We spotted Tsumire and her adorable daughter while wandering down the streets of Harajuku. The two were dressed stylishly in color-coordinated fashion as they spent the day together.
Tsumire’s little girl Ivy donned a vintage printed red dress, which featured long sleeves, black piping, and white ruffle trims. She also wore Converse red sneakers with white leggings and carried a Anpanman box clutch with a gold handle and an intricate design. Twin braids, blunt bangs, and cat-eye glasses with white frames and red lenses completed her look.
Meanwhile, Tsumire wore a vintage kimono top with three-quarter sleeves, neon green trim, and a black-and-white checkerboard print. The accessory designer tucked it into an Ivy sheer red pleated skirt. She styled them with a black leather belt, red fishnet stockings, and white platform sandals from a Thai brand, which featured multiple buckles, floral details, and an open-toe silhouette. Tsumire finished off her look with bold red lips and earrings and other accessories by her own label, The Ivy Tokyo.
For more on little Ivy, check out her adorable photos on Instagram. You can also follow Tsumire’s personal account for social media updates, and check out her stunning designs on The Ivy Tokyo’s Instagram.
Jonathan Bradley: A recording that takes John Mellencamp’s immortal twang-and-snap guitar riff and reconfigures its themes of nostalgic Americana and fading romance into a new and original work that — through the intertextual power of memory, canny production updates, and classic FM radio’s ability to make even old sounds eternally new — demands acclaim as the definitive version of this composition. But enough about Jessica Simpson’s “I Think I’m in Love With You.” [3]
Alfred Soto: “Better be at least a quarter as decent as Jessica Simpson’s interpolation,” I mumbled when I hit play. Jake Owen, who in a deal with Yahweh cut his locks in exchange for a Thomas Rhett talk-sing, pretends he was old enough to have listened to John Coog’s perennial as a kid. The despair in “Jack and Diane,” which sounded secondhand and teenage-cynical in 1982, is anathema to Owen. Wonder how the girl who Jake hopes stays sixteen would respond to his fantasies. [4]
Thomas Inskeep: Well, this is certainly in my wheelhouse: not only does Owen reference John Mellencamp’s classic ’82 #1 in both title and lyrics, but he actually interpolates “Jack and Diane” to the extent that Mellencamp gets a co-writing credit. (His influence on the country music genre as it is right now is vast — where’s his tribute album?) The vocal on the verses is sly and knowing; I love the register Owen talk/sings in here. He kinda stadium-belts the chorus, and that works, too. Most importantly, all of the references to “Jack and Diane,” both lyrically and musically, get it right. “You’re holdin’ on to 16 as long as you can, every time that it comes on,” Owen says, and he’s never been more right. At 36, Owen’s old enough now to understand yearning for the past, and that’s what inhabits “Jack and Diane” more than anything. That’s why it was a hit 36 years ago. And that’s precisely why this is gonna be a smash in 2018. [10]
Katie Gill: Oh noooo. Oh noooo. Bro country boring white boy rap over a badly modernized Mellencamp sound? I’ve said this before, but if you’re going to hang your entire song on another song, it needs to a: be as good as the previous song or b: reference the song in a smart and inventive way. This is like Jake Owen tried to write down the lyrics of “Jack and Diane,” only remembered about a fourth of them, and then decided to write a song about the fourth he remembered. [2]
Joshua Copperman: Last year an Owl City song came out that sounds suspiciously similar to this song, and that’s never how you want a blurb of your song to start. I’ve always had a pet peeve with the original “Jack and Diane”, guilty of a great opening leading into a mediocre verse (fellow classic rock staple “Life’s Been Good” has the same issue), so points for making that intro the chorus. Except the banjo crowds the actual thing the song’s trying to interpolate! I’m not sure whether I’m glad they didn’t attempt the drum fill or the “let it rock/let it roll” section. [4]
Edward Okulicz: Remember when people said sampling was stealing, was uncreative, was soulless? They were wrong, and sampling a great sounding song like “Jack and Diane” is definitely something one should do. Re-recording it without the elastic shuddering underpinning the riff — the production choice that made the song jump with force out of speakers — is the very definition of copying while losing the essential soul of the source. And the song on top is boring and sucks, though I obviously still would, Jakey. [3]
William John: It’s not the exhumation of the familiar riff that causes problems here, nor is it the well-worn trope of grafting parable onto one’s personal circumstances. It’s the spiritless vocals in the verses; any momentum, or hope to evoke nostalgia, is drained away by Owen’s apathetic drone. [2]
Katherine St Asaph: An aspiring country singer guest-hosts SNL in a skit making fun of country’s rap dilettante phase, where the joke is that he sounds like Lou Reed. Then the band comes out and they bang out an OK country chorus. Management insists on John Mellencamp’s involvement, and no one is quite sure why. [2]
John Seroff: Thanks for your time; please leave your headshot in the pile by the door, and we’ll call if there’s an opening. [2]
For 3 weeks I made animated portraits of Bach on Pico-8, to go along with @Gruber_music‘s Pico-8 recreation of Bach compositions. There’s a total of 15 portraits and for each one I wrotea short post about one or multiple of the effects I used in it!
This is the first part of the regroupement of these short write-ups!
Super big thanks to all my Patreon supporters without whom I certainly wouldn’t have been able to work on this project at all. Here are the names of all the 3$+ supporters:
Joseph White, Jefff , Riccardo Straccia, HERVAN , Andreas Bretteville, Bitzawolf , Alan Oliver, Paul Nguyen, Dan Lewis, Christian Östman, Dan Rees-Jones, Reza Esmaili, Thomas Wright, Chris McCluskey, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Cole Smith, Giles Graham, Tim and Alexandra Swast, Sasha Bilton, berkfrei , Jearl , Dave Hoffman, Finn Ellis, David Dresbach, Egor Dorichev, Jakub Wasilewski, amaris , Brent Werness, Anne Le Clech, Jesse Bergerstock, Jacel the Thing, Pierre B., nanoplink , Sean S. LeBlanc, C Oakreef, Andrew Reist, vaporstack
With special thanks to Ryan Malm for supporting me at the 16$+ tier, and for such a long time too!
All the source files for these Bach portraits are available to download to all my 5$+ supporters, on this post!
For this first of 15 days of Bach portraits, let’s talk about how I’m rendering Bach’s face!
First things first, we need some reference data! So let’s snatch a portrait of Bach off Google Pictures and cut out the face and hair.
Now import that cutout in Pico-8 and write a tiny program that will generate a long string that registers the shapes’ borders on each line of the screen. The string takes the form of a lua table initialization and it is exported with printh(str,”@clip”), directly to the clipboard! Here’s a short excerpt of what it looks like:
Pico-8 makes a great scripting tool when you want to format or generate formatted data strings like this!
From there, we can use these few lines to render the shapes:
for y,xs in pairs(face_cutout) do
local i=1
while i<#v do
local xa,xb=xs[i],xs[i+1]
rectfill(xa,y,xb,y,15)
i+=2
end
end
And that will give you an amazing feature-less wax reproduction of Bach’s face! So now the features!
I just love how that looks.
Yes, the features are simply sprites made as close as I could to the original portrait I showed you above. Now I only have to draw them at the right coordinates and we have our Bach portrait!
But of course that’s not it! In this first animated Bach portrait, I’m dynamically scaling Bach’s face up and down!
Don’t worry though, for it is but another simple trick, mainly based on this function:
function dis(n)
return (n-64)*fac+64
end
This function, (‘dis’, short for ‘displace’, because of course 8 letters is too long) will move any value towards the center of the screen (64;64) by the factor ‘fac’, a global variable.
With this function, the cut-out rendering snippet from above becomes this:
for y,xs in pairs(face_cutout) do
local y=dis(y)
local i=1
while i<#xs do
local xa,xb=dis(xs[i]),dis(xs[i+1])
rectfill(xa,y,xb,y,15)
i+=2
end
end
Each line of our cutout is displaced towards the center of the screen, and so are the x coordinates that are stored in it.
