#which governs our lives and the art we are allowed to produce and the things we are allowed to say

[demigirlboss2girlrotboogaloo]

No one on this site-comma-webbed understands how copyright works.

[for-a-longlongtime]

On Dieter, Goya's Black Paintings, and Pedro on Talk Art 

Alright y'all, it's Saturday evening, I have nothing better to do (I actually do but I don't feel like it), so welcome to my mini TED Talk about 'how to pay too much fucking attention to the Pedro cinematic universe'. None of this is new, and maybe everybody already knew about this, but I didn't... so here's a nerdy tangent courtesy of googling/wikipedia-ing.

I was reading a Dieter!fic (this one right here by @chaoticgeminate - go read her writing!) earlier today, which refers to the 'Saturn Devouring His Son' painting - that giant mural Dieter is working on in The Bubble:

(his brush isn't even touching the wall tho, ha)

The original 'Saturn' by Goya

The fic mentioned its part of 'The Black Paintings', so I got curious and started googling. I'm no art major or expert, so please allow me to just paraphraze the Wikipedia page. 'Saturn' is part of a group of 14 Goya paintings that are called Pinturas Negras/The Black Paintings. They "portray intense, haunting themes, reflective of both his fear of insanity and his bleak outlook on humanity" --this was late in Goya's life, and was connected to several illnesses he had experienced (and the fear of relapsing) and political turmoil in Spain at the time (post-Napolean war, changing Spanish government, etc.

Trivia fact 1: Goya actually made these paintings right on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo (so-called Deaf Man's villa) where he was staying -- so I love that Apatow had Dieter also paint right on the walls.

Trivia fact 2: while Goya was living in this villa, he actually became gravely ill (again) - not by a pandemic obviously, but it's hard to not link that loosely to the COVID period. He had never intended for these 'Black Paintings' to become public; "these paintings are as close to being hermetically private as any that have ever been produced in the history of Western art" (the murals were eventually transfered to canvas by other folks once he had moved out of the villa). Switching back to The Bubble -- I love how the tragic influence of Goya's illness(es) and art/things 'made at home away from the world, not intended for an audience' (so obviously, in a bubble) has that connection to the COVID experience and how many folks were suddenly homebound, along with the burden of illness in many ways (lord knows this all did a serious number on our mental health). In the movie, Dieter and the others do not want to go into isolation again, but that solitude is what eventually led him to painting on the walls in his room. This is not a 'grand discovery' of any kind, but I got a kick out of the parellels once I read up on it - and honestly makes me appreciate the movie a bit more, haha.

Not happy about another quarantine period.

Alright, more hyperfocusing after the cut:

Some googling led me to a post from last year by @nicolethered (gifs in this post are hers), and she included screencaps of the walls of Dieter's room (during that drug scene), which I hadn't even noticed while watching the movie. Upon taking a closer look, I noticed they're outtakes from other pieces of Goya's Black Paintings! I thought that was really cool, they sure worked on the details with that set (there's one more that's shown in a different shot but I can't exactly figure out which outtake that is):

First one is a mirror image from Two Old Men Eating Soup and the second one is basically Satan aka 'The Great He-Goat' from the Witches' Sabbath painting. Which IMO makes for fucking hilarious perfection a.k.a. trivia fact 3 -- because we all know about Dieter and his little emotional support goat, LOL. Excellent connection.

*insert sound bit from Hot Ones interview* : "Just let me love you!"

Anywaaay there's more. The Bubble was shot during Feb 22, 2021 to April 16, 2021, right? Pedro has spoken about how his input in shaping Dieter was mostly regarding his outfits (the Crocs, the robe, etc). But then I suddenly remember the Talk Art interview he had done in 2018, and how he namechecks 'The Dog' by Goya - and lo, guess which painting is actually part of the 14 Black Paintings? Yeap - the dog! So I checked the podcast and he was asked, 'if you could be any painting, what painting would you be?' by Russell. Here is the painting, and below it is what he said on Talk Art:

'The Drowning Dog' by Goya

"I think… it's a Goya. Yeah, old school. I think it's called 'Dog Buried in Sand' or something like that. It's so… I remember feeling it was such a visual representation of helplessness, in such a… come on, let's all admit that helplessness is a very recurring feeling for many of us, you know what I mean? When it comes to so many things. I guess… I was in Spain, in Madrid, and I was 20. And I went to the Goya museum. What's interesting about it is that the head of the dog is really quite small and sort of adorable, it looks like a stray mutt, and the painting - if I can remember it correctly - is very rectangular. There's so much above him, like the world just seems so big. It's quite incredible, isn't it? I know it's really sad, and sort of dark, and maybe I really like enjoy perceiving myself like..." (He gets interrupted by Russell, and then continues;) "Yeah, he's certainly not dying, it's sort of - it's a moment", (then interrupts himself with;) "Maybe he's totally dying, there's no way that dog is getting out of that. That dog is SO fucked. Anyway, that's the painting that represents my life". (All three of them burst out into laughing.)

If you're still reading this - I am impressed with your dedication to my silly little post, haha. Anyway, I just thought it was so striking that there basically is a straight line from the painting he mentioned in Talk Art to what Dieter is painting in the Bubble. Makes me wonder if perhaps he - or even Russell/Robert - had any input in that part of Dieter's backstory.

Thank you for attending my TED Talk on artistic analysis of Dieter Bravo during COVID, we now resume your regularly scheduled program for Saturday night. 🤪

(Have I been smoking because a local dispensary actually had 'Mando' bud? I sure as fuck have and I blame that for this post.)

[thehyppedstories]

The Misconception called SAPA.

The average Nigerian youth is a "relative-creative"; out of his belly flows rivers of Creativity. It's his own way of battling with the day-to-day limitations saddled on him by bad government and ill decisions of his. One of such creative measures to whisk him out of depression and illicit thoughts is the birth of new words with which he makes weighty matters become obscure. One of those trailblazing words has fast become a legend. It boasts of chart topping songs, and has gone as far as hitting the number 1 position on the trends table of the highly competitive and dismissive Twitter-NG on multiple occasions. That word is "SAPA."

As the urban dictionary would have it, Sapa is "a period of lack." A regular Nigerian youth is "sapa-fied" thanks to the high rate of unemployment and low appreciation of talents. The regular person would rather have you employed in a 9-5 job than support your craft. The problem in being a 9-5ier is that it kills talents. It destroys your zeal to become your truest forms. Not only are they "silent killers", 9-5 jobs are hard to come by. Except you have "long legs" you'd walk the streets of Ikeja and Agbara and the only thing you'd return with would be dust on your shoes. It's why many youths have resigned to their fate. However, this state we call Sapa, it has been highly misconstrued. It is highly misunderstood.

Sometime ago, our dear president referred to the Nigerian youths as being "lazy." The response? It was exciting. Nigerians from all works of life came out to show their strength, their strength in creativity, career, education, entrepreneurship and craft. The world at large came to recognize the force called a "Nigerian youth." These same Nigerian youths are seen flying the national flag of our beautiful nations in art, movies, music and sports. This sometimes make me wonder, what spurs the Nigerian youth to success?

Nigerians have a saying, "pikin wey dey find party rice no supposed to fear dance." This could be interpreted to being, he who chases after success should not be scared of adversaries. What are adversaries? Adversaries are many things which we come to put into one term "SAPA." Sapa is account balance of ₦0.00, Sapa is no electricity supply, Sapa is inflated transport fare. When you hear people talk about Sapa, you'd believe it is a demon. No, Sapa is the Nigerian version of tests and trials to a believer. It is the medium by which our skills, talent and resolve are tested.

Today, in Nigerian banks are farmers who are supposed to be producing bags of garri, in the labs are book writers who chose to switch because they were looking for a means of livelihood. Are we not supposed to look Sapa in the face head-on, with boldness and declare to it that it lost before the fight started? The question lies, how do we survive then?

It's simple, you survive when you live, not when you exist. Existence lies in a valueless life. Living on the other end is a state of giving value through your talents and skills. The misconception we had all stemmed from our perception of success, we expected it to be served to us on a platter of gold- this only happens in fairy tales, to the villains. It is not enough to be talented, it is not enough to have the desire to want to be successful. How far are you willing to go to become successful? The one who can sings allows it end there, the one who can write stories comes to build his life around it. That could have worked if we were in a nation where systems had been established. Here, you have to work, but in a bid to not get lost in your work, find temporary jobs or businesses that are in line with your talents and abilities.

Learn skills, there are a million and one platforms out there today that are willing to teach you one thing or another to help you progress in your chosen field. Are you a songwriter or a vocalist? How about you learn mastering of music online. Story writer, have you ever thought of video editing before? The internet is here to make life easier for us, don't allow Instagram be your comfort zone, make it a research ground too.

Sapa should not be the reason why you're finding it hard to survive. Sapa should be a form of inspiration. It should push you to want to give your all and best. It should help open your eyes to the position you find yourself in today, what you're losing and that which you stand to gain if only you decide to stand and push. Sapa is not a demon, it's an angel that wants to direct you to the reality of who you are.

[marinsawakening]

For the record I do understand the posts urging people to focus on the material harm AI art does (trained via art theft, has the potential to make artists starve even harder than they do already by allowing corporations to bypass hiring them) rather than whether it is or isn't 'real art', and I mostly agree with them because those obviously work better as arguments against AI art in casual conversation.

But I also think that debating whether or not AI art is real art is actually important. And frankly, I feel like this is the one time that we should actually put our foot down and decide that no, this isn't art. Because I don't think the material concerns can be successfully divorced from the question of whether AI art is real art.

Here's the thing: AI art is the one type of art that you can say, with 100%, objective certainty, that it was made without any creative drive, without a message, and yes, without a soul. Because an AI, in their current form, isn't capable of that. All an AI can do is recognize data, process it, and translate it to output. It cannot want anything, it cannot hope for anything, it cannot want to say anything, no more than a mountain can. And while a mountain can be gorgeous, and inspire the same feelings of awe, wonder, dread, and fear as art, I think anyone who isn't being purposefully pedantic can agree it isn't art. Art, by definition, is in some way, shape, or form, created by people with purpose, even if that purpose is 'stop myself from being bored in a meeting' or 'I want to make money' or something. A mountain has a purpose in the wider ecosystem, but it has no conciousness with which to do anything with purpose. It's just a mountain. Same goes for AI; it's just an AI. Nothing else is there.

''But isn't it people who use AI art to create? Doesn't that make it art?" Depends. If someone is using AI as a tool to create their own art piece, then that's art, sure. The AI, in that case, is a paintbrush, being guided to create art. But if you let an AI go on autopilot, click a button to generate an image, and do nothing with it? That's not art, no. It may look like it, but an art-like object does not art make. Art can in fact be art without looking like it. It cannot be art without purpose.

(And before anyone says it: deliberate removal or avoidance of purpose is purpose. DADA is not a gotcha here. The pisspot had a message.)

And of course, in a debate like this, we can go in circles forever. I'm sure there are some people who got their hackles raised when I said a mountain wasn't art, and are ready to start arguing that although a mountain itself has no purpose, we look at it with purpose, and that our interpretation makes it art, or whatever. I call those people purposefully pedantic because if we lived in a dystopian government that started forbidding the creation of art, 'looking at mountains' won't be considered rebellion, and they know it. On a purely philosophical level, sure, maybe looking at mountains is art. On a practical level it isn't, and we all know it.

And this debate isn't merely philosophical; it's practical. What are we willing to accept as art? This matters. Are we willing to accept a square of colours by a thing that cannot create with purpose as art? How far are we willing to remove art from creative expression, drive, purpose? And if we decide that art can be created without artistic expression, purpose, or message, then frankly: what's the point?

This is the practical question. We live under capitalism. Already, artists experience alienation from their labour. To some extent, art for money will always be a compromise, even under a different economic system. But if we decide art needs no purpose, then what's the point? Why create art at all, if a click of a button can produce the same thing? If we decide there is no difference between the creation of a human with purpose and the creation of an AI without, why should we bother with the human? Why should the human bother?

I'm sure artists and art will always exist, because the obvious answer to that question is 'because we want to make art'. But just like traditional craftsmen have been largely pushed out of business – and thus, existence – because we decided that a factory-made chair did the job of a chair just fine, if we come to accept AI art as art, artists will diminish. The artist as a job will become even rarer than it is today, and slowly but surely, knowledge of how to make art will fade, just like the knowledge of many crafts (in and of themselves a form of art) has already largely faded.

In essence: AI art is the streamlined, commodified version of human art, convenient for capitalism because cutting out the human element makes things infinitely cheaper and quicker. If we accept AI art as real art, then what does it matter that artists will have a harder time finding jobs? It's all art, right? Some professions just become obsolete with technological improvements; nothing to be done about that. You can always make your own drawings in your spare time, or buy your own art if it's so important to you that it's handmade! If you can afford the materials or art, that is.

And why is it 'art theft' to train AIs on other people's art? It's normal for art to draw inspiration from other art! What, is it art theft to go to a museum and make something in Rubens' style, now?

See what I mean? The practical and the philosophical are intertwined. If we accept AI art as real art, we may start to see real, material harm come from that. Because the protection of the artist (not as a person, who always should have protection, but as a creator) hinges on the idea that art needs human purpose to be art.

Until such a time that AI becomes sci-fi level sapient, AI art is not art, and to me, this very much matters.

[botogon]

Latest Tech Innovations

Latest Tech Innovations continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace, transforming every aspect of our lives, from how we communicate to how we work and play. Staying ahead of these changes is crucial in today’s fast-moving world. This article delves into the most exciting and impactful tech innovations shaping our future.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence has become a central part of modern life, from virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to advanced machine learning algorithms that drive decision-making in businesses. AI isn't just about robots taking over the world; it's about automating mundane tasks, improving healthcare diagnostics, and even creating art. Companies across various sectors are integrating AI into their processes to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and innovate products.

In healthcare, for example, AI-driven diagnostic tools can detect diseases with unprecedented accuracy, helping doctors make more informed decisions. In finance, AI algorithms are optimizing investment strategies, while in retail, AI is being used for personalized marketing.

However, with AI's growing influence comes the need for thoughtful regulation. As AI systems become more autonomous, ethical questions arise about accountability and transparency. Governments and organizations are working on policies to ensure that AI develops in ways that are beneficial to society.

5G Technology

5G, the fifth generation of wireless technology, is more than just faster internet. It’s a game-changer that will impact industries far beyond telecommunications. With 5G, we’re talking about ultra-fast speeds, low latency, and the ability to connect billions of devices seamlessly. This is the backbone of future innovations in smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Smart cities, for instance, will use 5G to power connected infrastructure—traffic systems, streetlights, and emergency services can communicate with each other in real-time, reducing congestion and improving safety. Meanwhile, in the world of entertainment, 5G is set to revolutionize how we stream videos, play games, and experience virtual reality.

