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quick and easy tips

#YEAH #ref

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ok concert thoughts, cc @whentherewerebicycles @alexenglish:

we were down on the floor, near the side stage, real close (shout out to the numbered queue system for standing floor - we showed up 1.25 hours before the show started and got to be this close!!). it was unlike any floor experience i've ever had: this crowd was nearly entirely still, and nearly entirely silent, everyone near us holding their phones up and watching through them. for the whole show, no exaggeration, the cameras not lowered for one single second.

obviously this was one show, in one city, in one crowd, and is hardly representative of boyband culture everywhere. part of it is certainly a different concert culture in the country (although the vibe wasn't necessarily respectful, there was a lot of shoving and phones battling for airspace). but it does point towards some widespread post-pandemic crowd and fan patterns. this was a young crowd (probably mostly 16-22) and that age group has felt the effects of the pandemic & modern technology culture in ways we have not yet fully seen the depths of - the agoraphobia, the experience of social life and pleasure through the internet, the fear of judgment in public places under the panopticon of tiktok, etc etc. crowd behaviour is also just soooo powerful, and its impossibly difficult to be loud in a quiet crowd, or move in a still crowd.

imo the whole crux of a boyband crowd is the opportunity for girls (etc) to be uninhibited. to scream your love out! to have your voice just one of so many, your deepest joys and desires sanctioned by virtue of sharing them, your identity swallowed up. absolution! liberation! you can't be uninhibited when you are watching through a phone, but... but the moment of witnessing the boyband is so fleeting, and so vastly outweighed by the time you spend watching them through screens, how can you resist wanting to keep it.

this boyband in particular is one that you dance and scream to - closer to the energy of a one direction than many kpop groups. much less focus on precise dance & spectacle, much more on joy and energy. the liberation on stage was even more notable with such a quiet crowd - boys tearing down the runway, running at full speed, jumping with their whole bodies, singing with their whole bodies. its exultant!! they do two encores!! they have a live band TEARING it up! how can you NOT dance! and by the end of the show, they had coaxed some energy out of the crowd - those who had been hanging back and dancing came and joined the stage crowd, and things got louder, bigger, less inhibited. the boys came down off the stage to the barricade, taking photos with peoples phones and running in circles, and the crowd jostled and clamoured to be close, so frantic that i could only see snatches of their faces through it. it's certainly not that the crowd didn't care. it's just that they were - what, too fixated on capturing it? too afraid to show how they felt?

anyways i've been keeping an eye on concert videos from other city stops and i do think that this was a notably small and timid crowd - others are audibly louder. but without fail, the first handful of rows are filled with people with their phones out, visibly avoiding moving out of fear of ruining their footage. sorry to be old and shaming the youth, but it makes me sad! i want liberation for them!

went on my boyband pilgrimage, saw so many beautiful things, witnessed my boys from sooooo close so crazy close, experienced soul enrichment!

#if only i was rich enough to be a treasure groupie #boyband feeling is strong! #want to see them in every crowd! #dear diary and all that

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went on my boyband pilgrimage, saw so many beautiful things, witnessed my boys from sooooo close so crazy close, experienced soul enrichment!

#dear diary and all that #there is something to be said for the privilege of working hard For Your Boys #lots to be said about witnessing them soooo close every microexpression on their faces every drop of sweat on their brow #i do however rly miss the room full of joy; bunch of girls having the best day of their lives; boyband euphoria feeling of one direction #that was the one thing missing... lots of thoughts about this crowd/evolving boyband culture/the tiktokification of life

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Dianne Doan & Manny Jacinto photographed by EMMA, September 2022.

#butch lesbianism

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#music

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Decision to Leave (2022) dir. Park Chan Wook

#eat well

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[“We come to gender as supplicants, all of us. And many of us fail the litmus test of decency because our modes of gender presentation are too vulgar, too louche, or genderfucked in such a way that we disrupt the “natural attitude” because we fail to enact and achieve a certain verisimilitude of normative, White maleness or femaleness. Failing this litmus test means we are repeatedly refused, turned away in moments of our imploring recognition.