For the sprites, we use sspr(sx, sy, sw, sh, dx, dy, dw, dh) to scale them and we displace them as well.
There is yet a little more to it than that, with the moving fill-patterns and the lighting effect mainly, but for those, you’ll have to dig into the source files yourself!
Here’s a silly bonus screenshot I took while working on this portrait!
Today’s Bach Invention portrait features stormy seas, with lightning and angry clouds! And all these effects are super simple!
Let’s follow the draw order and start with the stormy seas! That’s somewhat obvious but it’s only one rather big sprite drawn again and again!
The dark-grey color is palette-swapped with black so as to create an outline of sorts.
We use cos() and sin() to move each 64×32 sprite on the screen. The angle used for these functions depends on the time, the original x coordinate of the sprite and the original y coordinate. It is defined like this:
local xx=flr(x/64)
local yy=flr(y/8)
local a=-t*3+yy/16+(xx+(yy%2)*0.5)/3
Draw a big dark-blue rectangle in the background to hide the gapsbetween the sprites and we have our wave effect!
Next comes the lighting effect! No more than a few lines drawn from randomized coordinates to randomized coordinates!
It goes like this:
-- x should be defined beforehand
local lx,ly=x,0
for y=0,96,8 do
local nx=x+rnd(32)-16
local ny=y+rnd(8)-4
line(lx,ly,nx,ny,7)
lx,ly=nx,ny
end
But that will only draw a random broken line on the screen, we need to make it thicker! For that, we just have to draw every line some few more times with incremental offsets, in yellow before drawing the white, and before that, in black on the sides. Here’s a still of what the final result looks like:
Finally come the clouds! There again, very simple stuff, we just draw a line of circles of varying heights and radius. Both depend on combinations of trigonometric functions used with an angle depending on the time and the x coordinate.
The line of circles is drawn twice, once slightly bigger and lighterwith the color 13 (indigo) and over that, slightly smaller and higher and darker with the color 1 (dark-blue), to make the cloud convincing!
And that’s pretty much it!I’m very happy with this one!
In today’s Bach portrait, I used a super cheap and satisfying effect that I shamelessly stole from Celeste! (the Pico-8 version)It’s the drifting snow/dust!
To be clear, I didn’t actually steal Celeste’s implementation, I didn’t even take a look at it (I couldn’t find it), I simply came up with my own implementation to reproduce this effect.
My point is: that floating dust makes anything beneath it look better and today I’m going to tell you about my implementation!
First off, we want dust particles pretty much all over the screen. So we will use two ‘for’ loops like this:
for y=0,7 do
for x=0,7 do
local x=x*16+rnd(16)
local y=y*16+rnd(16)
end
end
Note that declaring the local variables x and y only overrides the x and y from the loops for the scope in which they’ve been declared. In simpler terms, the local x and y exist only until the first ‘end’ encountered. You could just as well call these variables something else, I just think it’s cool we can do that in lua.
With this snippet of code, we have points that are all over the screen, but also scattered, randomly placed.
But this snippet will go into the _draw() function and rnd(16) will give different values for every frame… unless we call ‘srand(1)’ right before these loops! That will reset the “Random Number Generation” (RNG) with the “seed” 1 and make the subsequent ‘rnd()’ calls give out the same thing as the last time you called ‘srand(1)’!
If you want to come back to more random numbers afterwards, I would recommend using the line ‘srand(time())’ just after the code for the dust effect.
Now let’s make those dust particles move! We want them to move towards the right in an irregular way!Here’s what I’ve come up with!
local t=time()
srand(1)
for y=0,8 do
for x=0,8 do
local x=x*16+rnd(16)+t*30
local y=y*16+rnd(16)
local kt=rnd(1)
x+=3*cos(t+kt)
y+=3*sin(t+kt)*(sgn(rnd(2)-1))
x=x%127
pset(x,y,7)
end
end
First, we add the time(*30)to the x coordinate of every particle, so that it moves towards the right.
Next, we add a circular motion to both x and y, using ‘cos()’ and ‘sin()’. We don’t want that circular motion to be synced up between all the particles, so instead of using the time as angle for these functions, we use the time + a random value, which will be the same for each particle every frame thanks to our ‘srand(1)’ call.
To make it look even more random and natural, we make it so there’s a chance that the motion added to the y coordinate is inversed. For this, we use this tiny bit of code: ‘*(sgn(rnd(2)-1))’, multiplying by the sign of a random number between 0 and 2, minus 1.
Finally, we use a modulo to make sure our x coordinate loops from the right side of the screen to the left.
We’re really close now!
All that’s left to do now is to make a few random particles bigger!For this, simply do a number comparison with a random number. For example, I used ‘if rnd(10)<2’. If that comparison is true, we use ‘rect(x,y,x+1,y+1,7)’. If it’s false, we only use ‘pset(x,y,7)’.
Once again, calling ‘srand(1)’ beforehand will make sure that we always get the same result for each particle.
And we’re done! Here’s the result and then the complete code:
local t=time()
srand(1)
for y=0,8 do
for x=0,8 do
local x=x*16+rnd(16)+t*30
local y=y*16+rnd(16)
local kt=rnd(1)
x+=3*cos(t+kt)
y+=3*sin(t+kt)*(sgn(rnd(2)-1))
x=x%127
if rnd(10)<2 then
rect(x,y,x+1,y+1,7)
else
pset(x,y,7)
end
end
end
I’m very tired today so this is going to be a LIST of what you need to do to make those puffy procedurally-generated animated clouds happen! But first, a little introduction!
Today’s Bach portrait features procedurally-generated animated clouds! It’s another cheap-but-effective trick can be used to spice up any background sky!
The main idea rests on how Bob Ross paints clouds. Yes, seriously.When Bob Ross paints clouds, he first uses a darker paint and draws a vague puffy cloud shape, and then he uses a much lighter paint to cover the top of those cloud shapes. The lighter paint becomes the biggest part of the clouds and makes it look like the sun is shining above, while the darker paint shows only on the underside of the clouds, making it look like the clouds are blocking the sun.
And that is pretty much what we’re going to do as well!
We’re initializing our clouds in the _init().
Every cloud is a table storing x and y coordinates, and then data for a bunch of circles.
Every circle is itself a table, with coordinates relative to those of the cloud, a radius, and then two random valuesrnda<1 and 1<rndb<4 which we will use later to animate the cloud.
Store all the clouds in one ‘clouds’ table.
Now we’re drawing the clouds in the _draw().
First you should calculate where you want your clouds to be on the screen. If you just want them scrolling by, add the time() to it (*10) and do a modulo so that it loops from one side of the screen to the other. If you want parallax or make the positions relative to a camera system, just, uh, do your calculations now.
Now you use ‘camera(-x,-y)’ to center on where you want your cloud to be on screen.
For every circle in your cloud, do the next two steps:
Add this to its y coordinate:circle.rndb * cos(circle.rnda + t()). (this step is optional – it’s for the animation)
Then draw the circle with the color 13(purple).
Repeat steps 8, 9, 10 with y-1, radius-1 and the color 6 (light grey) and then again with y-2, raidus-2 and the color 7 (white).
You’re all done!
Today we’re looking at Bach’s rotating crown and how I implemented it!
First off, you need two crown sprites, one for the outside of the crown and one for the inside. I set them side by side, but you can put one under the other. (or anywhere else, but these positions are good because it’s easy to get from one to the other in terms of coordinates)
Let’s draw that crown now! First off, we use camera(-x,-y) to choose where the center of the crown will be on screen.
In this portrait, the crown takes up 40 pixels in width on-screen. (for no reason other than it seemed like the right size) So we’ll start with a ‘for’ loop with x going from 0 to 39.
For each value of x, we will draw a vertical slice of the inside of the crown, and then a vertical slice of the inside for the crown.The inside will be drawn higher and the inside lower, to give an impression of perspective.
But here comes the trouble. We’re getting to the point where we need to figure out the height offset for every slice of crown to make it look circular. And then we need to find which slice of the sprite to draw for each x value.
