#we did natural science stuff & I did photography & a bit of art

[niksixx]

New Generation: Meet the Kids

I know many of you have been waiting patiently for anything New Generation related, and I am happy to say I have finally completed a list of the NG kids! I hope you enjoy reading about my little characters, and I can’t wait to write a few little stories about them. 

A few shoutouts first. To all of you who have contributed to the characters’ personalities by sending in messages to my inbox, thank you. You have all made this series possible. I did my best to incorporate my own vision of the NG kids as well as your ideas to create something fun for us all. Second, a big shoutout to @pepeu-stuff for inspiring me. They have gone out of their way to draw a few characters (Farrah, Ezra, etc.) with their own interpretation and have inspired some of the traits for my characters. I truly cherish all of you, and I hope you enjoy the NG kids as much as I do.

A/N: Also, this is just a fanfiction. I tried my best to incorporate Crüe’s and GNR’s personalities into their ‘children’ but we all know kids can 100% be completely different from their parents. 🤗

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Meet the Sixx Kids

Nash Sixx 

Nash Sixx is the nineteen-year-old son of Nikki Sixx. He has dark hair and blue eyes with specks of green and a jawline most men would kill for. Like his father, he has an outgoing personality and a killer smirk that’s manipulated people into giving him what he wants more than once. He’s a college student that is studying music education, as he would like to be a music teacher. One of his best friends is Declan Rose, and he’s taught Declan a few tips and tricks when it comes to schmoozing the ladies. He’s also a big partier, and loves having his friends and cousins over to his college apartment. Nash’s favorite pastime though is sitting around the bonfire, glass of whiskey in his hand, while his father tells him stories of life on the road with Mötley Crüe.  

Harlow Sixx 

Harlow Sixx is the six-year-old daughter of Nikki Sixx. She has dark brown hair with clear blue eyes and free-spirited energy. Harlow and Penelope Lee are a package deal and will go nowhere without each other. She’s creative by nature, and sometimes will paint during rainy days. For a six year-old, Harlow is ridiculously intelligent. And just like her father, she has interests in photography and art.

Colby Sixx

Colby Sixx is the two-year-old son of Nikki Sixx. He has Nikki’s natural light brown hair and light blue-gray eyes. He loves finger painting with his sister, playing with toy cars, and putting together puzzles. 

Meet the Lee Kids 

Penelope ‘Penny’ Lee

Penelope ‘Penny’ Lee is the five-year-old daughter of Tommy Lee. She’s a little girl with wavy brown hair (usually in pigtails with little bows attached), big brown eyes, a love for bright pink tutus, and has a bubbly, outgoing personality. She’s the spitting image of her father, and she has him wrapped around her tiny little finger. Penny Lee enjoys her dolls, her teddy bears, and tea parties. She’s been raised to be an independent child and loves exploring nature and making pretty flower bouquets. Penelope can be friends with anyone, and at five-years-old, she’s already shutting down the bullies who make fun of the other kids at preschool.

Meet the Mars Kids

Dillion Mars 

Dillon Mars is the seventeen-year-old son of Mick Mars. He’s tall, lanky, with soft brown hair, blue eyes, and a sarcastic attitude. He’s not as quiet as his father, but he has his moments. Dillion tries not to take life too seriously, which is why he and Isaac Stradlin get along extremely well. Dillion has no interest in school, although he’s extremely smart in math and science. He’s president of his school’s mathletes club though he was pressured by his teachers and hates disappointing others. Most of his time is spent on the living room aimlessly playing his guitar,  Luckily, Dillon did not inherit his father’s bone disease, but he is a huge vodka drinker and occasionally will smoke cigarettes with the Stradlin twins and Ryan McKagan.

Meet the Neil Kids 

Katerina ‘Kat’ Neil 

Katerina ‘Kat’ Neil is the eighteen-year-old daughter of Vince Neil. Kat’s thin blonde hair is usually styled straight or into two space buns on the top of her head with a few pieces framing her face. Green eyes the color of emeralds, she’s the chick every girl wants to be, and the girl every guy wants to be with. Katerina is friendly to all, but she’ll never let anyone take advantage of her kindness. As a senior in high school, she takes pride in being the captain of the cheerleading team, a lead choreographer in the dance club, and the president of the drama club. While the most popular girl in high school could have any boy she wanted, there’s only one boy that Katerina has ever been interested in. Unfortunately, that boy is Declan Rose, the son of her father’s arch enemy, Axl Rose. 

