I guess I’d now give that greatest living jazz musician title to either Cecil Taylor or William Parker. Probably the latter.
….Also of course Sonny Rollins, who actually probably does take that title.
[SL]: The Coleman show I saw in 2008 was easily one of the 5 best musical experiences of my life. This a huge loss — he was a true giant of American art.
The McKinney man who called the police has inspired a brilliant satirical hashtag
Sean Toon was one of the white McKinney residents who called the police on the group of teens at the pool last week. In honor of Toon dialing 911 when seeing black people engaging in “suspicious activity,” Twitter created a hashtag in his honor. Here’s how racists see the world.
Atena Farghadani is a 28-year-old Iranian artist. She was recently sentenced to 12 years and 9 months in prison for drawing a cartoon.
This cartoon, that she posted on her Facebook page last year, depicts members of the Iranian parliament as animals. It was drawn in protest of new legislature in Iran that will restrict access to contraception and criminalise voluntary sterilisation. Atena’s charges include ‘spreading propaganda against the system’ and ‘insulting members of parliament through paintings’.
Last August, 12 members of the elite Revolutionary Guard came to Atena’s house, blindfolded her and took her to the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran. According to Amnesty International:
“While in prison last year, Atena flattened paper cups to use them as a surface to paint on. When the prison guards realised what she had been doing, they confiscated her paintings and stopped giving her paper cups. When Atena found some cups in the bathroom, she smuggled them into her cell. Soon after, she was beaten by prison guards, when she refused to strip naked for a full body search. Atena says that they knew about her taking the cups because they had installed cameras in the toilet and bathroom facilities – cameras detainees had been told were not operating.”
She was released in November and gave media interviews and posted a video on YouTube detailing her beatings, constant interrogations and humiliating body searches. She was then rearrested possibly in retaliation for speaking out and has been imprisoned ever since. In January, Atena went on a hunger strike to protest the horrible prison conditions. Her health suffered dramatically, and after losing consciousness and suffering a heart attack in February, she was forced to eat again.
The quote used in the comic is taken from the speech Atena gave at her trial. It has been translated into English by the Free Atena Facebook page. You can read the whole thing here.
Time is now against her, she has just two weeks to lodge an appeal. Michael Cavna, comic journalist for The Washington Post, has launched a campaign appealing to artists to help bring awareness to Atena’s case by creating their own artwork in support of Atena and using the hashtag #Draw4Atena. Can a bunch of artists and a hashtag really make a difference and put pressure on the Iranian Government to release Atena? Probably not. But just remember that Atena is currently in prison enduring horrible conditions, and if her appeal isn’t successful, she will be there for another twelve years. FOR DRAWING A CARTOON AND POSTING IT ON FACEBOOK. Don’t we owe it to her to at least try?
RELATED COMICS: Malala Yousafzai. Sophie Scholl. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“This image was generated by a computer on its own (from a friend working on AI)”
R̙͢ U̼͕̬̼ ̶
BE̯̗A͓̩͎̭̯͉C̷̜̞͖̰H̰̟
̥̭͟B̠͚̳O̤̲̘̮̬̣͉͟D̷̼͔̘̺̥̤Y̵̬
READ̷̼͔̘̺̥̤Y̵̬?? ͏̥
“Dracula 1958 c” by Screenshot from “Internet Archive” of the movie Dracula (1958) – http://www.archive.org/details/HorrorOfDracula-Trailer. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Christopher Lee, RIP. I’m curious what percentage of his total career film earnings came since 2000. Well deserving of the fine, long career he enjoyed.
by @srodrig0209
One of my new favorite Tumblrs to follow is Un gif dans ta gueule… (roughly ‘A gif in the mouth…’) run by French photographer and animator Nicolas Monterrat who brings his surreal sense of humor to historical photos, paintings, and other borrowed imagery by creating bizarre and humorous animations. Collected here is just a sampling, do yourself and dive into his archive, you won’t regret it. (via Lustik)
The post throated adriana chechik appeared first on droolingfemme.