I scratched my head on this for longer than I’d care to admit when making this portrait and eventually fell back to keeping it super simple even if it meant it would be less convincing.
What I did is I used ‘x/40*0.5’ as angle for a sin() call that would give me the height offset for each new slice. And for finding the sprite slice, I went with the simplest solution possible: sx=(x/40*64+dt)%64. No trigonometry, we just take the x value, divide it by 40 (the width on-screen) and multiply it by 64 (the sprite’s width).
Before deciding to go with that, I fumbled with trigonometry for a long while to no avail. In the end, I figured that to do this properly, I would need an ‘arc cos’ function, which would give me the proper angle for both my height offset calculations and my sprite slice approximation. However this function is absent from the Pico-8 API.
Two hours ago, it occurred to me that the formula ‘cos(a)²+sin(a)²=1’could be used to make a custom acos() function. It’s too late now, but maybe I’ll get another occasion to try that out!
Anyway, here’s the final code!
local dt=t*30
camera(-x,-y)
for x=0,39 do
local y=4.5*sin(x/40*0.5)
local sx=(x/40*64+dt)%64 --outside of the crown
local sxb=(x/40*64-dt)%64 --inside of the crown
sspr(sxb+64,24,1,32,x,y) --24 is the y coordinate of the
sspr(sx,24,1,32,x,-y) -- sprite in the sprite-sheet
end
Thank you for reading! I hope this was informative!
As if pulled straight from the sewer clubs of the worlds of Robocop & C.O.P.S., L.O.T.I.O.N is executing a cyber punk that is messy, ugly, dark, and most importantly very apt at merging punk and electronic sounds into one. With a few tapes, an LP, and the killer usb earring split with SADIST under their belt NYC’s L.O.T.I.O.N. is poised to heap two slabs of post-apocalyptic wax on us in this slowly decaying year of 2018. This here tape is basically a sampler for the upcoming releases and a remix. It’s not much but it’s nasty and it whets the appetite. Evil computer punk is what we need right now.
“Xenophobia” demo from Scumputer/L.O.T.I.O.N. split 12” coming 2018
Hardware demo from L.O.T.I.O.N. Toxic State LP coming 2018
Goodbye Humans from “Digital Control And Man’s Obsolescence” remixed by Scumputer
In many ways, Liquid Sky was the cult movie of the ‘80s. Its outrageous new wave fashions and synth-heavy soundtrack, its eccentric plot (about a race of microscopic aliens who infiltrate the New York dance club scene to score heroin, and an androgynous model whose sexual partners die mysteriously), and its remarkable performance by lead actress/co-writer Anne Carlisle (who plays both the female protagonist and her male adversary) put it in a prime position to ride the transition from the Rocky Horror midnight movie era into the burgeoning frontier of home video weirdness. Yet despite its obvious period trappings, its commentary on sexuality, gender roles, and assault feels strikingly modern– and by “modern,” I mean right now, at this exact moment, in 2018. Like the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, lack of availability has caused Liquid Sky to go unseen by a generation of cineastes, but that’s poised to change with a gorgeous new blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome. What’s more, the Boston Underground Film Festival kicks off tonight with an ultra-rare 35mm screening, hosted by director Slava Tsukerman himself. I was fortunate enough to speak with Tsukerman on his upbringing behind the Iron Curtain, his unlikely friendships in the New York art scene, and his plans for the future of Liquid Sky.
BOSTON HASSLE:I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your background. You were born in the Soviet Union, is that right?
SLAVA TSUKERMAN: Right. I was born, educated, and actually started my film career in the Soviet Union.
BH: Oh, interesting. What sort of work did you do over there?
ST: Well, you see, in the Soviet Union, there was only one film institute. No separate film schools. One film institute with all the top filmmaking professors, with different divisions for different professions. And they were taking, like, twelve, fifteen students to start directing a year, from the entire socialist world, the third world, and Russia. So it was very difficult to get there, and you couldn’t work as a filmmaker without a diploma. It was impossible– “You should have diploma!” I was the right age to go there after high school, but there was terrible anti-Semitism– because I’m Jewish, I had no chance to get there. But I wanted to be a filmmaker. I think the first time I made something that I’d call “film,” I was eight years old. So I decided that, because I had no choice, I needed to get some other education, and because Eisenstein was an architect and a civil engineer, I decided that I should get the same thing. So I went to the civil engineering institute, and I graduated, but it was Krushchev’s time, with a lot of activity, and something which was called “amateur filmmaking” appeared. And I made, with the friends I made at the civil engineering school, we made amateur films. We shot a fiction short on 35mm film, which got first prize at the National Soviet Film Festival, and was released for general release in the Soviet Union. So I was a unique person, the only person in Russia, after Stalin’s time, who managed to make film before studying film school. So after that I became a student at film school.
After film school, because I had already had an education, they had special rules for me. They sent me to work at the studio of science documentaries and educational films, but I wasn’t really making educational films My friends and I created a new genre, philosophical films, which would mix everything– fiction, animation, and special effects– and they were about complicated questions of philosophy and science. Even some film stars were in my films. And I had great success with it– a lot of prizes. And then a moment came that emigration started. It became possible to emigrate– with risks, but it was possible. Me and my wife applied for emigration. There was only one way, to emigrate to Israel. We emigrated in 1973. Three years we spent in Israel. I started shooting in Israel within three months after we came there. My first documentary for Israeli TV got the first prize in the Hollywood TV Film Festival, which existed back then, and it was a very big event, because no Israeli television film ever won any prizes before that.
So I was very successful in Israel. I realized very fast back then, in Israel, you really couldn’t make a really internationally accepted film. The country was very small. No audience would see these films. And especially, for me, it was a big problem, because I had grown up behind the Iron Curtain in Russia, and knew nothing besides Russia. And in order to make films which would be accepted all over the world I needed a new worldview. So I’d already had the first year of life in Israel, and I’d already traveled to America– to Hollywood for festivals, and to New York. And I came to the decision that the best place for somebody who wants to make independent films is New York. So we moved to New York, with the idea that I would have a new life and find investors, and that would take me four or five years maybe, and then I’d make my first film. And it happened exactly that way– I made Liquid Sky after about five years of life in New York.
Anne Carlisle in LIQUID SKY (1982) dir. Slava Tsukerman
BH:How did you come to start making Liquid Sky itself? Where did the idea come from?
ST: Well, I had a lot of other projects before that, which I couldn’t finance. Then, finally, was the one [Sweet Sixteen, prior to Liquid Sky] which we found an investor who was ready to finance the pre-production. He wanted, actually, to finance the film for half a million. And after we finished pre-production, he invited a seasoned production manager, who said, “There is no way that someone would make this film for half a million!” So the investor trusted the experienced American production manager more than me, who had never made a film in America before. So he just decided that he wanted to spend some money on pre-production, and that’s enough. He stopped financing. And during pre-production, we were working on casting. It was a science fiction film, which was very close to nightlife, and all that. And casting was made by Bob Brady, who was playing the professor in Liquid Sky. He was a professor. He was teaching in the Boston School of Visual Arts, and he had classes with a lot of students. So all these people became my and my wife’s friends, and I was kind of among them. And then the idea of Liquid Sky came to my mind: I wanted these people I already know to play themselves in my new film.
BH:Watching it today, one of the most interesting things to me is how it really feels like a snapshot of the whole New York scene at the time– new wave and Danceteria and all that. Were you at all involved with that scene?
ST: Well, kind of– I was involved, but it was a little bit different than normal. It’s not that I came there to have fun. I came there because I already had this idea for Liquid Sky. And the people became, as I said, my friends, before I got involved. It was very exciting to me. I found all that very interesting, because I thought that young people in this movement– like the hippies in the ‘60s, and new wave in the ‘70s and ‘80s– that’s really the people who created a new style, who changed their life, and the world, and a new style of life was formed. So I found it all very interesting. And we were real friends, in spite of my accent, and being older, and being from Russia. They fit very good with me and my wife, and I fit very good with them. And then, at that moment, we started writing the script for Liquid Sky. Of course, we were going to a lot of nightclubs, trying to learn as much as possible.