Carson Neil

Carson Neil is the fifteen-year-old son of Vince Neil. Carson’s shoulder length blonde hair resembles his father’s, and he was gifted with a singing voice that could cure the world’s problems. He’s mature for his age, which is why most of his friends are a few years older than him. Carson can be a bit stuck up though and a bit of a prima donna. When he’s not busy rehearsing lines for his school's theater productions, Carson is confined to his room blasting Aerosmith, Ozzy Osborne, and writing his own lyrics to songs he’ll never share. 

~~~

Meet the Rose Kids

Declan Rose 

Declan Rose is the eighteen-year-old son of Axl Rose. He’s the spitting image of his father, except with shorter ginger hair with longer pieces framing his freckled face. Declan is unique in the fact that he refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps. While he enjoys listening to rock and his father’s old vinyl collection, Declan prefers hip-hop and rap music, much to his father’s dismay. Like Axl, Declan is extremely intelligent, and would decide to major in philosophy or psychology in college. He also does have his father’s temper, and while sometimes his father was misunderstood, Declan is lucky to have Katerina Neil around. She calms him down and supports his true personality, even if they have to keep their relationship hidden from their parents. 

Easton Rose 

Easton Rose is the eight-year-old son of Axl Rose. Easton was lucky enough to inherit his father’s hair color, but instead of the long locks, Easton’s hair is shorter and usually styled with gel. The eight-year-old is as stubborn as they come with a hyper and fiery personality to match his hair. He’s an athletic young boy who is also extremely personable and will talk to anyone. He’s impatient, especially when he wants his older brother Declan to help him with homework or play baseball in the backyard with his best friends Logan Adler and Hunter McKagan. Easton is a little flirt and has no problem charming ladies of any age. Easton also has a big crush on his brother’s girlfriend, Kat. 

Calla Rose 

Calla Rose is the five-year-old daughter of Axl Rose, and she is the queen of the household. Calla is the only child with blonde hair, but every now and again Axl dyes pieces of her pink (with temporary spray on hair color of course) to match the large gemstone on the tiara she wears around the house. Calla Rose is quite shy around other people, and it takes her a good twenty minutes before she’s able to muster up the courage to play with other children in preschool. Axl Rose is fully wrapped around his daughter’s finger, and it’s not shocking to catch them in the midst of coloring, ballet dancing, or playing with dolls. 

Willa Rose 

Willa Rose is the four-month-old daughter of Axl Rose. She’s a chubby baby with ginger hair and big hazel eyes. She loves making faces at her big sister and listening to her daddy as he sings her to sleep at night. 

Meet the McKagan Kids 

Ryan McKagan 

Ryan McKagan is the sixteen-year-old son of Duff McKagan. If teenage girls could use one word to describe this boy, it’s this: heartthrob. He’s tall with wavy blonde hair and a welcoming smile, it’s no wonder the girls in high school drool over him. Ryan can be found exercising (as he’s a hockey player) or running around his neighborhood five days out of the week. Ryan does smoke cigarettes and drinks on occasion, much to his father’s disapproval. Ryan tries not to take life too seriously and would have definitely picked up on some of his dad’s lame jokes. Around his neck is the letter ‘F’ attached to a gold chain as it’s the first initial of his girlfriend’s name, Farrah. Even if they have a rough relationship (thanks to Ryan being a typical flirt around other girls) he’s confident Farrah is the girl for him, so he never takes the necklace off. While Ryan didn’t necessarily inherit many of his father’s traits, what he did receive is the ability to sing. His father has taught him how to play guitar, and they’ll sit on the porch outside in the fall, singing and strumming to Guns N’ Roses old songs.

Hunter McKagan

Hunter is the seven-year-old son of Duff McKagan. Hunter’s hair is darker than his older brother’s, but lightens up in the sun. The seven-year-old boy loves to swim and skateboard (lessons are provided for free by Dillon Mars, Issac Stradlin, and Ezra Hudson), and he’s an absolute terror when he chases his family around the house shooting Nerf gun darts at them. He’s also the reason Duff cannot find his cowboy hats, as Hunter will usually steal them and wear them throughout the day. 

Meet the Hudson Kids 

Ezra Hudson 

Ezra Hudson is the eighteen-year-old son of Saul ‘Slash’ Hudson. Ezra is a bit shorter than his father, and yet could be his brother. Ezra was blessed with the most beautiful curls, and unlike his father he usually keeps them out of his face with headbands or ponytails. Ezra doesn’t have just one style, either. Somedays, he’ll dress head to toe in leather. Other days he prefers flannels and jeans, or button ups and khakis. Ezra is definitely a gamer. He also enjoys hiking, fishing, and hunting. He’s also into music, but is still learning how to play acoustic guitar. College is not in the cards for Ezra, as his dream is to form his own band. As for Ezra’s love life, he’s a total chick magnet. Unfortunately, he’s invisible to the only girl he wants: Isabel Stradlin. 

Mali Hudson 

Mali is the six-year-old daughter of Saul ‘Slash’ Hudson. She and her sister Maya were also blessed with their father’s glorious curly hair, and they’re damn proud of it. Mali’s hair is only to her shoulders, which is how you can tell twin from twin. At just six-years-old, little Mali has a plethora of hobbies such as origami, bracelet making, and flower pressing. Many of her crafts are given to either her parents or Farrah Adler. 

Maya Hudson

Maya is the six-year-old daughter (also the oldest twin between herself and Mali) of Saul ‘Slash’ Hudson. Maya has no problem wearing identical outfits with her sister, but their personalities couldn’t be more opposite. Maya loves to wrestle with her older brother and cousins (especially Declan who refuses to wrestle back for fear of hurting her) as well as having interests in dinosaurs, rock climbing, karate, and reptiles (she convinced her family to adopt two snakes and a lizard). 

Meet the Stradlin Kids 

Isaac Stradlin 

Issac Stradlin is the seventeen-year-old son of Izzy Stradlin. With dark shaggy hair, bright eyes, sharp jaw and toned body, Isaac comes off as intimidating at first glance. He can be intense about the things he is passionate about (music, poetry, history) but more often than not Isaac is laidback and easygoing. Isaac’s musical knowledge comes from what his father has taught him through the years, and he’s incredibly talented when it comes to playing instruments such as guitar, drums, keyboard, flute, and trumpet. He doesn’t particularly enjoy his father’s dark and gloomy style of dress that includes black jeans, black button ups, and even black hats, as he feels more comfortable in sweatpants and tank tops. As Isaac is the only boy that doesn’t mind babysitting and playing with the little girls, he has accidentally found himself a fan club whose members consist of Penny Lee, Calla Rose, Harlow Sixx, and twins Mali and Maya Hudson. 

Isabel Stradlin 

Isabel Stradlin is the seventeen-year-old daughter of Izzy Stradlin and the younger of the two between her and her twin brother, Isaac. Isabel marches to the beat of her own drum and has what most would call a ‘bone to pick with the world’ attitude. Isabel has had many different styles, but her current wardrobe is grunge. Isabel considers herself a humanitarian, constantly joining in protests while simultaneously volunteering at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Because of her compassionate heart, it’s no secret that she and Farrah Adler are inseparable. Isabel would inherit her father’s artistic ability, but her art would range from pottery to graffiti portraits. 

Meet the Adler Kids 

Farrah Adler 

Farrah Adler is the sixteen-year-old daughter of Steven Adler. Her blonde hair is mostly straight with a few layers here and there, and she has the same vibrant and playful eyes as her father. Farrah’s style is mostly hippie influenced (but on occasion she can rock a leather jacket and bandana), and she has more of a laid back personality, something she absolutely did NOT get from her dad. As someone who treasures the beauty of the Earth and its creatures, Farrah would join in rallies such as ‘save the sea turtles’ and volunteer at animal hospitals, where she discovered her calling as a veterinarian. Oh, and she’s 100% vegetarian. Farrah has a peaceful aura, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she enjoys yoga, astrology, essential oils, journaling, and smoking weed. She also has an on-again-off-again relationship with Ryan McKagan, who she drags to many wildlife rallies.

Logan Adler 

Logan Adler is the nine-year-old son of Steven Adler. He has wavy blonde hair past his neck, playful gray eyes, and a love for drumming. Logan inherited his father’s happy-go-lucky spirit, and loves to meddle into his sister’s business when he’s not playing sports or building legos. He definitely is the class clown and loves being the center of attention, which usually results in him being sent to the principal’s office. He’s a jokester, a prankster, and loves getting into trouble.

#niksixx new generation kids #motley crue fanfiction #guns n roses fanfiction #motley crue imagines #guns n roses imagine #nikki sixx #vince neil #mick mars #tommy lee #axl rose #saul hudson #steven adler #duff mckagan #izzy stradlin #gnr fanfic #motley crue fanfic #80s fanfic

[skrltwtch]

Muse

Prompt 1: Just like some people sleep-walk, you tend to paint or draw while in your transformed state because it calms you down. And apparently, people really like your art.

Prompt 2: A is a popular artist, and B messages them without thinking one day. They didn’t expect to become friends, and they definitely didn’t expect to become more. Person B just felt that connection between the two of them.

Prompt 3: A/Werewolf has a tendency to curl like a dog in front of the fireplace a lot (usually in their werewolf form, but it’s not uncommon for them to do it as a human). (Sources in master list)

Word count: 3,721 words

Genre: Fluff, romance, supernatural

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

I put up with the long commute to and fro between home and work for two reasons, and two reasons alone: the decent rent for a place with a picturesque view and that catered to my monthly needs, and the glut of time to catch up on my reading. And by ‘reading’, I meant ‘scrolling through the handful of social media feeds that survived my latest cull of shit that was taking up my time and storage space unnecessarily, and occasionally attempting (and failing) to pay attention to my Kindle’. Hey, at least I was aware I had a problem …?