Hale Tenger, “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” (1995/2015) (all photos by John Berens)
There is a contemporary preoccupation that our culture — global, Western, ‘modern’ — will not survive. This crisis is not necessarily centered on specific issues, but on the condition that our issues seem to have no readily available solutions. Such simplification points to an almost tragic paradigm: there is no exit. In a new iteration of her installation “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” (1995/2015), Turkish artist Hale Tenger attempts to open up a dialogue across 20 years about what it might mean to exit our contemporary situation. The title of the work draws on a line from the poem “Sera Hotel” by Turkish poet Edip Cansever, whose subject matter is very familiar to us now: the transformation of a big city, in this case Istanbul, under the weight of modernization and tourism, into a new urban space where we’re never at home but only in transit.
Hale Tenger, “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” (1995/2015) (click to enlarge)
The installation consists of a guard booth placed inside a barbed-wire zone, without clear signs of whether entry is permitted. It is necessary to trespass, to violate a nonexistent ‘no entry’ sign. When the work was first executed in Istanbul, for the fourth Istanbul Biennial, Tenger found the derelict guard booth on-site and integrated it almost without intervention, giving the impression that the enclosure wasn’t an exhibition area and blurring the viewer’s sense of direction inside the space. At the time, it was perfectly consistent with the theme of the biennial: orientation. Today, exactly 20 years later, Tenger has re-created the work in New York City (presented by Protocinema), and the context has changed radically, with the depletion of urban space and the unmasking of globalization as a fantasy of capitalist realism.
Contemporary ideas of citizenship are not rooted in the dwelling in or creation of places, but merely in the consumption of space. This consumption is a chronic disorientation, a way of getting lost to the extent of not being able to distinguish between places. In this geographical dislocation the points of reference for getting lost/found are obliterated themselves, and with them the specificity of position; emplacement becomes relative. To bring to New York a site-specific work that did not exist for 20 years required Tenger to reconstruct not just a site but also its absence, the possibility that something about it wasn’t real. The guard booth couldn’t be reassembled, therefore it had to be staged — reproduced in Istanbul with similar architectural elements, folded and shipped to the exhibition site. Isn’t it strange for an artwork to reappear in such a malleable way when it was meant to address our horizon of the real? But perhaps it is only now, in this torn-off context, that a reading can be completed.
Hale Tenger, “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” (1995/2015)
Inside the guard booth, the walls are covered with idyllic images from around the world that block the real view, of industrial sites in both Istanbul and New York, while a small pocket radio plays nostalgic Turkish songs. And not without reason: in 1994 the state monopoly on broadcasting, which had been in place since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, ended. Yet 20 years later, despite the new constitutional provisions for freedom of the press, Turkey battles with media censorship so strict it would have been unthinkable during the military dictatorship.
This alone highlights the degree to which our current economic realities are neither obvious nor unchangeable. At the same time that the border between inside/outside has apparently been lifted in favor of globalization, never before have so many people been uprooted yet trapped, including the nearly two million Syrian refugees stuck in bureaucratic limbo in Turkey, without anywhere to go.
The Westbeth building, where “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” is housed in New York City, is formerly a site of early technological innovation: Bell Laboratories (1868–1966). It then became one of the first examples of adaptation of industrial facilities for residential use in the United States. This is quite important today, as the housing crisis, endemic to our current city model everywhere, deeply affects New Yorkers and displaces many from creative centers, which are on their way to becoming ghost towns of franchised commerce and mega-wealth. The lack of orientation — alongside our apparent lack of imagination about the future, the ‘we’re stuck here’ situation — that the work wants to address couldn’t be more timely in the United States, where issues traditionally reserved for the image of the third world have taken center stage: race, police violence, housing shortages, internal displacement. The culture of crisis is not only an economic reality, as some argue, but a structural fault.
Hale Tenger, “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” (1995/2015) (click to enlarge)
In a number of works across these same 20 years, Hale Tenger has often adopted an ambiguous approach that we will call the possibility of uncertainty. While toying with the debris of very fragile national histories, often framed by institutional oblivion and denial (Turkification and the Armenian Genocide, military dictatorships, Kurdish massacres, mining accidents, the Gezi park protests, or the refugee question), the artist attempts to change the ways in which these events are recounted, in order to highlight their impact on the constitution of a strangely artificial political reality. While retaining a certain Kienholzesque instinct to assemble reality from its own materials, “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” deploys this possible uncertainty upon close inspection. Inside the guard booth there lies an inner world of fields, waterfalls, idyllic bays, which ironically places access to the real horizon in a distant, far-away, almost imagined place. There seems to be neither an exit nor an entry here but a large crossing: we’re lost at sea.