I’d wager that all trans people carry within them the memory of such refusals, even if they no longer actively shape our everyday engagements. This means that we all recognize gender as a morally loaded laborious process. It is work. And our labor is alienated, insofar as we don’t own what we produce and we rely on someone else to determine its value and worth. This means that we labor under conditions we don’t choose, conditions that many of us actively want to destroy. But we also understand, intimately, that the concept of autonomy that underwrites romantic myths of the insurrectionary subject can’t hold.

Gender recognition is sustained by a web of forces that we don’t control. Because we rely on others for recognition, we understand how selfhood is given through such forms of recognition. Because, when such recognition is withheld, we intimately sense that we are being relegated to the position of the monstrous, simultaneously both more and less than human. Because we exert agency in determining our forms of life and flesh, but that agency is always only one part of a much broader assembly into which our flesh—and its possibilities—are grafted.”]

hil malatino, trans care, 2020

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HAND ON MY HEART. HAND ON MY STUPID HEART

ross gay / susan sontag / unknown / richard siken / warsan shire / lana del ray / tturing / hera lindsay bird / richard siken

#oooohhh #words

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#eat well

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#we've done something wonderful #a little

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i love boybands because i am compelled by found family, but also transience (fleeting youth, fame/fan adoration that feels limitless but has a destined ending), and also the selfish determination to strive for something bigger than yourself, and also the likewise fleeting and brief time where men can have deep and intense emotional relationships with each other because of the circumstances of their job.

anyways, recently, i’ve been deeply caught up in some concepts new and old: failure, fame/expectation/influence, artistic ambition/hubris, and umm hm. how to say this one succinctly. the experience of living as a person who is in some way “othered” - due to queerness or a mental health struggle or etc, having some inescapable thing that distinguishes you and that dictates how people perceive/react to you. the way that sometimes identity matters much less than… place in the world. and especially how people who are gender nonconforming inhabit a space thats often unnamed, that the person themself may not fully be congnizant of, that might be walked into unconsciously or consciously but that essentially always comes from a deep vital place and that always alters forever their position in the social world. and thats why i’m obsessed with controversial washed up idol kwan jiyong aka gdragon

fascinating how fandom is not just an escape, but often a space for us to project our fears/longings, or safely cling to something we lack in our lives, or explore something with a modicum of control and self-centeredness. i’ve found that my fandom interests do tend to parallel or reflect my life events and/or the themes and concepts that are troubling or interesting me

#dear diary and all that #lots of fandom processing to do and not a lot of spaces in which to do it!!

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fascinating how fandom is not just an escape, but often a space for us to project our fears/longings, or safely cling to something we lack in our lives, or explore something with a modicum of control and self-centeredness. i’ve found that my fandom interests do tend to parallel or reflect my life events and/or the themes and concepts that are troubling or interesting me

#dear diary and all that

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I was never good at this body. 

There was always something in me so anxious to crawl out.

— kiki nicole, from NOBODY’S DAUGHTER

#we've done something wonderful

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shutting in. 

heather havrilesky // “last one up”, paul oxborough // from a letter to theo van gogh, vincent van gogh // on the beach at night alone (2017), dir. sang-soo hong // shauna niequist

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“Worry less about what you make — that will mostly look after itself, and is to some extent beyond your control, and perhaps even none of your business — and devote yourself to nourishing this animating spirit. Bring all your enthusiasm to bear on the development of that good and essential force. This is done by a commitment to the creative act itself. Each time you tend to that ingenious spark it grows stronger, and sets afire the ordinary gifts of the imagination. The more dedication you show to the process, the better the work, and the greater your gift to the world. Apply yourself fully to the task, let go of the outcome, and your true voice will appear. You’ll see. It can be no other way.”

— Nick Cave

#words

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from journal entry (april 11th 2022, silas denver melvin, paper + digital)

click for quality + do not remove caption (instagram)

[ID: a black and white photograph of several muscovy ducks swimming in a line on a pond. in yellow text above them it reads "it's hard work, trying to make yourself into something your mother can stand to look at." /End ID]

#we've done something wonderful

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Jonny Sun, “How to cook scrambled eggs” from Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

#eat well #food #wept reading this!! everything is about eggs #we've done something wonderful