Instagram was my first hit of the day. I flicked past images of makeup, friends in situations I wouldn’t be finding myself in anytime soon, and cute animals. The occasional meme and comic draw out an exhalation of air from my nostrils. I marvelled at artwork and photography, half wishing I were half as good as the people I followed and admired, half chiding myself for not practising either enough and losing interest quicker than I’d dropped money on new equipment in the name of my new endeavours. You could say one of my hobbies, the ones I’d been consistent about, was amassing gadgets obtained to indulge my whims and fancies.

My heart skipped a beat — or was it the pothole the bus went over? — when I came across a new post by George. I didn’t know him personally to refer to him by his first name like that, but hadn’t social media broken down boundaries between people, making them seem closer to each other than they really were? He was an illustrator whose work I chanced upon on Reddit a while back. His portfolio was a patchwork of subjects, often portraits, rendered mostly in traditional media like watercolour and oil paint. He sometimes shook things up with abstract, contemplative pieces. He had something for almost everyone. For me, it was his attractive, angular yet distinctive faces and statuesque figures, use of watercolour, and versatility: one piece could be superhero fanart, followed by a collection of moody, atmospheric paintings of the English landscape with some fantastical additions.

It also helped that he seemed to be a nice, chill person, and a handsome one at that, too, based on the smattering of pictures he had of himself on his feed. Please, let me imagine a world in which someone as ideal as him — or what I knew about him — wasn’t beholden to anyone for a moment.

His latest post was a drippy bust of a snarling wolf with full moons for eyes. The caption simply read: ‘Mood.’ I smirked as I hit the like button. Did I mention that he drew wolves a lot as well? Sometimes his wolves were feral; sometimes they were humanoid, but still wild. The latter featured heavily in his conceptual works, albeit as hazy, indistinct forms, like blurry photographs. In any case, I liked that he had a fondness for wolves and werewolves, as the constant presence of the full moon in art of the latter would suggest. Anyone who liked wolves was a-okay in my book. Anyone who liked werewolves was even more so. Because.

An interrupted connection between my brain and my reflexes led me to visit his profile. Instead of returning to my feed, my thumb gravitated toward the message button at the top of the screen. Not a single cell in my body resisted this turn of events despite the restored connection. Oh, what the hell. Why not? Like, what were the chances he’d read my message? He had tens of thousands of followers, a likely considerable chunk of them being bots aside. He must receive DMs every other minute. I’d be another sycophant in his sea of fans. Or he’d see my homely mug and locked profile, and he’d think I was driven to add to his never-ending count of unread messages simply out of misguided thirst.

The beauty of the Internet was that it made ‘out of sight, out of mind’ fairly easy to put into practice.

I got the following out of my system and into his inbox: ’Hi! Hope you’re doing well. I’ve been following your Instagram for a while, and your latest post just made me want to say your art is amazing. (I can totally identify with the sentiment behind it.) I especially love your more abstract pieces. There’s something so … raw about them. And I like that you seem to like wolves a lot, too. They’re beautiful animals, and your art really captures that about them. Anyway, keep up the great work! Take care.’

I exited Instagram, not caring about the rest of my feed anymore and not wanting to feel like I was stalking my notifications for something that’d never come. My phone buzzed with several notifications as I went down my Reddit homepage. I swiped away the banners with green icons that pelted the top of my screen. Those could wait. What couldn’t were the banners stating that I had a new message and a new follower request from —

‘Oh, my God!’ I said, loudly enough for me to hear my own voice above my music (the chorus of Walk the Moon’s ‘Shut Up and Dance’ at half of maximum volume, so … loud). Not one soul on this lightly populated bus acknowledged my exclamation — not even the woman sitting next to me. (Come on, lady, the front was mostly empty.) Thank God for technology making hermits of us all. Or my sudden outburst paled in comparison to the shit that could happen and had happened on public transport. When you took long journeys as I did every day, you’d see some real shit in due time, too.

I launched Instagram for the second time this morning (stop judging, Screen Time) and the first time ever with trembling hands. The notifications were real. I approved his request first. My mind raced to recollect anything on my profile that might make him regret his decision to let my piddling photos of food, myself, my cat, and random junk take up precious space on his feed. Nope, couldn’t think about that now, because I was now staring at an actual, honest-to-God message from George:

’Hey! Thanks for reaching out, and thank you for your kind comments. They mean a lot to me, especially what you said about my experimental stuff and wolves. They are stunning creatures, aren’t they? And yeah, I drew that last picture after a particularly rough night. You could call it a self-portrait of sorts, I suppose.’

I snorted. Change the fur colour and make the eyes normal, and it was a portrait of myself every full moon. Okay, not something I could tell someone I just met, let alone a popular artist on the Internet …

Before I could recover from the shock that my inbox held an actual, honest-to-God message from George Holden (that was his last name — the oxygen made it to my brain for me to remember that he had his last name on his profile), he sent another one: ’Anyway, how are you? I took a look at your profile, and it looks like we have quite a number of things in common.’

What, really? No way. Was it the lashings of sweet treats I subjected my stomach to every weekend? The horror and science fiction titles, celebrity memoirs, and comics, sometimes paired with an iced coffee at either a café I put down roots for the afternoon or the one-bedroom house in Waltham Forest I called home, I showcased to put forth some form of air of intellectualism? The cross-stitch projects featuring memes and popular culture icons? His profile was quite barren of anything that could provide insight into what else he enjoyed doing besides his art. Which, hey, was perfectly fine: no one was obligated to share their personal life online.

I replied, ’I’m fine, thank you. I’m on my way to work. Favourite part of my day, really. And really? Like what?’

Most of my notifications that day were from him.

✦✧✦✧

I was a bustling hub of activity in my seat: A sip of my drink. A shake of my knee. A lift of my phone. A turn of my neck. A shift of my weight from one butt cheek to the other. I was certain I was generating enough electricity to power a lightbulb in five-second intervals. I couldn’t help it. I was so, so excited — and so, so nervous. This was my and George’s first time meeting each other in person. There’d be no screen between us. Actually, what difference would that make? We’d been talking to each other for months, either through text or video calls, the latter more common in the weeks leading up to today. We’d seen each other even on our ‘I’ll put on a clean shirt, brush my hair, and hope for the best’ days. What could either one of us do in person that would irrevocably alter our friendship for the worse? Well …

The sound of someone entering the café stopped me from starting on a list of things that I could do to fuck things up. I looked up, probably the seventh time I did so in the last ten minutes. This was on me. I grossly overestimated the amount of time it’d take me to get somewhere as usual; a natural by-product of living far from the city. Seventh — probably — time was the charm: it was George — and right on the dot, too. His punctuality added to his attractiveness, which had already gone through the roof and was heading straight into the stratosphere. I bit my lip to suppress any unfortunate exclamations. He was a friend, Evelyn … just a friend, and I had no illusions otherwise.

I called out to him. He waved at me and joined me at the table I picked out for us. And the second our eyes met, devoid of any barrier between us, everything about him — and everything about us — clicked.

He was just like me.

And I was just like him.

And he was as astonished about it as I was, going by the long silence that passed between us, a first since we got to know each other.

‘Hi! Oh, my God, it’s so good to finally meet you!’ I said with a grin to break the tension. He broke out into a smile, his posture relaxing. Success. Should I go in for a handshake? No, that’d be too stuffy for a months-old friendship. A hug? No, that’d be too intimate for a months-old friendship, and an online one, too, no less. Was it obvious this was my first time meeting someone I met online?

‘It’s good to meet you, too,’ he said, his expression of cheer unabating. ‘I’m going to get myself a drink first, and then we can shoot the shit.’ His smile turned into a grin. ‘Do you want anything? My treat,’ he added as he spotted me reaching for my wallet.

‘I was thinking a red velvet muffin, please.’ I didn’t know why I didn’t get one earlier. ‘Thank you.’

‘No problem. I’ll be right back.’

As he left, my nerves turned into happiness that I met another werewolf. It was rare to meet other werewolves just about anywhere. What were the odds that two werewolves, one of whom was Internet-famous, would become friends because the other one had a brain fart one morning to send a message to the Internet-famous one? You couldn’t make this shit up. In all the years I’d been a werewolf, George was the first one I knew. I didn’t even know the one that turned me. I got bitten one night, and that was my life changed forever. I figured everything out on my own — I had to. And my puny social network of werewolves made sense: this wasn’t exactly the kind of thing anyone would advertise about themselves.

Once George settled down and courtesies were out of the way, the first thing out of his mouth was ‘I never thought I’d meet another one like me’.

I moved my chair closer to him so that we could speak at length about what we were without the fear of being overheard. ‘Me neither.’ Then it hit me, and I quickly said, ‘It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it, though.’ Personally, I was okay with what I was. No existential dread here, contrary to what one might expect of a werewolf. It happened. I learnt to manage it in a way that made it not have any kind of significant impact on my life. I refused to let it define me. And honestly, I lived for particularly bad days that coincided with full moons.

‘Are you kidding me?’ His face lit up with boyish glee. ‘I’ve been waiting for this day for so long! As in, us meeting up in person for the first time and me getting to know another werewolf. Two birds, one stone: the only kind of killing I endorse. And I’m so fucking chuffed it’s you. I always felt like I could talk to you about anything, and now that really, really means anything.’ It was his turn to be able to power a light bulb, but in twenty-second intervals this time.