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is one of the most futuristic technologies on the horizon. Unlike traditional computers that use bits (1s and 0s) to process information, quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits, which can represent both 1 and 0 simultaneously. This allows them to solve complex problems at speeds unimaginable with current computers.

Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize fields such as cryptography, materials science, and even drug discovery. Imagine a quantum computer that could simulate molecular interactions at a level that could lead to groundbreaking new medicines or materials.

Despite its promise, quantum computing is still in its infancy. Significant challenges remain, such as maintaining qubit stability and reducing error rates. But the possibilities are endless, and tech giants like Google and IBM are racing to achieve quantum supremacy.

Advancements in Renewable Energy

Renewable energy has come a long way from just solar panels on rooftops. Innovations in renewable technologies are making it more efficient, cost-effective, and accessible to everyone. Solar power is becoming more efficient with the development of perovskite solar cells, which promise higher efficiency at lower costs than traditional silicon-based cells.

In wind energy, offshore wind farms are being built at a massive scale, producing large amounts of power without taking up valuable land. But perhaps one of the most exciting areas is in energy storage. New battery technologies, like solid-state batteries, are making it possible to store renewable energy more effectively, which is crucial for a consistent and reliable energy supply.

These advancements play a vital role in combating climate change, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and paving the way for a more sustainable future.

Blockchain Beyond Cryptocurrency

When most people hear "blockchain," they think of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. But blockchain technology has far broader applications beyond digital currencies. Blockchain’s decentralized and transparent nature makes it ideal for industries where trust, security, and traceability are crucial.

In supply chain management, for example, blockchain can track products from their origin to the end consumer, ensuring authenticity and preventing fraud. In finance, blockchain is being used for faster, more secure transactions. Healthcare providers are exploring blockchain to secure patient data and streamline medical records.

One of the most disruptive uses of blockchain is in decentralized finance (DeFi), where traditional financial systems are being rebuilt using blockchain technology, removing intermediaries like banks and offering financial services directly to consumers.

The Evolution of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)

AR and VR have come a long way from being novelty technologies for gamers. Today, they are being used in various industries, from education to healthcare, to create immersive experiences. AR overlays digital content onto the real world, while VR creates a completely virtual environment.

In education, AR can bring textbooks to life, allowing students to interact with 3D models of everything from historical landmarks to molecules. In healthcare, VR is being used for training surgeons in simulated environments, reducing the risk of errors in real operations.

As AR and VR technologies advance, they are poised to transform not only entertainment and education but also communication and everyday life, offering new ways to interact with the world around us.

Biotechnology Breakthroughs

Biotechnology is at the forefront of some of the most life-changing innovations today. CRISPR, a revolutionary gene-editing technology, allows scientists to edit DNA with precision, opening the door to curing genetic diseases, improving crop resilience, and even altering the DNA of organisms to fight disease.

Personalized medicine is another exciting area in biotech. Advances in genomics are enabling doctors to tailor treatments to individuals' unique genetic profiles, leading to more effective and targeted therapies.

Wearable health technology is also making waves. Devices like smartwatches that monitor heart rates, blood oxygen levels, and sleep patterns are empowering individuals to take control of their health in ways that were once only possible in a clinical setting.

Autonomous Vehicles

Self-driving cars aren’t just science fiction anymore; they’re being tested on roads worldwide. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) use a combination of AI, sensors, and advanced algorithms to navigate roads without human intervention. Companies like Tesla, Waymo, and Uber are at the forefront of this innovation.

Beyond cars, autonomous technology is also being applied to drones and delivery robots. These innovations could revolutionize industries like logistics and transportation, making deliveries faster and reducing traffic congestion.

However, there are still significant challenges to overcome, including regulatory hurdles and safety concerns. But as the technology advances, the day when AVs become a common sight on our roads is drawing closer.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming everything from how we live in our homes to how businesses operate. IoT refers to the growing network of connected devices that communicate and exchange data with each other.

In smart homes, IoT devices like smart thermostats, lights, and security cameras allow homeowners to control their environment remotely. In industrial settings, IoT is driving the development of smart factories, where machines and systems communicate to optimize production.

However, as more devices become connected, security becomes a significant concern. Ensuring the privacy and security of data in IoT systems is crucial as these technologies continue to evolve.

Advancements in Robotics

Robotics technology is advancing at a rapid pace, with robots being used in various industries, from manufacturing to healthcare. In manufacturing, robots are taking on repetitive and dangerous tasks, increasing efficiency and reducing the risk of injury to workers.

Social robots, designed to interact with humans, are also making their way into healthcare settings, providing companionship to elderly patients and assisting with rehabilitation exercises.

Agriculture is another area where robotics is making a big impact. Autonomous tractors and drones are being used for tasks like planting, harvesting, and monitoring crops, increasing productivity and reducing labor costs.

Space Exploration and Technology

The final frontier—space—is now more accessible than ever, thanks to advances in technology and the growing involvement of private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. Space tourism is no longer a distant dream; it's becoming a reality, with companies offering trips to the edge of space for those who can afford it.

Beyond tourism, space technology is advancing in other areas, such as satellite communications and planetary exploration. With new missions planned to the Moon and Mars, the role of technology in space exploration continues to grow.

Sustainable Tech and Green Innovations

Sustainability is becoming a key focus for tech companies, with innovations aimed at reducing waste, conserving resources, and minimizing environmental impact. From energy-efficient buildings to biodegradable materials, sustainable tech is transforming industries.

Recycling technology is also advancing, with new methods for breaking down complex materials like plastics into their original components for reuse. Innovations in water purification and waste management are helping to address some of the world's most pressing environmental challenges.

These green innovations are crucial for building a sustainable future, and technology plays a pivotal role in making that future a reality.

Wearable Technology

Wearable technology has moved beyond fitness trackers and smartwatches. The latest wearables offer a wide range of features, from monitoring vital signs to helping manage chronic conditions. For example, smart clothing embedded with sensors can monitor posture and muscle activity, while wearable ECG monitors can detect early signs of heart problems.

Fashion is also merging with function in the world of wearables, with designers creating stylish devices that don't just look good but also provide valuable health data. As wearable technology continues to evolve, it’s set to become an even more integral part of our daily lives.

Conclusion

Latest Tech Innovations are accelerating, bringing with it new possibilities and challenges. From AI and quantum computing to renewable energy and biotechnology, the latest tech innovations are transforming industries and improving lives. Embracing these changes will be key to building a better, more connected, and sustainable future. Staying informed and adaptable will ensure that we can take full advantage of the incredible advancements on the horizon.

FAQs

What is the most exciting tech innovation in 2024?

AI advancements and quantum computing are among the most exciting innovations, offering unprecedented possibilities across various sectors.

How will 5G affect everyday consumers?

5G will enable faster, more reliable internet, revolutionizing industries like entertainment, healthcare, and transportation with its ultra-fast speeds and low latency.

Can AI completely replace human jobs?

While AI will automate many tasks, it's more likely to augment human work rather than completely replace it, allowing people to focus on more complex and creative tasks.

What are the ethical concerns surrounding biotechnology?

Ethical concerns in biotechnology include genetic privacy, the potential for designer babies, and the long-term impacts of gene editing on future generations.

How can individuals keep up with rapid tech changes?

Staying informed through tech news, attending industry conferences, and participating in continuous learning opportunities can help individuals stay ahead of technological advancements.

[continuations]

The World After Capital in 64 Theses

Over the weekend I tweeted out a summary of my book The World After Capital in 64 theses. Here they are in one place:

The Industrial Age is 20+ years past its expiration date, following a long decline that started in the 1970s.

Mainstream politicians have propped up the Industrial Age through incremental reforms that are simply pushing out the inevitable collapse.

The lack of a positive vision for what comes after the Industrial Age has created a narrative vacuum exploited by nihilist forces such as Trump and ISIS.

The failure to enact radical changes is based on vastly underestimating the importance of digital technology, which is not simply another set of Industrial Age machines.

Digital technology has two unique characteristics not found in any prior human technology: zero marginal cost and universality of computation.

Our existing approaches to regulation of markets, dissemination of information, education and more are based on the no longer valid assumption of positive marginal cost.

Our beliefs about the role of labor in production and work as a source of purpose are incompatible with the ability of computers to carry out ever more sophisticated computations (and to do so ultimately at zero marginal cost).

Digital technology represents as profound a shift in human capabilities as the invention of agriculture and the discovery of science, each of which resulted in a new age for humanity.

The two prior transitions, from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age and from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age resulted in humanity changing almost everything about how individuals live and societies function, including changes in religion.

Inventing the next age, will require nothing short of changing everything yet again.

We can, if we make the right choices now, set ourselves on a path to the Knowledge Age which will allow humanity to overcome the climate crisis and to broadly enjoy the benefits of automation.

Choosing a path into the future requires understanding the nature of the transition we are facing and coming to terms with what it means to be human.

New technology enlarges the “space of the possible,” which then contains both good and bad outcomes. This has been true starting from the earliest human technology: fire can be used to cook and heat, but also to wage war.

Technological breakthroughs shift the binding constraint. For foraging tribes it was food. For agrarian societies it was arable land. Industrial countries were constrained by how much physical capital (machines, factories, railroads, etc.) they could produce.

Today humanity is no longer constrained by capital, but by attention.

We are facing a crisis of attention. We are not paying enough attention to profound challenges, such as “what is our purpose?” and “how do we overcome the climate crisis?”

Attention is to time as velocity is to speed: attention is what we direct our minds to during a time period. We cannot go back and change what we paid attention to. If we are poorly prepared for a crisis it is because of how we have allocated our attention in the past.

We have enough capital to meet our individual and collective needs, as long as we are clear about the difference between needs and wants.

Our needs can be met despite the population explosion because of the amazing technological progress we have made and because population growth is slowing down everywhere with peak population in sight.

Industrial Age society, however, has intentionally led us down a path of confusing our unlimited wants with our modest needs, as well as specific solutions (e.g. individually owned cars) with needs (e.g. transportation).

The confusion of wants with needs keeps much of our attention trapped in the “job loop”: we work so that we can buy goods and services, which are produced by other people also working.

The job loop was once beneficial, when combined with markets and entrepreneurship, it resulted in much of the innovation that we now take for granted.

Now, however, we can and should apply as much automation as we can muster to free human attention from the “job loop” so that it can participate in the “knowledge loop” instead: learn, create, and share.

Digital technology can be used to vastly accelerate the knowledge loop, as can be seen from early successes, such as Wikipedia and open access scientific publications.

Much of digital technology is being used to hog human attention into systems such as Facebook, Twitter and others that engage in the business of reselling attention,  commonly known as advertising. Most of what is advertised is  furthering wants and reinforces the job loop.

The success of market-based capitalism is that capital is no longer our binding constraint. But markets cannot be used for allocating attention due to missing prices.

Prices do not and cannot exist for what we most need to pay attention to. Price formation requires supply and demand, which don't exist for finding purpose in life, overcoming the climate crisis, conducting fundamental research, or engineering an asteroid defense.

We must use the capabilities of digital technology so that we can freely allocate human attention.

We can do so by enhancing economic, information, and psychological freedom.

Economic freedom means allowing people to opt out of the job loop by providing them with a universal basic income (UBI).

Informational freedom means empowering people to control computation and thus information access, creation and sharing.

Psychological freedom means developing mindfulness practices that allow people to direct their attention in the face of a myriad distractions.

UBI is affordable today exactly because we have digital technology that allows us to drive down the cost of producing goods and services through automation.

UBI is the cornerstone of a new social contract for the Knowledge Age, much as pensions and health insurance were for the Industrial Age.

Paid jobs are not a source of purpose for humans in and of themselves. Doing something meaningful is. We will never run out of meaningful things to do.

We need one global internet without artificial geographic boundaries or fast and slow lanes for different types of content.

Copyright and patent laws must be curtailed to facilitate easier creation and sharing of derivative works.

Large systems such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. must be mandated to be fully programmable to diminish their power and permit innovation to take place on top of the capabilities they have created.

In the longrun privacy is incompatible with technological progress. Providing strong privacy assurances can only be accomplished via controlled computation. Innovation will always grow our ability to destroy faster than our ability to build due to entropy.

We must put more effort into protecting individuals from what can happen to them if their data winds up leaked, rather than trying to protect the data at the expense of innovation and transparency.

Our brains evolved in an environment where seeing a cat meant there was a cat. Now the internet can show us an infinity of cats. We can thus be forever distracted.

It is easier for us to form snap judgments and have quick emotional reactions than to engage our critical thinking facilities.

Our attention is readily hijacked by systems designed to exploit these evolutionarily engrained features of our brains.

We can use mindfulness practices, such as conscious breathing or meditation to take back and maintain control of our attention.

As we increase economic, informational and psychological freedom, we also require values that guide our actions and the allocation of our attention.

We should embrace a renewed humanism as the source of our values.

There is an objective basis for humanism. Only humans have developed knowledge in the form of books and works of art that transcend both time and space.

Knowledge is the source of humanity’s great power. And with great power comes great responsibility.

Humans need to support each other in solidarity, irrespective of such differences as gender, race or nationality.

We are all unique, and we should celebrate these differences. They are beautiful and an integral part of our humanity.

Because only humans have the power of knowledge, we are responsible for other species. For example, we are responsible for whales, rather than the other way round.

When we see something that could be improved, we need to have the ability to express that. Individuals, companies and societies that do not allow criticism become stagnant and will ultimately fail.

Beyond criticism, the major mode for improvement is to create new ideas, products and art. Without ongoing innovation, systems become stagnant and start to decay.

We need to believe that problems can be solved, that progress can be achieved. Without optimism we will stop trying, and problems like the climate crisis will go unsolved threatening human extinction.

If we succeed with the transition to the Knowledge Age, we can tackle extraordinary opportunities ahead for humanity, such as restoring wildlife habitats here on earth and exploring space.

We can and should each contribute to leaving the Industrial Age behind and bringing about the Knowledge Age.

We start by developing our own mindfulness practice and helping others do so.

We tackle the climate crisis through activism demanding government regulation, through research into new solutions, and through entrepreneurship deploying working technologies.

We defend democracy from attempts to push towards authoritarian forms of government.

We foster decentralization through supporting localism, building up mutual aid, participating in decentralized systems (crypto and otherwise).

We promote humanism and live in accordance with humanist values.

We recognize that we are on the threshold of both transhumans (augmented humans) and neohumans (robots and artificial intelligences).

We continue on our epic human journey while marveling at (and worrying about) our aloneness in the universe.

