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starstruckteacup · 4 years

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Cottagecore Films (pt. 7)

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

starring Takayama Minami, Sakuma Rei, Yamaguchi Kappei, Toda Keiko

Upon turning 13 years old, young witch Kiki leaves home to begin her independent training year, a longstanding tradition for witches. She journeys with her black cat, Jiji, to a large seaside town and befriends a pregnant baker, Osono, and her husband. Soon after settling in with the bakers, Kiki begins operating her own delivery service from the bakery. She befriends many of the local residents, including a young aviator named Tombo, an elderly grandmother who goes by Madame and her living partner Barsa, and a teenage painter named Ursula. Despite her successes, Kiki finds herself struggling with her identity, and begins to lose her magical powers. When a crisis strikes the town in the form of a severe windstorm, Kiki realizes that she must overcome her self-doubt in order to regain her powers and save her friend.

Kiki’s is easily my favorite Ghibli film. This sweet story of self-discovery tackles several difficult aspects of growing up in a kind, supportive, and positive way. When Kiki struggles to understand why she’s losing her powers, Ursula describes it as “sometimes you can, and sometimes you can’t” and encourages Kiki to rest and give herself the space to figure herself out, which is a message young people are constantly deprived of. The atmosphere of the film was absolutely delightful as well. Ghibli scenery never fails to ignite the deepest parts of the heart. The town felt huge and overwhelming at the beginning, but Kiki conquered it without hesitation; through her confidence, the town quickly began to feel like home, like somewhere we as the audience would love to spend our days. It has a lovely small-town ambiance that feels real to those watching it, as though we could step into the screen and not feel out of place for a moment. The simple routines of people are perfectly encapsulated in this film, but with the inclusion of a little magic and the naivety of our young protagonist, it still feels like an adventure. 10/10

Anna Karenina (2012)

starring Keira Knightley, Aaron-Taylor Johnson, Jude Law, Matthew Macfayden, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander

Inspired by the classic novel by Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina finds herself swept from her diplomatic and passionless marriage by the charming Count Vrosky. Meanwhile, a farmer by the name of Levin--a close friend of Anna’s brother--pursues his love for a young woman named Kitty, who initially spurns him in favor of Vrosky, until she herself is cast aside for Anna. The affair catches Anna and Vrosky in a whirlwind of passion and scandal, but regardless of the intensity of their affections, they are subsequently shunned by proper society and those closest to them. In the end, Anna must choose between her love for Vrosky and her duty to her husband, but the choice may be too much for her.

I found the aesthetic of this film to be very unique: much of it was portrayed as though on a stage, a hurricane of activity and set changes on multiple levels. I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of transferring between a stage and real life locations was, and it made the aesthetic feel inconsistent. As nice as the stage idea was, the film would have been more comprehensible if it was set in a distinct universe, not constantly transferring between multiple ones. The beginning was also kind of awkward in that it engaged some highly enticing music that had me wondering if there would be a song to follow, but then never did. It kind of just looked away from the music and shoved into a new scene without really making sense of it. That said, I thought the acting was fantastic overall. Knightley portrayed Anna’s throes of passion very well, really honing in on the complete irrationality of it all, and Anna’s complete ignorance to it. Johnson aptly conveyed Vrosky’s youth and naivety, his complete disregard for what is socially expected and accepted; his expressions detailed the youthful mind behind the character, and complemented Knightley’s performance well. I wouldn’t say they had much chemistry, but they made up for it with strong emotional performances. I would even say it emphasized the ridiculousness of the affair. Law, as always, impressed me greatly with his performance; his stoic character constantly refused to be affected by emotional reactions, focusing instead on dignity and duty, but Law portrayed every emotion Karenin was hiding with just his eyes and microexpressions. A stellar performance from all of the actors, even though this rendition lacked depth in favor of aesthetic much of the time. 6/10

All the Bright Places (2020)

TW: suicide (offscreen), attempted suicide (mentioned in conversation), mental illness, death of loved ones

starring Elle Fanning, Justice Smith, Alexandra Shipp, Keegan-Michael Key, Luke Wilson

Based on a young adult novel by Jennifer Niven, Violet Markey struggles to come to terms with her sister’s death, but when she meets the enthusiastically kind Theodore Finch, her outlook on life begins to change for the better. The two visit a variety of places in their home state of Indiana for a school project, but every one of these seemingly insignificant places contributes to a deeper experience of growth and love for both of them as they seek to understand themselves and each other. However, life isn’t always happy for either of them, as they struggle to come to terms with their own emotional and psychological struggles, and both come to very different conclusions on how to handle them.

This was a very dear but realistic film that portrayed a lot of serious mental health problems experienced by young people in a relatable, understandable, honest way. Violet and Finch were characters that I saw myself in, and expect many audience members could as well. Their relationship was genuine and heartfelt, and the actors played off of each other very well. I can’t laud Fanning and Smith enough for their incredibly emotional performances. They hit home hard, and you could feel their happiness and their pain deeply within your own soul. The story was also very well written, with the greatest respect for mental illness. It was not caricatured or mishandled at any point in the film. Every aspect was taken seriously and carried with great care by all involved. I greatly appreciated how the characters couldn’t define how they felt, which is so often the case for people struggling as they did, but the actors still conveyed it so strongly that you felt exactly what they were going through without putting a name to it. This film also had countless sweet, tender, and loving moments, not only between lovers, but between friends and family as well. These relationships are so critical to focus on because that’s what life really is. I think there are moments when traumatic experiences could have been conveyed a little better, but it still felt realistic. This movie will probably make you cry a little, but it is well worth the watch. 8/10

Part One // Part Two // Part Three // Part Four // Part Five // Part Six

#cottagecore #farmcore #cozycore #gardencore #grandmacore #period drama #studio ghibli #young adult #film #film review #movie review #movies #activities #mine

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petshopfox · 6 years

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Pet Shop Boys - West End Girls

Unreal City, under the brown fog of a winter dawn. Earth hath not anything to show more fair. Dirty old river, must you keep rolling, flowing on into the night. London – the lifeblood of the country and the vampire that sucks it back up.

Among other teenage favourites such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, the Eyewitness Guide to London was a library staple. Before the age of seventeen I never made the trip on the route of the Flying Scotsman down to King’s Cross; in fact, bar a school coach trip to Dover en route to France, I’d never been further south than Matlock. But there I was, lying on my bed, fitting Monopoly streets into the A to Z, memorising the names of the boroughs and their railway stations. I was doing what probably thousands if not millions of ‘provincial’ Britons had done before me, embarking on a love-hate relationship with a city I’d never seen.