Hale Tenger’s “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” is on view at Westbeth (55 Bethune Street, Basement, West Village, Manhattan) through June 13.
Museum of Modern Art employees and supporters protesting outside the museum on June 2, 2015 (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
Ever since the Museum of Modern Art’s contract negotiations with members of the United Autoworkers Local 2110 took a very public turn earlier this month, the Instagram account @MoMALocal2110 has been telling the stories of workers who would be affected by the proposed healthcare cuts. As negotiations between the museum and Local 2110 continue — and continue to get nowhere — MoMA’s union members are using Instagram to emphasize the human dimension of the often murky business of contract bargaining and broadcast their appeal beyond the negotiating table to coworkers, colleagues at other institutions, and the public. Their talks with museum administration may be deadlocked, but in the court of public opinion Instagram is giving the MoMA workers a decisive advantage.
“During negotiations it became clear to us that the lives and economic situations of the people the proposed changes were going to affect were not being considered, and that the budget and macro economics were the focus of museum management, which was not a surprise. We felt that we had to promote the people who make MoMA run,” the member of the negotiating committee who started the Instagram account, and who spoke to Hyperallergic on condition of anonymity, said. “People liked the idea of putting faces on the staff, and being heard. Some people were shy about having their photo on social media, or having their photo taken in general, and others were worried about retribution. As the campaign developed and people saw our positive message, they became more eager to participate. Like all projects at MoMA, it has become a collaboration.”
“Damien and In-Hee, Senior Graphic Designers, 1 year each at MoMA, want the contract to be as carefully considered as their design approach.” (photo by MoMALocal2110/Instagram) (click to enlarge)
Several MoMA workers now run the account, and many more have had their picture taken and posted online.
“What the Instagram project is doing successfully I think is showing the people who work here and opening up and kind of humanizing the museum in a way that doesn’t involve shouting or handing something to someone on the street,” said Jocelyn Meinhardt, an Associate Writer and Editor in the Department of Advertising and Graphic Design. “Hopefully it’s also showing non-union staff and the deciders of our fates who we are in a rounder way than a hello in an elevator or attendance at a staff meeting does. We really do feel lucky to work in a place with such an amazing collection and history, but that feeling gets heavily tarnished when your bills go up and your salary decreases.”
Increasingly, @MoMALocal2110’s photos have been incorporating works on view at the museum and offering glimpses of back-of-house facilities, creating visual puns that reinforce the connection between the contract negotiations and MoMA’s prized collection. “Francesca, Curatorial Assistant, 2.5 years at MoMA, thinks the title says it all,” reads the caption beneath a photo of the employee standing beside Ed Ruscha’s “OOF” (1962). Accompanying a detail of Kara Walker’s “Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart” (1994) is the caption: “Out of pocket cost for birthing babies under current health plan $100, under proposed health care design change $2500.” A photo of museum librarian and Local 2110 chair Danny Fermon alongside Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory” (1931) is accompanied by the message: “Danny, Associate Librarian, and Local 2110 chair, 44 years at MoMA, remembers every give back and fights persistently for a fair contract.”
“Talia, Curatorial Assistant, 2 years at MoMA, thinks the current health care benefits are constructed as beautifully as these Mondrians.” (photo by MoMALocal2110/Instagram)
“I don’t know who did it first, but I think many people who work here all felt it was important to have the art incorporated,” Brandi Pomfret, an assistant registrar at MoMA and union member, explained. “We’re not office drones and don’t want the world to see us that way. The majority of our union members work day in and day out directly with the artworks shown at MoMA. We don’t work at the museum because we just wanted an office job, we did it, and continue to do it, for the art.”
At least one non-union MoMA worker has also helped out with the Instagram campaign, seeing in Local 2110’s struggles a precedent for what benefits other museum employees can expect. “I am non-union and I support MoMA local 2110 because anything the union negotiates eventually ends up being applied to the rest of the staff,” the non-union worker, a member of the administrative staff in a curatorial department, said. “They are in a sense negotiating for all of us.”