We act boldly and with urgency, because humanity’s future depends on a successful transition to the Knowledge Age.

[cooki3face]

The 12 spiritual laws of the Universe 🤍🪐✨

This one is for my spiritual Queens and Kings who are wondering about the twelve spiritual laws for reasons like bettering yourself or anything else that may bring you to wondering what the twelve laws are. I love the universe, and so without further ado, let's get into those laws. <3

Bless.

1) The Law of Divine Oneness: This law really helps us to recognize that everything is essentially connected to everything or something else. That every thought, word, movement/action, and belief of ours affects others and the universe around us regardless of whether or not the people are near us or far away, typically, beyond time and space.

2) The Law of Mentalism: The all is mind. The universe is mental. Ideas lead to the manifestation of things and events. Thoughts create our state of existence and the nature of our experiences here on Earth. "Be responsible for anything you create by being responsible for everything you think."

3) The Law of Vibration: Everything in the Universe moves, vibrates, and travels in a circular pattern like the way the Earth spins on an axis. Those same principles of vibration in the physical world equally apply to our thoughts, feelings, desires, and will in the Etheric world. Each sound, thing, and even thought has its own vibrational frequency unique to itself.

Note: Etheric is defined as something being of or related to the heavens or a spiritual world or plane of existence. Etheric is the less common alternative to the word ethereal.

4) The Law of Action: This law helps us to understand that we must engage and/or take part in actions that support our thoughts, dreams, emotions, and words. Simply meaning that we should put actions behind our hopes and dreams to accomplish what we desire to.

5) The Law of Correspondence: The principles of physics that explain the physical world such as energy, light, vibration, and motion have their corresponding principles in the etheric world or universe. "As above, so below."

6) The Law of Cause & Effect: This universal law teaches us that nothing ever happens by chance/coincidence or outside of the universal laws. every action and/or thought has a reaction or consequence. "We reap what we sow" meaning that, basically, what goes around comes right back around. ⭐

7) The Law of Attraction: The law of attraction demonstrates how we create the things,events, and people that we come in contact with within our lives. Our thoughts, feelings, words and actions produce energies which in turn attract like energies. Negative energies attract negative things and positive energies attract positive things. ⭐

Note: This is everyone favorite law as well as the most famous this law is most often brought up within the conversation of manifestation. We need to think as if we already have what we desire and think positive to manifest things as we should.

8) The Law of Perpetual Transmutation of Energy: This law helps us to understand that all people have the ability and power to change the conditions of their lives. Higher vibrations will ALWAYS consume and transform lower vibrations. Thus, each of us can change the energies in our lives by understanding the universal laws and applying the principals in such a way as to inspire/affect change.

9) The Law of Relativity: Each person is given or will recieve a series of problems, tests, or lessons for the purpose of strengthening the light within each and every one of us. This law teaches us to compare our problems to others problems into its perceeding perspective. No matter how bad we percieve our situation or issue to be. There is always someone who is in a way worst situation than we are.

Note: This does not mean attempt to invalidate someone elses feelings or experiences at all nor does this mean to allow people to do it to you.

10) The Law of Polarity: This law teaches us that everything is on a continuum and has an opposite. We can suppress and transform undesirable thoughts by concentrating on the opposite pole. ⭐

Note: This is very important!!! learning the skill of pushing the negatives out of your mind and finding the positives and the light in every situation is fundamental.

11) The Law of Rhythms: This law teaches us that everything vibrates and moves on a certain rythm. These rhythems establish seasons, stages of development, and patterns. Each cycle reflects the regularity of the Universe. Some people have mastered the art of rising above negative patterns or parts of a cycle by never letting negative things to penetrate their consiousness.

Note: Changing how you react to things is what breaks patterns!

12) The Laws of Gender: The laws of gender manifests in all things masculine and feminine. It is the law that governs what we know as creation. This law demands everything in nature is both masculine and feminine. Both are neccessary for life to exist.

Note: I believe in energies over here. It is absolutely possible to possess masculine or feminine energies regardless of sex. Gender is energy it is mental as well. Sex is physical. Be who you are. Embrace that.

I hope that this was an enjoyable read and that this was helpful for you as well. <3

Stay Pretty, -𝓑

[antiquitiesandlabyrinths]

The Impact of Religion and the Mother Goddess on Human Culture

Notes: This essay is compiled from a number of sources ranging from books, university publications, youtube videos, and museum articles. This essay is also not just about Egypt, like the rest of this blog is––it concerns early civilizations ranging from Britains to Harappans.

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As we all know, religion inhabits much of our daily life in modern times, and even more so in ancient times. The origins of our existence have been explained many times over with many different ideas––how these ideas are presented to the world and the common man influences the actions of the people and government who follow that religion.

The oldest religions in the world tend to worship a Mother Goddess––a feminine figure that represents the ability to create life which, for a while, was confined entirely to the efforts of women and the miracle of childbirth. We know very little about these people beyond what the archaeological record can tell, as there is no written language for pre-history hominids who created the first works of art; women, with full hips and breasts, carved into wood and stone. What we do know about them is that they had forms of empathy––healed femur bones from old, preserved skeletons reveal that people healed from grievous injuries that, in many other species, would mark death. Jaws, hunched in like the pursed lips of old men, were also found without their teeth, but still living to an impressive age of around 80. Someone had to physically chew this person's food, and they did, for what could've been decades. This shows that same pattern; a tribe that fed, clothed, and took care of someone who otherwise would not have survived on their own.

All of this points not only to intelligence in early hominids, but also a form of empathy that some people even today lack in our society––a society that doesn't worship a Mother Goddess, whose origins in humanity are entirely different from the beliefs of the first humans.

The Sumerian civilization is among the oldest, including the four civilizations birthed in cradles of humanity––the Harappan civilization along the Indus Valley river, Mesopotamian culture along the Euphrates––or the fertile crescent––, as well as Egypt along the Nile and the rivers in China. This topic of Sumerian religion, the changes it went through, and the effect that had on its' people, are discussed in great detail in the book 'The Alphabet Versus the Goddess' by Leonard Shlain, but I will attempt to summarize the religious history of Sumeria and Mesopotamia.

When the first towns and cities began to prop up around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, the people who lived there worshipped a wide pantheon of Gods like many of the other first civilizations. Their creation myth involves the work of a primeval mother Goddess named Namma, who created humanity. These people who lived under this creation myth, this belief that they were created out of nothing and out of love, allowed for times of relative peace, as well as a rapid growth in art, structure, and other such refinements of city life. Later on, however, this idea was obstructed by a rising Babylonian culture coming into the fertile crescent. These people believed in a much more gruesome birth of humanity, and is a strikingly, and horrifying, difference from the myths of early Sumerians.

The Babylonian creation myth was written or told as a way of confirming Marduk as the main God of the world. This story is called Enuma Elish, and acted as a way to legitimize Marduk replacing Enlil, the previous God King. The telling of it occurred during the Kassite inhabitation of Babylon.

Tiamat, the Goddess of the Sea (salty water) mated with her husband Apsu, a God who represented fresh water. From this several Gods emerged in couplets. Most were boisterous and loud, as young children are, producing so much noise that Apsu was incensed to destroy them. He was stopped soon by his wife, Tiamat, who urged him to exhibit more patience; a request he did not heed. Their sons soon heard of this danger and, in fear of death, called upon the god Ea to help them. Ea was an incredibly resourceful God, and put the angered Apsu to sleep with a spell. They killed the sleeping God and stole his vizier, Mummu. After this, Ea birthed his own child with his consort, Damkina. This is the origin of Marduk.

Marduk was the tallest and the mightiest of all the Gods, who held power to control the four winds, a power given by the God Anu. Anu told him to let the winds whirl; it created a storm that picked up dust from the earth, the winds roaring loud enough to antagonize the usually patient Tiamat. Other Gods faced this same irritation and urged Tiamat to take action––to slay down the God, Marduk.

Another telling of this story has a slightly different timeline, that tells a significantly different story––instead of Ea and lesser Gods killing Apsu, Apsu is killed by Marduk, which directs Tiamat's anger more reasonably to Marduk.

When she comes to face Marduk on the battlefield, she has with her eleven monsters created by the Mother Goddess for this quest. While Ea tries to find a way to end this confrontation with magic spells, he is eventually told that it isn't exactly possible, and thus Marduk puts forth an offer that the other Gods take. He will face the Goddess Tiamat, and if he should win, he would be the King of all Gods. This battle is long and difficult, but eventually Marduk does win in a horrifying way. He blows massive gusts of wind down Tiamat's mouth, swelling her stomach and abdomen so massively she appears to be a woman in the final stages of pregnancy. While she is thoroughly and painfully stretched with Marduk's wind, he slays her with an arrow down her gullet, killing a woman who had the image of the feminine creation of life, an ending violently estranged from the myth of a mother Goddess creating things by her own magic, and not the death of others.

Once Tiamat is slain, her corpse is large, and Marduk puts it to use. He stretches her skin out to become the sky. Her pierced eyes, heavy with tears, are the origins of the Euphrates and the Tigris, flooded with her crying. Her tail is made into the Milky Way. Her split head, torn by the heavy club of Marduk, is used to make the mountains, and her body created the earth. He pricked her breasts in many places for the tributaries of the rivers. From her blood Marduk creates humans in a disturbingly dark way, a stark difference––humans made by magic, versus humans made by the murder of a Goddess mirroring the image of a pregnant woman.

As God-King, Marduk received complaints from lesser Gods that they had to toil on the earth themselves to create their own tributes, taken care of by worshippers. To remedy this, Marduk decides to create humans. He singled out Tiamat's favorite son, Kingu, who ruled with her after her husband's death, and accused him of instigating Tiamat's rage. He placed all blame on this one God, freeing everyone else of the blame but Kingu. Marduk then ordered his father, Ea, to knead the flesh and blood of Kingu's executed form, this sacrifice, molding it like clay in his hands. After the images of many humans were created, Marduk sentenced them to toil on Tiamat's corpse for all their lives in order to create offerings and worship for the Gods.

This violent origin creates a culture indebted to its' gods, forever attempting to repent from the sins of their past, the gruesomeness of their creation, to make up for Kingu's sacrifice. Compared to the simple origins of the mother Goddess Nammu, the people who worshipped her in Sumer didn't have this responsibility––they were created of love. But Babylonians lived forever attempting to make up for their own creations, a theme that is reflected clearly in Christianity. A savior, and worshippers forever trying to repent for their own existence.

This story also reflects the growth of monetary gain in a society. For example, the Indus Valley civilization on the Indus river had no such array of Gods that required tributes so often like that. It is hard to say what exactly the people of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro truly believed in, as we have yet to decipher their written language, but archaeological evidence shows no presence of temples for Gods in any of the cities. Instead, the cities are laid out in a straight, clearly preplanned manner that allowed wind to channel through the streets like air conditioning. There were no ways for these city-states to hold immense power over the people, as there was no reason that would excuse the abuse put upon lower-class citizens; there were no violent 'Gods' to which such offerings were necessary, meaning the class system most likely worked in a very different way to that of Babylonia, who had massive temples. The creation and building of these temples fuelled the Mesopotamian economy greatly, as money that was collected in taxes was actually put to use, not stored up and saved like what can happen in a capitalistic society. It's the difference between a city built for its' people or a city built for its' gods, and, in extension, the god-Kings that ruled on earth. Something interesting to note as well, is that the Indus Valley civilization didn't have any weapons or mass wars––as far as we know––in its' history from 5,000 BC to 1500 BC. There could be other reasons for this, but I believe it may have something to do with the feminine cult religion and the absence of temples.

There is a similar theme in Egyptian culture, surprisingly. Egypt is known as an ancient civilization that had forward-thinking rights for women and men, including divorce proceedings and the ability to hold a job and property. Like Sumer, its original creation myth dealt mainly with the creative, coming-together of powerful forces; this time two women, something that very rarely happens in religion. There are no male Gods that inspire or order the two Goddesses––they act alone, and of their own volition. This tale is one of the oldest creation myths we've found yet in Egypt, dating all the way back to the Early Dynastic Period of the Old Kingdom.

Nekhbet was the Goddess of Upper Egypt, a vulture Goddess (whose imagery and meaning we will discuss later). Wadjet was the serpent Goddess of Lower Egypt. These two Goddesses were primordial deities, existing before the creation of earth. They emerged from the waters of chaos, which was thought to be all that the world was back then, bringing with them land and air, and eventually the loving creations of humans. Like cobras that twist around each other into a double helix, the Egyptians were intrinsically entwined with the Nile, an image that is reflected even in modern times, with the symbol of two entwined snakes being the symbol for healing, often displayed in hospitals, and the formation of DNA in its ladder-like structure.

It may seem a little strange that the two Goddesses who created the earth––in this Divine Feminine mythology––are represented by a cobra and a vulture, but in Egyptian society, that was simply what they were.

In hieroglyphics, vultures denote a woman. They are in the spelling of mother, of daughter, of wife, and of Goddesses. In fact, the word mother is written the exact same way as vulture. These birds appeared to have foresight to the Egyptians as well––they circled their prey before a meal was assured, remarking a sort of prophecy. They also denoted a divine manifestation of death, an important trait to share with the goddess Nekhbet, who carried exceptional power.

The snake was also a feminine symbol, though strangely explained by the Egyptians, whose ideas on life differ greatly from the modern, more monotheistic view (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). The sinuous like movements of its' 'step' mimicked the swaying of a woman's hips in a dance, evocative and nubile, and her movements in the throes of passion mimicked a similar serpentine state. Snakes resembled the meandering shapes of rivers, the roots of trees and plants, and the umbilical cord of mammalians. They live deep within the earth, making their home within the Great Mother, and they appeared to live forever, shedding their skin whenever renewal was required. This specifically was a trait revered by Egyptians, who had a great love and zest for life, and wished to live forever. Renewal connected snakes to the Nile's inundation and the sun's revival every morning after its' death the night before. Hieroglyphs come into play with snakes, as well––the hieroglyphs for serpent are the same as the hieroglyphs for Goddess.

It can be difficult to say how exactly this myth was thought of during the Old Kingdom. This is an incredibly old myth, and by the time writing started to really take hold of the country, the myth was replaced with a new, more masculine one. While it wasn't as violent as the Babylonian creation myth, it contained an incredible amount of masculine energy. Female goddesses faded from the light as a particular two Gods shot up in popularity––Amun and Ra, or Amun-Re (there are many different spellings, including Atum, Re, Aten, etc.).

There is an incredibly theory put forth in the previously mentioned book "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess" that inspired me to truly think about the connection between religion and society, as well as the impact of writing on the ideas of feminine and masculine energies within that society. Leonard Shlain, the author of the book, posits that "... any written method of communication skews society toward masculine vales."

