agree with Cline about the limited emotional impact of some moments; I think this is a combination of our having spent limited time with the characters thus far, the somewhat artificial and schematic nature of Sweet Blue Flowers as an homage to and critique of the class S and yuri genres, and Shimura’s occasional tendency to emotional distancing in her story-telling. As for Kyoko, I think she is and likely will be a key character in the story.

Ruthsic at YA on My Mind (also at Krutula at GoodReads). An overall favorable review that highlights the art, characters, and good handling of lesbian themes. She rates it 4 stars out of 5.

Summary: “Overall, a manga I am really looking forward to read more of. (There’s also an anime of it, and I am so going to watch it!)”

My take: She makes a good point about the setting of Sweet Blue Flowers being “contemporary, but without the homophobia”, presumably in service to this being a “feel good” story as opposed to a truly realistic one.

Sean Gaffney at A Case Suitable for Treatment. A favorable review from a manga-focused site. He acknowledges that the long delay in bringing out a complete official translation of Sweet Blue Flowers makes it seem less distinctive compared to more recent works like Bloom Into You or Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl.

Summary: “Sweet Blue Flowers is absolutely worth reading and checking out, both if you like yuri and if you like Takako Shimura. It’s also only four omnibuses, so shouldn’t devastate your bookshelf too much.”

Alexandra Nutting (writing as EyeSpyeAlex) at The Geekly Grind. A favorable review on a site focused on anime, manga, and video games.

Summary: “At the end of the day, I really enjoy Sweet Blue Flowers. The characters feel real and have a depth and complexity to their lives. While the visuals could be a little more striking, it fits the down to earth tone of the manga.”

My take: The reviewer praises Sweet Blue Flowers for its “authenticity”, and notes that it is melodramatic but not overly so. I think this is about right.

Leroy Douresseaux at ComicBookBin. A favorable review (score 8 out of 10) on a general comics site.

Summary: “Fans of yuri and shojo romance will want to smell the Sweet Blue Flowers.”

My take: A fairly brief and vanilla review, though it does make an interesting point about the confusion due to the number of characters and their different feelings evoking the state of confusion the characters find themselves in.

And one final “not really a review” item:

Rachel Thorn at Twitter. Thorn asked for opinions on Sweet Blue Flowers, apparently for an article she’s writing on Takako Shimura’s work. (Thorn announced separately that she’s completed the article, but hasn’t announced when or where it will be published, or whether it’s in English or Japanese. However from something Erica Friedman wrote elsewhere I believe it may be intended for the Japanese magazine Eureka.) Warning: Some of the replies have mild spoilers for the end of the manga.

#Sweet Blue Flowers #Aoi Hana #Takako Shimura #yuri #manga #reviews

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