‘Same. How were you turned?’

‘I was bitten during a camping trip with friends a couple of years back. You?’

‘Secondary school. I was walking home from the library.’

‘Shit, that was some time ago, huh?’

‘Almost half my life a werewolf.’

‘Do you know the werewolf that did it?’

‘Nope. How about you?’

He shook his head. ‘Nah. Kind of sucks, doesn’t it, that you’ll never get to know the person who’s changed your life so … deeply? They won’t remember either that they turned someone. If only having kids was like that, yeah? Absolutely no sense of responsibility whatsoever.’ He gave his teaspoon a lazy twirl, causing a faint plume of milk to rise and sink into the dark, bittersweet depths from whence it came. ‘I struggled with what I’d become the first couple of months. The transformations were one thing.’ Oh, yeah. ‘I felt … grotesque. God, the amount of self-pity, like, why was I the only one who had to go through this every month when there were four other guys ripe for the picking? So, I decided to start incorporating wolves in my art to get to know and reclaim that part of me. I didn’t want to see it as something ugly. I mean, you get to experience a kind of rebirth every month. That’s extraordinary if you think about it. And I told myself that like myself, the wolf didn’t ask to be born. Ha, ha. Millennial humour. Anyway. Then the most miraculous thing happened one full moon: I woke up next to a coherent painting that wasn’t there the night before.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘Right? My more artsy stuff? The ones I hate coming up with captions for? Almost all done while I was transformed. I’d started some of my art — bet you can’t guess which one — on full moons, too, and I finished them after I changed back. It’s as if the wolf knew we were now cool with each other.’ He took a big chunk out of his apple crumble and jammed it into his mouth. ‘Sorry if that sounded like spiritual woo-woo. I’ve been wanting to tell someone about this forever.’ Crumbs fell out of his mouth as he spoke. ‘Shit, I’m such an’ — he shot me an impish look as he swallowed — ‘animal, aren’t I? Fuck, I can make stupid references like that now, and someone would get it!’

I laughed. He was such a dork. ‘It’s not “spiritual woo-woo”. It’s amazing. How is that even possible?’

‘I have no idea.’ He held out his hands in front of him. ‘So thankful we get to keep our hands and not have them turn into paws.’ He waggled his thumbs. ‘Fuck, yeah, opposable thumbs. And I want to say it’s like when artists get high and make stuff. I do know artists who do that, and hey, no judgment. To them, I do the same thing, too.’

‘And here I am, feeling accomplished whenever I make it through another full moon without waking up in a trashed place. Seriously, that’s amazing.’

‘I think that’s what’s keeping me from losing it while transformed. I was surprised people liked those pieces when I started posting them, considering they’re such far departures from what I usually post.’

‘That explains why they’re so … visceral.’

‘Yeah? I figure you’d appreciate them even more now.’ He smirked. ‘And you know, no one really talks about my wolf art, and especially my werewolf pieces. Maybe if I didn’t make them blurry and made them more explicit …’ Oh, he’d get a different breed of followers altogether. ‘But that’s fine. I don’t want my lycanthropy to define me and my work. It’s just a part of who I am.’

‘My turn to say something possibly corny: I like your wolf art because … they make me feel seen, because they’re drawn by you.’

He put a hand on his chest. ‘That’s not corny. I’m happy my art makes you feel that way. You know I don’t care about the likes or comments. It just so happens I like drawing things that make me get likes and comments.’ He pushed his plate toward me and motioned at me with his fork to try some of his apple crumble. I obliged him. ‘Did you ever suspect anything? Not that, you know, I purposely drew wolves and werewolves as a kind of signal for other werewolves to pick up on. That’d be giving me way too much credit.’

‘No, I just thought you like wolves a lot.’

‘Same here. What you said about wolves being beautiful creatures when you messaged me the first time … that made me feel something, too.’

‘Then I’m very glad we got to be friends,’ I said. Born from the same blip in brain activity that set us on this path, my hand found itself on top of his. His touch had a pleasant, almost familiar heat to it.

‘Me too.’ He turned his hand over and clasped mine.

‘I have an idea,’ I said, mostly to distract myself from how right this felt. ‘Do you want to meet on the next full moon?’

‘Sure. I can’t wait to see what kind of inspiration will strike with another werewolf around.’

‘Your place, then?’

He nodded. ‘Unless you’re cool with me possibly trashing your place with paint and stuff. That hasn’t happened before, but who knows? What if wolf-me doesn’t like change?’

I stared at him in disbelief.

‘I can’t help it. You have no idea what kind of beast this has unleashed. Oops.’

We sat and talked in the café the entire afternoon; we took turns treating each other to food and drinks to justify our occupancy. Our conversation moved on to other topics besides the one special, biggest thing we had in common. Just like we didn’t want it to define who we were as people, we made a promise to each other, and we did so over a strawberry custard tart, that we wouldn’t let it become the foundation of our friendship from this point on. It’d be unfair to the moments we shared before this. We were friends because we cared about each other, we brought out the best in each other, we could truly be ourselves around each other, and, honestly, I didn’t think anyone else would have the patience for his goofy in-jokes.

✦✧✦✧

I lay in front of the fireplace, rejoicing in the warmth it offered on this cool night, while George was working on his newest painting. Since getting to know each other in these forms, we’d been able to exercise better control. For me, that meant greater peace of mind; for him, that meant a more refined grasp of his artistic sensibilities. As with much about our condition, we didn’t question this. What could possibly be a drawback of us spending more time in each other’s company? I now understood why animals curled up by a fire was a common sight in media and real life, too. Wait, what if this, and not George’s presence, was what I’d been missing all my life?

My tail wagging like a fiend when I felt his breath on my skin begged to differ. I licked his face. He gently parted my lips and slid his tongue onto mine. Our tongues engaged each other in a playful scuffle; the fire crackling in the background could only dream of coming close to causing the rise in temperature in the pit of my stomach. The tussle between our tongues didn’t get to turn into something more: he’d had a long night. I nuzzled him to convey reassurance. He lay down beside me and wrapped his arms around me, his hold firm yet tender. We fell asleep like this, keeping each other warm long even after the fire had died out.

We wished each other a good morning with a kiss — no, two kisses, and we got ourselves ready for the day. As we were having breakfast, George piped up, ‘Do you want to see what I painted last night, love? I’m really proud of it, and I think you’d love it, too.’

I nodded excitedly, my mouth too full of scrambled egg to speak.

He returned as quickly as he’d left the table. His hands held on to a painting … of me curled up by the fire last night. The figure was the clearest, most detailed he’d ever done; the lighting was phenomenal. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, tearing up a little, frankly. ‘I love it. It’s going to look so good in our new place’, along with the recent paintings he’d made of a similar nature. He’d come so far from the gauzy forms that once populated his attempts at capturing his — our — condition on canvas.

‘Of course, when I have the most stunning model.’ He gave me a peck on the cheek. ‘I love you, my muse, my mate.’

#exophilia #terato #werewolf #monster love #monster romance #mine #fun fact #I wrote this story in early october last year #and it's kind of truth in television for me now

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #203

I’m not dead, World of Warcraft just devoured my life again.

Have you ever been inside of an abandoned building? Yes; a shack first, but we picked up the courage to just barely set foot into this small building absolutely littered with newspapers and such. Almost went into the main house, but my sister, friend, and I were too intimidated by the idea. I didn't want to imagine what could be in there; already anxious by that age, I worried about feral animals or homeless being in there. Have you ever actually believed in monsters? (Like as a kid) Yes, I think. Do you have any fascination with the macabre? Examples? Oh boy, do you know me? I find most gore cool, I love bone art/vulture culture sort of stuff, I find death and decay fascinating, then there's the roadkill photography I do (done in only great respect/to show the horror of what we can cause), dark and especially gory artwork... I could go on for a while. Do you actually think skeletons are scary? I LOVE skeletons, add that to the above list. I was always excited in school if our science class had a replica in it. What monster movie is your favorite? This is broad... You mean like, actual monsters? Not like Freddy Krueger, per se, and focused on them? Hell I dunno, maybe Monsters Inc., lol. Is Hocus Pocus really a good movie, or a bit overrated? We cannot associate if you so much as dislike Hocus Pocus. What witch-themed movie/show is your favorite, anyhow? See above. Do you like The Nightmare Before Christmas? Hell yeah. Ha, pretty funny though: I'm not obsessed with the movie or anything, yet people give me sooooooo much Jack Skellington stuff for my birthday and/or Christmas. I do love Jack, totally, but you'd assume I was more in love with the character than I actually am. Do you count it as a Halloween movie and a Christmas movie? Halloween, for me. Do you like Jack or Sally better? Jack. What other Tim Burton works do you enjoy, if any? Corpse Bride and Alice in Wonderland are my absolute favorites, then there's Frankenweenie, Beetlejuice, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach (literally my lil sis's and my childhoods), and probably more. I just love him. Are there any ‘dark’ or ‘spooky’ films you recommend? Absolutely the original Blair Witch Project. Spoiler, you never see the "witch," and that just made it so much spookier, particularly when there's a scene that seems to have a high chance of her showing up on the camera. It's very convincing in selling it as "based on a true story;" the characters act realistic in the situations they're in and are very dedicated to acting well. It's my personal definition of a "good" horror movie. If anything, shit, watch it for the ending. Creepiest goddamn thing. Just for fun – what would your personal hell look like? Yeesh, let's not visualize that... On Supernatural, do you like the angels or demons better? I am way, WAY behind, but from very faint memories, I believe the demons. Have you ever purchased