The new, masculine myth that took the place of the Goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet was a little more simple––Atum stood on a mound of earth, surrounded by the primordial sea. Atum masturbated, and from his seed sprouted the Ennead––nine deities making up a family of powerful Gods and Goddesses. This story was found to have its origins nearly 1500 years after the myth of Nekhbet and Wadjet.

So how did this change in mythology reflect in society?

Again, it is hard to say. In the Old Kingdom, Pharaohs tended to their people, and their was a feudal-type system ruled by an all-powerful King. Art flourished in the time, and even today many people claim that the art of Egypt peaked in the Old/Middle Kingdom and fizzled out during the New Kingdom. Another notable change is after the invasion of the Hyksos––and an occupation that lasted only a little over a century, one that was despised heavily––Egypt began to take on a new sort of mindset. Pharaohs now went out beyond the borders of Egypt, even up into Canaan and completing quests of great magnitude, erecting monuments in honor of their victory. Such behavior is found more in violent, masculine-powered societies than anywhere else.

Viking and Medieval UK faced this same problem––women were hardly considered people during this age, unable to own their own land or divorce. This was a masculine honoring society, praising the violence of colonizing and shunning empathy. There was a need within the people to 'spread their greatness' to others, but in reality, the greatness was nothing more than violence; a theme also seen in the Avatar: The Last Airbender, as the Fire nation brainwashed its' child citizens to believe the Fire Nation had a right to the rest of the world. I'm afraid I have little else to say on the topic of Europe because that is not my area of study, but the similarities are easy to draw.

Our society today is, despite our best efforts, a masculine-drawn society. Our God is chiefly referred to as 'He' and representation in our media for women is scant beyond superficial characters, as men, who rule most of the business in the world, can have trouble seeing women as something more than a pretty, talking toy. This, of course, isn't universal, but it is incredibly common and would be more so if women weren't trying to make a stand. Like Babylonians, Christians are born with innate guilt, attempting to make up and repent for the sacrifice of their savior, another masculine form of a deity. Like Atum-worshipping Egyptians, our world was created alone at the hands of an all powerful male God.

But, unlike Sumerians, we never had a Mother Goddess. Unlike the earliest myths of Egypt, the world was not birthed at the hands of a fertile woman. And, unlike early Egypt, we are not happy. Our 'life after death' is somewhere unlike Earth, somewhere that is perfect, unlike earth. But for Egyptians? Life after death was earth, just another form of it, and life in that afterlife was just the same as life during life. Whether or not that has anything to do with our method of governing, our economy, or our massive differences in religion––there is no evidence. It is a simple outlook on life that is only translated in holy texts and the remains of dead people, and dead people very rarely talk.

Like most things, religion isn't contained to a Sunday every week or to Muslim prayer mats every day––such things spread into our food, our way of life, our infrastructure, how we respect and treat each other, and how we treat the Earth. I believe it is important to remember that the oldest Gods are things seen every day––the water, the earth, the sky, the sun, and the stars. These are what influenced the first humans, the first beings to care for one another in old age, to heal what was thought to be forever broken, and to take up the mantle of kindness for each other without the threat of a violent God condemning them. Many modern people base their ethics on the threat of punishment from God(s), in which case we can all learn from atheists, who continue to do good without threat, simply because they believe it is right to help others, just as our ancestors did.

[themadamespod]

The Great White Gripe

A lot has been said about the “social commentary” within The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. 

“Since when is Marvel a bunch of SJWs? I don’t need this shit.”

“All this race stuff feels SUPER forced.”

“Oh here we go Marvel tryin to be all woke to get the libs on board.”

If you personally know anyone who spews this brand of ignorance, we’re sorry. 

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: there is no social commentary on TFATWS. Showrunner Malcolm Spellman and director Kari Skogland simply show the reality of life in America. It’s not their fault that so many (white) people (men) don’t like looking in the mirror.

And some people claim they have no problem with film and television addressing politics and social change.

“Just keep it out of my comic book movies. It doesn’t belong there.”

They could not be anymore wrong, even if Chandler Bing himself was lecturing them. 

If you asked 100 people to name the top ten movies of all time, you’d get 100 different lists. But one thing we can all agree on is that film has power. It has the power to move us, to divide us, to unite us. Entertainment can lead to the kind of discourse that prompts action and positive change.

And that’s why The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the conversations it’s sparking are so important.

One World, One Reality

“Marvel has always been and always will be a reflection of the world right outside our window.” - Stan Lee

There are two takeaways from that statement:

One: Stan Lee didn’t say that in the 1960s, 1970s, or even the 1980s. He said it in 2017.

Two: Our window, not your window, is a subtle but important distinction, particularly as it relates to TFATWS. The Flag Smashers, led by Karli Morgenthau, live by a simple creed: “One world, One people.” The core message of the show is that white Americans and Black Americans experience the world very differently, but there’s still only one world, one reality. 

It’s just a matter of people opening their eyes and seeing it.

TFATWS is an extension of Marvel’s early support of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, Stan Lee created the X-Men as an allegory for the ongoing struggles of the African-American community. Though he didn’t explicitly base Professor X and Magneto on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, there are ideological similarities.

Five years later, following the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, Stan wrote the following:

“Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. It’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race—to despise an entire nation—to vilify an entire religion. Sooner or later, we must learn to judge each other on our own merits. Sooner or later, if a man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill our hearts with tolerance.”

In 2021, Stan’s words still resonate. Racism in the United States is as virulent and damaging as it’s ever been. Black Americans are facing deadly policing, Jim Crow 2.0 voting laws, mass incarceration, and countless other roadblocks to mobility that most white people have never encountered.

Through the journeys of Sam and Sarah Wilson, Lemar Hoskins, and the heartbreaking Isaiah Bradley, TFATWS shows the unvarnished truth of what Ira Glass might call Black American Life. And through John Walker, the writers nail home the message that’s really making certain people squirm:

White men are the greatest threat not just to Black Americans, but all Americans, because TFATWS is as much an indictment of toxic masculinity as it is of bigotry. 

As aggressive racism has spread like wildfire since 2016, so has hostile sexism towards women of all colors. John Walker is the embodiment of the hyper aggression that the Proud Boys applaud. The clearest example of this comes when Walker dares to clap the shoulder of Ayo, one of Wakanda’s Dora Milaje.

Her swift and, ahem, pointed response had women the world over screaming like they’d just won the lottery. 

One could also argue that Walker’s dogged pursuit of Karli and displaced peoples supporting the Flag Smasher cause mirrors the Trump administration’s war on immigrants. 

There are plenty of parallels to draw. The point is, none of them are forced or manufactured or exaggerated. And whether we’re talking about a fictional road in Latvia or a real street in Minnesota, white Americans need to stop avoiding conversations that make them uncomfortable.

The Politics of Comics 

In 1938, Americans were still reeling from the Great Depression. Enter Superman, the everyman hero, who made his comic debut while the nation was facing widespread unemployment, rampant poverty, and blatant corruption at every level of government.

Superman could have faced off against any number of supernatural villains. But Siegel and Shuster went a different route, setting a precedent for comic books that has prevailed to this day:

They got political. 

Throughout Superman’s earliest adventures, he fought against evil politicians, apathetic bureaucrats, aggressive police officers, greedy businessmen, and even a Washington lobbyist. 

Then in 1941, Joe Simon & Jack Kirby introduced Captain America just in time to fight the nazis and free the world from fascism. A couple decades later, Kirby and Stan Lee would tell the tale of the aforementioned Erik Lehnsherr, who survived the horrors of Auschwitz. These comics endured because their passion and nuance transcended entertainment. So what was the secret sauce?

Like Siegel and Shuster, Simon, Kirby, and Stan Lee were Jewish. Representation matters, folks. 

Later on, the X-Men weren’t the only conduit through which Marvel supported Civil Rights. In 1966, on the heels of the “March Against Fear” from Memphis, TN to Jackson, MS, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby unveiled Black Panther. When African-Americans were fighting harder than ever, Black children could suddenly read a comic book about T’Challa, the noble warrior king of a highly advanced African nation. 

Marvel has never been shy about critiquing foreign policy either. Tony Stark and Iron Man debuted in 1968 as the conflict in Vietnam was escalating. And let’s not forget, Tony made his MCU debut in a film that is a clear indictment of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We could do this all day, but you get the idea. 

Comic books have always reflected the politics of our times, and so has the MCU. Fanboys can’t start crying now just because they’re on the wrong side of history. And when they do, we defer to the great Jon Bernthal when asked about alt-righters appropriating the Punisher symbol:

“Fuck them.”

Life Imitates Art

In 1986, American men felt the need for speed. After Top Gun was released, applications to U.S. aviation forces increased by a staggering 500%. 

Two years later, Errol Morris exposed police corruption in his film The Thin Blue Line. The documentary prompted a new investigation that eventually exonerated death row inmate Randall Adams for the murder of a police officer.

That same year, the Polish government ceased all executions after leaders were swayed to do so by A Short Film about Killing.

Following the release of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine in 1999, Kmart bowed to public pressure and stopped selling handgun ammunition. 

And 5 years ago, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif changed the law on honor killings in response to the critically-acclaimed film A Girl in the River. 

Like we said earlier, film has the power to spur social change. Even if the effects aren’t always so direct and immediate, television and movies have always contributed to the process in America. 

Seeing the Ricardos sharing a bed allowed some Americans to start relaxing their prudish ways. 

The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Maude empowered women as they fought for reproductive rights.

The Jeffersons and Good Times facilitated calmer discussions about race relations.

And The Ellen Show led to greater representation of queer people on screen and greater acceptance of queer people in society. Though Ellen herself has become a problematic figure in the last year, that legacy still remains.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is hardly the first show of its kind. And given the impact film has on society, we believe Hollywood has a moral obligation to produce content that exposes society’s ills and fosters productive debate. 

Stan Lee would be very proud of the team behind TFATWS for bringing the stark reality of American life into people’s living rooms. The next time you see someone bitching about it, remind them what Stan himself said just a few years ago: 

“Those stories have room for everyone, regardless of their race, gender, religion, or color of their skin. The only things we don't have room for are hatred, intolerance, and bigotry.”

[vvanite]

Art Deco and TAZ Graduation

- Episode 30 "Take your Firbolg to Work Day

I know Travis probably made his choice to have the H.O.G. headquarters be designed with Art Deco for aesthetic purposes and didn't think of its function to the world of Nua BUT his choice is a really great accidental component that adds onto the world building in Nua and to one of the core problems that Graduation addresses involving the systemic nature of Nua. In this essay, I-

(And then I proceed to actually write the essay hidden below. FAIR WARNING: This is extremely long. If you want to learn about Modern Art History and how it ties into Graduation, this is your lucky day.)

This analysis/essay is going to be meta in terms of using evidence from real world events but it is needed to explain the history behind Art Deco and help us relate to the themes of Graduation. I think it’s clear to see how the systems and people in power in Graduation are influenced from the way our governments are now so I don’t think these connections are distant, rather closer together than we think.

Also, before we continue, I want to direct you to this lovely post made by a dear user and friend, Michelle/ fitzroythecreator, LINK HERE

She explains what she believes to be a core theme of graduation that I agree with and have integrated into this essay. Check it out <3

Before I can explain how Art Deco is tied into Graduation's core theme, I need to lay out definitions and context to art movements in the early 20th century. Along the way, I will make connections to the world of Nua and how real-life events in the early 20th century actually can relate to Graduation and its worldbuilding.

Let’s address what is Art Deco. Art Deco started as an art and architecture movement during the early 20th century (1900s). Most people are familiar with its aesthetics of geometric designs and influence of industrialization because of the roaring 20s era and many media influenced by it. Do you wonder why it was popularized in the US? It’s because during the great depression in the US, public buildings, more importantly federal government buildings, were commissioned to have this aesthetic thus it would have more publicity and access to the public. The H.O.G. headquarters could easily be compared to this event because it shares similar attributes of being a public government building.

With this information, it would be really interesting to imagine the timing of Graduation being set around the early 20th century. Art Deco gives us a time period to compare what kind of social events Nua could have faced similar to the real world. The modern period of the 1850s-1950s was a time when people were disinterested and scared of the changes that industrialism made in their daily lives. People were frustrated with the changes made in their lives and sought out ways to cope with the changes through escapism. In Graduation, I would argue that we see this skepticism and wariness in the characters about the changes Nua’s Socioeconomic systems made in their lives and society in general. A good example would be the student NPCs and their insistence that their hero and villain titles are just labels since they have been stripped from their original meanings. They still somewhat criticize the structure while upholding it. As the campaign progresses, we meet various characters who are very critical to Nua’s current orderly system such as Order and Gordie. In fact, despite their roles in society being vastly different, they both share the same opinions that the system is unjust as it hurts people thus there needs to be a push for change. I am not trying to label the time of Graduation to be around the 1900s, rather whatever year Graduation happens is in parallel to the events of the 1900s.

When I first heard Travis say, Art Deco, I was interested but disappointed it wasn’t Art Nouveau. My original thinking was because of Art Nouveau’s elitism of making the architecture more artistic and complex that only educated rich people can understand and less functional for the average citizen. A lot of the art displays during the art movement were held in house museums that were limited to rich eyes. I thought this reasoning made sense in terms of the H.O.G. headquarters being this elite building common people can’t comprehend. However, with continuous thought, it clicked. Art Deco fits so well.

Art Deco was meant to be a direct response to Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement. (And many more but for the sake of simplicity, sticking to these two major ones) Both movements share similarities of the desire to make total works of art.

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For art Nouveau in architecture, that is more on its aesthetics of stylized curving forms, thus it creates uniqueness with the architecture. For the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe, they focused on the importance of the craftsmanship and quality. The thing about the movement is that it’s heavily influenced by socialist values and the distaste for industrialism. Both art movements were diverse in style and locations globally. Because both took place internationally, there was no determined manifesto or structures for artists to adhere to. Another thing is both movements had lots of ornamentation which takes great skill and time to put into the works. By doing this, it would make the works more unique aspects to its character, however more time consuming and difficult to replicate.

Art Deco takes response to this because critics felt like these movements were outdated for the growing industrialism happening during the early 20th century. Art Deco focuses on sleek geometric design meant to be reproduced easily thanks to industries and have more emphasis on its function rather than aesthetics. It’s meant to be functional to accommodate for the new technologies of the 20th century.

So, let’s recap, in the late 19th century, two movements, focused on the style which had no concrete structures to adhere to and had the goal to make total works of art that is reliant on itself, are then replaced by Art Deco, a movement focused on its aesthetic to be mass produced easily and have a stronger focus on the form of the architecture to serve its functions. Does Art Deco sound similar to a number of Socioeconomic systems placed in Nua?