“Mirna, MoMA Retail, 3 years at MoMA, wants to be valued greater than a Starry Night mug” (photo by MoMALocal2110/Instagram)
The Instagram account is the latest in a long string of campaigns critiquing MoMA that have been mounted from within the museum, often at times when union contracts have come up for negotiation (like the Local 2110 strike in 2000). The project’s many precursors will be the subject of the exhibition MoMA: Critical Interventions at the Museum of Modern Art, 1939–Now, which will open on the mezzanine of the museum’s education and research building on July 1.
“Management is essentially seeing us as a line item on a budget, but the Instagram account challenges that perspective and bears witness,” said Bret Taboada, the Assistant to the Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. “It says, ‘These are the people who make your museum run,’ and, ‘These are the people you will betray with your cuts.’ For MoMA to cut our benefits and hold back our wages in 2015 would be a choice, not a necessity; and one hopes management is not past the point of making moral choices.”
I find it fascinating that as the lower end fast food chains find their sales slipping, a solution is to create the most ridiculous and/or disgusting food possible. Such is the new Pizza Hut hot dog pizza. I never thought I would object to mustard on anything, but I guess I am wrong.
Richard Branson is not just a billionaire businessman. He's also a father and grandfather who understands the challenges of being a new parent
That's how Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, described his support for a very generous parental leave policy adopted by Virgin Management, the investment and brand licensing arm of Branson's empire
Virgin Management will now provide employees with four years of experience up to 100% of their salary over a 52-week period of shared parental leave. Those with fewer than two years of experience will receive 25% of their salary. The policy applies to both men and women, and to parents who adopt Read more...
More about Children, Business, Parenting, Family, and VirginTake a look at the bottom right-hand corner of that phone, the reflection tells the story of a guy who's going to get a severe talking to.
Submitted by: (via Venturebeat)
Scientists have built a computer out of water droplets, but why? It's not the first computer we've seen built with analog materials, and obviously runs at a tiny fraction of an electronic circuit's speed. It turns out, however, that it could be very ...
Apple began distributing fourth beta of iOS 8.4 to its developers on Wednesday that includes a permanent solution to the recently discovered "shutdown bug." This programming glitch causes an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to automatically reboot when a s...
Liturgy at Primavera Sound, Barcelona, 2012 (all images courtesy the artist, photo by Angelina Dreem)
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is the creator of Liturgy, the band from Brooklyn that plays “transcendental black metal music,” as defined in a manifesto by Hunt-Hendrix. Liturgy began as a solo project and in 2008 a band was formed after Hunt-Hendrix released his 12” Immortal Life. This EP was followed by the release of Liturgy’s 2009 debuted black metal album Renihilation. In 2011, the release of the band’s second album, Aesthethica, created something of a shit storm as people attacked Hunt-Hendrix’s approach to framing his music within theoretical and philosophical terms. While Aesthethica prompted heated reactions within traditional black metal circles, it also attracted critical acclaim.
I reached out to Hunter Hunt-Hendrix to discuss Liturgy’s most recent album, The Ark Work, which is radically novel in style and quite out-there conceptually, musically, and, dare I say it, arty.
* * *
Joseph Nechvatal: To frame our discussion a bit, you should know that I have very limited interest in, and knowledge of, black metal music, but I found the work with your group Liturgy, and your “Transcendental Black Metal” manifesto, very compelling and, indeed, inspiring. I cited Liturgy as an inspiration for my nOise anusmOs show at Galerie Richard (NYC 2012). The composer Rhys Chatham, a friend and occasional collaborator, first pointed your work out to me because of my interest in noise music. At that point, you were rather prominent in the media (2011/12) with the release of your album Aesthethica. So I wanted to catch up on what you have been doing since — have you any new recording and/or writing projects underway?
‘The Ark Work’ album
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: Yes. For the past few years I’ve been slowly putting together a new album called The Ark Work. We finished recording it this past fall and it was released in March. It’s a very dense and varied album — a much more varied arrangement than Aesthethica.
I also just completed a text called “Genesis Caul as Primordial Wound,” to be released in a journal on Schism Press. And I am currently at work on a piece for the upcoming Black Metal Theory symposium called “Perichoresis of Music, Art, and Philosophy,” which outlines a vision of a new kind of gesamtkunstwerk.
These are all connected by a mythology that I’ve been developing as an expansion of the ideas from the “Transcendental Black Metal” text.
JN: Excellent news. Let’s get into each of these developments.