I finally made the journey on a school trip in 1998. The A-level art students headed off to the National Gallery; I visited UCL with a friend, had a slice of overpriced pizza for lunch in Leicester Square, then reconvened with the English lit students to see Othello at the National. It was sticky hot, and I felt disappointed for most of the time. It was almost worse to come to London for one day, and not get to do or see any of the things on my list, than never go at all. The schedule was so overdetermined I had no time to gawp at the tube posters or read the blue plaques, no time to catch myself realising I’d jumped through the rabbit hole into Wonderland. But then, post-play, we had to cross Waterloo Bridge. The skyline shimmered into focus, St Paul’s ghostly with floodlight, the river lapping against the Embankment. I’ll be back, I said to myself, and a blood-rush flushed me all over. London isn’t a city of instant epiphanies. You don’t see it and die; it can be ugly and gawky, ill-assembled and unphotogenic. But there are always clicks; joints snapping into place; gear shifts. That moment on the bridge was one such: like a photographic print gradually darkening in the developing fluid, London was emerging.

Listen carefully to the opening of ‘West End Girls’ and this is exactly what you hear: London flickering into life, beginning to glitter through the fog. It’s morning, and someone walks into the light from the Paddington concourse. Their heels take to the wet pavement, and their heart beats faster as they scour the street for a taxi. The pulse begins to assert itself, and then the synth string chords – those chords – dark, cool and grand, clean and sleek as a black cab. And a pause, ever so slight, before the new arrival decides to walk; to take in the rush on foot, buoyed airily by the Pet Shop Boys’ smooth minimalism, slinking through the crowds. It’s all there in the video, as a rapid montage of random faces gives way to Neil and Chris, who take to their heels in a vaporous, ghostly Soho, like sombre night-watchmen coming off shift. ‘West End Girls’ is the sound of London settling into focus. Eight million people waking up to the distant rumble of tubes and screech of buses; eight million people rubbing their eyes as the greatest synth bassline in eighties pop music rings out from their clock radios.

It must have been quite an awakening, back then in 1985. It seemed to arrive fully-formed; not just a song, but an aesthetic (though the original Bobby Orlando version from the previous year proves how crucial Stephen Hague was in realising the song’s latent atmospheres). This was not the barroom and dog-track London of Ian Dury, nor was it the hazy, romanticised cityscape of The Kinks. Tennant and Lowe are, of course, northerners, and thus outsiders, though they don’t so much crash the party as float spectrally in a corner with a martini and a raised eyebrow. When the Boys first broke into the charts, much was made of Tennant’s former career at Smash Hits, the foremost evidence cited for his apparently ‘ironic’ take on pop. But I’ve often thought that the beautiful balance they strike between the knowing and the credulous is the product of northern eyes surveying southern landscapes. They are detached, perhaps even sceptical at times; but there’s also that Eyewitness Guide in the bedroom, a city learned and loved, an excitement at having gone through the portals at King’s Cross and slipped into the anonymity of the throng. Despite Tennant having said on more than one occasion that ‘West End Girls’ was inspired by The Waste Land – ‘too many shadows, whispering voices’ is a true summary of Eliot’s fractured epic indeed – the song is too stimulated by what’s going on around it to be either a lament for the lost or a prophecy of doom. It does sound dangerous – there’s something dark and doleful in that bass – but it’s the kind of danger that makes you feel alive and adrenalized. It’s determined to keep its cool, determined not to spend its money all at once; but despite this caution, it’s still the sound of two northerners who will never quite fail to wonder at their adopted home.

It’s a dichotomy embodied by the Boys themselves: arty, askance Tennant, asking questions and pondering significances, and hedonistic Lowe (you can take the lad out of Blackpool!), disappearing into the massed bodies of the rave or shopping incognito at the record exchanges (check out the 1989 B-side, ‘One of the crowd’, Chris’s very own credo). It’s why their songs at their finest have such cross-cultural appeal; the Guardianista manifesto of ‘Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat’ (‘Left to my own devices’) can coexist quite happily with the football terrace reworking of gay utopianism (their definitive cover of ‘Go West’, which was taken on in earnest by Arsenal supporters). It’s what makes them so English, yes (another epithet interviewers and critics find impossible to avoid), but more than that, it’s what makes them so London, and more specifically Northern and London. In no other city in the world do you get quite so many disparate people rubbing shoulders in the crush; underfunded social housing and potholes on one side of the street, while the opposite side gleams with stucco and swept pavements. This is the world the Boys both celebrate and lament, and often with an emphasis on the relationship between regionalism and metropolitanism. It’s mourned in ‘King’s Cross’ (the station from which Geordies spill out into the city like foaming brown ale from a broken bottle), and especially ‘The Theatre’, which again makes specific reference to expats from beyond the Watford Gap (‘Boys and girls come to roost / From Northern parts and Scottish towns / Will we catch your eye?’) But then there’s the funny B-side ‘Sexy Northerner’, about a guy who takes the capital by the scruff and recasts it in his own image. London is always up for grabs, and the Boys will be there as the daybreak traffic hits, on through lunch at the office, then dinner, pub, club, and into the demimonde of the dead hours. You always wanted a lover, I only wanted a job. You wait till later, till later tonight…

You see, London is all about almost unlikely juxtapositions, and the Pet Shop Boys pull off some of the unlikeliest. The astonishing ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ (perhaps the most moving song they have ever written) is the most surreal. It’s an elegy for the AIDS dead (‘there are no more lovers left alive’) sung by ‘Lady Di’, whose own marriage is failing; the ‘Queen’ of the title is both the monarch Neil visualizes in his dream, chastising him for being in the nude, and, perhaps, the patron saint of all ‘queens’ everywhere who are traumatized by the epidemic. It’s timely – on release in 1993, all these events were highly topical – and timeless, commenting on the ways in which our subconscious finds its own warped logic to deal with the crushing events of history. And then that heartbreaking line, ‘Yes, it’s true / Look, it’s happened to me and you’ (a rejoinder to an earlier AIDS lament, ‘It couldn’t happen here’). London is a place in which ‘big’ history is made all around us, in which we constantly rub up against grand monuments and memorials; it’s also a place that can find space for the ‘me and you’. At its best, Tennant and Lowe’s songwriting focuses through both of these lenses. Remember ‘Shopping’, seemingly a deadpanned celebration of the personal benefits of the credit boom, but actually a broadside against Thatcher’s privatisations? No eighties band was better at defining the emptiness of consumerist luxury than the Pet Shop Boys, and I’m not just talking about the immortal ‘I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money’. Stick on the original version of ‘I want a dog’, and marvel at the boredom of desire; the blank-eyed intonation of ‘oh, you can get lonely’; the killer couplet ‘Don’t want a cat / Scratching its claws all over my habitat’, expressing withering disdain for any mog that ruins Terence Conran’s finest.