One of the key ideals of Art Deco is Functionalism. Art Deco is one of the many architectural movements in the early 20th century that decided to focus on function rather than aesthetics. What is functionalism? It is the idea that everything works as an integrated whole and that all the different components of a larger system are designed to work together. It is orderly. Architecture in the early 20th century was designed to suit the needs of the space. For example, each element of an office buildings would be designed and organized to suit that place. This ideal is more emphasized after the Great Depression in America where architects shifted their focus on the Streamline Moderne, where they aimed to make structures practical to the demands of real life and remove the emotional aspects of expressionist art.

Travis’s little choice to pick Art Deco is tied to a core theme of Graduation of dismantling the standards and structures set in Nua. It’s so brilliant yet unintentional. I know Travis hasn’t read up on modern art history. I hope by reading through, you can spot Art Deco’s need for creating limitation to focus on the functions and how it benefits the whole system. It doesn’t allow for the emotional aspects that Art Nouveau and the Art and Crafts movements held. Nua’s system follow the same thing. Everyone has a function in the socioeconomic system that has limitations meant to exploit the work labor and functions of the individual. The system leaves no room for indivduals to have growth to create real change. That’s not a flaw of the system. The system is literally designed to be that way with its many rules and standards. It's impossible to break away from it without being punished by the system itself. You need to function within its rules and have practical skills to contribute to the system. Your independent nature is stripped away. By having Art Deco be a core aesthetic design for the H.O.G. Headquarters, Art Deco ITSELF is just another element in the architecture meant to serve its function of upholding the ideology of order that H.O.G. and the world of Nua has. This orderly system has replaced the wild world that Higglemas in episode 12 remembers.

“I remember... the world when it was wild. Not sophisticated and ordered and... bureaucratic, like it is now.”

[english100project]

Numbness in Reaction to Horror

Part of the dystopia in Fahrenheit 451’s society was the lack of care that practically everyone had towards the world that they lived in. Nobody really felt bothered, or were allowed to feel bothered about anything. Large televisors spewed out the equivalent to white noise was what was passed as entertainment, and the idea of an original thought that threatened the status quo was quickly dealt with. Even then, if people had wanted to care it was made quite difficult by their society. News of the war was being broadcast on occasion, but the rest of the media was very much focused on other things. The vast majority of people were not privy to the urgency that their situation possesed. This lack of knowledge led to an obvious lack of action, but what would have been the alternative? If the environment was the same, but the people used their technology to connect to each other and share information, what would that have looked like? Unfortunately, I think it would look a lot like what we’re dealing with right now.

The COVID-19 pandemic sort of catapulted people to online platforms and shifted our reality to include these platforms no matter what. In my youth, technology felt like something we could opt out of if we wanted to, but now it’s a requirement if you want to be able to do anything. This also means that everything that is happening in the world right now has us involved. In the U.S, our media platforms are not (for the most part) censored, and so the most horrifying of world events is shoved in our faces quite often. TikTok as of late has been the main vehicle for which people, in particular generation z, have been given access to videos from the front lines of the Russian and Ukraine war, police brutality, and a literal slew of other first hand recordings of horrifying acts. Infact, it was TikTok where I first heard about the leaked draft of the proposed overturning of Roe v. Wade just an hour after it leaked, and where I watched the January 6 insurrection.

This environment of hyper awareness does not compare to that of Fahrenheit 451. In the book, the people were too distracted by their parlor families to care about the war that was on the horizon, and so failed to do anything about it, “Is it because we’re having so much fun at home that we’ve forgotten the world?”(Bradbury 69) The people are passive, and annoyed even if you try to talk about certain issues. Of course, the latter aspect is also due to the government's involvement in “dealing” with outspoken individuals, but the sentiment is still there. The book also makes you aware that even though people are supposed to be “happy”, they're in fact incredibly depressed. No one is talking about anything, and digesting watered down parlor family entertainment, but they're not happy. Montag’s wife Mildred tries to kill herself through a drug overdose, and Montag himself was pushed to read because he longed for something he felt missing in his life. He is even able to recognize the world he lives in is not producing a happy population and exclaims so to Faber that people are instead, “Committing suicide. Murdering!” (Bradbury 83). They’re not completely ignorant to the fact that their world is wrong in some way, but they're too numb and too ignorant to do anything to change their environment. This aspect is unfortunately comparable to the world that reads Fahrenheit 451. Being inundated with all the grotesque aspects of the world has left a lot of us feeling numb to it. There's too much to care about at the same time, and it feels incredibly hopeless. Plus, the lackadaisical tone of the outlets we find this information on makes the news feel even more alien and abstract. This phenomenon in itself has been noted by individuals, and usually results in one of two responses. Either just acknowledging the horrifying predicament we find ourselves in, or making a joke out of it. Both have yielded expressions of said feeling with some kind of art ironically, something that we tend to do when nothing else feels of value. The former’s most succinct example is Bo Burnham's song Funny Feeling from his 2021 film Inside, which sports such lyrics as,

Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go

Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul

A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling

It’s an acknowledgement of the weird situation we are in. Knowing all the horror that is going on in the world, and just having to move on because we can’t do anything. The flip side to this is to make off handed jokes about the situation, which gen z has an incredible knack for doing. Hell, I make horrible jokes about things and share jokes with my friends because we have a shared community in trying to laugh at the messed up situation we’re in. In saying this, I also want to acknowledge that it’s easy to criticize the people of Fahrenheit 451. How could they not realize it was their society that was making them sick? However, we do the same thing. If you're depressed, the burden of fixing or dealing with that is on you as an individual. YOU need to go to therapy or take medication. There is no reflection or questioning of why our society is producing so many mentally ill individuals, that problem is yours. Just as it was for the individuals in Fahrenheit 451. If you tried to kill yourself, they’ll just pump your stomach and take all the bad stuff out for the time being and send you on your way, not taking the time to reflect what lead to such a predicament. So yes, it’s easy to get frustrated at them for not doing anything and it’s easy to call them ignorant and claim we can't allow ourselves to become them, but I fear the alternative is not any better. We know everything, but at what cost? You and I dont have the ability to change the world, and those who do are instead too busy buying Twitter or sitting on their hoards of money like wicked dragons. The end result of our situation is incredibly akin to those of Fahrenheit 451, but we’re burdened with the knowledge of the horror where they were at least somewhat unaware of it. They didn't know the war was coming, and they also didn't know they couldn't do anything about it. We know the war is happening, and we’re terrified we can't do anything.

Works Cited

Inside, Burham, Bo. Netflix, 2020

[foreverdavidbyrne]

David Byrne’s interview in NME magazine

In 1979, David Byrne predicted Netflix. “It’ll be as easy to hook your computer up to a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries,” he told NME’s Max Bell, sitting in a Paris hotel considering the implications of Talking Heads’ dystopian single ‘Life During Wartime’.

He predicted the Apple Watch in that interview too: “[People will] be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches.” And he foresaw surveillance culture and data harvesting: “Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there’s this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience, but as more information gets on file, it’s bound to be misused.”

In fact, over 40 years ago, he predicted the entire modern-day experience, as if he instinctively knew what was coming. “We’ll be cushioned by amazing technological development,” he said, “but sitting on Salvation Army furniture.”

The 68-year-old Byrne says today, “You can’t say that you know,” chuckling down a Zoom link from his home in New York and belying his reputation for awkwardness by seeming giddily relieved to be talking to someone. “It’s crazy to set yourself up as some sort of prophet. But there’s plenty of people who have done well with books where they claim to predict what’s going on. I suppose sometimes it’s possible to let yourself imagine, ‘Okay – what if?’ This can evolve into something that exists, can evolve into something more substantial, cheaper – these kinds of things.”

It’s been a lifelong gift. Byrne turned up at CBGBs in 1975 with his art school band Talking Heads touting ‘Psycho Killer’, as if predicting the punk scene’s angular melodic evolution, new wave, before punk was even called punk. In 1980, Talking Heads assimilated African beats and textures into their seminal ‘Remain In Light’ album, foreshadowing ‘world music’ and modern music’s globalist melting pot, then used it to warn America of the dangers of consumerism, selfishness and the collapse of civilisation. Pioneering or propheteering, Byrne has been on the front-line of musical evolution for 45 years, collaborating with fellow visionaries from Brian Eno to St Vincent’s Annie Clark, constantly imagining, ‘What if?’

The live music lockdown has been a frustrating freeze frame, but Byrne was already leading the way into music’s new normal. Launched in 2018, the tour to support his 10th solo album, ‘American Utopia’, has now turned into a cinematic marvel courtesy of Spike Lee – the concert film was released in the UK this week. The original tour was acclaimed as a live music revolution. Using remote technology, Byrne was able to remove all of the traditional equipment clutter from the stage and allow his musicians and dancers, in uniform grey suits and barefoot, to roam around a stage lined with curtains of metal chains with their instruments strapped to them. A Marshally distanced gig, if you will.

“As the show was conceptually coming together, I realised that once we had a completely empty stage the rulebook has now been thrown out,” Byrne says. “Now we can go anywhere and do anything. This is completely liberating. It means that people like drummers, for example, who are usually relegated to the back shadows, can now come to the front – all those kinds of things – which changes the whole dynamic.”

With six performers making up an entire drum kit and Byrne meandering through the choreography trying to navigate a nonsensical world, the show was his most striking and original since he jerked and jived around a constructed-mid-gig band set-up in Jonathan Demme’s legendary 1984 Talking Heads live film Stop Making Sense.

The American Utopia show embarked on a Broadway run last year, where Byrne super-fan Spike Lee saw it twice and leapt at the chance of turning the spectacle into Byrne’s second revolutionary live film, dotted with his musings on the human condition to illuminate the crux of the songs: institutional racism, our lack of modern connection, the erosion of democracy and, on opener ‘Here’, a lecture-like tour of the human brain, Byrne holding aloft a scale model, trying to fathom, ‘How do I work this?’

“I didn’t know how much of a fan Spike was!” Byrne laughs today. “He’d even go, ‘Why don’t you do this song? Why don’t you add this song in’. We knew one another casually so I could text him and say, ‘I want you to come and see our show; I think that you might be interested in making a film of it’.”

Are the days of the traditional stage set-up numbered? “Yes, I think so,” he replies. “At least in theatres and concert halls the size that I would normally play, yes. The fact that we can get the music digitally [means] a performance has to be really of value. It has to be really something special, because that’s where the performers are getting their money and that’s what the audience is paying for. They’re not paying very much for streaming music, but they are paying quite a bit to go and see a performance, so the performance has to give them value for money… It has to be really something to see.”

How does David Byrne envisage the future possibilities of live performance?

“I’ve seen a lot of things that hip-hop artists have done – like the Kanye West show where he emerges on a platform that floats above the stage,” he says. “I’d seen one with Kendrick Lamar where it was pretty much just him on stage, an empty stage with just him on stage and a DJ, somebody with a laptop – that was it. I thought, ‘Wow’. Then he started doing things with huge projections behind. There are lots of ways to do this. I love the idea of working with a band, with live musicians. ‘How can I innovate in this kind of way?’ It’s maybe easier for a hip-hop musician who doesn’t have a band to figure out. The pressure is on to come up with new ways of doing this.”

In liberating his musicians from fixed, immovable positions, American Utopia also acts as a metaphor for freeing our minds from our own ingrained ways of thinking. As Byrne intersperses Talking Heads classics such as ‘Once In A Lifetime’, ‘I Zimbra’ and ‘Road To Nowhere’ with choice solo cuts and tracks from ‘American Utopia’, he also dots the show with musings on an array of post-millennial questions: the health of democracy; the rise of xenophobia and fascism; our increasing reliance on materialism and online communication; the climate change threat; the existential nightmare of the dating app; and, crucially, the distances all of these things put between us.

“The ‘likes’ and friends and connections and everything that the internet enables,” he argues, “even Zoom calls like this, they’re no substitute for really being with other people. Calling social networks ‘social’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”

Byrne closes the show with the suggestion that, rather than isolate behind our LCD barriers, we should try to reconnect with each other. In an age when social media has descended into all-out thought war and anyone can find concocted ‘facts’ to support anything they want to believe, is that realistic?

“I have a little bit of hope,” he says. “Not every day, but some days. I have hope that people will abandon a lot of social media, that they’ll realise how intentionally addictive it is, and they’re actually being used, and that they might enjoy actually being with other people rather than just constantly scrolling through their phone. So, I’m a little bit optimistic that people will, in some ways, use this technology a little bit less than they have.”

A key moment in American Utopia comes with Byrne’s cover of Janelle Monae’s ‘Hell You Talmbout’, a confrontational track shouting the names of African-Americans who have been killed by police or in racially motivated attacks – Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and far, far too many more. Does Byrne think the civil unrest in the wake of Floyd’s death and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement make a serious impact?

“We’ll see how long this continues,” he says, “but in projects that I’m working on – there’s a theatre project I’m working on in Denver, there’s the idea of bringing this show back to Broadway, there’s other projects – those issues came to the fore. Issues of diversity and inclusion and things like that, which were always there. Now they’re being taken more seriously. The producers and theatre owners realise that they can’t push those things aside, that they have to be included in the whole structure of how a show gets put together.”

“At least for now, that seems to be a big change. I see it in TV shows and other areas too. There’s a lot of tokenism, but there’s a lot of real opportunity and changed thinking as well.”

Elsewhere, he encourages his audience to register to vote, and had registration booths at the shows. He must have been pleased about the record turnout in the recent US election? “Yeah, the turnout was great. Now you just got to keep doing that. Gotta keep doing it at all the local elections, too. It was important for me not to endorse a political party or anything in the show but to say, ‘Listen, we can’t have a democracy if you don’t vote. You have to get out there and let your voice be heard and there’s lots of people trying to block it.’ We have to at least try.”

Will Trump’s loss help bring people together after four years with such a divisive influence in charge?

“Yes. I think for me Trump was not so much a shock; we knew who he is. He was around New York before that, in the reality show [The Apprentice], we knew what kind of character he was. What shocked me was how quickly the Republican party all fell into line behind him, behind this guy who’s obviously a racist, misogynist liar and everything else. But it’s kind of encouraging – although it’s taken four years and with some it’s only with the prospect of him being gone – that quite a few have been breaking ranks. There are some possibilities of bridge building being held out.”

But, he says, “It’s too early to celebrate,” concerned that Senate Majority Leader and fairweather Trump loyalist Mitch McConnell will use any Republican control of the Senate to block many of Biden’s policies from coming into effect. “[This] is what happened with Obama… I want to see real change happen. [Climate change] absolutely needs to be a priority. The clock had turned back over the last four years, so there’s a lot to be done. Whether there’s the willpower to do everything that needs to be done, it remains to be seen, but at least now it’s pointing in the right direction.”

