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granvarones · 3 years

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Sometimes we are late to the BBQ right? Well in the case of Ultra Naté (pronounced Na-Tay), I didn’t arrive at the BBQ til 1998. I was 15 years old and my teenage icon Filipinx Freestyle/Dance Diva Jocelyn Enriquez was sprinkled with Disco fairy dust along with dance divas Amber and Ultra Naté under the moniker Stars On 54. They revamped the 1971 folk classic “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot into one the most fascinating covers I’ve ever heard (just listen back to back and gag). This collaboration introduced me to Ms. Naté and piqued my curiosity.

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Eight years into her career, Ultra Naté had landed five singles into Top 10 on the Billboard Dance Chart by the time I bought the single to her hit single “Free” at Tower Records (I miss you so much). As soon as I heard that guitar riff in the intro followed by those chords and 4/4 I was hooketh. I immediately grabbed a copy of the Situation: Critical album. I stared at the artwork fascinated by its silvery gloss and the acupuncture needles in her face. It was futuristic as fuck! The album’s photography was shot by the legendary Eric Johson who is known for iconic photos of Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Aaliyah, and Biggie. I wasn’t totally sold on the album at first because as a teenager I was infatuated with Freestyle music and this was out of my teenage comfort. However, the album grew on me and eventually I connected to each song on a personal level. At the time I was struggling with my budding sexuality, lack of interest in education, and a toxic-ass family dynamic. This album would eventually become my personal teenage bible.

“Somehow things must change, and it’s got to be for the better” the lyrics from the albums intro track “Situation: Critical” pierced my young gay soul. When my being sexually molested was brought to the light my parents were so wounded by life; none of them had the capacity to support me. My father was strung out on drugs, my mother’s mental health was dwindling, and my step mother struggled to keep a roof over our heads. I felt so fucking hurt by their neglect that all I thought of was escaping at 18. My then therapist Judy had a huge black and white picture of New York City and one day I declared “I’m going to live there!” Until then I endlessly played this album on my discman throughout my teens to keep my ass sane.

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There was a rage building inside me and “Found A Cure” was that song that embodied what I felt. Lines like “Feels like I’m going crazy, feels like I’m going insane” were my everyday life and I wanted out but I was still underaged. “How many times have you been left alone and you feel confused?” solidified my connection to Ultra. This was the second single from the album which hit #1 on Billboard Club Songs. The music video was directed by Charles Stone III who would years later direct the epic CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story. Larry Flick of Billboard wrote “Naté fearlessly faces the challenge with a jam that smartly doesn’t aim to duplicate the tone of her now-classic hit…The diva is in fine voice here and is matched by a muscular bassline and keyboard/guitar interplay that oozes with funk flavor…Miss Nate proves there’s more than Free in her locker with a pure floorfiller. A Gloria Gaynor for the Millennium.” Mic drop.

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“A New Kind of Medicine,” the album’s second track, and third single, lightened the mood after the dark yet realist ‘Situation’. During this era in House music Disco samples were a huge commodity. While this was purely an original song the Disco influence is prevalent. The single had some heavy hitters on the remixes and the first two being producers in Freestyle: Albert Cabrera, David Morales, and Danny Tenaglia. The Morales mix is quite festive especially at the 5:20 mark when you get that tidbit of Inner City’s “Big Fun” followed by a lyric not in the original: “Stop taking me down.”

My favorite track on the album was the last single released from the album, the Al Mack produced “Release The Pressure.” How can you not feel like you’re transpired into a film where the woman is struggling, breaking shit, cursing bitches out, lights a joint, a sip of wine, puts on her favorite 12” and gets her damn life. The production on this track has so many beautiful layers from the piano, to the horns, and guitars. It always felt like time froze whenever this track came on. The song was also featured on the soundtrack The 24 Hour Woman starring Rosie Perez. This is one of my forever tracks because it always remains true to this day: “You get up, It knocks you back down, Release the pressure, Let it out.”

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The album itself pays homage to the 70’s and 80’s influence of staples in Disco, Funk and House which are very evident in: “Any Ole Love” (Indeep’s “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”) and “Love You Can’t Deny” (Royal House “Can You Party”). The mellower affairs “It’s Crying Time” and “Every Now and Then” were so damn pretty that they seduced my young self who was anti anything slow. The last original track on the album “Divine Love,” produced by the duo Masters At Work, transports you to Sunday mass everytime. That 5 minute mark is pure gospel ear candy with those luscious rhodes and ab libs take you on a journey to the ether. This felt like the sequel to “Rejoicing (I’ll Never Forget)” from her first album Blue Notes In The Basement. At this point in time I was severely struggling with my belief in God however this song just anoints you, especially the 9 minute MAW Version.

This album took me on a musical journey. It became my bible, my salvation, my healing. In the spring of 2001 my life took a huge turn. I had fallen in the love with a man in NYC whom I thought I’d be with forever. After a huge argument with my parents I finally said “fuck this shit I’m out!” Ultra’s lyrics rang in my head “Now I know you’re no good for me, Now I got to find a remedy,” my remedy: move to NYC. After settling into my then boyfriend’s apartment I would blast this album on volume 5000 and the whole damn planet would shake. I didn’t give a fuck about the neighbor downstairs because I was ‘Free’ and living my damn best gay life. I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco that’s for damn sure!

In 2012, I had a full circle moment when I was hired by Naté’s management, Peace Bisquit. It was completely surreal to be in direct communication with her, and an honor working under the brilliance of Bill Coleman (remember Deee-Lite? “Groove Is In The Heart”? Nuff said.). I was bestowed the task of managing the execution of the Hero Worship album to digital platforms. Miss Naté was the most humble artist I ever worked with. A memory I will always hold dear is a tender moment we shared at the Paradise Garage Reunion Party in 2014. The DJ began to play “The Whistle Song” in honor of the iconic Frankie Knuckles who had passed just months earlier. As the song played, Ultra began to cry. I put my arm around her and consoled her. The same way her music had done for me in all the years before.