In ‘West End Girls’, of course, there are cats and dogs, paws and claws. The greyhounds of Walthamstow (east end boys) and the Persian princesses of Kensington (the girls of the title). Another great juxtaposition, and one that makes London sexy in a constantly surprising way. All sorts of mythologies catch each other’s eyes on the escalators. The Kray brothers lock stares with Charlotte Rampling; there’s a frisson of sexual danger, a possibility of pugilism. But London has to brook its own contradictions in order to survive. It surfs breezily above them, just as the track itself is both shiny and seamy, dark and light. The song is all tensions: African and European (the jazzy trumpet and rich gospel backing vocalist knocking against Tennant’s high white plaint), passive and active, dispassionate and yet full of deep, deep yearning; yet it’s miraculous how these coexist with such effortless panache. These are the frictions of all great British pop, but seldom do they ever sound so exotic and lush. The Pet Shop Boys really did change the game; this is a London both real and imagined, both as good as the real thing and somehow even better. It’s not surprising that it was number one all over the world, including America, and no accident that it even featured prominently in the Olympic shebang last year.

You see, for all the expert satire, it’s easy to forget that the Pet Shop Boys are still actually in love with London, and that its allure will never pall. ‘We’ve got no future, we’ve got no past’, intones Neil in the last verse. In London, you can be someone different every day, ventriloquizing the people around you, learning to walk to their gait; only the present, and your presence matter. Just to be there at all; to be swimming in the tide. East End boys will always chase West End girls, and perhaps vice versa. Northerners and foreigners will always be both repelled and fascinated by the Unreal City. As long as London exists, so will ‘West End Girls’; so will a thousand teenagers from elsewhere dreaming in their bedrooms about ‘running down, underground, to a dive bar in a West End town’. As T.S. Eliot would have it, we shore these fragments against our ruin. Or else, we save ourselves with the power of a synth bass, a crunchy snare and the ecstasy of urban romance.

#Pet Shop Boys #West End Girls #Neil Tennant #Chris Lowe #Article #Text #Music #Video #1985 #80ies #London

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archiveofprolbems · 5 years

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Duchamp’s Financial Documents: Exchange as a Source of Value by Velthuis, Olav

Introduction

“You know, I like signing all those things – it devalues them,” Duchamp confided to Richard Hamilton at the Pasadena Art Museum. (Tomkins 1965, p. 68.) A retrospective of his work had just opened (1963) and without reluctance Duchamp spent the morning signing papers, posters and other objects. His fame in America was greater than ever, and as Duchamp recalled himself he would sign anything in those days. (cf. Judovitz 1995, p. 162.) Many more shows were put together in the years to follow. Vogue interviewed Duchamp, museums organized round table discussions where Duchamp himself would frequently show up, and slowly a body of literature emerged that vainly tried to pin down the meaning of his work.

A little over a year after Pasadena, the same ritual took place: a show opened at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York and an unknown man entered.(1) Philippe Bruno, more of a groupie than an art collector, had cut out all newspaper

reviews of the show and pasted them in his copy of the show’s catalogue. If Duchamp could sign this please, maybe on the blank check that was attached with a paperclip to the page where the Tzanck Check was reproduced (facing L.H.O.O.Q.)...

Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp Cheque Bruno, 1965

With the “Cheque Bruno a quartet of financial readymades had been completed. Duchamp created the first of them in 1919 (Figure 2) for his dentist Tzanck, followed five years later by a bond issued to finance a roulette project. (Figure 3) In the same year that he signed Philippe Bruno’s check (1965), Duchamp had also converted a Czech membership card into a readymade by wittily naming it “Czech Check.” Duchamp’s four financial readymades have hardly received attention.(2)

The status of the Czech Check and the Cheque Bruno is particularly ambiguous, as if Duchamp’s interpreters have understood his lesson all too well (or not at all). The checks have never been institutionalized as proper works by Duchamp.(3) At the same time, they have been noticed too often to live in oblivion altogether.

Duchamp’s financial documents both specify and generalize his overall artistic enterprise. Rather than addressing all institutions of the art world, they nail art down at one specific institution: the art market. Rather than questioning artistic worth, they address the general question of how value comes into being. As epitomes of the readymade, Duchamp’s financial documents defy general interpretations. They may be fingerprints of a charlatan, but it is impossible to deny their critical potential as readymades. Conversely their refined critique of the art market’s perversity can only be seen by ignoring Duchamp’s biography; it recounts how Duchamp was highly implicated in the market mechanisms the financial documents allegedly critique.

Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp Tzank Check, 1919

Four financial documents

Drawn on “The Teeth’s Loan and Trust Company, Consolidated, 2 Wall Street” in the amount of $115, Duchamp created the Tzanck Check in 1919 to pay for the services of a Parisian dentist, Daniel Tzanck. Apart from its larger size, the check resembles the design of standard checks accurately. Duchamp minutely drew the whole check by hand and had a stamp manufactured for the background print which reads “theteeth’sloanandtrustcompanyconsolidated,” repeated over and over.(4) Whereas his other readymades questioned the value of artistic craftsmanship in a capitalist society, the Tzanck Check traveled the opposite direction by importing this value in the world of finance.