I listened to the cut “Quetzalcoatl” in The Ark Work, and it struck me as being slimmer and breezier than the black metal music you made on Immortal Life and Renihilation, two earlier albums of yours that I also liked, or Aesthethica. All three disks have the incoherent sound of fierce shattering, but while a lot of black metal music has a negative energy to it, your music is ecstatic in its speed and sustained crescendo.
“Quetzalcoatl” has an easier poise and eloquence about it that sounds different, as you don’t fucking shriek throughout the whole song. You kind of robotically stammer or chant, but it still has the murky, complex sounds and speed I associate with Liturgy. But now the sound is increasingly electronic.
Quetzalcoatl is a feathered serpent, Mesoamerican deity and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent is the name for the third largest pyramid at Teotihuacan, a pre-Columbian Aztec site in central Mexico. I’m assuming the mythology you mentioned above is that of, or inclusive of, the Aztec?
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (photo by Kevin Shea Adams)
I could see why it might be, as a long time ago I climbed to the top of that pyramid just as a huge black thunderstorm came rolling in. That scary and sublime experience opened up an understanding of Aztec art in a way that no museum or book could. The art took on a way of expressing to me its unbearable relationship to a pre-electronic existence.
If what I have said sounds at all accurate, how does that tie into your “Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism” manifesto text? How does “Quetzalcoatl” suggest, if it does, what is on the new disk?
HH-H: Believe it or not — though Quetzalcoatl is indeed a mythological figure — there’s no particular connection between Aztec mythology and the mythology of The Ark Work. The song title has no particular significance. There are other song titles on the album, however, which do name figures that play a role in the mythology: Kel Valhaal, Reign Array, Haelegen, and Father Vorizen. But other song titles mean nothing at all.
The relationship between the mythology and the record is strange. It isn’t so much an album that represents a mythology or a story. The mythology is an ethical system, a sort of tool kit or structure that I’ve used to make the music. It is the mythology itself, in fact, which gave birth to the record. The basic contour is something like this: 01010n is an unbearably powerful light. She wanted to give her light to someone, so she gave birth to S/he/im. But S/he/im couldn’t bear 01010n’s light and shattered immediately as soon as s/he was born. 01010n retreated from the scene, but left behind The Genesis Caul, a little flicker of light. Reign Array and Kel Valhaal have the task, led by the Genesis Caul, of creating poetic/cultural/symbolic structures that might work as prisms so as to refract and reflect 01010n’s light, so that some day perhaps S/he/im will be able to bear it.
As for the music — yes, “Quetzalcoatl” is a departure from the sound of the past few records. But it isn’t particularly representative of the album as a whole.
JN: That’s fascinating. Your myth seems rather Nietzschean (S/he/im negating a negation) and very much in tune with the contemporary mindset of having a fluid self-identity. For those unschooled in Continental philosophy, Nietzschean genealogy stresses the importance of interpretation over dogma. How else does The Ark Work channel this countercultural subjectivity?
HH-H: The music on the record is very protean, you might say post-human or at least internet-era, to be a little more down-to-earth about it. I made an effort to create arrangements that synthesize the organic and the synthetic in uncanny ways — alternating between live horns, strings and bells, and their MIDI equivalents — and quoting disparate forms and uses of music ranging from medieval organum to trap rap. Though of course it all is in the framework of black metal.
Diagram from “Transcendental Black Metal” manifesto by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
I’m always thinking of these antinomies between live/synthetic, rock/classical, art/religion, fame/counterculture, emotion/repetition, and so on, and I view that effort to transcend them as a sort cyber-alchemy. An apophatic effort to achieve a kind of philosopher’s stone, a synthesis of music, art, and philosophy that would redeem everything in an eschaton [or end of the world], were it to be achieved.
I see Alexander Scriabin and his effort at composing the “Mysterium” as a major inspiration.
To address more specifically the question of subjectivity, for this project, it comes down to a contradiction between work in the music industry and the effort to treat that music career itself, the endeavor (with all its components including labels, managers, blogs, personnel, and so on), as a work of art. Here the reference point is something more like the ethics proposed by Alain Badiou: to be faithful to a truth that appears impossible.
The truth of “Transcendental Black Metal” is the effort to sustain a metal band that is at the same time a work of art, a business, and a hermetic quest.