Thank you for never giving up on your music Ultra because this album saved me!

“You might save someone’s life.” – Ultra Naté “Situation: Critical”

If you are experiencing or have experienced sexual abuse please call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline 800.656.HOPE (4673)

Giorgio Alxndr (He/Him) is into music, modeling, activism, and plant fathering. He creates beats and playlists in his free time. Loves deep conversations and therapy sessions. Professionally he’s always in the mix between music and technology.

#granvarones #ultra nate #gay #queer #storytelling #1990s #music history #lgbtq #afro latinx #latinx #Youtube

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justgotham · 6 years

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The year is 1985, and a closeted young man is returning from New York City to his family’s home in Texas, hoping to reconnect before the unspeakable tragedy he’s been burdened with separates them... forever.

You can probably surmise what this film is about.

It’s Christmastime in the first wave of the AIDS crisis. Rock Hudson had died just two months earlier. Adrian’s family doesn’t know there is an ulterior motive to his first trip home for the holidays in years: He’s there to say goodbye.

Writer-director Yen Tan’s new film 1985, which just premiered at this year’s SXSW Festival, is a rare black-and-white, pared-down take on the otherwise familiar AIDS drama. Much of the film takes place within the confines of the blue-collar house Adrian grew up in, far from the New York/San Francisco setting we’re used to taking these stories in from. It’s a quiet, intimate entry into the canon, in stark contrast to last year’s vibrant and vivacious BPM, the French film about a group of ACT UP activists in the 1990s.

The result is a poignant, even provocative meditation on a part of LGBTQ history, one that strips away color and scope, portraying it in black and white and setting it in a blue-collar American living room.

Tan, who adapted the feature from his 2016 short by the same name, says shooting the film in black and white gives the viewer a visual cue that we’re going back in time, perhaps encouraging them to consider it from a perspective removed from today’s ideologies about being gay, coming out, and the AIDS crisis. It also creates a nostalgic, almost soothing Leave It to Beaver or Norman Rockwell aesthetic, in certain juxtaposition with the film’s grief-stricken theme—not to mention cultural attitudes at the time.

Tan was inspired to make and write 1985 by conversations he had with older gay men when he was in his early twenties, fresh out of college and working at a viatical settlement firm. It was 1998, and many of his clients were men living with HIV or AIDS and negotiating the sale of their life insurance policies to third parties.

By the nature of the job, men revealed details about the relationships they had—or more often, didn’t have—with their families. Often, Tan felt confused. Why would this gay man whom his family disowned still name his father as his beneficiary? And then there was one patient whose offhand comment stuck with him, two decades later, planting the seed from which 1985 eventually grew: “The saddest thing is when the family doesn’t know.”

When we meet Adrian, his partner has recently died of AIDS. He himself is sick. We watch his pilgrimage, leaving his community in New York City for his family home in Texas, and perhaps expect to see a coming out story. But in many ways, Tan says, 1985 is a film about not coming out. There’s an added layer to the tragedy: the desire to be truly known by the people you love, especially before your death. And the emotional burden you carry when they don’t.

That notion in particular struck Cory Michael Smith, who plays Adrian in the film. The 31-year-old actor, who has starred in Carol and HBO’s Olive Kitteridge miniseries, is best known for playing Edward Nygma, aka The Riddler, on Fox’s Gotham. “There’s something special about telling a story that feels closer to home,” Smith, who identifies as queer, tells The Daily Beast. “I’m not exactly like The Riddler in real life.

“I’m from Middle America,” he says. “I’m from Ohio. I’ve been living here [in New York] for a while, and there are stretches when I don’t see my family often. Going home and that whole charade is very familiar. The first family dinner after a while. Coming out to a family, the fear of that.”

He says his family handled his coming out with “a lot of love,” though it took “a lot of time.” It wasn’t hard for him to imagine the pain Adrian feels as he goes through his last holidays with his parents (played by Virginia Madsen and Michael Chiklis). The fear of coming out is compounded by a disease that no one knows much about, that is killing his community, that killed his boyfriend, that he knows will probably kill him, too. This will probably be his last Christmas, and he knows it.

“I don’t take the perspective that we don’t need to talk about it because it’s sad and tragic. That’s more reason that we should talk about it.”— Yen Tan

“This story, a story about AIDS and stripping away politics, stripping away activism, stripping away the medical drama of it, what you’re left with is something so personal about family and connecting with family and keeping secrets with family,” Smith says. “It just overwhelmed me.”

Tan and Smith are both fully aware 1985 is hardly the first queer film to depict the AIDS crisis. They also know that it is premiering at a time when there is a rising tide, though hardly a dam break, of LGBTQ stories in pop culture, and that attitudes about how those stories are told are shifting. There has been, for example, a critical pushback against the instinct to entrench the gay experience in darkness and tragedy: stories consistently involve disease, death, bigotry, the anxiety of coming out, the loneliness of out life.

“I won’t be surprised if at a Q&A people are blaming me for bringing something sad back into the conversation again,” Tan says. “I think it’s a sad story, but I didn’t make it wanting to exploit the sadness. I feel like I made a hopeful film.” Besides, he says, “I don’t take the perspective that we don’t need to talk about it because it’s sad and tragic. That’s more reason that we should talk about it.”

Smith spent time talking with doctors who were on the frontlines of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s when little was known about this disease killing so many members of the gay community. He tears up while recounting how, while shooting, he kept a book of photos of men who were dying at that time, men who were just like Adrian. Who, had he been born then, could have been him.