The Monte Carlo Bonds (Obligations pour la Roulette Monte Carlo) were issued five years later to raise funds for a gambling project. In an interview Duchamp recalled that he created the bonds “to make capital to break the Monte Carlo bank” (Lebel 1959, p. 137): roulette would be converted into a game of chess by removing luck from the table and relying on mathematical calculations instead. Like the Tzanck Check, the Monte Carlo Bond is a look-a-like of the actual financial document.(5) On top of the bond is a photograph by Man Ray of Duchamp’s face covered in shaving foam, Duchamp’s Financial Documents: Exchange as a Source of Value | Toutfait while the background reads “moustiques domestiques demistock” (“domestic mosquitoes half-stock”). The document is signed by Rrose Sélavy, president, and Marcel Duchamp, one of Sélavy’s administrators.(6) Of the thirty bonds that were created, about twelve would eventually be sold for 500 francs each. All owners of the bonds were entitled to an annual dividend of 20%.(7) After the Monte Carlo Bonds, it would take a long time before Duchamp resumed making art.(8) Indeed, the other two checks came into being towards the end of Duchamp’s life. With the Czech Check (Figure 4), Duchamp supported his friend John Cage who was organizing a fund-raising action for the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. Instead of a real check, the document is Cage’s membership card at the Czech Mycological Society which Duchamp merely signed. The check was sold for $500 at the fund-raising event. Finally the Cheque Bruno came into being when Duchamp complied with Philippe Bruno’s request to sign the check he had included in his catalogue from the Cordier & Ekstrom show. Duchamp wrote the check in an unlimited amount to the “Banque Mona Lisa.”

Figure 3 Marcel Duchamp Monte Carlo Bond, 1924

Expositions of value

When Jane Heap, editor of the American Little Review, received a copy of the Monte Carlo Bond from Duchamp she advertised it as follows: “If anyone is in the business of buying art curiosities as an investment, here is a chance to invest in a perfect masterpiece. Marcel’s signature alone is worth much more than the 500 francs asked for the share. Marcel has given up painting entirely and has devoted most of his time to chess in the last few years. He will go to Monte Carlo early in January to begin the operation of his new company.” (Lebel 1959, p. 185.) It is unclear if Heap intended to be ironic or if she was simply unable to read underneath the economic surface of the bonds, but just like the other readymades Duchamp’s financial documents obviously criticize an art world where the signature certifies both artistic and economic value, where the authority of the artist and the authenticity of the work are seemingly all that counts. And if Duchamp had to face the fact that people ended up ascribing aesthetic value to his readymades whereas his choices were informed by aesthetic indifference, the financial documents were an effective remedy.(9) Thus Duchamp’s readymades express the intent “to eliminate art as an institution,” as avant-garde’s advocate Peter Bürger puts it:

When Duchamp signs mass-produced objects...and sends them to art exhibits, he negates the category of individual creation. The signature, whose very purpose it is to mark what is individual in the work, that it owes its existence to this particular artist, is inscribed on an arbitrarily chosen mass product, because all claims to individual creativity are to be mocked. Duchamp’s provocation not only unmasks the art market where the signature means more than the quality of the work; it radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art. (Bürger 1974, p. 51-52.)

The financial documents take Duchamp’s general critique of value one step further by not only questioning the distinction between art and non-art, but also exposing the congruency between the art world and the economy. The financial documents made artworks equivalent to monetary tokens, conflating the categories of culture and finance in one object. To be sure, Duchamp was highly critical of art’s marriage to commerce in the modern art world. When asked why he had stopped painting, Duchamp answered, “I don’t want to copy myself, like all the others. Do you think they enjoy painting the same thing fifty or a hundred times? Not at all, they no longer make pictures; they make checks.” (Naumann 1984, p. 192.) And to one of his American patrons, Katherine Dreier, he complained that economic success corrupted artists, while art lovers would only be able to value a work once it had a high price.(10) (Tomkins 1996, p. 285.)

Figure 4 Marcel Duchamp Czech Check, 1965

The Tzanck Check, with the word “original” printed on it, more specifically questions the value of originality and addresses issues of forgery, common to the worlds of both finance and art. (Read 1989, p. 99.) Likewise the Cheque Bruno addresses the art historical canon, and the way it is safeguarded by the museum (the Louvre being the most likely candidate for the “Banque Mona Lisa,” with Mona Lisa’s pricelessness as an analogy to the unlimited sum of the check), while the Monte Carlo bonds point at the speculative nature of both gambling and the art world: success is based on luck rather than merit. As Duchamp argued in a letter to Jean Crotti: “Artists throughout history are like gamblers in Monte Carlo and in the blind lottery some are picked out while others are ruined... It all happens according to random chance. Artists who during their lifetime manage to get their stuff noticed are excellent traveling salesmen, but that does not guarantee a thing as far as the immortality of their work is concerned.” (Judovitz 1995, p. 182.)

Economic implications

Given his condemnation of the art market, it is hardly surprising that rather than getting involved in commercial transactions, Duchamp gave away the major part of his oeuvre. Collectors are said to have rarely left his studio without a gift. When the art collector and couturier Jean Doucet financed the production costs of Duchamp’s second optical machine, the Rotary Demisphere (Figure 5), the artist gave him the machine in return. He insisted that the transaction was “an exchange and not a payment.” (Tomkins 1996, p. 255.) Furthermore, Duchamp seemingly avoided involvement in the art world, urged his main patron Walter Arensberg not to lend his works to others, and frequently denied requests to have his art exhibited. “All expositions make me ill,” he wrote to Doucet. Duchamp disapproved of commercial transactions in art in particular and wrote in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz that “[t]he feeling of the market here is so disgusting. Painters and Paintings go up and down like Wall Street Stock.” (Tomkins 1996, p. 285)

Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp Rotary Demisphere, 1925

At the same time however, Duchamp was highly implicated in the mechanisms and institutions he critiqued in word and object. To begin with, he was extremely well connected in the art world. During the course of his life, Duchamp became friends with bourgeois art collectors like Jean Doucet, Katherine Dreier, and Walter and Lydia Arensberg; with (would-be) art dealers like Sidney Janis, Julien Levy and Arturo Schwarz; and with museum officials like Alfred Barr, Walter Hopps (Pasadena Museum of Art) and Fiske Kimball (Philadelphia Museum of Art). More than once he used this network to do favors for befriended artists. Furthermore Duchamp functioned as executor of the estates of Dreier and of Mary Reynolds, frequently gave assistance to galleries (11) and was active organizing exhibitions and spotting new talents as co-founder of the Société Anonyme, a short-lived museum for contemporary art in New York. At the 1917 show of the Society of Independent Artists (where R. Mutt submitted his urinal) he played a double role, being an artist as well as president of the hanging committee. (De Duve 1990, p. 63.) Duchamp was very keen on keeping his work together in the collections of Dreier and Arensberg, and seemed to be extremely pleased with the abundance of attention he got in the United States towards the end of his life. (cf. Jones 1994.) From the mid 1920s to the 1940s, Duchamp made a partial living from trading art. In 1926 he helped out his friend Francis Picabia by buying eighty of his works directly from the artist. After framing them and making a catalogue (with an entry by Rrose Sélavy) Duchamp sold the works at one of Hotel Drouot’s auctions in Paris. Afterwards Duchamp and one of his best friends Henri-Pierre Roché bought twenty-nine sculptures by Brancusi from the estate of John Quinn, a rich American collector of modern art and early buyer of Brancusi’s work. They were encouraged to do so by Brancusi himself who was afraid that the sculptures would not be able to maintain their value if dumped on the market in such a large quantity. After this transaction, Duchamp organized a Brancusi exhibition at the Brummer gallery in New York, where some of the works were sold. Over the fifteen years to follow, he sold the rest of his share piece by piece. The anticlimax of these commercial transactions was Duchamp’s cooperation with the writer and art dealer Arturo Schwarz, who reproduced thirteen of his readymades in 1964, including Fountain, Bottle Rack and Bicycle Wheel. According to Schwarz it was Duchamp who came up with this idea because he regretted the fact that many of the readymades had been lost, and it was impossible to see the surviving ones together. Duchamp was highly involved in establishing the price of the edition, its size, production process and presentation (Camfield 1989, p. 91-92); Schwarz sold the edition in his gallery on a commercial basis.