anything from an occult or New Age shop? What? No. Do you know any Pagans/Wiccans? I believe one of my old friends is Wiccan? Do you know any Satanists? I don't believe so. Would you ever keep a tarantula as a pet? Nah. Are there any urban legends in your area? What are they? Looked it up and apparently NC does have some, but idk about *my* area. Do you find dead trees beautiful? Some, like really big ones. Who was the last person you sat next to? Mom. Are you embarrassed to let others see you without makeup? No. Have you ever had a nickname at your church? If so, what? Don't believe so, when I grew up going to church. What was the last stuffed animal you bought? Not sure. Maple trees, fir trees, or palm trees? Maple. Which biblical name do you prefer: Naomi, Esther, Rachel, or Joanna? Naomi, easily. I used to want to name my hypothetical daughter that. Which biblical guys name do you prefer: Seth, Jedidiah, Ezra, or Buz? Seth. Who is the hardest working person you know? MY. MOTHER. She works her fucking ASS off; I'd like to see most people handle even a single day in her life. Can you name any songs by Godsmack? A few: "No Rest For The Wicked," "Whatever," "Mama," "Voodoo," "Voodoo Too," "Hollow," "Time Bomb," "The Enemy," and... that may be it? What has been the most exciting moment of your life thus far? Meeting Sara. How deeply do you care for your education? Is it something you take seriously? I don't really know how to answer this. Like... I care, but I don't care enough to be competitive about it or obsess over it. I target for just being "enough." Would you prefer to go to a beach or to a park for a day, and why? What would you do? Park. The beach is too hot, windy, and I hate the feel of sand. Idk what I'd do at the park considering there are various kinds... What are five things you own in your favorite color? Tank top, iPod, uh... I'm blanking. Is your favorite clothing store close to your house or do you have to travel far? The nearest one is like an hour away. In real life do you laugh like ‘haha,’ ‘hehe’ or something else? The former. Do you have any unusual skills? No. Do you have any bug bites right now? No. Do you like to look at other peoples’ houses? Sure, when riding by them. What’s the weirdest compliment you’ve ever received? Good question. Maybe my toes are cute? (They're fucking tiny.) Would you say you’re more witty or childish about jokes? Witty, I guess. What do you think about video games? One of the greatest technological achievements. Video games brought forth a new form of entertainment to enjoy, one that can hold someone's focus for hours and stay fun. They can also tell fantastic stories, just like reading a book or watching TV, and the more and more realistic in vision games are becoming, it just becomes easier with every game to feel more immersed in the universe. What would you, or do you, study at college? I'm going for zoology. Have you ever had, or wanted, a pet ferret? Oh my god in Heaven, yes. They are so damn cute; when Sara was here and we were in PetSmart for something, I actually started tearing up and squealing because of how GODDAMN PRECIOUS THEY WERE, like they all came up to the glass pawing at us, and watching them play was one of the cutest things I've ever seen. The only thing holding me back from getting one is the fact I know they are veeery messy and require a lot of care. Is there anything you find undeserving of the hype it received? Eh, don't feel like thinking about this. In other words, idk and idc. Do you think it’s better to label yourself than be labelled? Who cares, honestly. Don't restrain yourself with a label, and what others see in you and you following along with it solely because of that is naive. What’s something you do a lot? Over-evaluate anything and everything, because my OCD has been an absolute beast for the longest time. Are you currently on any other websites? Twitch and deviantART are open. Have you ever been told you naturally tilt your head a certain way? YES. I have done this since like... late middle school or earlier when the hair to the right of my part covered my eye. My mom points it out all the time, and no matter how many times I've tried to unlearn it, I can't do it. My head physically feels weird if I straighten it. When was the last time you laughed at someone? Some time earlier when I was watching Mark play GTA. Do you have any projects on the go right now? I started a massive YouTubers video with "High Hopes" over a month ago, and now I haven't touched it since the day I started lmao. Do you, or did you, really look forward to when you can finally move away? Eh... yes and no. I really question my ability to be that independent. What’s the worst tattoo you’ve ever seen? Who knows. What’s your favorite name ever? Alessandra. Are you a hat person? No. Have you ever forgotten how to do something simple? Ha, yeah. Have you ever been hit on by somebody way too old for you? Possibly an old family friend; he had this thing for being REALLY flirtatious with my older sister, and then me sometimes as I got older. We were never alone with him or anything, I mean he did it right in front of our mother and dad (he fucking loathed him because of it, probably still does), so we think he was joking? Have you ever climbed a chain-link fence? Yes. Have you ever had to run from the cops? No. Do you know anyone who is constantly humming? No? Are you afraid of any specific animals? I mean the usual insects and spiders, then there's the few more unusual ones such as SLUGS, MAGGOTS, larvae in general really, whale sharks, worms... probably others that aren't coming to me. Did anything comical happen to you today? No. Are you any good at fussball? Not especially. Who do you usually dream about? Jason is most often in the ones I actually remember. Yay. It made sense when I wasn't even beginning to heal, but now that I am and I STILL have them despite having fully and entirely moved on, I finally just asked my mother if it was normal, which apparently it is extremely common with even "recovered" PTSD victims. Shoulda asked/looked it up way sooner... Do you visit your dentist as often as you should? Yeah, thanks to Mom. She always ensures I stay updated with medical exams/appointments. I'm lucky as hell to have her here to keep my life straight. Do you still have a teddy bear? Maybe in the bags in the attic? Did you get any Girl Scout cookies this year? No. They don't come here. What’s your favorite fairytale? Bitch Shrek don't even @ me it's a fucking fairytale. Do you apologize when you know you should? Usually. In most cases, I feel overwhelming guilt otherwise. Do apologies really make anything better? Sometimes, to a degree. Can other people tell when you’re high? I've never been high. Do you own a birdcage? No. Have you ever planted anything? Yeah. Have you ever been blackmailed into doing anything? No. What eyeshadow color looks best on you? I only ever wear black. Can you tolerate small children? jfc no. In almost any situation. Even my niece and nephew, I can't be around them but for so long without getting burnt out or aggravated. What’s the stupidest behavior humans partake in? Holy sweet mother of The Lord God Almighty- Have you ever seriously considered suicide? Yeah. Did you ever hit anything while learning to drive? I like... immediately hit a curb lmao, and I STILL can't turn past them without the risk of running over it. It's one of the things that's holding me back from getting my license yet. Which movie’s musical score is truly memorable? UM, The Lion King??????? Hurry the FUCK up July. Which TV show theme music do you remember most? That '70s Show. Have you ever bounced any checks? I've never even used a check... How many speeding tickets have you been given? None. Not that I drive a lot. First kiss: quick, sloppy, and forgettable or passionate and memorable? It was fucking adorable and definitely memorable. I don't care how I feel about him now, that's a little event I'll always remember and cherish. Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, Ron White, or Larry the Cable Guy? OH GOD what was that stand-up show with just them? I LOVED that back as a teen. I don't know who I liked most, but probably Jeff or Bill. I do know Ron was my least favorite, but he wasn't bad. How many bills do you pay online? I'm a 23-year-old "adult" who doesn't have bills. What’s the highest score you ever bowled? Hell if I remember. Nothing impressive. What’s your definition of a good, full breakfast? The "perfect" picture is like pancakes, scrambled cheesy eggs, and bacon. Whats your favorite flavor of jam? Of what I've tried, I only like grape. Are you a fast runner? I can't even TELL you the last time this bitch ran. At school was is/was the main reason you get/got in trouble? It was never severe trouble, just a quick word, but Jason because we'd always hug and usually just exchange a peck in-between going to classes; both were no-nos in our shit school, and the hall monitors or whatever would tell us not to if they saw, buuut we didn't listen. Hell, I think maybe hand-holding was against the rules too, which I know we didn't abide by if that was present. Do you make your views heard or do you hide in the background? It depends. I'd say heard more often, maybe? Do you have many friends from foreign countries? No. Can you open your mouth very wide? No. You know those things at the dentist where you have to bite down straight onto them for an impression of your molars? If the dentist was considerate enough, I'd use the one for older children instead of adult because I canNOT fully bite down on the normal ones without it being incredibly painful and I gag like mad to the point I inevitably tear up. What was the reason for your last x-ray? My knees were being checked with all the horrible pain I'd been dealing with from them. Did you have a rebellious phase growing up? Not for the sake of being rebellious, no. I only had such streaks (and still do) when I saw/see them appropriate to the situation. What religion were you brought up with? Roman Catholic. What is the most common name where you live? I dunno. Elizabeth, maybe? Actually just looked it up for the hell of it and what I found first says William (which I can absolutely believe) and Ava (which I question?). When something really scares you, what’s your immediate reaction? Jump, gasp, and either dash or stare at whatever the source is like a deer in headlights. Does it bother you to be around people who are smoking? Yes. How much time do you spend on the phone a day? Not long at all. I check Instagram usually at least once, and I don't follow a lot at all. Sometimes I check Facebook on my phone, but I usually do on my laptop now. That doesn't take very long, either. Your favorite song lyrics right now: "What I do know is come Judgment Day, I followed love; can you say the same?" from "Natural Born Sinner" by In This Moment. Do you think it’s possible for a rap song to make you cry? Ever heard "Runaway Love" by Ludacris & Mary J. Blige? Bitch you bet it makes me wanna cry. Name three books that have actually made you cry [really cry not a few tears]: I don't think I've ever gone beyond just a few tears, really. The Notebook probably was the hardest on me, though. Or Old Yeller. Idr. Is it easy