JN: As The Ark Work is a conceptual project, I couldn’t help but flash on Matthew Barney and his The Cremaster Cycle with its use of narrative models that recall mythology. As you mentioned, you are working towards a vision of a new kind of gesamtkunstwerk, perhaps this is a good time to ask you about that vision. Does it include visual art and dance, as well as text/voice/sound? Is it something along the lines adapted from Wagnerian operatic theory — a total art that combines all the arts into one expression — that came out of Wagner’s seminal text “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (The Art of the Future)? How is your version of the gesamtkunstwerk part of the larger monastic philosophy that I discovered in your “Transcendental Black Metal” manifesto?
“Perichoresis of Music, Art, Thought” from “Transcendental Black Metal” manifesto by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
HH-H: Yes, it is hard not to consider Wagner and Barney when working with the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, though for me Beuys and Kippinberger are equally important as reference points. Not that these two are the same, but for me they complement one another with the opposed mottos, “every human is an artist” and “every artist is human.”
You should see the text I wrote for the now defunct journal Lacanian Ink called “New Music Drama” that is a commentary on Wagner’s text. The idea is that, given the state of contemporary subjectivity in the internet-era, a true Gesamtkunstwerk can’t be a performance on the stage: it has to be an enterprise that takes place in reality, like the career of a rock band. So that the band’s music along with its relationships to people, institutions, businesses, blogs, magazines, and so on, constitute a drama.
Thus I see the scandal caused by my manifesto on the internet and various personal difficulties the band has experienced as something like a narrative or a sculpture. Maybe the best way to put it is this: as I see it there are basically two kinds of Gesamtkunstwerk. One is the Wagner/Barney type that incorporates a vast array of mythological material into an epic work so as to stand as a beacon of eternal truth in the place formerly occupied by religions — crossing the art/religion divide. On the one hand, there is the attempt to cross the art/life divide associated with Fluxus, Beuys, Kippinberger — artists who use all kinds of everyday activities as art so as to, as a sort of short-circuit, pierce through the ideological veil of our time. Artists who even use shame, humiliation, and abjection as materials, like perhaps Bjarne Melgaard does when he writes a failed novel and turns it into a painting.
My aim is to synthesize these two types of Gestamtkunstwerk into, if you will, a meta-Gesamtkunstwerk that is a philosophic/cosmological whole, a radical critique of representation, and an affirmation of the flow of life that includes my own emotions, fears, and failures.
Why do this? Because the former Wagnerian type can easily turn towards fascism. And because the latter, in my view, does not engage directly enough with certain objectively existing cosmic laws, to which every age deserves access.
The new Liturgy album The Ark Work was released March 23 on Thrill Jockey Records.
There are some people who believe that any consumption of alcohol is a horrible, irresponsible, dangerous thing, that it is impossible to drink wisely or well.
To them, there is no difference between “I walked down to the bar, had a couple of drinks, hopped on the bus home, and fell asleep” and “I drove to the bar, had a whole bunch of drinks all night long, started several fights, groped every person I found even slightly attractive, then got in my car and drove home drunk, probably ran over a couple of people along the way.”
Most of the rest of us recognize that there’s a world of difference, that in the first example nobody was harmed. This metaphor can be extended, but unfortunately there are far too many people who can’t distinguish between an example comparable to the first and an example comparable to the second if I were to take this the direction I want to go with it… so it’s not prudent for me to do so.
By the time I was fifteen, I’d mastered the art of being a good girl. I wore my uniform skirt to my knees, raised my hand in English, refused to sneak cigarettes before class. I smiled a lot.
I was called only once into the guidance counselor’s office. She’d heard rumors that I was having a hard time and maybe even hurting myself. When I told her I was fine, she looked relieved and said, “When I first heard, I thought to myself, ‘Now wait a minute. That doesn’t sound right. I know Naima.’”
I was good at my role.
Every day when I got home from school, I’d shed my good-girl persona by locking myself in the bathroom and listening to rock and roll. The first time I listened to Nevermind, I sat on the bathroom floor with the liner notes and jewel case open on my lap. I was working my way through ’90s staples, and Nirvana had beat out Jagged Little Pill that afternoon at HMV. I let the first track—their most famous—rip through me. It was by turns dark and pretty, raucous and simple. Even when Kurt wasn’t singing, I could hear his voice. His presence hovered over every bar. The album played, and I felt that someone had reached down into my throat, grabbed hold of some vital, neglected organ, and squeezed, as if to say, “I know what’s there.”