Duchamp’s compromise

Probably the main motivation for Duchamp to partake in these commercial activities was simply to make a small profit. Since he had given most of his works away, his reputation had not been translated into economic terms. Apart from commercial reasons, the replicas had artistic repercussions which Duchamp did not eschew. The American painter Douglas Gorsline, for instance, who asked Duchamp to sign his bottle-dryer, got the following reply in the mail: “In Milan I have just made a contract with Schwarz, authorizing him to make an edition (8 replicas) of all my few Duchamp’s Financial Documents: Exchange as a Source of Value | Toutfait readymades, including the porte bouteille [bottle-dryer]. I have therefore pledged myself not to sign anymore readymades to protect this edition. But signature or no signature, your find has the same ‘metaphysical’ value as any other ready-made, [it] even has the advantage to have no commercial value.” (Naumann 1999, p. 245.) Thus Duchamp suggested that his signature decreased rather than increased the value of his readymades, since the commercial value that the signature generated was a vice rather than a virtue. Likewise his friend Max Ernst, who first thought that “the value of the gesture which established the great beauty of the readymade seemed compromised,” started wondering later on if the transaction was not merely “a new attempt to throw public opinion, to confuse minds, to deceive admirers, to encourage his imitators by his bad example, etc.” (Naumann 1999, p. 25.) When Ernst asked Duchamp, the latter laughingly agreed. Duchamp’s commercial excursions were condemned nevertheless, for they seemed to turn the readymade’s original critique into a celebration of exchange value. Robert Lebel, one of the first experts on Duchamp, refused to include any of these replicas in an exhibition. (Naumann 1999, p. 22.)

Daniel Buren maintained that “Duchamp totally betrayed himself...when he allowed Schwarz to make replicas.” John Cage wondered why he permitted the creation of these replicas that looked more like business than art (12) and many other people could not understand why their model of artistic integrity no longer resisted the temptations of the market. Critics of Duchamp saw their doubts confirmed.

If the readymades deconstructed “modernist notions” of originality, the replicas deconstructed this very critical potential. Because of his commercial joint venture of the 1960s, Duchamp became “a factory foreman...O.K.ing a product” rather than an “originary genius authenticating a creative work through his signature.” (Jones 1995, p.140.) Thus Duchamp exactly enacted what Peter Bürger warned the neo avant-garde about: that the means by which art could be sublated, would be burdened with the status of an artwork, fully institutionalized and incorporated into the market.(13) (Bürger 1974, p. 57-58.)

Anti-market perspective

So here we are at a dead end. Duchamp’s own defense with respect to Schwarz’s reproduction of the readymades, that all great painters have made copies of their work, that hardly any sculpture in the history of art is unique, that “it is rarity which gives the artistic certificate.” (Camfield 1989, p. 94.) Obviously these defenses only add insult to injury. We are stuck with a body of work whose critical impact is unmistakable, but a biography which seems to be entirely affirmative of Institution Art.

But let’s return one more time to the first of Duchamp’s financial documents, the Tzanck Check, and take a close look at its economic biography. Since Duchamp made the Tzanck Check (just before he created L.H.O.O.Q) to pay for the services of a dentist, the origin of the work is in economics, not art; only later would the document move back into the art world. Tzanck, who was an established Parisian art collector, accepted the check wholeheartedly. The Tzanck Check – Thank Check? – thus constituted an ambiguous transaction, a mixture of ordinary market exchange, barter trade, and gift-giving based on reciprocity. Duchamp probably knew the dentist via his brother-in-law Jean Crotti, Suzanne Duchamp’s husband; many artists and poets went to see him because of his willingness to accept art work as a means of payment. (Tomkins 1996, p. 220.) Of course the check had no direct monetary value, and contrary to the other works Tzanck accepted the aesthetic value of this piece was negligible as well, but by “buying” Tzanck a place in the art world the check definitely had sumptuary value. (cf. Foster 1996, p. 108.) The work remained in Tzanck’s collection for more than two decades. In 1940 Duchamp was busy putting together the first edition of the Boîte-en-valise. The war had started but he was still able to find the materials he needed to create the boxes. Furthermore, he found his patron Arensberg willing to finance the project. As a counter-gesture, Duchamp created the opportunity for Arensberg to buy the Tzanck Check for $50 from Tzanck and L.H.O.O.Q., which Duchamp still owned himself, for another $100. (Tomkins 1996, p. 319.) For unknown reasons, Arensberg declined the offer. Eventually Duchamp would buy the check himself for 1000 francs, somewhat more than the stated value of $115. In an interview with Cabanne, Duchamp vaguely recalls giving the check away later to the painter Roberto Matta (Cabanne 1967, p. 59), but in fact Matta’s wife Patricia, future daughter-in-law of Henri Matisse and admirer of Duchamp, bought the work from him together with the original L.H.O.O.Q. and Network of Stoppages (Tomkins 1996, p. 391). In 1965 the work would be shown at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York after which it ended up in the Mary Sisler Collection, together with a number of other works like the Rotary Demisphere, a large number of early works by Duchamp, and a set of Schwarz’s edition of readymades.(14) Probably this transaction did not get much approval by Duchamp: in the eyes of Duchamp and gallery owner Ekstrom, Mary Sisler turned out to be less of an art lover than they had assumed. They expected her to donate the whole collection to a museum, but instead she sold parts of it off. Ekstrom: “She had no real interest in or feeling for the work.” (Tomkins 1996, p. 436.) The Tzanck Check was later sold by Sisler to Arturo Schwarz, who recently donated the work to the Israel Museum (Jerusalem).