to annoy you? Maybe. Do you watch musicals? If so, which is your favorite? If not, why not? No, because they make me cringe into a new dimension. Do you wear short shorts & tanktops in the summer? You will never see me in shorts, and I wear tank tops like... always. Always to bed, at least. Does the idea of having a baby at your age scare you? Having a baby period does. No fucking thanks. Do you remember who your best friend was in fourth grade? Quiata. Maybe still Brianna, idr. What band has the power to make you cry by splitting up? None. Is there anywhere in your house that you’re scared to be alone in? No. Any embarrassing/childish shows you secretly still enjoy watching? No. I don't watch TV period, but what I do like, BELIEVE THIS SHIT OR NOT, I'm not embarrassed. Have you ever been admitted to the hospital for a long period of time? I think the longest I was ever supposed to stay somewhere was three months, but that didn't actually happen. The longest I've actually been in a hospital was two weeks, give or take. Would you feel funny if you kissed somebody of the same sex? I'm not straight so obviously not. Name three things in your room that others probably don’t have in theirs: An iguana, a snake, and a rat. In the same general area lmao. What’s something you can cook or bake like a pro? Nothing. If you could pull off any hairstyle, what would it look like? A pixie cut. The kind with the shaved sides. Besides furniture, what’s the biggest thing in your bedroom? Uhhh my snake's cage? Do you diet and exercise regularly? I do a 16-hour fast daily. What’s something that you think is really cute? Even though I don't want kids, I can't see men being really vibrant and cute with babies or toddlers without just alksdfjioawer Would you rather donate time, blood, or money? Hm. I feel like ultimately, money would be most beneficial in the majority of cases? Can grills be sexy on a guy? They are incredibly unattractive on anyone. Are braces cute? Not particularly, but they're not like, unattractive. Unlike grills, they serve an actual purpose and aren't as obnoxious. Which of your friends makes you laugh the hardest? Girt. What brings out the worst in you? Being extremely stressed. I'm seriously snappy and irritable. Would you rather go to Canada or Mexico on vacation? Canada, probably. If you have glasses, do you get days when you don’t feel like wearing them? I don't think about it because I don't have a choice if I want to see. Do you ever wear hats indoors? I don't wear them period. Have you ever played bingo at an actual bingo hall? No. Have you ever pledged money to a Kickstarter and it reached its goal? If so, did you get any fun extra stuff because you pledged a higher amount? No. What’s your favorite comic book/graphic novel? I don't have one. What’s something you can do without looking/with your eyes closed? Type. Is there a color combination that holds a significance to you? If so, what is the combination and what does it mean? No. What was the last thing you swore at? I don't know. If you use Facebook, do you ever look at the Memories page? Ugh no. Let's not remind myself of dark times or more specifically cringy ones. Do you have a drawer where you just throw some random stuff? No. What’s the funniest shirt that you own? I don't find any really funny. What is something you absolutely refuse to pay for? Ummm "fancy" clothing brands, to name one of the top contenders. Has a stray/runaway cat or a dog ever followed you home? If so, what did you do with it? Maybe a cat? I don't think so, though. Is there a stranger you expect to see every day? No. What is something you take pride in? My recovery. What is something you have a lot of experience in? I guess photography? What’s the biggest magnet on your fridge? I don't feel like going to check. Do you prefer things (movies, books, etc) that scare you or make you laugh? Entertainment media rarely actually scares me, but I prefer "scary" stuff. Were you born with naturally straight teeth? Well, I had to get braces, so I would assume not? Do you try not to take a lot of medicine or do you take it whenever? I avoid OTCs when I can; I'm on enough prescribed stuff. Do you prefer original or sour Skittles? Sour. Do you check to make sure your ear phones are going in the right ear? No. Are fireworks illegal to buy where you live? The big ones, yes. People still go to Myrtle Beach on the SC side to buy them tho. Can you talk and work at the same time? No. Do you care more about yourself or more about others? This really depends on what the situation is... and my state of mind at the time. But I think usually myself? It used to be others, but I learned how unhealthy that can be. Do you find it easy to pass the time or do you get really bored? I get bored excruciatingly easily. How often do you re-watch/re-read things or are you more ‘once only’? I'm typically an "only once" person. What color ink do you prefer writing in? Black? Have you inherited any garments from your parents or grandparents? I don't think so. When was the last time you visited the doctor? Why did you go? Around a week ago to get my vitamin D re-checked. Have you ever been in a Catholic confessional? Yes. Who was the last non-relative you rode in a vehicle with? My VR coach. What movie are you looking forward to coming out? I will be seeing the live action TLK as fast as physically possible. What was the title of the last song you listened to? "God Hates Your Outfit" lmao. ^Who performs it? Jeffree Star. Can you do a backflip? No. Is your car newer than a 2004? I don't have my own car. Who is the lead singer of your favorite band? Ozzy Osbourne. How would you feel if you knew you were adopted? If I grew up knowing, I wouldn't feel much of anything new besides the fact I'd be grateful as hell someone chose me. If I just suddenly found out, I'd be inexplicably shocked and furious I was never told. Do you have freckles? No. Do you have dimples? Very clearly on my left cheek, and I have a super shallow one on the right that used to be more apparent. And I have back dimples. When was the last time you went fishing? When Sara was here in June last year. Do you know anyone with a pet that has your name? No. Do you expect to be married in the next 2 years? Most likely not. What was the last injury you received? Probably something from Roman playing. Have you ever liked someone and never told them? Yeah. Do you regret it? No. Do you ever get in weird moods and listen to music you normally hate? Very rarely I listen to pop from when I was a kid. How old is the oldest person you’ve dated? Well, we "dated" for less than a day, but idk. I'd guess he's 27-ish now? Have you ever tried a colorful macaroon? No. What’s the last thing you made out of clay? An anatomical heart, I think? Did you learn to type through a computer program for kids? Not really for kids? We took them in middle school, and they weren't like, super kiddy. How many years were you homeschooled? I never was. What color is the tree outside your window? Uhhh probably green? I don't wanna get up and look. What do you take for pain? Advil/Ibuprofen. Which pharmacy do you use? Harris Teeter. What is this month’s calendar picture? Don't have a calendar. Is there a coffee shop in your town that’s better than Starbucks? N/A Who has the best personality on YouTube? Shane Dawson's is probably the most universally likable, I think. Have you ridden your bike yet this year? I don't have one anymore. What does your bike look like? N/A Who are your favorite kids that you’ve babysat? I babysat only once and hated it. Not the kid, just the duty. Who is your favorite cousin? I don't have a favorite. Does one side of your family live in another state? Both sides do. What states did your parents grow up in? New York and Ohio. What, if anything, are you severely allergic to? Severely, nothing. Have you ever had an allergic reaction to an insect? No, thankfully. Do you spill food on yourself while you eat? Not often. What is a topic you like to answer questions on the most? Meerkats or Mark. Have you ever seen a queen bee outside its hive? I have no clue. Which Clue (or Cluedo) character is your favorite? I was always Miss Scarlet because even as a kid I knew she was hot stuff. Do you watch any old films? If so, name a few of your favorites. I don't really watch movies period. But a few I like are The Outsiders, Old Yeller, Johnny Got His Gun, A Raisin In The Sun, Steel Magnolias... lots of others, really. Just not many are coming to mind immediately. Who are some of your classic era film actors and actresses, if any? Idk. Do you have any novelty ice cube trays? No. Your ex taps you on the shoulder and says, “I still love you.” You say? The only ex who I'm aware even loved me in the first place is Jason, and I probably wouldn't say anything. Got a very strong feeling my PTSD would literally erupt like goddamn Saint Helen and I'd leave the situation in the blink of an eye. I don't love him anymore, and I don't even know if I'd believe him telling me that now, but I know damn well it would fuck with me. Would you ever work at a movie theater? It sure as hell wouldn't be my first pick. At least here, they're grossly underpaid and overworked. Do you have a phone charger in your car? If you have a specific type of cord. Do you live far from your parents? I live with my mom. Dad's like... 20-ish minutes away, if that? Can you go see a doctor alone or do you like to take someone with you? Mom is always with me. Do you like pineapple on pizza? Never tried, never want to. I can just about guarantee I would positively loathe it. Sweet and savory don't mix with me. Do you like to hold hands? With my s/o and I'm comfortable with them, yeah. What’s a show that you absolutely refuse to watch? 13 Reasons Why. How many times have you been in love? Twice. Do you remember how old you were when you started swearing? However old I was in the 7th grade. Last thing you cooked? Toaster strudels in the toaster oven. Movie you want to see? I wanna see the newest HTTYD soooo badly, but I doubt I'll get the chance while it's in theaters. Ever spent the night in a tent? Yeah. What do you call your grandparents? Grammy. The others are dead. Can you snap your fingers? Poorly with my right hand. Can you wink? Only with my right eye. How many keys do you carry with you? One. How well do you know the people you live with? Well, she's my mom and we're very close. Do you own any jerseys? No. Who knows your biggest secrets? Sara. Have you ever ran from your own parents? No. Are you afraid of clowns? No. Do you crack your knuckles? I physically can't, and besides, the sound is disgusting to me. Who IMed you on Facebook last? Girt. Could you see yourself dropping out of high school? I'm long out of high school, and I didn't. Do you have any personal fashion rules that revolve around your own preferences/body type (e.g., you never/always wear a certain color, sleeve type, or length of dress)? I don't wear shorts, tight shirts, dresses, skirts, crop tops, I wouldn't dare touch a romper, I highly doubt I'd wear yellow... just to name the ones that came to me immediately. Do you remember any celebrity whose style you admired when you were a teen? What do you think of that style now? YO Avril Lavigne was my emo model okay. She's still a queen. The last time you had a conflict with someone else, did you confront them about it or keep it to yourself? Do you think it would have been better or worse to do the opposite? Uhhh... I don't remember who this was. When you finally make a decision to do something you have been contemplating for a while, do you become highly anxious and motivated to do it right away? Yup. When you were a kid did you make up lies about your life to make yourself seem more interesting? Alternatively, did you know kids who told these stories and did you believe them? Bitch I made up that a talking wolf came to me and gave me animal powers and the rule was I could only tell three people. I was a fucking weird kid. I know others who have made things up, too. Can you think of a moment from your childhood that was totally “on brand” for you, or consistent with your adult personality? I'm sure there's something, but nothing's coming to me rn. Have you ever warned someone else about something, whether it was about a person in their life or an oncoming weather event? Yup, in numerous scenarios. So, is it "gif" with a hard G or soft G? I say both, but "jiff" more frequently. Is there a book or movie that you thought was about something completely different from what it actually ended up being about? What did you think it would be? Maybe... Is there an item that you bought on a whim, but now consider it a crucial part of your life and you would or have purchased it again? I have no clue.