BH:One of the most arresting parts of the film is Anne Carlisle, who plays both the male and female leads, and also is credited with co-writing the screenplay.
ST: Yes. Anne, as I said, became our friend. My wife, who was educated as a screenwriter as well, had written a script about a woman who cannot have orgasms. And because she was from Russia, and she wasn’t sure about the quality of her English, she wanted help with the dialogue, to finish the script. And Anne was already a friend, so she invited Anne to help. They were writing, and she actually moved in with us to our loft. Every night, during dinner, we had all these discussions about the female orgasm, and other things like that. And then the idea for the script for Liquid Sky came to my mind. That’s really how it started! [laughs] And because she was really a fashion model, it really was her life. So one of my ideas at that moment was that good independent film should be done around real people, who would play themselves.
Anne was an ideal character for a film like that. From the very beginning, the idea was to build the story around her, and all the other characters would be people who really had some relationship with her, who would play themselves. That was the first idea. Actually, finally, a couple of characters were not played by the original characters themselves, because they were shocked by the script, and it didn’t look like it was the right thing to be involved with the production. [laughs] So we recast a couple of characters. But most of the people were played by the prototypes themselves, and obviously Anne was there from the very beginning. But the second part, the male part [Jimmy], was a real person. There was this boy, and we thought he would play the character. But he was very negative toward the script, [and didn’t want to play] a negative character, and we decided not to use him as an actor. But probably in my subconscious, I knew that Anne would play both parts, first of all because I love an actress playing two parts, and second, because that’s a part of Anne’s personality. When she was a little girl, her mother would dress her as a boy, and called her “Jimmy.” So, immediately, that was used by me. I said, “Listen, let’s make you Jimmy!” [laughs] And then we tried a small experiment– we dressed Anne in the costume, and went to the nightclub, and nobody recognized that she was a girl. She even picked up a girl there! And that made me make the final decision that she would play both parts.
Anne Carlisle (again) in LIQUID SKY (1982) dir. Slava Tsukerman
BH:Another thing that struck me watching it is that a lot of the conversation in it about sexuality and gender feels especially relevant right now. I take it that sort of came from the whole scene as well?
ST: Yes. Yes, actually, we’d planned already, over a year ago, to make Liquid Sky 2. The script that we’re finishing is all about abuse. It’s very close to what’s happening now. It’s like with Liquid Sky1— you know, AIDS happened after we made Liquid Sky. And now, you know, we haven’t had time to shoot the film, but we were just writing this script about social male abuse, and then this whole episode happened.
BH: That’s interesting. I’ll admit that I’m a little younger than the movie, but I was wondering about that, whether AIDS had already broken or not at the time.
ST: Well, really, it started before Liquid Sky was made, but no one really knew about it. But it became known after LIquid Sky was made. It became a popular subject.
BH: It definitely felt prescient, with the link between sex and heroin and death.
ST: A lot of things like that, the connection between sex and drugs, was my creative idea– it had nothing to do with reality, it was science fiction. But not only AIDS made it clear that there is a connection, but in a couple of years, scientists discovered that there is some connection in the brain. I just wanted a metaphor. I wanted to put together all the myths of the time, like sex, rock and roll, drugs, aliens from outer space. It was just a collection of all the mythological elements of the time. They’re all connected, because they all belong to the same world! [laughs]
BH:The film played in some cities for many years, right? At midnight screenings?
ST: Yes. In three cities– New York, Boston, and Washington, DC– it played more than three years. And not only midnight shows– every day. When it closed, I think in all the theaters, especially in New York, it was one of the champions. It still was making more money per screen than any other movie. They just couldn’t keep it anymore, because they had a long line of other films to play. I think they could keep it forever. Which, really, some theaters tried to show it at midnight shows forever, but I was against it, to tell the truth. Because I thought that, after a while, the film could be released again, but if it’s playing all the time at midnight, then eventually they’d lose interest. It’s an idea I learned from Disney. Disney had this idea from the very beginning, that all his films should be released every seven years, so that a new generation of audiences could get it. Well, of course, it’s a different type of audience, but I think that Liquid Sky— today, I can see it. We have new audiences which weren’t old enough when Liquid Sky was made, and they like it as much as the audiences liked it 35 years ago.
BH:And, of course, around the same time, the home video market came up. I, as well as I’m sure many other people, mostly knew it from that
ST: Well, I think it’s very important, the new digital release, because the quality of the video release was very, very bad. Because we never had money for that, and, really, the DVD was based on the video master made 35 years ago. The video master was bad to start with, and by then it’d lost color. The DVD wasn’t made from negatives. The definition was bad. And now, we really have it [looking] fantastic… the look of digitized film is unexpected and surprising, even for me!
BH: Speaking as someone who’s only ever seen it on VHS, I saw some of the screenshots from the new Vinegar Syndrome remaster, and it’s really shocking how different it looks.
ST: VHS, by itself, is a very bad format. It isn’t supposed to have good quality, but if it’s made from a bad master, it’s terrible.
BH:You mentioned you were working on a sequel.Do you have any idea when that might come to fruition?
ST: We’re finishing the script. I haven’t finished it, because we haven’t started raising money, and I want to know exactly what kind of budget I can use. Then I’ll finish the script. But we didn’t start doing it for many reasons. One of the reasons is I think that the rerelease of the film will raise new interest. And it’s much easier to raise money for a finished script.
BH: With the new reissue, you’ll definitely probably see an audience that either hasn’t seen it in a long time, or has never seen it at all.
ST: I’m always telling people that we’re doing a lot of things with Liquid Sky. I’m trying to make a stage musical based on Liquid Sky, and we’re making Liquid Sky 2, and if people are interested, it’s very easy to get all the new information, because we have the site, liquidskythemovie.com. On the opening the page of the website, there’s a big button. You push the button, and you get on our mailing list. Everybody on the list gets all the news of the campaign for Liquid Sky!
Slava Tsukerman will be in attendance for a rare 35mm screening of Liquid Sky at the Brattle Theatre on Wednesday, 3/21, at 9:30pm
*squinting* I'm sorry, what is — there's a phrase in this headline I don't understand? What is "paid for overtime?"
State Police report 19 troopers from Troop E - who patrol the Massachusetts Turnpike - face hearings on whether they put in for overtime shifts they didn't work.
A 20th trooper, who retired last year, is also under investigation, State Police say.
Depending on the outcome of these hearings, those members face a potential change in their duty status, up to and including suspension without pay, while further investigation into the discrepancies is conducted.
To help showcase BRAIN Arts & Boston Hassle’s ongoing & continued commitment to show-goers of ALL AGES we have decided to make our shows FREE for those UNDER 18 for the remainder of 2018. There are of course exceptions, such as shows we might simply be co-promoting @ larger venues, or festivals such as Hassle Fest 10 in November, but the vast majority of the the remaining 80-ish shows we will book this year are now FREE for show-goers under 18 years old. Please get in touch with any questions: bostonhassle@gmail.com
The youth is our future, hopefully some of them will be motivated to check out a handful of shows they might not have checked out otherwise because of this initiative.
Please see the following link for the regularly updated listing of our Hassle Shows series: https://bostonhassle.com/chosen-shows/category/hassle-shows/
BRAIN Arts Organization, providing Creative Cultural Empowerment for All!!
What is happening in this post. Who is this terrible musician and how did he get into this feed
Alan Scardapane only started singing when he was a senior in college, but that hasn’t stopped him from following his passions and recording a number of tracks, including an upcoming EP and soon-to-follow album.During his senior year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Long Island native was living with a group of friends, almost all of whom played the guitar. He wanted to play along with them and eventually started playing the keyboard, which he learned by ear. [...]