The social/cultural subtext of exchange

Defying the “anti-market” perspective prevalent in the humanities, the economic biography of the Tzanck Check points at the highly personalized nature of economic transactions in art. Indeed, almost all of Duchamp’s artworks have been owned by persons he had known for a long time, and the majority of them ended up with two collectors, Walter Arensberg and Katherine Dreier who were patrons of Duchamp for almost all of his life (they donated their collections to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Yale Art Gallery respectively). Copies of the Monte Carlo Bond were owned by his friends André Breton, Jacques Doucet, the painter Marie Laurencin (an ex-lover of Apollinaire, who had been represented along with Duchamp and seven other artists in Apollinaire’s The Cubist Painters), Daniel Tzanck and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which had received a copy from Duchamp as a gift in 1939. (Lebel 1959, p. 171.)

Analogous to Greek or Medieval societies, where commercial exchange was largely the domain of strangers rather than citizens proper, or to contemporary society, where commercial transactions are avoided as much as possible in intimate relationships, Duchamp seemed to have discriminated deliberately between the transactions he got involved in. Whereas he made a partial living from buying and selling works that were more remote from his own studio, he avoided commercial transactions in the works he created himself by giving them away.(15) The impersonal financial systems signified by the Tzanck Check, theCheque Bruno and the Czech Check not withstanding, these checks were in fact subjects of gift relationships.

The economic biography of the Tzanck Check also defies the anti-market mentality that is still so common in the humanities by qualifying the concept of commodification: artworks, like other goods, merely go through “commodity phases.” (cf. Appadurai 1986.) The evaluational history they adopt in their non-commodified status – from admirers talking informally about the work in a private setting to highly specialized and institutionalized scholarly analysis – is inevitably taken into the economic realm every time an artwork enters a commodity phase.

Interrogated by Cabanne about the opportunities he continuously created for Arensberg to acquire his works, Duchamp answered, “I had a certain love for what I was making, and this love was translated into that form.” (Cabanne 1967, p. 74.) Valuation in the domain of art in other words spills over into the domain of the market, and thus both domains are blurred. “Value is created through exchange, through the display, circulation, and consumption of the work, in a game where worth has no meaning in and of itself.” (Judovitz 1995, p. 163.)

Seen in this light, the financial documents take Duchamp’s “ordinary” readymades one step further: whereas the readymades had defied Marxian notions of value by indicating that objects can have value without “embodying” labor, they obscured the source of this value in the signature and institutional setting of the work. The financial documents indicate by contrast, that exchange, both inside and outside of the economic realm, may be closer to the source of value and of our desire to own a good. Desire, in other words, is at the same time satisfied and generated by exchange.

Rather than signifying the commensurability of art on the market (commensurate, for instance, to the services of a dentist), they highlight the social and cultural subtexts of exchange. The financial documents emphasize the fact that both money and art work are dependent on trust, while both need a social setting in order to function. Just as the paper money and checks we use in everyday transactions are fiduciary and do not embody any value themselves, Duchamp’s checks destroy any illusions we may still have had about the intrinsic value of art. Instead, its value is based on a discursive context which initiates the production of belief. (cf. Bourdieu 1993.) As one interpreter concludes:

Rather than viewing Duchamp’s commercial activity as a betrayal of both his artistic detachment and putative disinterest in financial value, his fascination for the speculative value of art can be better understood in intellectual terms. It is a fascination with how artistic and monetary value is generated arbitrarily through social exchange. Duchamp’s interest in the speculative character of money does not translate itself into the subservience of his own artistic work to monetary considerations. Instead, it expresses the recognition that value, be it artistic or financial, is embedded in a circuit of symbolic exchange. (Judovitz 1995, p. 167.)

And Duchamp? Yes, both making a living and making art could surely be done simultaneously, “without one destroying the other,” and no, not too much attention should be paid to his activities as an arts marketer. Admittedly, “I bought back one of my paintings...Then I sold it, a year or two later, to a fellow from Canada. This was amusing. It didn’t require much work from me.” (Cabanne 1967, p. 74.) Or, in other words, “it is not that important.”

Notes

1. Not Seen and/or Less Seen of/by Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy, 1904-1964.

2. For exceptions, see De Duve (1990), Judovitz (1995), Joselit (1998) and Read (1989).

3. By contrast, the Tzanck Check was published under the title Dessin Dada in Francis Picabia’s short-lived magazine Cannibale in 1920. Duchamp included the Check in the Boîte-en-valise (Box-in-a-suitcase), which he started working on in the late 1930s (Tomkins 1996, p. 317), and it was part of a number of main collections. Furthermore Alfred Barr included André Breton’s copy of the Monte Carlo Bonds in his 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, whereas the Tzanck Check was exhibited in 1945 at Yale in a show of Duchamp and his two brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. (Tomkins 1996, p. 346.)

4. In an interview he stressed the labor of making it: “I took a long time doing the little letters, to do something which would look printed – it wasn’t a small check.” (Cabanne 1967, p. 63.)

5. Arturo Schwarz has coined pseudo-readymades like the Tzanck Check and Monte Carlo Bonds “rectified readymades.” (Schwarz 1997, p. 45.)

6. As Amelia Jones (1994) notices, Rrose Sélavy thus became an authority over her author Marcel Duchamp.

7. Duchamp did try out his system but unsurprisingly the profits were not large enough to make more than a fraction of the dividends payable. (cf. Lebel 1959, p. 137.) The only person known to have received any dividends is the Parisian couturier and art collector Jean Doucet.

8. Instead, he concentrated on playing chess. However, with the Monte Carlo Bonds in mind Duchamp wrote playfully to Picabia: “You see, I haven’t quit being a painter, now I am drawing on chance.” (Lebel 1959, p. 187.)

9. In a letter to Hans Richter Duchamp had complained that “in Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” (Camfield 1989, p. 96.)

10. This complaint echoes the American economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen. Value, Veblen argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), is informed by “pecuniary canons of taste”: for an object to appeal to our sense of beauty, it must have aesthetic qualities as well as the looks of expensiveness. And if beauty and expensiveness are related, this is because we tend to value an object “in proportion as they are costly.” (Veblen 1899, p. 108.) Because of its high price art is an exemplary tool for what Veblen calls “invidious distinction” or, in other words for being a marker of status.