#survey #quiz #questions #random

[peckhampeculiar]

Master of the arts

LOU SMITH WAS INTERVIEWED ABOUT THE PECKHAM PECULIAR BY BBC BREAKFAST ON THE DAY OUR FIRST ISSUE CAME OUT.

The local artist and screenprinter, who is the man behind the famous “Made in Peckham” design, tells us more about his creative career

WORDS: COLIN RICHARDSON; PHOTO: PAUL STAFFORD

Lou Smith is one of those enviable people who seem to be able to turn their hand to anything and do very well indeed.

Lou is an artist, jeweller, sculptor and screen-printer. He’s a photographer and videographer. He’s been a maker of bespoke, high-end furniture. And he’s a children’s party organiser, candyfloss-maker and indoor pyrotechnist.

What he’s not, though – and he is the first to admit it – is a self-promoter. “I’m a bit lackadaisical on the self-promotion front,” he admits, “so these things just seem to happen, not because I’ve promoted them. If I had promoted them, I don’t know what position I’d have been in.” Or to put it another way: “The thing is, I do too much stuff.”

Lou was born in Leeds. “My father was a geologist,” he says. “He used to take us on regular outings into the wilds of Yorkshire, which instilled in me a deep love of nature. My mother was very artistic, but, as was so often the case in those days, she stayed home and looked after us. There were three of us, so it was pretty much full-time.

“She’d always be doing something – painting for instance – and she taught me how to cook and sew, the things I would need later. My dad taught me all the hammering and sawing kind of skills.”

When Lou was 14, his father’s job was relocated to London and the family upped sticks and moved to Uxbridge. “It was tough,” he recalls. “In London regional accents weren’t popular in those days.”

He got on, though, achieving three science A-levels and going on to Imperial College to study biochemistry. Then, halfway through his studies, he fell ill and was hospitalised. When he recovered, he went travelling before returning to college, but later dropped out.

After abandoning his formal studies, Lou moved away from science and towards art and design. He rekindled his passion for nature, which is reflected in his photography and jewellery. He took up video-making. And then he got together with his friend Roy Middleton, who had trained at Camberwell Art College as a fine-art metalsmith.

“For years, we worked together as a team doing really nice bespoke interiors for commercial premises and houses,” he says. They worked on three houses for Channel 4 series Grand Designs.

But eventually, Lou reached the point where “I saw I didn’t want to be doing this in 10 years’ time.” In any case, the work was drying up as people tightened their belts in the face of economic austerity. So Lou cut loose. And having done so, he came up with a design classic that moved his career in yet another direction.

“Made in Peckham” is one of those ideas that is so fiendishly clever that you wish you’d thought of it first. Indeed, many people seem to think they have. Lou has recently discovered that his iconic image has been appropriated by a wide range of businesses who use it to promote their enterprises without so much as a “by your leave”, never mind an “and here’s a little something for your trouble”.

You’re sure to have seen the image yourself. It’s so much part of the culture of Peckham now that it’s almost as though it has always been here. The image is of an SE15 street sign with the street name replaced with the words, “Made in Peckham”. And perching atop the sign, bending down as if to peck at Peckham, is a large black crow.

To start with, Lou screen-printed the image onto T-shirts. A friend of his had opened a clothes shop on Bellenden Road and she offered to sell his T-shirts. “She sold hundreds of them,” Lou says. “I couldn’t print them fast enough.”

Since then, the range has expanded to include mugs and, among other things, hotpants. Lou has produced lampshades screen-printed with images of creatures from his nature photography, which are also available as framed prints.

He makes everything in his studio in one of the railway arches on Blenheim Grove. How long he’ll be able to continue doing that is a matter for conjecture. Last year, his rent was increased by 80 per cent, backdated for two years, and he anticipates further rises later this year. He laments the fact that once-affordable spaces are being priced out of the reach of many artists and craftspeople. “It’s killing experimental art,” he says.

For several years, as well as selling through local shops, Lou sold his merchandise at street markets and events like Pexmas. At the moment, though, he doesn’t have any retail outlets and is keen to hear from anyone interested in stocking his wares.

In the meantime, he welcomes enquiries via his website or through Captured on the Rye, the shop on Pellatt Road in East Dulwich that he co-owns with his wife. It used to be Jack’s Cafe. The coffee machine is still in situ and “occasionally, the ghost of Jack’s can be seen from the original vinyl that they had on the window,” says Lou. “When it gets breathed on, it illuminates a crown with ‘Jack’s’ written on it. I started retailing my Made in Peckham stuff from the shop, but people didn’t really understand: why is it in East Dulwich?”

Lou’s wife, Lorraine Liyanage, is founder of the Dulwich Music Festival and runs her SE22 Piano School from the shop. Between lessons, Lou turns it into a party venue for children.

“I did some summer screen-printing workshops for the London Wildlife Trust,” he says. “It was then that I thought, ‘This could be a good business’, because children love to make their own T-shirts.”

Lou runs two types of parties: artistic ones, focusing on screen-printing, and science ones, which involve explosions and white lab coats. “The kids come and dress up in them and wear specs and make slime and bath bombs and fire little cannons at one another. And we do spin-painting and pyrotechnics and candyfloss-making.”

As if all that weren’t exciting enough, Lou says, casually, “I’m also a champion of the underground music scene in London. That’s one of my biggest things, actually. It doesn’t pay very much, though.”

He has made videos for a number of bands and has an extensive collection of photos taken at gigs. One day, he hopes to stage an exhibition of them...

So yes, Lou Smith probably does do too much stuff. But he does it damned well.

[khaizarlim]

My Shade Of Colors

Everything we see has a color in it, learning to appreciate each and every shades and give value to it would cause us no harm. To whether in fashion, photography, and in our food colors tend to bring the best in arts and also in science. Colors are the spices of our vision.

In today’s activity, I want to venture in world of fashion and its unique color experiments. I am literally obsessed with the glam, and how it embodied fashion. To whether punk, Gothic it didn't really seem to matter, all colors have its place in the fashion world.

Red do really brings out the sass of a person. The matching red dress and roll bag did really make a lot of attention. In the hit series “Kadenang ginto”, Daniela shows how to rock the color red and show how intimidating is by getting the attention that she deserves. Fearless, war, vengeance, power and sophistication all in one place.

Silver gives a futuristic vibe, with a little bit of a goth in it. Lady Gaga rocking the VMA showing her creative style every year. Silver gives us the feeling of satisfaction, luxury and sophistication. But silver can’t be gold, that’s why silver is associated with second place. 

Pink is associated with girly stuff, like barbies and etc. Pink gives an impression of immaturity, youthfulness and charm. Vice-Ganda is serving us with his over-the-top look. Vice never failed to surprised us with his out of this world style to pull off with a bang.

Green is the color of nature and money, even in fashion green symbolizes growth, harmony and the freshness of nature. It has a strong correspondence with safety as well as luxury. In advertising green is directly associated with nature, so in fashion it can be use to promote organic or eco-friendly design or products.

White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity and virginity. That is why in weddings, the bride usually wears an all white gown, as it is considered to be the color of perfection.

Gold symbolizes elegance, power and wealth. Artist like Mariah Carey do often wear gold to look sophisticated and classy. Gold is the color for elites and those rich people with influence.

Pia Wurtzbach nailed the Miss Universe Pageant with a blue gown that defies confidence. Blue symbolizes intelligence, truth, calmness and confidence. Blue is use to promote products and services that are related to cleanliness or purification. 

Purple is associated with royalty, nobility, and ambition. It conveys wealth and extravagance or an over-the-top look. Some designers considered purple as an artificial color as it is a very rare color in nature.

Black color is associated with mystery, formality, depress, evil and death. That is why in funerals, people do often used black to show sorrow and grief. Black gives the feeling of depth and fear or intimidation.

Orange color do really stand out in the crowd for its bright and daring color. It represents enthusiasm, fascination and happiness. Orange is the color of lava, so it gives a feeling of heat that makes anyone who wear them even sexier or hot. 

Colors do really play an important role, for it is a way for us to express ourselves the way we want others to see or interpret it. The colors we wear or our favorite do really reflects our personality. With knowledge Mix and matching it  color can benefit us in a lot ways.,