How will he look back on the last four years? Byrne ponders. “I’m hoping that I look back at it as a near-miss.”

American Utopia is as much a personal journey as a dissection of modern ills. Ahead of ‘Everybody’s Coming To My House’, Byrne admits to being a rather socially awkward type. He claims that a choir of Detroit teenagers, when singing the song for the accompanying video, had imbued the song with a far more welcoming message than his own rendition, which found him wracked with the fear that his visitors might never leave. How does someone like that deal with celebrity?

“In a certain way it’s a blessing,” Byrne grins, “because I don’t have to go up to people to talk to them – they sometimes come up to me. In other ways it’s a little bit awkward. Celebrity itself seems very superficial and I have to constantly remind myself that your character, your behaviour and the work that you do is what’s important – not how well known you are, not this thing of celebrity. I learned early on it’s pretty easy to get carried away. But it does have its advantages. I had Spike Lee’s phone number, so I could text him.”

Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz’s recent book Remain In Love suggests that the more successful Byrne got early on, the more distant he became.

Byrne nods. “I haven’t read the book, but I know that as we became more successful I definitely used some of that to be able to work on other projects. I worked on a dance score with [American choreographer] Twyla Tharp and I worked on a theatre piece with [director] Robert Wilson – other kinds of things – [and] I started working on directing some of the band’s music videos. So I guess I spent less time just hanging out. As often happens with bands, you start off being all best friends and doing everything together and after a while that gets to be a bit much. Everybody develops their own friends and it’s like, ‘I have my own friends too’. Everybody starts to have their own lives.”

The future is far too enticing for David Byrne to consider revisiting the past. “I do live alone so sometimes it would get lonely”, he says of lockdown, but he’s been using his Covid downtime to cycle around undiscovered areas of New York and remain philosophical about the aftermath.

“We’ll see how long before the vaccine is in, before we return to being able to socialise,” he says, “but I’m also wondering, ‘How am I going to look at this year? Am I going to look at it as, “Oh yes, that’s the year that was to some extent taken away from our lives; our lives were put on pause?”’ We kept growing; we kept ageing; we keep eating, but it was almost like this barrier had been put up. It has been a period where, in a good way, it’s led us to question a lot of what we do. You get up in the morning and go, ‘Why am I doing this? What am I doing this for? What’s this about?’ Everything is questioned.”

Post-vaccine, he hopes to “travel a little bit” before looking into plans to bring the ‘American Utopia’ show back to Broadway, and possibly even to London if the financial aspects can be worked out. “Often when a show like that travels, the lead actors might travel,” Byrne explains, “but in this case it’s the entire cast that has to travel. So you’ve got a lot of hotel bills and all that kind of stuff. We wanted to do it. There might be a way, if we can figure that out.”

Once we all get our jab, will everyone come to recognise that, as Byrne sings on ‘American Utopia’s most inspiring track, ‘Every Day Is A Miracle’? “Optimistically, maybe,” he says. “There will be a lot of people who will just go, ‘Let’s get back to normal – get out to the bars, the clubs and discos’. That’s already been happening in New York; there’s been these underground parties where people just can’t help themselves. But after all this it’d be nice to think that people might reassess things a little bit.”

And with the algorithm as the new gatekeeper and technology beginning to subsume the sounds and consumption of music, what does the new wave Nostradamus foresee for rock in the coming decades? Will AIs soon be writing songs for other AIs to consume to inflate the numbers, cutting humanity out of the equation altogether?

“It seems like there’ll be a kind of factory,” Byrne predicts, “an AI factory of things like that, and of newspaper articles and all of this kind of stuff, and it will just exaggerate and duplicate human biases and weaknesses and stupidity. On the other hand, I was part of a panel a while back, and a guy told a story about how his listening habits were Afrofuturism and ambient music – those were his two favourite ways to go. The algorithm tried to find commonalities between the two so it could recommend things to him and he said it was hopeless. Everything it recommended was just horrible because it tried to find commonalities between these two very separate things. This just shows that we’re a little more eclectic than these machines would like to think.”

And in the distant future? Best prepare to welcome your new gloop overlords. Byrne isn’t concerned about The Singularity – the point at which machine intelligence supersedes ours and AI becomes God – but instead believes that future technologies will emulate microbial forms.

“I watched a documentary on slime moulds [a simple slimy organism] the other day,” he says, warming to his sticky theme. “Slime moulds are actually extremely intelligent for being a single-celled organism. They can build networks and bunches of them can communicate. They can learn, they have memories, they can do all these kinds of things that you wouldn’t expect a single-celled organism to be able to do.”

“I started thinking, ‘Well, is there a lesson there for AI and machine learning, of how all these emerging properties could be done with something as simple as a single cell?’ It’s all in there… when things interact, they become greater than the sum of their parts. I thought, okay, maybe the future of AI is not in imitating human brains, but imitating these other kinds of networks, these other kinds of intelligences. Forget about imitating human intelligence – there’s other kinds of intelligence out there, and that might be more fruitful. But I don’t know where that leads.”

His grin says he does know, that he has a vision of our icky soup-world future, but maybe the rest of the species isn’t yet advanced enough to handle it. But if we’re evolving towards disaster rather than utopia, we can trust David Byrne to give us plenty of warning.

December 18, 2020

[waystobuild-blog]

Spare Room?

Hey everybody. Last year, I had worked on the Sonic Zine @stayhomesonic which was a fanzine that would be sold to fans each with pieces of art and writing about the pandemic, with the proceeds going towards Doctor’s Without Borders in the end. $612 was raised and it was great to take part in such a nice cause.

Now that the zine has been finished, I am able to post my piece to social medias which I am doing so now. Rather than something soft or emotional, I decided to go a little more comical with these characters while also going into the importance of staying home and social distancing.

Spare Room?

 With a global pandemic going on, everybody was asked to stay inside their homes. This was a good thing, it kept people safe. But if you were a guy that didn’t really have a house and just kinda camped out wherever you stopped running, then you were in for a problem. Unfortunately for Sonic the Hedgehog, that was his predicament.

He now stood in the Mystic Ruins outside of Tails’ lab where he hoped that he could crash until this whole thing blew over.

Tails arrived at the door decked out in a hazmat suit that even covered his namesakes.

“Hey, bud!” Sonic smiled and waved at him.

“Sonic, it’s good to see you!” The fox grinned.

Sonic was quick to go in for a hug, but Tails was quick to duck away. “Sorry, Sonic. No touching. You know how it is right now.”

The hedgehog sheepishly rubbed the back of his head. “Sorry, Sorry. Forgot.”

“It’s all good. So what brings you by these parts?”

“Well, everybody’s been told to go inside for this whole virus thing, and I don’t really have a house so I’m like ‘Why not bunk with the best little bro in the whole world?’ y’know?”

“Sonic that’s great and I’d love to have you.”

“Perfect!” He beamed as he began to make his way towards the door.

But for the first time in a long time, Tails was faster than him as he quickly produced a remote control with a single red button on it and stepped back into the house.

Suddenly, metal bars appeared in front of him as warning sirens went off all around. Sonic was quick to cover his ears as he watched his friend’s shack basically become Fort Knox in a matter of seconds.

“Sorry, Sonic. I’d love to have you but I just can’t. I’m busy trying to find a cure so it’s not safe here.”

“They’re trusting an 8 year old to find a cure for a worldwide pandemic?”

“Yes and they pay me handsomely. Good luck trying to find a place to stay, I gotta get back to work.”

Sonic waved him off before leaving.

If Tails wasn’t gonna let him stay then who would? He wondered as he ran off.

However, quickly he found himself in Station Square and that’s when he realized that he knew someone that would have to let him in.

It wasn’t long before Sonic stood outside of an apartment and rang the doorbell, giving off his best winning smile.

When the door opened, Amy Rose stood before him, wearing her usual outfit but a facemask as well.

“Sonic!” She cried. “It’s good to see you!”

“Hey, Ames. Good to see you too.”

Sonic reached out for a hug, but Amy was quick to back away. “No, no mister, you know the rules. Keep a safe distance.”

“Aw, come on, it’s just one hug.”

“Sure first it’s one hug and then it’s one kiss and then it’s one virus.” Amy shook her head. “We’re not in good times right now.”

Sonic chuckled. “Who are you and what have you done with Amy Rose?”

Amy swiped her hand around and laughed with him. “Oh, stop. But seriously, what brings you by?’

“Well, with this whole virus thing going around I’ve been looking for a place to stay, so I thought Amy will definitely let me-”

“No.”

“Stay and so I’m just gonna go in and- wait, did you say no?”

Amy gave a placate smile and shook her head “Same thing, Sonic. Any other day, I’d love to have you over, but right now it’s just not a good idea.”

Sonic sighed at this but nodded in understanding.

Amy quickly closed her door and Sonic was left to find someone else to bunk with.

First Tails and now Amy. This was proving to be a lot harder than he thought. He thought he was a shoe in to get inside Amy’s apartment but the girl was far more serious than he initially thought she would be. Part of him was proud of her for sticking to her guns and staying safe, but another part of him just wanted a bed to sleep in for once.

Who else did he know that actually had some sort of roof over their head could he go to?

And then it clicked. While definitely not ideal, he supposed he could give them a try.

Sonic raced off from Station Square and shortly arrived in Westopolis where he went to a specific high rise apartment complex to find Team Dark.

Team Dark, having more government funds than they knew what to do with lived incredibly comfy in what was more or less a penthouse and they were 100% fine with that. It was a bit too stuffy and fancy for Sonic’s tastes, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

Sonic’s eyes widened in shock when he went to the top floor of the building and found steel plating surrounding the entrance to their apartment.

Sonic looked confused at this as he walked over to ring the doorbell.

But as soon as he placed a finger on it, alarms began to blare causing the hedgehog to instinctively jump into a battle pose.

But no danger came.

Instead, a massive screen flared to life and there stood the face of E123 Omega. “Who dares violate the safety of Rouge?!”

“Omega?” Sonic looked confusedly.

“Sonic the Hedgehog how dare you try to infiltrate our place of dwelling during the infection?! Please vacate the premises immediately or lethal force will be taken!”

Suddenly a comically large laser gun appeared from next to the panel and pointed dangerously at the hedgehog.

“Woah, woah, woah!” A sharp voice came from offscreen. “Omega, put those away right now!”

“But Rouge, he-”

“We do not vaporize our friends, Omega!” Rouge shouted.

If Sonic wasn’t mistaken he thought he had heard the robot groan but the laser was in fact put away.

In a few short moments the camera was turned in a new direction and he could see Rouge the bat lying lazily on the couch wearing a bathrobe and slippers, a magazine discarded at her side.

“Hey, Big Blue.” She waved. “Sorry about Omega, he’s gotten a little extreme when it comes to the virus.”

“A little? Dude tried to blast me!”

“And I would do it again.”

Rouge rolled her eyes at this. “Omega put the place on lockdown as soon as news broke out and won’t allow me to leave the house. I don’t really care though so I’ve just made myself comfortable.”

“Okay… what about Shads?”

“Shadow?” She snickered. “As soon as he heard, he didn’t even bother with me or Omega, he just used his Chaos Control and left. Who knows where he is?”

“Knowing him, he probably thinks he can’t be infected or something and is off trying to figure out how he can punch the virus.”

Rouge simply shrugged.

“Anyway, you gonna let me stay?”

Rouge shrugged. “I’d love to… But I am 100% sure Omega will vaporize you…”

“I will!”

“And I just can’t stop him.”

Sonic sighed. “Alright, thanks.”

Sonic ran off yet again, trying to find where exactly he could go but to no avail. He had friends all over the world and yet, none of them were taking him. He tried the Chaotix, he tried Professor Pickle, he even considered Omochao but then realized nothing was worth that hell.

But soon, he ran into someone that actually wanted him.

If only he could say the same about them.

“Hello, Sonic!”

Sonic stopped his running nearly tripping over his own feet with how sudden the gravelly voice had come out at him.

He looked up to the source of the voice and saw a floating screen before him and on that screen was none other than Doctor Eggman himself, giving him a big cheeky smile. The doctor wasn’t looking to good, he was covered in a blanket, his face redder than usual, his usually bushy moustache drooped down low.

“Sonic!” He announced. “I hear you are looking for a place to stay!”

“Pass.” Sonic tried to run away but the same floating screen was quick to have two robot arms extend from it and grab the hedgehog.

“Now hold on there, Sonic. I would like to extend an olive branch to you. With these trying times, we all need to stick together and I happen to know that you need a roof over your head. So, stay with me and we’ll make great company!”

Sonic let himself go from where the arms were holding him. “You’re sick, Eggman.”

Eggman violently coughed at that. “N-n-no, of course not. I am of perfect health.”

“I meant you’re messed up but yeah, that too.”

Eggman frowned at that. “Wait, I promise that no harm will come to you.”

“Is that right?”

“But of course.”

“In that case…”

“Chaos Control!”

Sonic and Eggman both looked up in shock to see none other than Shadow the Hedgehog drop down and dropkick Eggman’s screen, causing it to break.

“I- okay, I wasn’t expecting that, Shadow.”

Shadow rose from where he was crouched down on the ground and glared at the hedgehog.

“So… since you’re here, I was wondering if I could bunk it in wherever you were hiding out an-”

“Absolutely not!” Shadow roared. “After Rouge called me on my communicator, she informed me of your little crusade to find a roommate. So I’m telling you here and now, stay away from space. If I hear you so much as step one foot off the planet, then I will not hesitate to-”

“Woha, wait, space? I didn’t even know that…” And then it clicked. “You’re hiding out on the Ark aren’t you?”

Shadow’s eyes widened in shock and he quickly tried to cover himself. “I- I- I- cannot confirm or deny that… I- I have to go. Uh… Chaos Control!”

Sonic sighed at this, being left all alone with flaming pile of machinery.

After trying all his friends he was left in complete isolation. What was he to do now that he had nowhere to stay, nowhere to run to… He was all alone.

But it was those thoughts of loneliness, isolation that made him realize that he had one friend that he had completely forgotten to ask and zoomed off.

It wasn’t long before he arrived at his destination. Lush greenery surrounded him, birds were singing, nature was alive and well, standing amongst it all was a great big altar where a massive green gem of power could be seen radiating a comforting energy that rolled over him in waves.

Leaning against the same gem was none other than the Emerald Guardian himself, Knuckles the Echidna and as soon as Sonic stepped foot on the Altar, he cracked open an eye and looked over at his visitor.

“Sonic.”

“Hey, buddy. It’s good to see ya!” He sheepishly waved.

“What are you doing on my island?”