11. Sidney Janis, for instance, recalls Duchamp’s help in putting together the Dada show at his gallery in 1953: “A most difficult show to do since collectors were hesitant to risk invaluable loans, but Marcel’s frequent intercession smoothly resolved these problems.” (Janis in D’Harnoncourt and McShine 1973, p. 202.)

12. When Buren asked Duchamp why he did that, Duchamp supposedly answered that “[t]he notion of original extends to eight...today.” (De Duve 1991, p. 309.) Ironically, Cage induced Duchamp to make a reproduction of the Czech Check, desiring to own Marcel’s signature on his membership card himself. When Cage coincidentally received a new membership card on the day the old one was sold at the fund-raising action, Duchamp did not mind signing the new card as well.

13. As a review of a recent exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s works in a New York gallery noted: “While Duchamp often blurred such distinctions, they become important in defining his market. A good signature and the artist’s touch still means something in terms of prices.” (Art and Auction Magazine, October 1999.)

14. Sisler acquired most of the works before they were exhibited at Cordier & Ekstrom in 1965, mainly from Henri-Pierre Roché, who had died in 1959, and Gustave Candel. (Naumann 1984, p. 17.) It is unclear however how she acquired the Tzanck Check and sold it afterwards.

15. As Foster argues, the gift is one of the ways to challenge capitalist exchange and its presupposition of equivalence symbolically. (Foster 1996, p. 115.) Likewise Lewis Hyde has noted that gift-giving acknowledges similarities between the persons involved in the transaction: “an academic scientist who ventures outside of the community to consult for industry expects to be paid a fee (...) The inverse might be the old institution of ‘professional courtesy’ in which professionals discount their services to each other. The custom is the opposite of a ‘fee for service’ in that it changes what would normally be a market transaction into a gift transaction (removing the profit) as a recognition of the fact that the ‘buyer and seller’ are members of the same community and it is therefore inappropriate to benefit from each other’s knowledge.” (Hyde 1983, p. 78.)

Bibilography

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by M. Shaw. 1974. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Translated by R. Padgett. 1967. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971.

Camfield, William A. Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1989.

Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery. NOT SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of/by MARCEL DUCHAMP/RROSE SELAVY 1904-64. Exhibition Catalogue, New York, 1965.

Sanouillet, M. and E. Peterson, eds. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. 1959. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

De Duve, Thierry. “Marcel Duchamp, or The Phynancier of Modern Life,” October 52 (1990), 60-75.

De Duve, Thierry, ed. The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Foster, Hal. Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: MIT Press 1996.

D’Harnoncourt, Anne and Kynaston McShine, eds. Marcel Duchamp. 1973. Munich: Prestel, 1989.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, 1989.

James, Carol P. “An Original Revolutionary Messagerie Rrose, or What Became of Readymades,” in Thierry De Duve, ed., The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Jones, Amelia. Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Joselit, David. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

Judovitz, Dalia. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Lebel, Robert. Marcel Duchamp. Translated by G.H. Hamilton. New York: Trianon Press, 1959.

Naumann, Francis M. The Mary and William Sisler Collection. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984.

Naumann, Francis M. Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ghent: Ludion Press, 1999.

Paz, Octavio. Marcel Duchamp. Appearance Stripped Bare. Translated by R. Philips and D. Gardner. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

Read, Peter. “The Tzanck Check and Related Works by Marcel Duchamp,” in R. Kuenzli and F. Nauman, eds., Artist of the Century, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Schwarz, Arturo. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. 3rd ed. New York: Delano Greenidge, 1997.

Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride & The Bachelors. The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art. 1962. New York: Viking Press, 1965.

Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp. A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. New York: Dover, 1996.

Duchamp’s Financial Documents: Exchange as a Source of Value | Toutfait | Published: 2000/05/01, Updated: 2016/07/12

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I was tagged by @twothirtyams

FINALLY got around to it HERE:

Nickname(s): Energizer Bonnie. Bon Bon. Bon. The Bonster. Babe (Jake literally has called me Bonnie less than 20 times akdjakanan).

Gender: Lady gal. Tbh I would be agender because I just don't care but along that same vein I just don't care enough to explain that all the time/insist on pronouns. So. Respect to y'all who do. ✌

Height: 5′6�� (I'm the tallest woman in me or Jake's families but also like. Why am I not 5'11"+ akdjakajaj Kaylor's impact….)

Time: 5:47p CST

Where I'm from: Dallas, Texas. (I would specify the suburb but nobody outside DFW seems to kno lol.) Living in Austin, Texas for 21 more days though...

Hogwarts house: SLYTHERIN. Through and through. When I took the quiz at like 15 and got put in the opposite of Gryffindor I cried. But like. Now, I cannot imagine ever not identifying with everything about Slytherin. The ~dark side~ has never ever been appealing to me - I didn't even have an "emo phase" (I thought MCR was scary even) lol but. Ambition and cunning? Hell. Yes. Also Merlin was a Slytherin so. Dab.

Favorite show: Parks and Recreation has taken the top spot for yeeeears - but now it is tied with Crazy Ex Girlfriend. (I base a lot of my identity on kinned TV characters akdjakaj but ANYway.) 30 Rock close 2nd. Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul are 3rd, shockingly. Bojack Horseman an unfortunate 4th but I kin Bojack in a negative way. Always, ALWAYS stan Avatar: The Last Airbender at #5. I have too many to list tbh lol so just check my TV tag.

Favorite animal: So preface: I only like female animals. Akdjakaja. JUDGE me as you WILL. BUT. Other than hyenas, female animals don't RAPE. SO! ANYWAY! Bunnies at a hard #1!!!! 🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰 Alligators, sharks, dolphins, elephants, horses/ponies, cows, pigs (lotta livestock akdjakajaba), cats, opossums, cheetahs, big cats in general, GIRAFFES (KK……) - I love animals a lot (from a sanitary distance akdjakajaj)

Favorite band/artist: I will not even count the obvious answer because that isn't fair. Other than her: Paramore/Hayley Williams, Ariana Grande, Lorde, Hayley Kiyoko, Halsey, Bastille, Troye Sivan, Harry Styles/One Direction, Rush (hate you Jake…), the cast of Hamilton and Crazy Ex Girlfriend.

…

...you can't judge me.

Song stuck in my head: Well I'm currently listening to Kung Fu Fighting akdjakaj but other than that Love Kernels has been stuck in my head for OVER A WEEK!!!!