“I don’t ever want to insinuate or push that the queer experience is hindered with shame or darkness and depression,” he says, taking a beat before elaborating.

“It’s not about connecting gay people with the idea of disease. But I do think it is important to look at the gay experience in the early ’80s and know that it was overwhelmed by disease. It’s a film that is going back to a moment and telling a very personal story about the pain and suffering that certain people went through. Sometimes I think it’s OK to have a moment of silence and consider what that experience was.”

#Gotham #Edward Nygma #Cory Michael Smith

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supernoondles · 3 years

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2020

A lot happens in a year, even when nothing seems to happen at all.

There's nothing new my commentary about a global pandemic (and the particularly frustrating experience of living in America during it, even with all my privileges of continued employment, owning a car, rent stability, and living in the bay area) will bring to the reader, but I will underscore this: my feelings aren't that 2020 is any kind of exceptional year, but the point where, hopefully, we finally realize that economic/climate/racial injustice has been a terrible problem for a long time, and will continue to be unless we enact massive collective change. A vaccine is not going to make any of those issues disappear, and I worry the people in power (including myself) will return to their comfortable life styles as if the next decade won't be even worse.

Anyway, general DOOM aside (RIP man), here's my year in specific!

From looking through my photos: January was off to a great start. I celebrated the new year with dim sum with J/M/M, as per tradition, and went on a foggy hike through SF with my family that involved my dad and J getting hilariously lost. Soon after I went to Sonoma with J/M -- for all my years in the bay, I had never explored north of the Golden Gate that much -- which was a wonderful trip seeing J's hometown. I helped my lab demo research at the Exploratorium, started growing my own microgreens, and went on more (to become semi-regular and my only source of cardio through the pandemic) bike rides with my lab mates. I finally saw Hamilton (though feel a need to justify here how "cringey" I think LMM is). I went to Genesis, my first gaming-related convention, and it was a lot of fun despite seeing no women. I did so many things, was making progress on research (I think? I don't recall any breakdowns) and my mental health was generally good.

The doing of things continued in February. After not going last year, I went to the Tet Festival in SJ (which was kind of sad). I joined a Chinese learning club and a crafts club and had a delicious omakase. N visited again, I went ice skating and tried to rescue a giant rat from string lights, and saw the Sonic movie in theaters (which would have been my last movie in theaters, sigh). After having a drink at Wursthall with T, I felt terrible (to the unaccustomed reader, not only do I Asian glow, my hands/feet itch whenever I drink and I feel like I want to die), and decided that was the last drink I'd ever have -- thanks to the pandemic that's stayed true. I went on a ski retreat with the lab that felt particularly special (and not just because I didn't have to pay). We (I, in convincing my mostly Asian office) wanted to make 元宵 on the eve of E's birthday, but it turns out that a bunch of CS PhD students really love singing karaoke for like 4 hours straight into the night, and at some point I was like, okay y'all, time to go to bed. So I hosted 元宵 making at my apartment the next weekend, and we watched another Bong Joon-Ho movie (The Host) to celebrate his Oscar win. Typing this out, it seems wild that this was even in this year. I also did sh*** for the first time, hallucinated white woman in the edges of my vision like a GAN, ate a lot of shaved parmesan from TJ, and let go of any stress I had about the UIST deadline to the abundance of nature and the world.

I break from the month-per-paragraph format now because we all know what happens next. M and I biked around campus to film a virtual tour for the newly virtual admit weekend. Being in Gates that Friday (three days before the bay area wide shelter-in-place order) was the last time I'd be on campus for a while. The next day I adopted 3 wonderful baby rats (my biggest brain move this whole year) and the day after that I moved home. I was counting down the days until Animal Crossing and then J and I were duplicating royal crowns in ACNH. At some point my hair got really bad. The months blurred together. Adjusting to WFH was extremely challenging for me, someone who had structured their whole life around the "I only do work in the office and I leave the office when I get hungry for dinner" logic. I would stop working at 6pm but spent the entire afternoon mentally prepping myself to do maybe 30 menial minutes of it. I binged AtLA. I gave up submitting to UIST. In May I hung out in the park with J, who came home from Seattle, which was the first time I saw anyone outside my family. Sometime in there I decided to become a Twitch streamer and had a brief revival as DJ Noon before I felt bad for roping my friends into listening to my music and ran out of interesting songs I wanted to play. In June I, like many others, took to the streets. For two weeks I donated $50 a day to a different organization. I couldn't get any work done at all and spent an entire advisor meeting sobbing so intensely that they felt bad and canceled it after 10 minutes. I emailed the university and got my housing back for the summer and I moved back to start my internship.

The internship was the break I needed -- working with W was a godsend compared to the struggle of my advisors. After reaching new lows at the start of the summer, my mental health was sloping positively again -- working on a new research project helped clear the emotional baggage of the last one. I was also getting more outdoor social interaction -- I went to Ocean Beach with M/D, Half Moon Bay with my family, and going on weekly bike rides with M. At the end of June, M, my roommate, her boyfriend M the clown (there are now 3 different Ms) and I waited for negative COVID results before going on a 2 day camping trip to Mt. Lassen, which felt completely surreal, and, at that time, completely necessary.