"Stopped animals from developing need for alcohol after experiencing trauma"
(Toady One) Here's the first substantial update to the fortress's world map screen. New raid options are available, and it shouldn't be hard for you to antagonize your neighbors now if that's what you want to do. Use the 'd'etails option when preparing the raid to set what sorts of actions you'd like your raiders to perform. Skills and equipment matter, and skills can be improved during missions. The skill of your best tactician is important (you'll see feedback in the mission report.) If you demand tribute on an ongoing basis and the target site agrees to your demands, you'll receive something like a merchant caravan on an annual basis a few seasons after the initial demand. They'll drop goods off at your depot and depart. These goods can be carried off immediately for storage, but there's a new report so you can look at a complete list of what was delivered; the same is true of spoils from raids.
A few notes on the bug fixes below: the identity fixes won't stop bad feelings from existing conflicts in old saves. Also in old saves, distracted animals might still appear to be broken at first, but they should sort themselves out after a bit.
New stuff
Can pillage and raze and demand tribute from other sites
Dwarves on missions can now can gain skills
Military tactics skill is now gained and matters in off-site battles
Major bug fixes
Fixed several problems causing the meeting queue to get gummed up
Made monster-type critters and non-monster-type critters have proper hostile again
Allowed people in the same squad to know each other's identities
Made scribe copy job cancel properly to free up materials
Fixed calculation of available writing materials in library
Other bug fixes/tweaks
Various speed tweaks
Made clean job work inside and on outdoor constructions
Made clean jobs continue to nearby tiles
Made drunkenness make you less private instead of more private and fixed a typo there
Made dwarven adventurers experience trances properly
Made non-historical populations defend sites post w.g.
Made off-site raid stealth success depend on site
Fixed broken flags on merchant historical event
Stopped dwarves being dragged to cages/chains from trying to clean the floor
Stopped live generals from being elevated from zombie populations
Stopped animals from developing need for alcohol after experiencing trauma
Stopped unintelligent creatures associated to civilizations, like domestic animals, from worshipping gods when given historical status
Stopped animals from revealing the location of artifacts to questers
Stopped animals from forming grudges and other chat-based relationships
Sped up legends loading in high-artifact worlds
Stopped rooting around in the dirt from resetting path
Fixed issue causing certain older army units from not appearing
Fixed a few errors with abstract skill calculation for armies
Reconciled bandit's map and in-play valuations of opponent strength to stop aborted ambushes
Disallowed certain flying/swimming/visual/projectile/attack moves involving half-stairways
Made branches/twigs burning over walls leave behind a floor properly
Gamasutra speaks with the creators of Super Slime Arena about supporting every controller they could plug into a USB port -- from flight sticks to the Donkey Konga bongo drums. ...
Soso is a 15-year-old Japanese student who we often see around the streets of Harajuku. He loves 1980s and 1990s American pop culture.
Soso is wearing a green Peco Club denim jacket over a purple Peco Club sweatshirt, belted matching green Peco Club shorts with purple tights, and high top sneakers from Spinns. Accessories – some of which came from Peco Club – include oversized glasses, a necklace, purple button, and Teenstyle E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial bag.
Soso’s favorite fashion brand is Peco Club and he likes the music of Kids in America. Follow Soso on Instagram or Twitter for more 1980s inspired street style.
Open Thread is where Waypoint staff talk about games and other things we find interesting. This is where you'll see us chat about games, music, movies, TV, and even sports, and welcome you to participate in the discussion.
A few days ago, deep into my obsession with tactical mech RPG Into the Breach, I got my first "four island" win, meaning that I'd managed to clear every available mission before tackling the game's final challenge. I was pumped, not only because I'd won, but because of how I'd won.
Unlike Subset's last game, FTL, which ended in an incredibly difficult but ultimately formulaic battle against a unique enemy mothership, Into the Breach concludes with back to back missions that are just... tough. It tosses some of the game's tougher enemies at you, forces you to defend not only the normal power grid nodes but also a special anti-bug bomb, and fills the board, each turn with major environmental hazards. It doesn't demand the same exact strategy each time, nor does it make certain builds unplayable. It just asks you to play consistently and play well.
I had not played well. I had been sloppy. I'd wasted my free reset, failed to clear the board of enemies quickly enough, and left one or two specifically troublesome foes with too much health to take down easily. I was one turn away and it seemed impossible. Then I did what I always do in situations like this: I stared at the screen for 20 minutes until a solution appeared. Victory.
It isn't that I won that made the feeling so sweet. It was that the final turn of this very good run had turned into a perfect puzzle, specifically able to push my team to its limits. Enemy arrangement meant that my own weapons were being turned against me. The Vek focus on my power nodes meant that I needed to find the perfect blend of offense and defense. And the damn bomb was totally trapped. It was such a good puzzle that, after winning, I challenged my Twitter followers to solve it (before sharing my own solution later in the thread).
Take a look:
Screenshot by
Okay... there's a lot going on here, I know. Even if you've been playing as much Into the Breach as I have, there's a lot to unpack. In fact, one of the things I loved to see on Twitter (beyond the attempts to solve the fight in new ways) was the sheer number of ways people were describing what steps they'd take.
Which brings me to my favorite thing to happen in the growing Into the Breach fandom: Notation.
As soon as people started streaming Into the Breach, it became clear that conversations between players and their audiences needed a linguistic glue to hold conversations together. "I"m going to rocket punch that bug" and "What if you electro-whip the purple one" just doesn't cut it when you're trying to save the world. One fan built a Twitch overlay that gave the game screen a chess-like grid, and within a day or two, Subset had incorporated the same idea into the game directly as an optional on-screen effect. (Check the header image if you're curious).
But it hasn't stopped with Twitch chat. I've begun to see people use chess-like notation in Tweets and chat conversations, and one fan has even put together a really impressive system of algebraic notation that accounts for everything from killed bugs and shields to status effects and pilot abilities. It's a complex game after all, dense with information that has to be conveyed properly if we're going to be able to dig into the fun of exchanging solutions.
My hope is that this is only the start for Into the Breach's community-driven notation and collaboration. You know how they print chess puzzles in the paper? (They do that, trust me). I want that but for Into the Breach. I want players designing devious challenges for each other. I want Subset to add a daily challenge mode focused on a single turn of play. Please, world, give me even more ways for this beautiful mech game to takeover my brain.
So, for today's Open Thread question, I wanna know: Have you ever gotten deep enough into a game to learn a special language of notation? Whether that's as simple as shorthand for abilities in your MMO character's rotation or as complex as joystick and button sequences in the world of fighting games, let me know over in the forums!
I confess to having little experience with unions, but judged from a distance the developments in the West Virginia teachers strike are quite new in the modern history of organized labor. The teachers have ground the state to a halt and have gotten even the state senate to scramble for ways to yield to their demands while saving face:
On Thursday, one week into the statewide public school employee strike, which will continue Friday with public schools in all 55 counties closed, the West Virginia Senate pumped the brakes on a bill that would give teachers, school service personnel and the State Police a 5 percent raise.
Instead, Senate President Mitch Carmichael, R-Jackson, sent the legislation (House Bill 4145) to the Senate Finance Committee to change it and create a long-term revenue source for Public Employees Insurance Agency health coverage.
tate school employee union leaders suggested Tuesday evening, when the 5 percent raise for school employees was proposed by Gov. Jim Justice, that workers return to schools Thursday. But with the strike now continuing two days beyond what the state union heads called for, it isn’t clear what effect the proposed alternative will have on ending the strike, and it isn’t clear if any end to the strike will be unified statewide.
The Senate Finance Committee is expected to meet Friday afternoon.
Growing up in the aftermath of the 1981 PATCO strikes induced me to accept Ronald Reagan’s assertion, borrowed from idol Calvin Coolidge (who made his reputation when as governor of Massachusetts he fired striking cops), that public union employees couldn’t walk out of their jobs. To fuming parents who argue that their children’s educations are endangered, I respond: teachers who live paycheck to paycheck and face the possibility of deducting three hundred dollars from a $1300 biweekly check for health insurance can’t concentrate on the basic duties of education.
As far as I know, no Democrats with national profiles have breathed a word of support.