Last movie I saw: Uhhh….tbh I really do not watch enough movies??? Honestly, it might have been Endgame?? God I am sad akdjakakja. Watched Crazy Ex Girlfriend 3× since June tho akdjakana

Last thing I Googled: murphy texas fourth of july concert

Other blogs: I've got a SHIT ton of saved URLs, but other than my temp hiatus blog @kaylor and its side blog @marvelousmidgesusie nah. Too much effort.

Do I get asks:Absolutely not. Never have never will akdjakajaj I'm good with it now.

Why this URL: Not to be like. Dramatic. But. After getting a canon URL previously and receiving 0 validation from it, I started this blog under the guise of like. Having just...a fun URL I can change whenever just to enjoy. So, when the lyrics were leaked, I jumped on this bitch because it was fun! And I'll probably change it again once Lover releases.

Number of blankets: Oh my God. Over 10. Too many.

Followers: Little over 125 I think.

Following: Idk. Maybe 200?

Average amount of sleep: I have been working pretty hard to make it at LEAST 8 - but that never fucking happens aidhakan 7-6 usually and it makes me MISERABLE.

Lucky number: 187, and any combination thereof. I know. Weird. But. On birthday turning from 7 to 8, July 18th (7/18), I decided that was the best day of my life, and that was my number. Do I remember anything about that birthday? Absolutely not. But. The number stuck. It shows up in my life a lot. From random (187 on a bus or on a utilities panel driving by), to mildly interesting (my license plate just has 718 or reblogging/liking things that equal combos of the numbers a lot), to really freakin' weird (the number my mom has had for almost 30 years ends with 0718, my Jake's birthday just happens to be August 17th 8/17). So. Idk. I just wike it.

What am I wearing: Tee from a coffee shop, A&M workout shorts, sports bra, crap underwear, and my heart on my sleeve.

Dream job: For my entire life, it was working in film, most recently being an editor. But within the last few months, in a dramatic turn of events, my ideal job would be doing what @tree-paine does: being the publicist of clientele in media, music, film, sports, maybe even politics. Idk.

Dream trips: Jake and I have an elaborate dream of traveling down the Alps from Frankford to Austria to Switzerland to Mulan and ending in Verona. Additionally, I am desperate to take Jake to NYC, LA, Boston, and San Fran. Would love to visit almost every hotspot in the US (Chicago, Atlanta, NOLA, Southwest, Pacific Northwest, Disneyworld, Colorado, Alaska, etc). Also VANCOUVER, lots of East Asia, lots of Europe, Giza, Jerusalem, South Africa - but I have literally never been out of the country and am TERRIFIED of flying let alone over the OCEAN. UM. I just want to be well traveled man lmao.

Favorite food: LOTTA shit I am NOT picky, but tops for sure: cinnamon rolls, cheeseburgers, pizza, mac n cheese, blueberries, pasta in general, sushi, and Jake's aglio e olio/veggie nachos.

Instruments I play: Lol. As if. I spent almost $300 on a keyboard but have been too depressed to try. Maybe someday. Have also been dying to sing for 23 years…

Eye color: Very, VERY light blue. Whenever I am in public, people lose their SHIT on the daily when they see my eyes. But for me like. Blue eyes be creepy. Lmao. I really want green/hazel eyes but like. W/e. So it goes.

Hair color: Naturally this dark, awful shade of ash blonde. But I've been coloring my hair since middle school, and for the past 5 or so years it has been a natural ginger copper. I dye my brows too, people think it's really because I am such a cracker ass white gal akdjakanakan

Aesthetic: Check my "aesthetic" tag lol. Idk. Peach/salmon tones. Farm animals. Florals. Dresses with sneakers. Women. Taylor Swift lyrics over pastel backgrounds akdjakaj. BUNNIES. Shots with a lot of negative space. Mornings and coffee and eggs and pancakes. Waking up next to Jake. Texas hill country. Cowboy boots worn right. Snow. Christmas. Idk. Just like. Look at the "moodboards" tag too akdjakaj.

Languages I speak: English, do you see my lily white ass akdjakajaj. I can speak Spanglish well enough to get through a transaction or vaguely pick up words but that is IT. Would love to know Cherokee, Korean, German, and whatever the hell Australians are saying tho.

Most iconic song: One time, I had a dream that I wrote my senior thesis on why the song "Red" was on the level of modern icon/classic as songs "Don't Stop Believin'", "Livin' On A Prayer", "Smoke On The Water", etc. I was insistent the opening notes were on the same level as "Immigrant Song" aodaajakaja. And I was SO passionate about it I WOKE UP CRYING AKDHALAJAKKAAJ.

Anyway.

OTHER than that, this is 100% subjective and to me personally but: Tim McGraw because those opening notes are just nostalgic as hell; Out of the Woods because when that leaked I was just starting to get back into TS and I put on my headphones and covered myself in a blanket and closed my eyes to be fully into it and oh my God...it was immersive, I will never forget that feeling; IV Sweatpants by Childish Gambino, because it was the MOST PLAYED SONG OF 2018 on our Spotify akdjakajaj; My Shot/Wait For It from Hamilton because they have both inspired and driven me to feel like I can take on the fucking world; and A Diagnosis from Crazy Ex Girlfriend because it changed my life and I have listened to it more times than I can count.

When I created this account: A few months ago. I am changing my person this year, and starting fresh with how I present my online persona was an important part of that process for me. But I have been on Tumblr on various accounts since 2010/11 lmao.

Best memory: Getting moved to the front row at my first TS concert, the 1989 Tour; so, so many things with Jake, years of memories; getting my bun; reconnecting with Sarah; a lot of SXSW 2018; my 20th birthday.

Best pun: The first thing that comes to mind is a post I reblogged earlier about how Lyra from The Golden Compass does not have a moral compass in the metaphorical sense and I said, "I mean. She has a compass. She quite literally very much has a moral compass." I thought I was funny lol.

Random fact: I finally got diagnosed with BPD! And I've lost 20+lbs this year (getting healthy, it's a good thing)! My closet is color organized by item!

I tag:

@kayspiracy @jake-from-state-farm-school @toastedcoconutchips @vagabonds-and-troubadours @grizzlybairparty @thefuckingstory @pictureofsoph1sticatedgrace @his-dark-memerials @taylorswift

#THANKS FOR THE TAG TAAAAAAAAY #op #about me #tagged

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