The summer dragged on and my mental health, at some point, began to slip. If I were to graph it it would probably look like the inverse of COVID cases in the US -- gradually decreasing, but with high variance from the day to day. I got an embroidery machine, I attended a workshop on docu-poetics with CPH that was so ripe with information my brain physically ached, I saw my lab mates again for the first time as we sat in a very, very wide circle to say goodbye to a post-doc who got a faculty job in Israel. Most weekends I drove to my parents' house and would take J on various hikes around East Bay so he could better appreciate his roots before he went off to Boston for college. He was taking the Switch with him, so in August I bought myself a new one and planned out my entire second ACNH town, which kept me busy for a while -- but surprisingly not as long as I thought, as with planning (and money from my old account) the whole project took I think less than 50 hours. The camping itch came back and the day before my birthday, which was also the day before J would leave for Boston, we went camping at a small state park in San Jose where he got heat stroke and we slept on top of fire ants. The entire experience reminded me how much I disliked camping -- but what else was there to do? I had a wonderful (and long, bless the folks who stayed) Zoom birthday party where I wore a mesh shirt I made and covered with worms on a string. The day after my birthday someone backed into my car, which, following the demands of a racist letter from the HOA, was parked in guest parking. (Ultimately this would be a blessing of insurance money, as the damage was mainly cosmetic and the person kindly left their contact information.) At this time I was also unironically watching ASMR videos to fall asleep, so I painted a two Bob Ross style paintings, one in my virtual art club, to pay homage.

Fire season this year was worse than it's ever been. Being trapped inside the house combined with my roommate moving out at the start of fall quarter and now living alone marked the second downward spiral of my mental health. The bad days were more frequent. I TA'd a game design course, my first time teaching at this university, where many students messaged me to complain that their 95s were not 100s. In the end the lowest grade in the class was an A- and 20% of the class got an A+. At some point I submitted a summer-long project I did with J and S to CHI; it is so much easier to produce work when I do not have to wrangle with M. (This paper gets accepted, but my silly grad student excitement is tampered both by general "why are we still trying to publish when society is crumbling" pandemic feelings and the fact that CHI will not be physically in Japan next year.) Maybe once a month I go birding. I feel increasingly as if there is nothing novel in my life; I am tired of it all and my body feels fatigued even though I don't do anything with my days. Some days it feels like if I don't touch someone I will explode. My use of recreational marijuana skyrockets. I start doing exercise videos semi-regularly with A. I briefly consider moving to Seattle with E, who is about to defend, before it's clear we have, as always, different boundaries and expectations. I look for places in Sunset/Richmond with M to little success.

In October I somehow pull it together and organize student volunteers for a 3 day conference that requires waking up before 5am every day. I do nothing the rest of the week. After we get flu shots and I let someone into my apartment for the first time since the pandemic started, I help E move up to Seattle. The trip is comfortable and we get to take care of each other; this fulfills a need in me. On Halloween J and I dance in a soccer field next to a combination anarchist recruitment center and homeless encampment -- now cleared by the cops -- and eat a mud pie that is too sweet. On my last day in WA I ask E if he would like to have sex, as friends, and he politely declines. I am pleased with how easily I emotionally accept this answer, how through time and therapy I've finally come to cherish our friendship without always looking for what could have been. I am extremely nervous on the flight home, and it's the first and only flight I will take during the pandemic, and the N-95 squishes my face so my head looks like a balloon, but I have the privilege of free 5 minute weekly tests through the university and I collect another negative result.

In November I fully embrace the hyperfixation lifestyle. My brain, always looking for novel stimuli, has given up on doing work entirely and instead thinks of Thanzag constantly. There is one day where I play Hades for 8 hours and I feel gross, as if I've completed my regression to my high school self. It takes 90 hours until I achieve all my goals, and with no more runs necessary to roll for RNG-based conversational triggers, I finally feel a sense of freedom. (My Switch tells me I have used it for 580+ hours this year, which is more than double last year.) The second SwSh DLC is a struggle for me to complete as I do not find catching legendaries enticing. J comes back early from university at my urging to avoid the travel surge, a week before Thanksgiving, and starts living with me. This helps a lot. My next hyperfixations come overlapping and staggered: I write 25k words of a second iteration of my 2015 NaNoWriMo with the protagonist I had developed in high school before I get bored with the story and realize I need yet another iteration; I buy a combination air fryer pressure cooker and ask my parents for a functional vacuum and bidet as early Christmas gifts and become obsessed with immaculate inside living spaces. This carries on to re-decorating my room at my parents' house, after installing a shelf in the closet and a curtain to close it off from the living room, and spending roughly 30 hours over December break organizing and cleaning their entire garage--they have not thrown out a single piece of paper or article of clothing since they set foot in this country over 20 years ago. My therapist quits the practice and my relationship with my advisors improve. I watch a few housewife vlogs and make my own. I have the revelation that doing research in a pandemic is basically just like any other creative project -- no one really cares that much if I get it done, it's just harder to do than, say, putting together a vlog in a few hours. This shift in mindset feels life changing to me, having before thought of research more as work, a taboo thing to pursue in a pandemic, and when W compliments me for the progress I've made in both the system and managing our meeting with M I do not know how to respond because no one has ever done that before. In the last two weeks of the year I start tracking my time. In our last session (that I almost sleep through), my therapist tells me that I seem stable to her and she is not worried about me. I believe her.

In 2020 I made a marked point to let everyone know that I didn't have goals. It felt lofty to have personal ambitions in the face of everything at a global scale. With this said I will now revisit the 2020 resolutions I wrote last year: (1) Intentionally seek out love: absolutely not, (2) Do enough work such that I don't feel guilty: also no, (3) sew one thing a month: no, but in the end I sewed 11 things total this year so I was close, (4) improve my Chinese: this was actually the only thing that did happen, and now my mom and I have better conversations because of it and I'm so thankful.

In 2021, however, I feel like I finally have it in me to have goals again. They are simple. (1) Get laid. (2) Submit the two research projects I've been doing forever. (3) Commit to writing down my thoughts that make me think, "Oh, that's interesting, I should write it down." Ideas are unfortunately such currency in what I do.

Last year I wrapped up this post with some candid, but embarrassing, optimism. I will offer no such high hopes for 2021, but I do ask the reader if they have noticed that I switched tenses from past to present halfway through this post. And that's 2021: an incidentally unintentional, but then consciously controllable, shift to the present.