A colleague and lover of Ezra Pound before realizing her bisexuality, Hilda Doolittle (known as H.D.) emerged from his shadow shortly after her death. Thanks to women’s and queer studies, she’s rightly acclaimed as one of the twentieth century’s strongest American poets. Precision and spareness are the hallmarks of her work. Louis Glück and Henri Cole count among her heirs. She wrote Tribute to Freud about her sessions with the legendary psychoanalyst.
Below is “At Baia,” a love poem of exquisite delicacy.
Happy March.
I should have thought
in a dream you would have brought
some lovely, perilous thing,
orchids piled in a great sheath,
as who would say (in a dream),
“I send you this,
who left the blue veins
of your throat unkissed.”
Why was it that your hands
(that never took mine),
your hands that I could see
drift over the orchid-heads
so carefully,
your hands, so fragile, sure to lift
so gently, the fragile flower-stuff–
ah, ah, how was it
You never sent (in a dream)
the very form, the very scent,
not heavy, not sensuous,
but perilous–perilous–
of orchids, piled in a great sheath,
and folded underneath on a bright scroll,
some word:
“Flower sent to flower;
for white hands, the lesser white,
less lovely of flower-leaf,”
or
“Lover to lover, no kiss,
no touch, but forever and ever this.”
Tsukasa is a 17-year-old student we met while walking along the Harajuku street. He easily caught our eye with his see through jacket and brightly colored fashion style.
Sporting a bob hairstyle, Tsukasa’s look consists of a see through jacket from Avalone, a black Metallica band shirt, which he wore over a yellow turtleneck sweatshirt, vintage red pants, LAD Musician leather boots, and a vintage Zipbag by Aquvii see through tote bag. He accessorized with statement sunglasses, a single hoop earring, silver knuckle rings, and a wallet chain.
Tsukasa’s favorite vintage shop is Kinji Harajuku. Follow him on Instagram or Twitter for his updates.
Momoko is a stylish 23-year-old with a cool ironic mullet hairstyle who we met on the street in Harajuku.
In addition to the hairstyle, her look features a vintage blazer from Funktique Tokyo tucked into Martine Rose baggy jeans, a graphic top from No Dress, and Eytys platform boots. Accessories include two vintage brooches on her blazer and a black leather crossbody bag by Bigotre.
Momoko’s favorite fashion brands include Martine Rose, Y/Project, Eytys, and Perverze. Her favorite musical artists right now are Brooke Candy, Big Bang, and BTS. Follow her on Instagram for more of her daily street style.
One day, Bethesda will make another Fallout game, and chances are it’ll be another open world RPG. Experiments like Fallout Shelter occasionally drag the series into new directions, but Fallout’s rich post-apocalyptic mythology could work in all manner of genres, if Bethesda only allowed it. That void is filled by mods like Old World Blues, a comically ambitious mod for Hearts of Iron IV that, even in its alpha state, has been ravenously praised by fans for delivering on a promise to deliver strategic Fallout.
Hearts of Iron falls into the category of “grand” strategy games, where the player is less concerned with the fate of individual units than a whole theater of war. As big as the landscapes are in games like Fallout 3, it’s tiny compared to the whole of America—or the world. Your actions feel important, but likely pale in comparison to what’s playing out writ large. Old World Blues tries to give a broader sense of what’s happening.
You can watch YouTube creator Rimmy play through a round to get a sense of the mod:
Mods that promise to import a popular franchise into a wholly different game are a dime a dozen. Most disappear into the ether, or radically under deliver. It’s not shocking, given the reality of mods: amateur developers biting off more than they can chew. It’s why anyone would have been right to be skeptical about Old World Blues.
And yet...
Developed for little more than a year by a team of four, Old World Blues features a map spanning North and Central America with 9,077 provinces, 735 states, and 94 nations. That’s just the alpha version. There’s work to do, as they expand geography, squash bugs, and wrap their heads around what people find interesting about the mod.
I recently had a chance to shoot the mods developers some questions. We touched on the game’s “development hell," what makes Old World Blues different from a normal round of Hearts of Iron IV, and if non-strategy Fallout fans should give this a look.
Waypoint: Why did Fallout—and specifically New Vegas —make sense for Hearts of Iron IV?
Briar Bowie, lead narrative designer: Hearts of Iron appealed to us through its ability to offer a new unique perspective on the Fallout universe, one that we felt hadn’t been explored very well. It allows players to enjoy the dynamic of the series on a grand scale, taming the wasteland and telling compelling stories all the while. Fallout” New Vegas is a good starting point because it enables that type of storytelling, with a variety of factions interacting in a myriad of exciting ways.
The Fallout games have, both past and present, been about player expression. What kind of experience did you want to impart during each round of Old World Blues?
Mechano, lead programmer: When you load up a game of Old World Blues, our focus is on creating immersion so that players are encouraged to engage themselves in the world and it’s evolving narrative. From the beginning, the player determines some of the background of their nation. For example, was the nation born out of former vault dwellers, or did they survive in the wasteland? These choices provide context for a playthrough and contribute to the potential for roleplaying.
The player isn’t the only one that shapes the world, however. Smaller nations declare war and create conflicts, forming larger empires out of their conquests, while larger nations also focus on conquering their neighbours and rivals, consequently creating unique challenges as the player expands and comes into conflict with others. It’s these interactions between the player and the world around them that consequently define the experience of an Old World Blues playthrough.
There are certain kinds of people who will look at this screen shot and go "oh my god, yes." You are the target market for Old World Blues. I look at this and get anxiety.
To that end, can you point to a specific “oh shit” moment you’ve had while playing?
AntoniusMagnus, lead content designer: One of the things we focused on, particularly on the narrative side, was “emergent factions.” Basically, some of the more interesting Fallout factions are almost hidden in the game mechanics themselves, so you can unlock them through taking different focuses or doing certain things, like some sort of puzzle box. The clues are there if you’re observant, but they can also be a cool surprise.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but in one game I had during our closed alpha testing, pretty much all of these emergent factions fired. What had started as a pretty regular game became this almost doomsday scenario, where these hulking beasts of emergent factions just absorbed the areas around me—as power-armoured Romans, I had to take on the remnants of the US Government and a giant resurgence of the Super Mutant Master’s Army.
Let’s say you haven’t played Hearts of Iron and don’t understand what’s involved in the moment-to-moment gameplay. Break down what happens in Old World Blues.
AntoniusMagnus: In the short term, that may be something like “Should I focus on building up my military base, or my industrial base?” or “Should I research heavy robots or focus on hard-hitting energy weapons?” It could also be something more substantial, like “Which faction do I want to ally with?” or “Do I want to war with them instead?” The main goal, especially through H eart of Iron IV's focus tree system, is to outline what the long-term impacts one choice might have. These long-term effects could be from as minor as one faction not liking the player's faction because they chose to build their internal industry instead, to the player's faction changing entirely.
We want every choice the player makes to have far reaching consequences, and for these consequences to be broadcast or foreshadowed to them. We actually had a lot of reports in the first few days of a path that many players believed didn't have the consequences foreshadowed enough, and we took steps to rectify that in a later patch.
Old World Blues is sprawling, but you could have easily gone bigger (or smaller). How did you manage scope? That seems to be the death of most mods: feature creep.
Edward Cannon, lead map designer: When I joined in December 2016, our team decided to set the bar high, and the scope reasonably wide because we wanted to deliver the best Fallout experience possible. For us, that didn’t mean the entire world, it entailed a hyper realistic map of North America featuring Fallout’s best characters and our own tailor-made nations to fit the theme.
The West Coast was an obvious choice for where to begin; it’s an iconic part of Fallout, with fan-favourite games based within it. However, our ambition didn’t come without a cost. We’ve basically been in development hell for the last year, not due to a bad working environment, but just how small our team was and how large our goal became. Feature creep isn’t the right term, nor were we overly ambitious, we just simply didn’t have the manpower required for a “perfect” alpha 1.0.