I was a scholarship kid at a posh girls’s school on the Upper East Side, a Brooklyn girl with a bright future. My father worked second jobs and tutored me in math; my mother penny-pinched and had taught me how to read, even as she was learning English herself. And yet, I didn’t feel like a prized child. I knew myself to be a grave disappointment, unworthy of all their sacrifices, their hopes.
I wasn’t as thin as my mother wanted me to be, or as pretty, and if I didn’t lose weight, she was certain I’d end up alone. I tried, and, in the meantime, I wore my yellow rain jacket everywhere—during class, at my grandmother’s—so that no one would see my body and know what an embarrassment I’d become to the parents I wanted so desperately to please. Kurt understood: “I’m worst at what I do best.”
I was weak too, a crier. I couldn’t handle my parents’ advice, their truth talk. I didn’t want to believe they were right, that I was ugly, fat, sensitive, as entitled as any rich white girl from school, but sometimes I wondered, “And just maybe I’m to blame for all I’ve heard.”
No matter how bad things were at home, I remained a star at school. “The water is so yellow, I’m a healthy student”—I could write English papers in an hour, memorize flashcards on the train uptown. I was fine, aside from the little scrapes and nicks, the incisions I used to prove my unhappiness wasn’t all in my head. Sometimes, it didn’t seem so bad, my nights in the bathroom, my loneliness. Maybe this was just what it was to be alive, to be here one day, then another, and the next. I just had to hold on until college, when I could get away. I sang my determination, “I like it, I’m not gonna crack.”
The music was a boon to me, but eventually I wanted more. I searched for everything I could find about Nirvana. Mostly, I found photographs: Kurt swinging from a chandelier, Kurt in a floral dress, Kurt in bug-eye sunglasses, glamorous, and frail. I admired his rule breaking, how sad, irreverent, and ferocious he could be. He expressed a whole range of life, while I was stuck to a single setting: good. But I easily saw the kinship between my insides and his outsides. In my diary, I wrote, “Kurt Cobain = me.”
I was aware of the ironies: I was a Brooklyn girl; Kurt grew up in Aberdeen. His hair was blond (except when it was pink or blue); his mother didn’t speak to him in Spanish. I was a daughter and a sister; Kurt had started a family of his own. In 1991, I was five years old.
But when I listened to Nevermind, the gaps didn’t matter. Kurt and I had the whole world in common.
Few understood my infatuation. My boyfriend at the time was a painter, a Puerto Rican kid who wore eyeliner and fishnet stockings for sleeves. He got it. For anniversaries and birthdays, we bought each other Nirvana paraphernalia: postcards, biographies, Kurt’s journals. Once, I gave him a guidebook to Seattle. The city, its mountains and gray, symbolized escape to us. It was The Land of Kurt—a place where we could be ourselves. We planned to live there one day.
Even as a teenager, I knew my worship of Nirvana was both balm and fuel for my depression. When I sang along with Kurt, I felt less alone (“I’m not the only one”), but I also affirmed my misery as a fixed, integral, if unseen, part of who I was. My depression was as definitive to me as my race, gender, name, and religion. All things Nirvana—In Utero, Unplugged, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah—were my most sacred artifacts.
At Yale, I hung a poster of Kurt in every room I had, even after I found other bands, friends. I still fought with my parents. I still hated my body. I still strained to earn A’s even as I lost days to my depression. But I was freer than I’d been in Brooklyn. I had my own space. I wasn’t fifteen anymore. I’d finally arrived at the future I’d been living for. When I graduated, I threw my poster Kurt away.
I was twenty-six when I finally made it to Seattle. A friend of mine moved out west, and I leapt at the chance to sleep on her couch and explore the city. For days, I walked through the unseasonable March snow to Volunteer Park and Pike Place Market, I ate pho and Ezell’s fried chicken, read books at Elliot Bay, posed in front of the Fremont Troll, drank far too much coffee. I scheduled a trip to the Experience Music Project to see an exhibit on the Washington grunge scene. It was the closest thing I could imagine to a shrine for Kurt.