“Well… ya see, there’s this whole virus thing going on and…”

“Virus? What virus?”

Sonic stood there in stunned disbelief for a moment, staring at the echidna in complete befuddlement as Knuckles looked at him expectantly.

He just shrugged. “Forget about it. Anyway, you mind if I crash on Angel Island for a while?”

Knuckles put a hand to his chin in thought for a moment. “Eh, sure. Just stay away from the Master Emerald and me for that matter.”

“Works for me.” Sonic shrugged as he left to jog a few laps around the island, finally having a place to stay during this pandemic.

[dwellordream]

“...Today, most – though by no means all – free countries (along with a number of rather unfree ones) have shifted from mass conscription based militaries to professional, all-volunteer militaries. The United States, of course, made that shift in 1973 (along lines proposed by the 1969 Gates Commission). The shift to a professional military has always been understood to have involved risks – the classic(al) example of those risks being the Roman one: the creation of a semi-professional Roman army misaligned the interests of the volunteer soldiers with the voting citizens, resulting in the end (though a complicated process) in the collapse of the Republic and the formation of the Empire in what might well be termed a shift to ‘military rule’ as the chief commander of the republic (first Julius Caesar, then Octavian) seized power from the apparatus of civilian government (the senate and citizen assemblies).

It is in that context that ‘warrior’ – despite its recent, frustrating use by the United States Army – is an unfortunate way for soldiers (regardless of branch or country) to think of themselves. Encouraging soldiers to see themselves as ‘warriors’ means encouraging them to see their role as combatants as the foundational core of their identity. A Mongol warrior was a warrior because as an adult male Mongol, being a warrior was central to his gender-identity and place in society (the Mongols being a society, as common with Steppe nomads, where all adult males were warriors); such a Mongol remained a warrior for his whole adult life.

Likewise, a medieval knight – who I’d class as a warrior (remember, the distinction is on identity more than unit fighting) – had warrior as a core part of their identity. It is striking that, apart from taking religious orders to become a monk (and thus shift to an equally totalizing vocation), knights – especially as we progress through the High Middle Ages as the knighthood becomes a more rigid and recognized institution – do not generally seem to retire. They do not lay down their arms and become civilians (and just one look at the attitude of knightly writers towards civilians quickly answers the question as to why). Being a warrior was the foundation of their identity and so could not be disposed of. We could do the same exercise with any number of ‘warrior classes’ within various societies. Those individuals were, in effect born warriors and they would die warriors. In societies with meaningful degrees of labor specialization, to be a warrior was to be, permanently, a class apart.

Creating such a class apart (especially one with lots of weapons) presents a tremendous danger to civilian government and consequently to a free society (though it is also a danger to civilian government in an unfree society). As the interests of this ‘warrior class’ diverge from the interests of the rest of society, even with the best of intentions the tendency is going to be for the warriors to seek to preserve their interests and status with the tools they have, which is to say all of the weapons (what in technical terms we’d call a ‘failure of civil-military relations,’ civ-mil being the term for the relationship between civil society and its military).

The end result of that process is generally the replacement of civilian self-government with ‘warrior rule.’ In pre-modern societies, such ‘warrior rule’ took the form of governments composed of military aristocrats (often with the chiefest military aristocrat, the king, at the pinnacle of the system); the modern variant, rule by officer corps (often with a general as the king-in-all-but-name) is of course quite common. Because of that concern, it is generally well understood that keeping the cultural gap between the civilian and military worlds as small as possible is important to a free society.

Instead, what a modern free society wants are effectively civilians, who put on the soldier’s uniform for a few years, acquire the soldier’s skills and arts, and then when their time is done take that uniform off and rejoin civil society as seamlessly as possible (the phrase ‘citizen-soldier’ is often used represent this ideal). It is clear that, at least for the United States, the current realization of this is less than ideal. The endless pressure to ‘re-up‘ (or for folks to be stop-lossed) hardly help.

But encouraging soldiers (or people in everyday civilian life; we’ll come back to that in the last post in this series) to identify as warriors – individual, self-motivated combatants whose entire identity is bound up in the practice of war – does real harm to the actual goal of keeping the cultural divide between soldiers and civilians as small as possible. Observers both within the military and without have been shouting the alarm on this point for some time now, but the heroic allure of the warrior remains strong.

...But as I noted above, we’ve discussed on this blog already a lot of different military social structures (mounted aristocrats in France and Arabia, the theme and fyrd systems, the Spartans themselves, and so on). And they are very different and produce armies – because societies cannot help but replicate their own peacetime social order on the battlefield – that are organized differently, value different things and as a consequence fight differently. But focusing on (fictitious) ‘universal warriors’ also obscures another complex set of relationships to war and warfare: all of the civilians.

When we talk about the impact of war on civilians, the mind quite naturally turns to the civilian victims of war – sacked cities, enslaved captives, murdered non-combatants – and of course their experience is part of war too. But even in a war somehow fought entirely in an empty field between two communities (which, to be clear, no actual war even slightly resembles this ‘Platonic’ ideal war; there is a tendency to romanticize certain periods of military history, particularly European military history, this way, but it wasn’t so), it would still shape the lives of all of the non-combatants in that society (this is the key insight of the ‘war and society’ school of military history).

To take just my own specialty, warfare in the Middle Roman Republic wasn’t simply a matter for the soldiery, even when the wars were fought outside of Italy (which they weren’t always kept outside!). The demand for conscripts to fill the legions bent and molded Roman family patterns, influencing marriage and child-bearing patterns for both men and women. With so many of the males of society processed through the military, the values of the army became the values of society not only for the men but also for women as well. Women in these societies did not consider themselves uninterested bystanders in these conflicts: by and large they had a side and were on that side, supporting the war effort by whatever means.

And even in late-third and early-second century (BC) Rome, with its absolutely vast military deployments, the majority of men (and all of the women) were still on the ‘homefront’ at any given time, farming the food, paying the taxes, making the armor and weapons and generally doing the tasks that allowed the war machine to function, often in situations of considerable hardship. And in the end – though the exact mechanisms remain the subject of debate – it is clear that the results of Rome’s victory induced significant economic instability, which was also a part of the experience of war.

In short, warriors were not the only people who mattered in war. The wartime social role of a warrior was not only different from that of a soldier, it was different than that of the working peasant forced to pay heavy taxes, or to provide Corvée labor to the army. It was different from the woman whose husband went off to war, or whose son did, or who had to keep up her farm and pay the taxes while they did so. It was different for the aristocrat than for the peasant, for the artisan than for the farmer. Different for the child than for the adult.

And yet for a complex society (one with significant specialization of labor) to wage war efficiently, all of these roles were necessary. To focus on only the warrior (or the soldier) as the sole interesting relationship in warfare is to erase the indispensable contributions made by all of these folks, without which the combatant could not combat.

It would be worse yet, of course, to suggest that the role of the warrior is somehow morally superior to these other roles (something Pressfield does explicitly, I might add, comparing ‘decadent’ modern society to supposedly superior ‘warrior societies’ in his opening videos). To do so with reference to our modern professional militaries is to invite disastrous civil-military failure. To suggest, more deeply, that everyone ought to be in some sense a ‘warrior’ in their own occupation sounds better, but – as we’ll see in the last essay of this series – leads to equally dark places.

A modern, free society has no need for warriors; the warrior is almost wholly inimical to a free society if that society has a significant degree of labor specialization (and thus full-time civilian specialists). It needs citizens, some of whom must be, at any time, soldiers but who must never stop being citizens both when in uniform and afterwards.”

- Bret Devereaux, “The Universal Warrior, Part I: Soldiers, Warriors, and…”

[divineknowing2021]

viewing guide

At its core, divine knowing is an exhibition about knowledge, power, and agency. It’s become a more common understanding that governments, institutions, and algorithms will manipulate the public with what information they frame as fact, fiction, or worthy of attention. Though I am early in researching this topic, I've only come across a minimal amount of mainstream discourse on how the initial threat limiting our scope of knowledge is a refusal to listen to ourselves.

In a world faced with so many threats - humans being violent toward each other, toward animals, toward the earth - it can be a bit unsettling to release the reins and allow ourselves to bear witness for a moment, as we slowly develop a deeper awareness of surrounding phenomena and happenings.  

divine knowing includes works by formally trained and self-taught artists. A majority of the artists are bisexual, non-binary, or transgender. Regardless of degree-status, gender, or sexuality, these artists have tapped into the autonomous well of self-knowing. Their artworks speak to tactics for opening up to a more perceptive mode of being. They unravel dependencies on external sources for knowledge and what we might recognize, connect with, or achieve once we do.

The installation Femme Digitale by Sierra Bagish originates from a series she began in 2017 by converting photographs of women that were taken and distributed online without the subject’s consent into paintings. Her practice at the time was concerned with female abjection. Sourcing images found via simple keywords and phrases (e.g., passed out, passed out drunk) she swathes a mass-circulated canon of internet detritus that articulates and produces aggression towards women. With her paintings, she circumvents the images’ original framing mechanisms and subverts these proliferated images through a sincere and personal lens.

These paintings divulge the blurred space between idolatry and denigration these online photos occupy, asking whose desires these images fulfill and what their propagation reveals about the culture producing them.  While Bagish's work contends with political motivations, she also remains keenly observant of form and the varying utilities of different media.

“I use the expressive potential of paint as a vehicle to intervene and challenge ideas about photography as a harbinger of the real and everyday.”

Chariot Birthday Wish is an artist and angel living in Brooklyn. They have seen The Matrix 28 times in 2 years and love horses. The tarot series included in divine knowing is their most intuitive project, something they revisit when unsure of what to work on next. The Major Arcana are composed of digital collages made from sourced images, the Minor Arcana are represented by short, poetic, interpretative texts about the cards. The series is played on shuffle, creating a unique reading for each viewer. This is a work in progress that will eventually finalize as a completed deck of digital collages available for purchase.

Chariot's work emerges from a constant consideration of apocalypse and connection. They reference technology in tandem with nature and a desire for unity. Underneath their work's surface conversation on beauty, care, and relationship exists an agenda to subtly evoke a conspiratorial anti-state mindset. Through a collective imagining of how good things could be and how good we want them to be, we might be able to reckon with how bad things are in contrast.

“I think about texting my friends from the middle of the woods...

Humans are a part of nature and we created these things. There's this Bjork quote where she says that "You can use pro tools and still be pagan." I'm really into the idea of using technology as a tool for divination and holy connection with nature. I imagine a scene; being in moss, it's absolute bliss, and then the connection of texting, sharing an image of moss with a friend, sharing that moment through cellular towers.”

The album "adding up" by thanks for coming is composed of songs Rachel Brown wrote during what they believe to be the most challenging year of their life. Rachel now looks back on this time in appreciation, recognizing they grew in ways they had never imagined. The entire year, they were committed to following their feelings to wherever it may lead.

“If I hadn't been open to following the almost indiscernible signs I was being sent, then I would have missed out on some of the most important moments in my life.”

Kimberly Consroe holds a Masters in Anthropology along with degrees in Archaeology, Literature, and History. She is currently a Research Analyst at the US Department of Commerce. Her artwork is a passionate escape from a hectic professional life and touches on themes of feminism and nature.

Her works begin as general ideas; their narrative complexity growing with the amount of time she invests in making each one. Her decoupage process starts with cutting hundreds, if not thousands, pieces of paper. The accumulation of clippings sourced from vintage and current-day magazines overlap to tell a story. In Domestication, Kimberly borrows submissive female figures from found images of Ryan Mcguinness's work and places them in a position of power.

“I believe intuition is associated with emotion and experience. It is wisdom and fear, empathy and outrage, distrust and familiarity. It is what we know before we know it. This relates to my artwork in that, from beginning to end, there is never one complete idea concerning the outcome: it is a personal journey. It emerges from an ephemeral narrative that coalesces into a definitive story.”

Anabelle DeClement is a photographer who primarily works with film and is interested in relationships as they exist within a frame. She is drawn to the mystery of the mundane. Intuition exists in her practice as a feeling of urgency and the decision to act on it  ---  a drive often used to describe street photography where the camera catches unexpected moments in an urban environment. Anabelle tends to photograph individuals with whom she has established personal relationships in a slow domestic setting. Her sense of urgency lies in capturing moments of peak intimacy, preserving a memory's informal beauty that otherwise may have been forgotten or overlooked.

Gla5 is a visual artist, poet, bookmaker, production designer, and educator. Play is at the center of their practice. Their process is an experimental one embracing impulse and adventure. Their compositions are informed by relationships among bodies of varying shapes, materials, and densities. Interests that come up in their work include a discernment between symbols and non-symbols, dream states, the portrayal of energy in action, and a fixation on forms such as cups, tables, and spoons.

“I generally think of my work as depicting a layer of life that exists underneath what we see in our everyday lives.”

Gladys Harlow is a sound-based performance artist, comedian, and activist who experiments with found objects, contact mics, textures, range, analog formats, present moments, and emotions. Through raw, avant-garbage performance art, they aim to breakdown societal barriers, abolish oppressive systems, and empower communities. Gladys was born in Queens, NY, raised in Miami, FL and has deep roots in Venezuela. Currently haunting in Philadelphia, PA, Gladys is a founding member of Sound Museum Collective. SMC holds space for reconstructing our relationships to sounds by creating a platform for women, nonbinary, and trans sound artists and engineers.

Street Rat is a visceral exploration of the mysteries of life. Attempting to bring heavy concepts to your reality, it is the eye on the ground that sees and translates all intersecting issues as they merge, explode, dissolve, and implode. Street Rat is Gladys Harlow's way of comprehending, coping, feeling, taking action, disrupting the status quo, and rebuilding our path.

All Power To The People originated as a recorded performance intended to demystify sound by revealing the tools, wires, and movements used to create it. All Power To The People evolved into an installation conceived specifically for this exhibition. The installation includes a theremin and oscillator built by Gladys, a tarot deck they made by hand, and books from the artist's personal collection, amongst other elements. Gladys has created a structure of comfort and exploration. They welcome all visitors of divine knowing to play with the instrument, flip freely through the books, and pull a tarot card to take home.

Phoebe Hart is an experimental animator and filmmaker. A majority of her work is centered around mental illness and the line between dreams and reality. Merry Go Round is a sculptural zoetrope that changes in shape and color as it spins. Its form is inspired by nature and its color by the circus. The video’s sound was produced by Hayden Waggener. It consists of reverbing chimes which are in rhythm with the stop animation’s movement; both oscillate seamlessly between serene and anxious states.

“I often don't plan the sculptures or objects I am fabricating, there is a vague image in my mind, and my hands take care of the rest. I find that sometimes overthinking is what can get me and other artists stuck. If I just abandon my judgments and ego, I can really let go and create work that feels like it came inherently from me.”