With that in mind sometimes, you just have to learn to let go, and for us that meant cutting numerous focus trees, new doctrines, a government overhaul, etc—all in service of releasing the mod on time. We might not have launched with everything we planned to when we first started, but 30,000 subs [on the Steam Workshop] over three days and being called “the most feature complete alpha ever” really speaks for itself.
It’s not about abandoning your ideas, it’s about managing your expectations. After all, the benefit of modding is that it’s on your own time, we can always go back and add those features—and we fully intend to.
How did the team come together? I’m guessing you didn’t know each other before the mod, which means you probably ran into some unexpected conflicts. A year is a long time to work with brand-new people, and you probably learn a lot during that period.
AntoniusMagnus, lead content designer: The current team has been around for about a year. Before that, I'd made a pretty small prototype over the course of about a week, and it got a lot of attention. Before I knew it, I was working with these two Russian guys, an American, a Canadian, and another Brit—who were all far better at this than I was. We’ve always been this kind of rag-tag bunch of pretty diverse backgrounds—we now have more Brits and Canadians, a Swede, Ukrainian and two Polish artists—who are united by this incredible passion for Fallout and this mod especially.
We actually came pretty close to not being able to make the mod; we ran into a major issue with the custom map, and since it was uncharted territory in the modding scene, it took a major god-end to get us over that hurdle—in the form of [lead programmer] Mechano.
Still, through that, the team persevered with unwavering optimism. I think that’s really the core of our success, the team are all so devoted and incredibly skilled at what they do, so where other mods have almost let themselves fall into non-development, everybody on Old World Blues carried on, until, a whole year later we had a version (though in early alpha) that we are incredibly happy with.
I suspect some folks might be interested in this mod, but haven't touched Hearts of Iron. How approachable is the mod, if your background is the other Fallout games?
Briar Bowie, lead narrative designer: Hearts of Iron isn’t an experience overly akin to anything you’ve experienced in other Fallout games, but what it does offer is a unique perspective on a beloved franchise. If the idea of being able to look down on the wasteland and dictate the ins and outs of your favorite faction appeals to you, you’ll enjoy the experience.
Follow Patrick on Twitter. If you have a tip or a story idea, drop him an email: patrick.klepek@vice.com.
I’ve been blown away by the instant move toward activism and organizing by the Florida shooting survivors. Me, I’d probably be a blubbering wreck curled up in the corner of my bedroom. Their instance move toward politicizing their experience and doing everything they can to stop it from happening again is incredibly welcome, a breath of fresh air that reminds us that small groups of people can make a great difference. I mean, according to the media, the kidz do nothing but eat avocado toast, complain about the authenticity of the food in the Oberlin cafeteria, and stare into their phones. It’s almost as if young people are actually doing amazing things that the rest of us can learn from. To force the NRA on its heels and embarrass their bought politicians could lead to real change.
1. Give Donald Trump Precisely 5 Percent of Your Mental Energy
These students aren’t wasting their time and energy on the president. Outside a handful of tweets on the day of the shootings, and a line or two in speeches and television appearances, the student protesters are modeling how to essentially ignore Donald Trump. They have no interest in talking to him or even about him. They have internalized the lesson that he is a symptom of the problem but unworthy of credit or blame. I suspect that if the rest of us ignored the president half as ably as they have, we’d all have vastly more emotional energy for the fights that really do matter.
Correct. Donald Trump is a small part of the problem. Our constant mental energy spent on the latest Trump tweet is really a distraction from fighting the problem. The problem is not Donald Trump. It is the Republican Party.
2. Don’t Waste Time Fighting People Who Don’t Share Your Values and Goals
The Stoneman Douglas students don’t seem to be wasting their time debating or negotiating with the gun lovers on the other side. They are simply working to get gun legislation passed, to raise awareness, and to energize other young people. As someone who has devoted the greater part of the past year to an intramural media debate about whether to give up completely on the other side or to strive to change hearts and minds, it’s refreshing to see that this doesn’t really matter. Stoneman Douglas can’t be bothered with David Brooks. Endless progressive debate over engagement with opponents or the lack thereof and the complex moral nuance of allyship is a luxury these kids cannot afford and aren’t bothered by. Good for them. They have work to do. If Wednesday night’s CNN town hall proved anything, it was that the National Rifle Association and GOP senators literally have no answers for them. They aren’t wasting time on gentle persuasion. They know when they are being lied to.
Yes! This goes back to my post from awhile ago where I said dialogue with right-wingers was a complete waste of your time. Evil people just have to be defeated. You won’t convince them and it’s not worth trying. You will spend lots of time and energy making no progress if you do this. There are millions of people out there who are not decided about the world and you can convince them, but not through dialogue. You convince them through action, through defeating your opponents, through showing leadership, through setting the conversation. All of this is what the Stoneman Douglas students are doing. Just go work on the issues you care about and let the chips fall where they may.
And let’s be honest–talking about the latest inanity from David Brooks is also a huge waste of our time. I slip on this somewhat too, when I write about the horribleness of the New York Times op-ed page. But none of these people actually matter in terms of making change. A Times op-ed page without Brooks or whatever troll James Bennet hires would be less annoying, but it wouldn’t make defeating right-wingers any easier. It might be fun to make fun of these people, but it doesn’t actually matter.
Admittedly, without talking about Trump or David Brooks, we wouldn’t have 400 comment threads since that’s what the readership seems to want. But if LGM readers want to be leaders in the fight to change, taking Lithwick’s advice and following the model of the Stoneman Douglas students would be a lot more valuable.
BOSTON NOISE ROCK PODCAST A 90 minute special podcast about mythic early 90’s Boston Noise Rock featuring records digitized for the first time and interviews with the folks who made them.
The music of: Luca Brasi, Kudgel, Slug Hog, Red Bliss, Madbox, Ambulance Driver, Blood Letter, God Mama, Sugar Bitch, and Spore
It’s been a hard year. I saw exactly one film in theaters, my favorite albums weren’t as phenomenal as my favorites in years past, and I can’t leave my phone in my pocket for one hour without the discourse shifting to the President’s tweets, another beloved celebrity being exposed as a sexual assailant, or some other Hell. So over the next twelve days, I’ll be counting down twelve pieces of entertainment that kept me sane in 2017.
5. The Wicked + The Divine: “Imperial Phase” (Image Comics), by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie
“Every ninety years twelve gods return as young people. They are loved. They are hated. In two years, they are all dead. It’s happening now. It’s happening again.”
Exactly everyone who has discussed “Imperial Phase,” the third year of four for The Wicked + The Divine, has mentioned that this arc’s title applies not just to the young adult gods realizing their maddening, overwhelming freedom, but writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie’s immense success and persisting urge to make their comic masterwork grander before the final year’s pressure to end the series right rears its head. But what’s seldom mentioned is that despite an awful lot happening in “Imperial Phase,” its biggest story beats are puny compared to what readers have become accustomed to. With the beginning of the end arriving with next month’s issue, I’ve begun to wonder if “Imperial Phase” was simply exquisite tablesetting.
It feels ludicrous and unfair to do so, but if it can be said that “Imperial Phase” represents The Wicked + The Divine at its weakest and it’s still worthy of a spot this high on a list of any entertainment in any medium, it’s among the best comic series of all time. To me, I’m entirely convinced that once I finally see the full picture a year or so from now, it will be at the tippy top. But no, these issues don’t carry the raw wonder and epic hurt of “The Faust Act” and “Fandemonium.” They don’t have the expertly carried, crushing intrigue of “Commercial Suicide,” and they certainly don’t give you the same urge to pore over every page and every panel over and over again trying to understand. It doesn’t come straight for your neck and explode the way “Rising Action” does.
But still, “Imperial Phase” is necessary because The Wicked + The Divine must pause from its greatest plot beats and breathe, which is a funny thing to say when characters that you love will die. They will die, and you will be the saddest.