#noon's shitty end of the year summary posts #my last post on this blog was my 2019 post lmao

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jonjost · 4 years

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Cara Clarinha

The days now pass in a dense fog, one of mis- and dys-information, a tidal wave of news from around the world, of how many infected, how many dead. Each day the numbers leap, each day the social responses become harsher. Now it seems half the world is ordered to stay at home (if you have one). Highways are empty, hospitals are full. In Italy corpses line the corridors of some places. A plague is upon us. Not only that of this virus, but of our own ill behavior. One feels the sense of dread thickening in the air, the fear of change, drastic change, casting across the sky like a leaden cloud. While some suffocate literally, which is how one dies from the coronavirus, metaphorically we are all suffocating, choking on a blunt reminder of what we have actually done to our globe and ourselves. The skies clear. And somewhere deep inside some clarity begins to come into focus, and those suddenly not working 8 to 14 hours a day, frantically going to and from, buying things of habit, find time to think a moment. And other things become clear: that the frantic world in which your job, your life, your imagined future were all invested may just vanish. And it may.

Reading tea leaves is a nice mystical thing, like Tarot cards and astrology charts. Some like to do these things and some take them seriously. I instead read other things – hard, often unpleasant facts, social, political, and physical realities. I do not come to conclusions because I like them, but because that is what I see, piecing one thing and another together. For now many decades I saw this kind of conjunction of realities coming together to produce something like what is going on now; that at some point the stresses constructed into our society and our way of living – our “life-style” would become too great, and it would all quickly collapse. Not long ago there was a period when catastrophe theory was academically popular.

While I was long ago familiar with this theory, though I had hardly “studied” it, I had an interesting experience which took the theory out of the sterile world of academia, and put it right in front of me. Back in 1975 or so, I had driven all the way from Montana in a VW van, to San Diego and on all the way to the East Coast. It was for my first screening at the Museum of Modern Art. The van had no brakes, and it is a long, interesting story, but best told another time. At all events I went for a screening in New England, meeting for the first time Peter Hutton (who died 4 years ago, come June), and saw his wonderful films the first time. And he saw my Speaking Directly, which he liked and he wondered how I could like his films, so very different. Some people seem to think one can only like work that is the same as one’s own.

From Speaking Directly

Where he lived there was a Porsche garage, and since they are VW’s underneath, I traded them a lid of the world’s worst grass I’d grown in Montana, to fix my brakes. At the time the Tet offensive was going on in Vietnam – that was the last military action by the Vietcong against America – and they were moving into Saigon and American troops were fleeing, taking helicopters from the roof of the US Embassy. That was on the radio while the mechanic was taking the wheels off my van to fix the brakes. The wheel drums were rusted onto the spindle, and he explained rust was a crystalline structure and when the tool he was using applied enough pressure the structure would suddenly collapse, and the 30 kilo piece of steel would just pop off. He advised me to step back as I wouldn’t like that landing on my foot. A few days before the US government had assured the public that in Vietnam all was stable and not to be concerned. Standing in that garage I put the two together, the rusted corroded matter of my van, and the corrupted, corroded social/political matter in Vietnam. The same.

Peter Hutton and New York Portrait 1

And so today as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the world, it is quite similar. The economic system which we have built under the rubric “globalism” under “neo- liberal” ideology, which is really just capitalism unrestrained from its own tendencies and unchecked by regional forces, has, in combination with modern medical practices – meaning from the last 100 years – and other factors, including our methods of agriculture and manufacturing, all come together to make this rupture. It is an unsustainable system and finally the stresses on it have caused it to stumble, and fall, just as did the rusted structure on my van’s wheel, and Saigon, when there was enough stress to break the seemingly stable system.

Whether this virus will accomplish such a rupture or not in the long run, it has certainly in a very short period caused a great disruption in our “life as usual.” While there are now, of course, various conspiracy theories as to just how, who, what, why all this has happened (that the US did it, China did it, etc. etc.), my sense is that while it was not deliberate, it is a consequence of our cumulative actions and abuse of the natural world in which we live.

Philip Guston

I would hope this great break in what we thought of as “normal” would give us pause about resuming things as usual once this has passed. That we would, globally, and locally sit down and seriously think about what it is that we have done so terribly wrong – not just to produce this virus, but to produce the ultimately deeply damaging and unhappy world we have created. For this to actually happen I think this current crisis must last into the summer or autumn, enough of a shock to our sense of “normal” to settle in deep enough for us to stop and consider everything. So I hope. The hard-nosed observer of our cultures, though, has his doubts.

Matilde, in Portrait

The other day, my “other” Italian family, with Tilde being the messenger, sent me word that so far they are all OK (the older of them are in their 80’s so this is very risky for them, and they live in Lombardia where the virus has hit hardest to now). And she sent me photos of her grandchildren, writing she hope it would make me smile. Which it did, though also it brought tears to my eyes, thinking of the possible world they may grow up in. Unless, as I suggested above, we seriously and deeply change our societies, their values and behaviors.

Famiglia Rebosio

And as the world has indeed changed, so has the little modest and really not very important world of cinema. Festivals are cancelled around the world, including Cannes. Productions have come to a halt (a big animation feature my friend here in Portland, Mark, was working on has stopped for two weeks, for now, but I imagine it will be at least two months and perhaps more, or perhaps it will simply be stopped despite its Oscar winning director).

With the changed circumstances I have decided to post Pequenos Milagres on-line, for the moment for free. Aside from the last minutes of it, it is a joyous and beautiful work, so perhaps in these hard times around the globe it might make some joy for people to see it. I hope so. And for you. Preferably see on a good screen and with a good sound system or headphones. It is here.