Powerviolets is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Violet Hetson who is currently based in New York. After experiencing several false starts while bouncing coast to coast, recording and performing with several lineups, Hetson has finally released her debut album. ~No Boys~ namesake is a sarcastic sign she hung on her suburban CT teenage bedroom door. Violet Hetson grew up primarily listening to punk and hardcore. She parses elements of these genres with influences from bands such as X and Suburban Lawns. ~No Boys~ takes a softer, melodic approach to Hetson's punk roots. Powerviolets' music is linear, unconventional, dark, and airy with a sense of humor.

Mary Hunt is a fiber artist specializing in chain stitch embroidery. This traditional form of embroidery uses vintage machinery and thick thread to create fibrous art and embellishments. They use an approach called "thread painting," which requires each stitch to be hand guided by the turn of a knob underneath the table while the speed of movement is controlled by a foot pedal. Chainstitch works can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 200 hours, encouraging a slow and thoughtful process. Mary uses a Cornely A machine, made in Paris more than 100 years ago.

“I think we are sent messages and guidance constantly. Our intuition is simply our ability to clear the path for those messages. The largest obstacles on my artistic path are usually self-imposed negative thoughts. I simply do things to take care of my spiritual well-being, first and foremost, and the rest follows. If I can trust the universe, trust the process, then I am much more likely to listen to the messages sent my way.”

Jes the Jem is a multi-media artist working with acrylic, watercolor, mold clay, and whatever else she can get her hands on. She uses vivid color to bring joy into the lives of those who view her art. Jes the Jem has experienced a great deal of pain in her life. Through that unique displeasure, she has been gifted a nuanced perspective. She aims to energize the present while paying homage to the past events that shape us. In her art, her life, and her interpersonal relationships, Jes the Jem appreciates the gift of all of life's experiences.

“The pursuit of happiness and understanding is instinct.”

Pamela Kivi pieces together visual scraps she has saved over the years, choosing to fuse them at whatever present moment she sees fit. Her work reflects on creative mania, fleeting emotions, and memories. Pamela's collages are a compilation of unexpected elements that include: old notebooks, cut-outs, text messages or Facebook message conversations, nostalgic cellphone photos, and visual materials she has chosen to hold onto. She prints out, cuts up, scans, edits, repeats. Pamela's artistic practice is deeply personal. It is a submittal to the process of dusting things off until a reflection can be seen, all enacted without an attachment to the end result.

“I rely on intuition and whatever state of mind I am in to whisk me away. In life, I often confuse intuition with anxiety- when it comes to creative work, I can decipher the two.”

Through sobriety, Kendall Kolenik's focus has shifted toward self-discovery and shedding old adaptive patterns, a process that led her to a passion for helping others heal themselves too. In autumn, she will begin her Masters in Social Work at Columbia University.

“I love how when I'm painting my self-doubt becomes so apparent. Painting shows me exactly where my doubt lies, which guides me towards overriding it. When I paint something and lean into doubt, I don't like what comes out. When I take note of the resistance and go with my gut more freely, I love it. This reminds me of my yoga practice. What you practice on the mat is a metaphor for how you show up in life. By breathing through the uncomfortable poses on the mat, you learn to breathe through challenging life moments.

I think we all grow up learning to numb and edit ourselves. We are taught not to trust our feelings; we are told to look outside ourselves for answers when we already have a perfectly good compass within. Painting is an archway back to that for me - rediscovering self-reliance and faith in my first instinct. When I'm creating these rainbow squares, sometimes I move so fast it's like something else is carrying me. I sort of leave myself and enter a trance. Like how you don't have to tell the heart to beat or the lungs to breathe - thinking goes away and I can get so close to my knowing that I become it. I love how art allows me to access my love for ambiguity, interpretation, and an interpretation that feels closer to Truth. I find no greater purpose than guiding people back to safety and reconnecting them with themselves. The most important thing to ever happen in my life was when I stopped trying to deny my reality - listening to your intuition can be like a freefall - no one but you can ever know or tell you - it is a deep trust without any outside proof.”

Lucille Loffredo is a music school dropout, Jewish trans lesbian, and veterinary assistant doing her best to make sure each day is better than the last. Lucille tries to find the music rather than make it. She lets it tell her what it wants to do and what it wants to be. The Wandering EP was in part written as a way to come out to herself. She asks all listeners to please be gentle.

“Change will come, and it will be good. You are who you think you are, no matter how far it seems.”

Whitney Lorenze generally works without reference, making thick, graphic pictures with precise forms conceived almost entirely from her imagination. Images like a slowly rolling car crackling out of a driveway, afternoon sun rays shining through a cloud of humidity, or headlights throwing a lined shadow across a black bedroom inspire her.

“As it concerns my own practice and the creation of artworks generally, I would define intuition as the ability to succumb to some primal creative impulse. Of course, this implies also the ability to resist the temptations of producing a calculated or contrived output.”

Ellie Mesa began teaching herself to paint at the age of 15, exploring landscapes and portraiture. Her work has evolved into a style of painting influenced by surrealism where teddy bears will morph into demons and vice versa. Her work speaks to cuteness, the grotesque, and mystical beings. The painting "Kali" is an homage to the Hindu goddess of creation,  destruction, life and death. This was Ellie's first painting after becoming sober and is an expression of the aforementioned forces in her own life. Through meditations on Kali, Elli has been able to find beauty in the cycle of love and loss.

“To me, intuition means doing the thing that feels right whether or not it's what you want it to be. When I'm painting or making a sculpture, I give myself the freedom to follow what feels right, even if that means starting over or changing it completely. I allow the piece to present itself to me instead of forcing something that doesn't want to be.”

Mari Ogihara is a sculptor exploring duality, resilience, beauty, and serenity as experienced through the female gaze. Her work is informed by the duality of womanhood and the contradictions of femininity. In particular, the multitude of roles we inhabit as friend, lover, sister, and mother and their complex associations to the feminine perspective.

“Intuition is an innate, immediate reaction to an experience. While making art, I try to balance intuition, logic, and craftsmanship.”

All Of Me Is War by Ames Valaitis addresses the subconscious rifts society initiates between women, estranging them from each other and themselves.

“It is an unspoken, quick, and quiet battle within me as the feeling of intuition purely, and when I am making a drawing. I am immediately drawn to poses and subject matter that reflect the emotion inside myself, whether it is loud or under the surface. If a line or figure doesn't move me, after working on it for a few minutes, I get rid of it. If something looks right to me immediately, I keep it; nurture it. I try to let go of my vision, let my instinct take hold. I mirror this in my life as I get older, choosing who and what to put my energy into. The feeling is rarely wrong; I'd say we all know inherently when it is time to continue or tap out.”

Chardel Williams is a self-taught artist currently living in Bridgeport. Her biggest inspiration is her birthplace of Jamaica. Chardel views painting as a method for blocking out chaos. Her attraction to the medium springs from its coalescence of freedom, meditative qualities, and the connection it engenders. rears.

“Intuition for me is going where my art flows. I implement it in my practice by simply creating space and time to listen. There are times when what I'm painting is done in everyone else's eyes, but I just keep picking at it. Sometimes I would stop painting a piece and go months without touching it. Then, out of nowhere, be obsessed with finishing. I used to get frustrated with that process, but now I go with it. I stopped calling it a block and just flow with it. I listen because my work talks.”

[thewidowstanton]

The Widow’s best of 2020

Well… during a year when we haven’t been able to see many live shows we’ve still managed to find lots of things we loved. Here are some of them; live shows are indicated, otherwise we watched them online – our grateful thanks go to all the companies that streamed their productions for free – listened to them or read them. You’ll notice that our list includes lots of women and the occasional man.

But before that we start with a new category…

PERSON OF THE YEAR: Circus director Carol Gandey (pictured) of Gandeys Circus. If UK touring circus – an artform championed by The Widow’s Liz Arratoon for more than 25 years – is to survive Covid-19, it will be in large part to her. Gandeys had produced three shows before the UK’s March lockdown, two of which never had a chance to open, incurring hundreds of thousands of pounds in costs. It then provided accommodation and living expenses for 33 stranded artists, and meanwhile developed an air-flow working model for circus – trialling an opening at Butlins – which gave the government enough confidence to allow circuses to reopen with reduced seating capacities.  

Carol constantly lobbied the government and the Arts Council for aid – as did other industry figures – and her application to the Arts Council Recovery Fund, which was said to be exceptional, resulted in a £1.1 million grant; the largest amount awarded to any UK circus company. Gandeys used some of the money to cover the losses due to the lockdown, and to fund a survival package that included some reduced-capacity performances this autumn, as well as funding the production costs for reopening in 2021.

From one strong and inspirational woman to another…

BEST EXTRAVAGANZA: Rhianna’s Savage X Fenty Volume 2 TV special for her lingerie range. Wow! What a mix! This was an explosion of creativity; part fashion show, part dance show, part gig, part circus, part ad, and included a simply stunning floral set. Add a cast of big names, a wonderfully diverse choice of dancers and models, no expense had been spared. Exciting, fresh and really impressive.

BEST LIVE SHOW: Zebra, a solo show by juggling genius Wes Peden, which was part of the London International Mime Festival at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room.

BEST CIRCUS SHOW: The really inventive CAPAS by Circo Eia (pictured) – so great to see so many new ideas, and here’s our chat with cast member Francesca Lissia. Plus the intricate and dazzling Twenty Twenty by Gandini Juggling. 

BEST DANCE SHOW: Faust by the Ballets de Monte-Carlo, featuring the spectral Bernice Coppieters (pictured) as Death; and Cia de Dança Deborah Colker’s super-stylish Belle, inspired by the novel Belle de Jour.

BEST KIDS’ SHOW: Little Angel Theatre’s hat trilogy, presented by puppeteer Ian Nicholson; an adaptation of the picture books by Jon Klassen: I Want My Hat Back, This Is Not My Hat and We Found a Hat.

BEST COSTUME: The Widow has always considered costumes to be extremely important. As Federico Fellini said: “Don’t forget that costumes, like dreams, are symbolic communication,” and frankly we wish more artists would make the sort of effort Dua Lipa made on Saturday Night Live!

Staying with costumes… slightly less glamorous, but an effort was made by Hot Mess in party-sketch work-in-progress Dirty Stop Outs.

MOST EXCITING: Meeting Marina Abramović in the foyer at London’s Barbican before the Efterklang gig.

BEST SHOWGIRLS: Seen in the 1972 film Un Flic; costumes by Colette Baudot. Also featured is a stunning black dress, worn by Catherine Deneuve, designed by Yves Saint Laurent.

BEST BURLESQUE: Lady of Burlesque, starring Barbara Stanwyck, who wears costumes by the great Edith Head.

BEST FILM CREDITS: Sudden Fear, starring Joan Crawford as a scorned – but impeccably dressed – woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown! 

BEST CASTAWAY: Hard to choose between Rupert Everett, Ian Wright or Daniel Radcliffe, who all washed up on BBC Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs.

BEST SHOWBIZ STORY: Catherine Russell – on Outlook, BBC Radio 4 – who has played the same role for 32 years and said the same lines more than 13,000 times. She holds the world record for the most theatre performances in the same role; Margaret Thorne Brent – a psychiatrist who might also be a cold-blooded killer – in the off-Broadway play Perfect Crime.

BEST TV SERIES: It was a close call with The Queen’s Gambit, but our choice is the utterly brilliant My Brilliant Friend; the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s series of Neapolitan novels. 

BEST DOCUMENTARY: The Bee Gees – How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.

BEST CABARET PIC: The ever-lovely Eve Ferret at the Crazy Coqs in London. Picture: @marc_t_albert 

BEST SHOWBIZ MEMOIR: John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours.

BEST SHOWBIZ BIOGRAPHY: Jon Gresham: The Life and Adventures of a Sideshow Showman, Fire-Eater and Magician by Edwin A Dawes, Pat Gresham and Jon Marshall. This is a painstakingly detailed and enthralling account of Gresham’s life, lovingly compiled by his widow and friends from material written by Gresham himself. Want one? Details below.

BEST SHOWBIZ AUTOBIOGRAPHY: The heartbreaking Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy by Dorothy Dandridge and Earl Conrad. The revealing autobiography of Hollywood’s first African-American sex symbol and screen legend.

BEST GIG: Sevdaliza’s only show this year, streamed live from The Hague's Koninklijke Schouwburg (Royal Theatre) to a global audience.

BEST SONG: Désormais by Charles Aznavour, which was used as the title track for the film Chambre 212 or On a Magical Night.

BEST ALBUM COVER: Charles Aznavour’s Désormais. That hat!

MOST CHARMING: The sheep invasion during Isabella Rossellini’s show Sex and Consequences, which was streamed live from her farm in Bellport, Long Island, USA. Yes, her live sheep! 

BEST TWITTER CIRCUS PIC: The stunning Crystal Pyramids by Severus posted by @PablosCircus.

BEST LIVE COMEDY: Myra Dubois – star of Britain’s Got Talent – at The Poodle Club in Sydenham. Some of us recognised the greatness of Rotherham’s finest before she was famous!

GONE TOO SOON: Actor Chadwick Boseman (pictured) at just 43, funnymen Eddie Large, Tim Brooke Taylor and Bobby Ball, and dancer, choreographer and actor Ann Reinking.

MOST MISSED: Davenports magic shop that closed at the end of January – but you luckily can still order from it online – and a more recent casualty, after 96 years, London’s beautiful Café de Paris.

MOST DISAPPOINTING: Madonna’s Madame X show at the London Palladium. Goodness, this was shoddy! She was so incapacitated that she simply marked all the dance moves and had to be helped around the set, and up and down the stairs. The tickets were exorbitantly expensive and no one paid to see someone hobbling about onstage. We paid to see Madonna!

But let’s not end on a sour note…

BEST SHOWBIZ MASK: Shirley Bassey’s fabulous sequinned number!

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL: Some things we’re looking forward to include:  The 45th London International Mime Festival, which will be screening free-to-view videos of shows from past LIMF editions, running an extended workshop series with live and online classes, and hosting a series of talks.

We’re also awaiting the new series of Call My Agent, which starts on Netflix on 21 January 2021.

And, last but by no mean least, one of the world’s truly funny clowns, Gloria – also known as Mooky Cornish – has been busy training her chickens – Kukuruzza (pictured top), who has been taking piano lessons, and the athletic Galina – and will be touring the Canadian prairies with them next summer. Now that’s something we’d love to see! Picture: Nichole Huck

Better days ahead!

*Jon Gresham book is available via PayPal from jon@magiccarpettheatre.com: P&P incl, UK – £25, EU – £30, USA tracked – $52