To the other visitors, I must have looked sappy and nostalgic: a long-haired girl in Converses and busted jeans, reading old set lists and crying, leaning in to look at the grainy photographs, the powder-blue guitar with the broken fretboard that used to belong to him.
Cliché or not, I cried for Kurt—because he’d suffered, and created so much, and the world would never know what else he might have done. I cried, too, for the man I’d invented, whom I hadn’t known but cleaved to, and for the girl I’d been when I’d claimed Kurt as myself.
I was slowly learning to do more with my life than hurt and pretend I wasn’t hurting. I’d started therapy, a novel. I was deep into a relationship with a man who was kind and didn’t listen to rock music at all—he preferred salsa. I wanted to publish my book, get a tattoo, cut off all my hair just to upset my mother and learn I could be pretty without it. I wanted to get married, drink beers with my friends, ride my bicycle in the summer. I wanted to see the Olympic Mountains on a clear day before I left. I couldn’t believe sometimes how much I wanted to live.
As I left the exhibit, I was sure that I wouldn’t be able to explain what it had meant to anyone without sounding like a fangirl or dope. It’s easy to deride the attachments of teenage girls, but I was convinced that what I’d felt in the museum was holy.
Out on the street, I searched for a bus that would take me back to the apartment that I’d call home for the next few days. I was emptied out from all my crying, and lost, but I didn’t quite feel alone. I’d carried something out of EMP with me—a memory, a riff, I couldn’t say.
It may have been raining, and I may have sung to myself as I wandered, “And I’ve got this friend, you see, who makes me feel.”
This fellow started out reviewing a camp stove and ended up accidentally creating an beautiful piece of art made from Coca Cola and molten lead. (more…)
SophianotlorenWHUT
Research paper on developed method to create a 3D model of your head using video captured with a smartphone:
We present a complete pipeline for creating fully rigged, personalized 3D facial avatars from hand-held video. Our system faithfully recovers facial expression dynamics of the user by adapting a blendshape template to an image sequence of recorded expressions using an optimization that integrates feature tracking, optical flow, and shape from shading. Fine-scale details such as wrinkles are captured separately in normal maps and ambient occlusion maps. From this user- and expression-specific data, we learn a regressor for on-the-fly detail synthesis during animation to enhance the perceptual realism of the avatars. Our system demonstrates that the use of appropriate reconstruction priors yields compelling face rigs even with a minimalistic acquisition system and limited user assistance. This facilitates a range of new applications in computer animation and consumer-level online communication based on personalized avatars.
SophianotlorenFuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Yesterday, the Fifth Circuit upheld the Texas near-ban on abortion. So either Kennedy is going to have to agree to give Casey some actual content, or admit that Roe is effectively overruled:
In 1992, the supreme court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v Casey nominally upheld Roe v Wade, but it replaced Roe’s clear rules with a holding that abortion regulations, even in the first trimester of pregnancy, were unconstitutional only if they constituted an “undue burden”. As applied by federal courts, the Casey standard has been a disaster, allowing states to pass increasingly restrictive rules.
The three judges who wrote the fifth circuit opinion – all nominated, you’ll be shocked to discover, by George W Bush – make good use out of the extent to which the supreme court has undermined Roe in the name of saving it. The opinion is appalling if you care about the equality and autonomy of American women, but it’s not stupid. It’s written in a way designed to appeal to Anthony Kennedy, the only member of the Casey majority still on the court, and the swing vote in abortion cases.
Casey’s biggest sin was ruling that Pennsylvania’s 24-hour waiting period was constitutional. As the fifth circuit opinion observes, the Casey decision acknowledged that the regulation would be “particularly burdensome” for poor rural women and conceded that it would have “the effect of increasing the cost and risk of delay of abortions.” And yet, justices still found that it was not an undue burden. The road between this and So what if women in west Texas have to drive 150 miles to find an abortion clinic? is shorter than it should be.
This reasoning doesn’t guarantee a supreme court ruling in favor of HB2 – the Texas regulations are more restrictive in their cumulative impact than the waiting period and the other regulations upheld in Casey. But Casey put a loaded weapon in the hands of opponents of safe, legal abortions, and the fifth circuit has now pointed it squarely at the reproductive freedom of American women.
So the access many American women will have to safe abortions will now rest on the most conservative member of the Casey triad. What could possib-lie go wrong?