From Pequenos Milagres

I assume you are, like many others, staying at home. I hope things go well for you, Tiago, and your friends. I am staying as best I can in, avoiding other people and trying as best I can to not contract the coronavirus. And if I do I hope my body can deal with it. I have no medical insurance so I don’t really know what would be done with me if I required hospitalization – though I would I think try to refuse it. We shall see.

Amo-te, Clarinha. Be safe and be well.

I love you

Teu pai,

jon

Uma Lettera para Clara: O Contágio 3 Cara Clarinha The days now pass in a dense fog, one of mis- and dys-information, a tidal wave of news from around the world, of how many infected, how many dead.

#Chicken Little #coronavirus #COVID-19 #Famiglia Rebosio #MoMA #Pequenos Milagres #Peter Hutton #Philip Guston #Speaking Directly

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bloodontheclocktower · 6 years

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A Video, BGG, San Francisco, Canberra, and CanCon

Barring a short break over Christmas, the BOTC Team has been super busy moving production forward, getting more pre-release copies out there, going to conventions, hosting games nights, and making cool videos...

We Made a Video!

It was such a fun day! It shows highlights of rad people playing a real game of Blood on the Clocktower and tells you why we think it's awesome:

youtube

Everyone in this video is a friend who’s been playing in Sydney with us for at least the past year or so - some have even been with us since the very first game in 2014. We filmed it at Claire’s house in Newtown (Sydney, Australia) with the extensive setup of lights, vines, props, and whole light-up clock that Steven has for when he needs to make a session of BOTC extra fancy. It took about three or four hours to film because there were many breaks for technical reasons (and a lot of breaks for food), but other than that it was an honest-to-goodness game and we had no idea how it would play out or which team would win. For those after a few more details, the lineup going clockwise from the Imp was:

Imp (Lucy) Virgin (Misha) Baron (Julian) Ravenkeeper (Myeisha) Chef (Lewis) Drunk Undertaker (Kurt) Bone Collector - Evil (Marianna) Saint (Doug) Washerwoman (Fil) Empath (Claire) Spy (Abdallah)

Early on, Steven and I thought the Good team had it won - they executed a minion (the Baron) on the first day and then nearly got a majority vote on the Demon the next day. However her bluff as an outsider after that was strong, the Baron (assisted by the Drunk Undertaker’s bad info) convinced the Good players that he was the Recluse and not Evil, and the Spy helped sow a lot of confusion by bluffing as the Fortune Teller. It was enough confusion to turn suspicion against Doug, whose (genuine) claim of being the Saint was in contradiction of the bluffs of two evil players (Julian and Lucy). Eventually it was enough to convince the group to execute the Saint and bring victory for Evil.

Although the moment of Marianna’s arrival and entry into the game as the Traveller was staged for the video, we did indeed choose to make her the Traveller in this game because she missed the shooting call-time and was the last player to turn up. We are devotees to accuracy.

This video could not have been made without the videography, production, and all-round guidance of our friend John Hanna at Midnight Runners. He is super rad, so make sure to check his stuff out.

We’re on BoardGameGeek.com

It took us a little while to get there, but we finally have an entry for Blood on the Clocktower on Board Game Geek.

We campaigned with our regular players to get nominated for BGG’s Most Anticipated Game of 2018 and received nominations in two categories: Party and Horror. So, a horror party. Halloween, basically.

We didn’t manage to win in either category (we haven’t been out and about that long you guys), but a lot of people who’ve played it rated the game and wrote some really lovely things about it. It was fantastic to see so many of the nice things we‘ve heard about the game all coalesce together into one spot.

Check out the ratings and comments here, and if you’ve played the game please jump on and give it whatever rating you think it deserves. (We had a few friends who haven’t played it yet offer to give it a generous rating, and whilst that’s super nice of them we ask everyone that you please don’t rate the game if you haven’t played it - we want to make sure that the number accurately reflects how the players really feel about it.)

San Francisco is Live

We kicked of the new year in Sydney with a massive session of BOTC at my place on the 2nd of January. There were about fifty people with three different games running from six o’clock to midnight and it amounted to a definitive party atmosphere.

See more photos of that night here on Facebook.

Part of the reason for the celebratory mood (apart from BOTC being awesome) was that our friend Brianna was visiting from San Francisco. She’s taken a pre-release copy of the game back to San Francisco with her - our very first permanent copy in the U.S. She’s running a bunch of games already, so if you live in San Francisco (or know anyone there), you can join or add people to the group for Blood on the Clocktower - San Francisco.

Canberra and #CanCon2018

San Francisco isn’t the only city with a new grimoire - as of late January, Canberra now has one too. After a few fun trips to play BOTC at the social deception nights at Reload Bar late last year, we found a city full of cool people and great gamers who really dig BOTC. We figured they should have greater access to it than they previously possessed and made a pre-release copy for them.

Over the late January long weekend, myself, Steven, and our friend Alex travelled from Sydney to Canberra for CanCon 2018 - the Canberra Games Society’s 40th annual gaming convention. Through fourteen games of BOTC we witnessed mayhem, murder, countless lies, and sincere puzzlement - all along with some amazing displays of deduction and persuasion. Some highlights included a four-in-a-row evil streak from a totally new player (who won the first three of those four), a skeleton joining the game, and on Saturday night a pair of the most hilarious games I’ve ever seen - courtesy of a really great group of young, sharp players (who gave execution defenses like “In the world today, is anyone really good or evil?”, and whose name tags all became variations of “clemon” after I misread a player’s name tag as “not a clemon” instead of “not a demon”).

Yep, CanCon was pretty fantastic.