Jamie McKelvie draws most of the series, able to render any member of its diverse cast, or any face and any body he draws at all, sexy and appealing. An award should be created for achievement in wardrobe in a continuing series simply so that it can be given to him. Along with Matt Wilson’s colors, the series’ art is absolutely immaculate – my favorite page of the series, in fact from “Imperial Phase,” is after a page turn in issue #26: simply the speaking of one word, “anarchy,” and the reactions it elicits, hair flowing diagonally across the page. The Wicked + The Divine is not an achievement of writing alone. (Gillen’s other grand work, Phonogram, is also done with McKelvie, and is a comic any music fan must own.)
But though all stories could not be told by other writers, it’s truer of The Wicked + The Divine, which simply would not function without Kieron Gillen’s obsession with clockwork storytelling, never daring to take off with a concept unless an ending exists to justify it, writing each moment to make the major beats stronger, never setting out without a map. Kieron Gillen is the greatest writer in comics today, and The Wicked + The Divine is his magnum opus.
If you have yet to dive into this series, I will tell you now in no uncertain terms to prioritize it over any other comic. Go find the first two trades, “The Faust Act” and “Fandemonium” (yes, both), and read them. If you do not find yourself a husk of a human aching for more, you are already dead.
For context, if I made a list like this one in 2015 – the year the issues from its second and third trades, “Fandemonium” and “Commercial Suicide,” were released, including two of the best individual comic issues I’ve ever read in issues #11 and #13 – The Wicked + The Divine would be an easy #1 if it wasn’t for a certain pesky Album of the Millennium.
So yes, the general concept is that in 2014, young people – mostly young adults, some grown children, even a precocious preteen – emerge as gods. Their purpose is to inspire, and The Wicked + The Divine largely helps us understand this inspiration via pop stars. Baal smacks of Kanye West. A glance at Sakhment and you’ll think of Rihanna. Woden is constantly masked in a weird robot getup a la Daft Punk. Lucifer, Bowie. Inanna, Prince. (Hrm…)
But those gifted to inspire are also doomed to die. Front and center, along with giving the most to the world with the time one has left, is simply coping with the time one has left. Art. Death.
“Imperial Phase” comes after the initial thrill of divinity, of creation. What needs to be done is no longer clear. Leading up to the arc, one god asks, “What do we do now?”
“Duh…” replies another. “Whatever we want.”
“Imperial Phase” is the realization that an overabundance of possibility leaves one even more lost.
Between halves of “Imperial Phase,” WicDiv, as it were, trotted out its second special: “455 AD,” featuring the artwork of André Lima Araújo. Lucifer, the final remaining god of the Recurrence of the 450s, experiences his own imperial phase, assuming Emperorship prior to the sack of Rome.
Even in a series with no shortage of gruesome moments, “455 AD” is the peak of its brutality, a horrifying look into the sad history of young gods left to their own ambitions.
And at the end, we’re rocketed back to the notion that Gillen has a series to land. He tells us that along with art and death, there’s another theme he can’t tell us yet because it’d give the game away. Hrmph. To think WicDiv’s mysteries would extend so radically to its meta.
And we’re ever closer to answers. Earlier this week, the 54-page special “1923,” for the first time giving context to the series’ first few pages, shot us back into a world with WicDiv. In a month’s time, we’ll start seeing the final twelve issues appear.
But I haven’t said enough about “Imperial Phase” itself. It’s difficult to ruminate much on the quality of the arc itself without spilling the beans, not just on “Imperial Phase” but on the rest of a series well worth discovering for the first time. But I’ll skim the surface. As an introduction to its opulence, issue #23 kicks off the imperial phase by reimagining the comic as a magazine, complete with interviews conducted by great real life folks from GOAT games writer Leigh Alexander to Ezekiel Kweku, operator of one of the greatest Twitter has to offer, @theshrillest. Its explorations of relationships – the romantic, the abusive, the sexual, the asexual – are long-needed dives into characters who have been too busy with other drama to just simply fall or fuck or fail together. You will never hear “One More Time” quite the same way again.
We live in an age where, for better or worse, decades worth of popcult flotsam can be revisited with a quick internet search.
That weird PSA you remember from grade school? The public television edu-program you watched while home sick from school? Some power pop song that was a regional hit for all of five minutes in 1980? All summonable with a few keywords and a little effort.
It’s a far cry from pre-millennium times, when some stray splinter of memory would remain lodged in your skull for decades with little chance for clarification. The best you could hope for was finding someone similarly afflicted to share notes with, and even then the individual errors and embellishments introduced over time would only result in further muddying the waters. Mostly, you’d just spend fruitless years asking folks if they recalled “that thing, you know THAT THING WITH THE THING” until the litany of confused stares made you wonder if you’d been imagining its existence all along.
Even in this era of archived retrological excess, however, some mysteries do remain. I’ve never been able to suss out the name of the short-lived Facts of Life rip-off about a girls’ boarding school that decided to go co-ed, or find a copy of the Lost in Space themed punk single that used to play on local college radio circa 1990, or locate a digital rip of a truly bizarre GI Joe story-on-tape thing Lil Bro used to have when we were kids.
Every so often, I’ll take another look around for answers on these fronts, but more out of boredom than any hope of closure. It’s not as if the fate of the world depends on learning the truth, just a whiff of residual nostalgia and another useless factoid to file away. I’ve learned to accept that some things are simply lost to time and hazy memory.
And then, sometimes, Lil Bro texts a link with zero context on a Sunday afternoon, and another piece falls into place.
Lil Bro got the “Listen ‘n’ Fun” set as a birthday gift from one of our aunts. He was more interested in the Tripwire figure (whose garish re-deco would’ve been ideal for stealth missions in the warehouse where Cobra stored its traffic cones) than the tape which came with it. The cassette sat unplayed for a good while before we worked up the courage to listen to it — a decision we initially regretted but eventually grew to celebrate.
The cheapjack oddness and over-the-top voice acting became an inside joke between us that lasted up through the present day. The tape was one of the handful of items that managed to survive the upheaval following my mother’s death. It survived long enough to terrorize my brother’s high school friends and some of my college pals. I was absolutely convinced it was supernaturally indestructible right up until the moment it mysteriously vanished during the late Nineties.
Years passed, and the frequency of our references to it diminished. On the few occasions it did come to mind, I wondered if it was as truly dire as I remembered it being.
I made it fifteen seconds into the clip before realizing it was even worse.
Learning the extent of Prince’s involvement in the writing, recording, playing, and producing of his greatest threat bothered me too on reading Alex Hahn’s Possessed: The Rise and Fall of Prince in 2005. But writing and producing are overrated talents in pop music, especially when the copious record indicates how phenomenally The Time compensated as live act in the early eighties, with or without Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and, god, Alexander O’Neal.
In 1985, the year went Day-Glo — the year when the Prince proteges like Time members Jesse Johnson and Morris Day, and others like Ready for the World and Ta Mara & the Seen and Sheena Easton stormed the charts; but also the year when pop artists like Heart, Stevie Nicks, Animotion, and disparate L.A. types wore colorful raincoats and teased up their hair to match the synth blasts; even Denise Huxtable got into the act. “Jungle Love” was part of this moment. Five years later, “Jerk Out” became a surprising top ten American hit on the strength of the much-needed black insurgency, fueled by Bobby Brown and Teddy Riley’s New Jack-influenced followers, and Janet Jackson (whose “Black Cat” remixes boasted Jesse Johnson solos).
As I wrote this list today at work, listening to the Time catalog, a student at her laptop said, You just reminded me — I gotta listen to Prince today.
I’m not listening to Prince, I said.
She gave me a look like I’d said I’d danced onstage at the Grammys. Then I realized “Wild and Loose” was on, a dead ringer for a cut on 1999, side three.
Finally, let me note: The Time recorded a ballad called “Donald Trump (Black Version).”
1. 777-5311
2. Jungle Love
3. Wild and Loose
4. Tricky
5. Jerk Out
6. Girl
7. The Bird
8. Morris Day – Fishnet
9. Cool
10. Jesse Johnson’s Revue – I Want My Girl
11. Chili Sauce
12. Release It
13. Blondie
14. Ice Cream Castles
15. Gigolos Get Lonely Too
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