We met a whole heap of great and awesome people across the three days - if you’re reading this, we hope to see you at a game in Sydney or Canberra soon. Evil ‘won’ CanCon (taking 8 games to the Good Team’s 6) and we left a copy of BOTC behind in Canberra with some really excellent people who will be able to run regular games. Join the Blood on the Clocktower Canberra Facebook Group to see when games will be running (and you may also see it regularly at Reload Bar’s monthly social deception nights).

Site Updates - The Script and the Base Editions

For a while now, behind the scenes, we’ve had an online tool to easily create a custom character list from the 200+ characters that we’ve created. We call it The Script, and it was made by our amazing Technical Minion, Amy.

To give everyone a taste, we’ve put up a version of The Script with characters from the three first editions (Trouble Brewing, Sects & Violets, and Bad Moon Rising) - this means that anyone in a city with a pre-release grimoire can have a go at making a custom list with a unique character combination and try it out in a game. Go make a crazy script with a tonne of action or a tonne of death and see what happens! (Or you could just take a stickybeak to see the characters coming out with the main game.)

A lot of characters beyond the first three editions are still being played with in Sydney. They’re being sorted into their own official game lists and will be added to The Script as they come out with the game’s expansions.

Check out The Script here: http://bloodontheclocktower.com/script

We’ve also put up descriptions of the three editions of the game you’ll get in the box when Blood on the Clocktower is released. Check those out here: http://bloodontheclocktower.com/buy

The Ninth Salisbury Festival of Board Games

The Salisbury Festival of Board Games is on in Sydney from March 8-10! It’s a big three-day board games house party! Come join us! Free! Fun! Inside an actual house! Plenty of BOTC will be on as well as other games. Info is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/865328406956834/

Thanks to all of the excellent people who’ve played BOTC with us and run games and chatted with us and hung out with us and stuff. You’re all rad and I hope to see you at a game soon. Until next time,

Evin Donohoe Social Minion for Blood on the Clocktower

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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MOMENTUM 9: A case for user-alienating design

Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, webpage of MOMENTUM 9

Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9

Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9. Image courtesy of the artists

I don’t often mention the website of biennial, festivals and exhibitions. They are usually designed to look edgy, efficient and user-friendly. They are also remarkably easy to forget. The website of the Momentum 9 biennial website is a bit different. First of all, it is an art destination in itself where you can listen to podcasts from Third Ear that explore the Alienation theme of the biennial (i listened to one about space travel) and read Ylva Westerlund‘s graphic novel The New Hird.

But the reason why i wanted to write about the website of MOMENTUM 9 the Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art is that it doesn’t look like anything i have experienced before. First of all, it doesn’t seem to pride itself in being user-friendly. I remember cursing my way through the website when i first opened it. Where was the list of artists? And what’s with that barely decipherable typeface?! At the same time, the design of the website was so intriguing and appealing i really wanted to master it. It’s actually not difficult at all, just a bit disconcerting. Later, when i arrived in Moss for the press view of the biennial, i kept being drawn to the posters advertising the biennial in the city. They were fluoro green with enigmatic white doodles on it, the information texts had been printed on the duct tape used to hold the poster on walls. The more i saw of the visual identity of the biennial, the more i wanted to talk to the designers responsible for it.

Their names are Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen. They are listed, and rightly so, among the biennial participating artists. Their work for MOMENTUM 9 involved designing a cacographic -yet strangely elegant- typeface, playing with subtitles and filling your retina with blazing green. Here’s our little Q&A:

Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, logo for MOMENTUM 9

Hi Heikki and Tuomas! What was the influence for the visual look of the biennial? i’m guessing sci-fi and old movies with green aliens but would you mind explaining if you were inspired by specific movies, books, ideas, atmospheres, artworks?

Tuomas: I think the conscious influences we tried to take cues from were all more historical than sci-fi. The sci-fi thing is always there I guess though, as we both enjoy our bit of anime and/or cheeky sci-fi novel. But for this I think we consciously departed from the notion that an alienating distance can be found from the past as well as from the future. In this case, it was specifically the weird form the Latin alphabet took in Medieval times after the breakdown of the Roman empire, and especially the forms of a script called Merovingian cursive from the 6th and 7th centuries (the image is a scan from Nicolete Gray’s book Lettering as Drawing):

Further than that, in terms of the theme of “translation”, we were inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s use of subtitles in his Film Socialisme. There the subtitles only translate a few keywords of the dialogue into English — thus forming a ‘Brechtian’ alienating effect — and force upon the English speaking viewer that, for them, rare condition of not completely understanding what is going (and not having thing always translated to your native language).

The green colour was a bit of an afterthought maybe? At least I don’t think we had a clear, rational reason for suggesting it. In the end the high-vis fluoro works quite well (when it is actually fluorescent), and I think the pairing of the colour and the weird type makes it feel way less historical — which is good and what were after I guess.

You are both listed among the participating artists. That’s quite unusual for an art event to do so. Was it an idea that the curators had right from the start? And did it influence the way you approached the commission?

Tuomas: Yes, it was something they approached us with straight from the beginning, but it is something Heikki and I have done before. We’re both part of this Finnish design collective GRMMXI, where, in 2015 and 2016, we designed the visual identity and all other relevant material for Baltic Circle, a festival of theatre and performance art in Helsinki. Like the Baltic Circle people, the curators of Momentum asked for an identity that would 1) fulfill the necessary communicative requirements of a visual identity, and 2) have something (expressive, conceptual, alienating) to say of its own. This naturally affected the way we approached the project — we didn’t really need to hold back — but then the things the identity ended up “saying” as a whole had, in the end, travelled quite a distance from the original ideas that we begun from. And that’s not a bad thing — I think we both hate the kind of graphic design that first lists out its conceptual premises and then goes on simply to fulfill them. That way can easily get quite cold, austere and humourless.

Was the visual identity of the biennial the result of a conversation with the curators? Or were you given free wheel?

Heikki: Both actually. While we were given completely free wheel on everything, we worked closely together with Ilari Laamanen, one of the curators. During the design process, we would skype almost every Saturday, bouncing ideas back and forth about the concept and execution of the designs and he would encourage us to experiment with even crazier ideas than what we sometimes proposed. This combination provided to be very fruitful. It was a fresh break from typical service provision or client-centric problem solving that graphic designers usually face into a more collaborative but still very autonomous work that felt meaningful.

Now i’m going to confess that i found the website a bit disconcerting at first. I wasn’t sure where to click (yet, once i started clicking everything felt into place), the logo on the left upper corner was very unusual and there was this puzzling typography. Were you hoping that the website visitor would feel a sense of alienation when the page opened? Could you explain the choice of typography, symbols, etc?

Heikki: Yes, definitely! The website (and the whole identity) tries to challenge the often narrow confines of established (web) design practices, and the contemporary human conditions in digital environments by disrupting the experience users are expecting and accustomed to. This is something that goes hand in hand with the theme of alienation, and because the site is partly made as an “art piece” we didn’t want to present it in the form of slick, start-up style web design or follow the template of other exhibition sites. We wanted to make the user stop, get maybe a bit perplexed or annoyed, but curious, and to explore the many materials on the site, while still getting the necessary information.

Tuomas: About the typefaces:

The weird, almost unreadable, uncial-inspired typeface was based on old Merovingian models. In addition to the peculiar looks and to the stuff stated earlier, we found it interesting because, while it still is a model of the Latin alphabet, it really did not fit into existing categories of lettering or type (such as humanist sans serif, slab serif, transitional serif, etc.). As such, it can be said to exist within a queer space — a space that challenges the legitimacy and semblance of natural order conveyed by taxonomic systems (I’m super grateful to Sheena Calvert, my RCA tutor, for informing of the notion of ‘queer type’).

The other typefaces are attempts to place something else in that space, although while making them a bit more readable. So the basic typeface is a slightly inverted contrast, semi-serif, calligraphic monospaced, with a duospaced alternative. This means that in the basic form of the typeface, each letter, number and punctuation mark is of equal width, but then that in the duospaced version there is a corresponding symbol for everything, only twice as wide. (One could here state that the fact that the typeface can actually be described this way, with taxonomic descriptors, makes it actually way less queer than it could be if it went completely beyond, but then again, I cannot think of another existing typeface that would combine all these features, and in the end one can only do so much.)

Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, logo for MOMENTUM 9

How did you translate that visual identity into physical objects (I particularly loved the posters and the video) and communicate this sense of alienation into the ‘physical world’?

Tuomas: We wanted to stay away from compositions as much as we could. Often, graphic design is so much about picking a nice, unobtrusive typeface and then making strong compositions, where positive and negative space counteract to create something larger than the sum of their parts. And I think we didn’t want to do that here. So instead of compositions, we thought of the physical applications of the identity in terms of their texture. So some stuff is full of type, while something else might just have the logo or a bunch of lines. But almost everything is either quite empty or then full of stuff — there’s no golden ratios or grid systems at play really. For us, texture is a much more malleable, vague and ambiguous term than anything along the point, line, plane -axis, and it was something really interesting and rewarding to explore.

Furthermore, the Momentum typefaces themselves were a fruitful starting point for this exploration. Usually what type designers and typographers aspire towards is an even typographic texture — that when you squint your eyes, a block of text transforms into a uniform block of grey, without any lighter or darker bits and pieces. This means is supposed to mean that a page is easy to read and easy on the eyes — that nothing pops out in an obtrusive way. For Momentum, we wanted to see what happens when you have a typeface that does produce an even colour, but where the lettershapes themselves are barely legible (the Uncial), and another typeface, where the individual characters are easily readable, but the overall texture of a page is super jumpy and uneven because of differences in letter widths.

Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, webpage of MOMENTUM 9

vimeo

Trailer for MOMENTUM 9: BerlinARTlink Productions. Monica Salazar and Peter Cairns. Overness animation by Heikki Lotvonen and Tuomas Kortteinen. Music by Victoria Trunova

Finally, Momentum is “The Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art”. Do you think that your work (this one in particular but also other projects you’ve made) have some particularly Nordic characteristics?

Tuomas: I don’t know really. I never thought of my own identity as specifically Nordic or even Finnish, but then I moved to London, where both have suddenly become easy ways to explain things. I do think many UK graphic designers have an aversion to formal expression — they want to make things nice and tidy so that the content is ‘framed’ in appropriately conceptual, but still very inconspicuous ways. And I don’t think an aversion like that exists within Finnish graphic design, at least not one quite so prevalent anyway.

While we worked on the project primarily in Finnish with Heikki and Ilari, none of us were actually in the same place (I was in London, Heikki in Amsterdam, Ilari in New York), and everything happened through skype and gmail. So we were submerged in quite different physical environments, which then leads to the question of how much of Nordic design project this was. Usually the way old school Finnish designers talk about their inspirations is not in terms of language or community, but specifically in terms of the natural landscape: the forest, the archipelago, the northern tundra. If you take that away, what is left of the ‘Finnishness’? For us, I guess one could say it was a question of straddling borders, of having one foot out and the other one in.

Thanks Tuomas and Heikki!

Momentum 9, The Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art curated by Ulrika Flink, Ilari Laamanen, Jacob Lillemose, Gunhild Moe and Jón B.K Ransu remains open in various location in Moss, Norway, until 11 October 2017.

Previously: MOMENTUM9 – “Alienation is our contemporary condition”, MOMENTUM9. Maybe none of this is science fiction and The Museum of NonHumanity.

from We Make Money Not Art http://ift.tt/2tVAQKh via IFTTT

#IFTTT #We Make Money Not Art

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