[mysmessmistake]

How about College AU with the RFA and Minor Trio? Like what their major would be, roommate, stuff like that

I don’t know muchabout collage majors, so I’m sorry if you were looking for specifics. Also Iwasn’t sure if you wanted a MC to be included or not, but I included themanyway. The RFA isn’t running by the way. 

Yoosung

Yoosung was taking a course in     order to become a vet     

The work was brutal

Though he loved it, and he was     sure he wanted to help pets    

It was still brutal

Shares a dorm with Saeyoung &     Saeran

He goes to almost every class

Mainly because he’s scared of failing 

Has all nighters too frequently

Can often be found crying in     the library at 3am as he writes an essay 

He tries to join astronomy club

But he can’t keep up with them     because of his gaming addiction    

Saeyoung fuels this addiction

Saeyoung also messes with him     by hacking into the game and getting a bunch of rare stuff for his own     character     

“I have to defeat him! I     can’t let Saeyoung defeat me!”    

There goes Yoosungs life. 

He meets MC in his class

And

Oh god is he in trouble

Finds he can’t focus in class     because of you

Saeyoung convinces him to talk     to you about a problem he’s having    

So he catches you in the     library one night

“Hey, you’re MC right?     You’re in my vet corse! I was wondering if you could help me with     this…”

He tries to be sly but he’s red     in the face the entire time    

Your friendship and more     blossoms from there on out.    

Also 100% shows you off to     everyone once you get together    

Jaehee

Business & hospitality     major     

She’s a fucking boss

She’s bomb at studying, and you     best bet she gets top of the class    

She works for that shit

She shares a dorm with a girl     she doesn’t know very well, and doesn’t really talk to due to conflicting     interests.     

She’s super invested in the     coffee club at school    

To the point where she becomes     the leader of the group!     

You are also in the coffee club     and you instantly connect with Jaehee, so naturally you two become     friends.     

She’s had friends, but not     friends like you.     

You also met everyone else     through Jaeheee

Jaehee knew Zen, V and Jumin,     and through them she knew Yoosung, Saeyoung and Saeran. 

And some guy named Vanderwood

She has all nighters frequently     as well

Goes to all classes on time     unless she’s sick

Even then she gets someone to     send her notes

A year or so through her     college experience, after she’s calmed down a little about the idea of     college

She realises there’s something     she feels about you that isn’t… just friendship 

She doesn’t say anything, she’s     afraid of your reaction    

You aren’t stupid, you know the     looks she gives you

So you make the first move

It’s slow

But it’s nice

Zen

Drama and Literature major

Teachers pet + ladies man

You’ve seen Monsters University     right? Well, he’s like the Sullivan of the college. 

He has his own fan club

Jaehee takes part in said fan     club     

His roommates are … Jumin and     V!

It’s a little bit of a     nightmare     

His relationship with Jumin is     pretty much the same relationship as cats and dogs…

However

Jumin is very good at calming     Zen down when he gets angry, and bring him back to earth when he’s too     full of himself     

And Zen is very good at     grounding Jumin when he gets a little out of hand, or his ego is too     large.     

And V just tries to make     everyone happy

So it works

He doesn’t study excessively 

“God gave me a gift! Why     would I need to study?”    

He changed this thought after     he failed his first test    

You thought he was a little     arrogant     

He thought you were cute

He needed help with a few     things so you offered to tutor him 

After a few tutoring sessions     he began to flirt, a lot    

He did his best to impress you 

And eventually he just made his     move

Power couple!!!!

You still help him study

Jumin

Business major 

Not that he really needs it

He already knows all there is     to know about business so he’s top of his class

He also doesn’t really need to     study     

Wants a cat but can’t have one     in his dorm     

Also his roommate is allergic

Not that he cares all that much

Because he doesn’t have to     study, and he doesn’t belong to any clubs, his time is consumed by     meetings with his father and arguments with Zen or long chats with V 

You catch his eye when he sees     you struggling slightly in the business class

So like a gentleman he offers     his help

Spoiler: Jumin is a very bad     tutor     

Okay he’s not terrible he just     isn’t good at explaining things on a level you can understand

You appreciate the help though

He flat out asks you if you’d     like to have dinner with him    

No tip toeing around that

You accept, and after a few     more dates and a bit more horrible tutoring you two become a thing

Zen is shocked and wonders if     he’s paying you

Saeyoung

hacking major

Is there a hacking major?

Computer science & programming     major

Top of the class but rarely     shows up

When he does he’s unusually     reserved and quiet in the back of the class, not talking to anyone

Shares his dorm with his     brother and Yoosung

Eats like a true college     student

He studies but it doesn’t look     like studying

Like he’ll be on his computer,     and it will look like he’s playing a game

But he’s actually looking     through the games code    

This is also how he messes with     Yoosung

Should he hear even a peep out     of someone about Saeran in a bad way    

They can kiss their grades     goodbye

Admittedly hacked into the     schools system before in order to change Saerans grade

You meet him when you sit at     the back of class one day because all of the front spots were taken

And you realise that Saeyoung     is not quiet, or reserved, he just doesn’t have anyone to talk to

Because he doesn’t shut the     fuck up when you sit next to him    

Everything out of his mouth is     a meme or a sly comment about the professors work ethic 

Unfortunately you were     struggling a little with the class    

“Alright then smart guy,     if you know so much then teach me”

“Deal”

Well that was easy

His personality just gets     goofier every time you see him    

Eventually you just become a     thing

You both act like it wasn’t a     big deal

But it was

Now he helps you complete the     course and you listen to his stupid jokes! 

Saeran

I saw someone headcannon Saeran     as an art major

I agree

Art Major

He shows up to class a lot but     sometimes leaves during lectures 

Sometimes it’s boredom,     sometimes it’s panic attacks.    

Studies but not intensely

He doesn’t really want to     become an artist, he’s just always liked art

And he’s pretty good at it

He just had to pick a major and     art happened to be one of the first things he thought of

He shares his room with his     brother and Yoosung

He likes Yoosung, but he’s     waaaayyyy too gullible    

He also doesn’t talk to any of     Saeyoungs other friends that much, he tries though

He meets you when he sits next     to you in class one day    

Normally you’re at the back by     yourself, so your comments can go unnoticed

Not today

“Are you fucking- this is     not a hand”

“What the fuck is     Picasso”

“If I don’t eat dinners     for the next week I can afford new paints”

He looks at you strangely, you     catch his look, you smile and put your head down

He looks over to see you     writing ‘fuck colour theory’ over and over again

“I can help you with that     if you’d like”

You were surprised 

You accepted his help     nonetheless     

because

Fuck colour theory

It took some time, and patience     and a forceful push from Saeyoung    

But eventually he confessed 

Artsy couple!!

You often doodle on each     other’s arms

V

photography Major

Obviously

Studies hard, but not too hard

Wonderful student and friend to     all

Golden boy

Shares his room with Zen and     Jumin

Which can be overwhelming at     times

But they’re both very nice, to     him at least, and they do try to get along sometimes

He wouldn’t be in any clubs

He prefers going out and taking     pictures, or hanging out with Jumin    

You met through class

You were paired up for a     project together

“One will be the muse, and     the other the photographer”    

Theoretically, you should be     the muse, right?

Ohhhh no

You force kindly ask him to be     the muse for this project    

He’s too nice so he says yes

The two of you joke and laugh     the entire time     

You manage to get some lovely     shots of him smiling and laughing, when he things you aren’t taking the     picture

Sly V probably managed to     skilfully ask you on a date    

“We should do this again,     however you are to be the muse next time”

“It’s a deal”

“How about its a     date?”

Sly

He helps you with studies and     is always willing to be your muse    

Also he has a lot of pictures     of you

Cutest couple!!

Vanderwood

listen

I don’t know

I don’t fucking know what he’d     do

My headcannon, if he wasn’t     dragged into the mess of the Agency, would be he went to college to major     in psychology and chemistry    

I DONT KNOW!!!!!!! Let’s just     go with it

Psychology & Chemistry     Major!

He’s very reserved, he just     gets what he needs to done    

Doesn’t fuck around

He only really talks to     Saeyoung and sometimes Saeran, other than that he’s usually alone

A lot of people are weary of     him 

He lives in a dorm alone     because no one wanted him as a roommate because he works better alone

You met bc neither of you were     looking where you were going and you ran into each other

“Watch it” He growled     at you

Excuse me?

Excuse me??

“You watch it, you’re the     one walking around like a fucking mountain, don’t expect me to step out of     your way, asshole”    

The sass was amazing

He literally had to watch you     watch away because what the fuck just happened?? 

Of course, Murpheys Law,     Saeyoung saw all of it and teased Vanderwood for his ‘crush' 

He punched him

Gradually the two of you ran     into each other more, around campus, at the library, going in and out of     lecture rooms and hallways    

Until you just sat down next to     him in the library and asked for his help on your chemistry assignment

“You’re in my chemistry     lectures??”

“Ya have been for a year     thanks for noticing”    

It’s a slow, painful process     but the two of you become friends    

And then more…

Saeyoung prides himself on     being right about the two of you     

#mystic Messenger #mystic Messenger headcannon #mystic Messenger imagine #mystic messenger saeyoung #mystic messenger jumin #mystic messenger yoosung #mystic messenger jaehee #mystic Messenger saeran #mystic messenger Vanderwood #mystic Messenger V #mystic Messenger zen

[topicprinter]

Scroll down your Facebook feed, and you’ll most likely see friends experimenting with some new hobby or project you might’ve never expected. They’re baking artisan breads, building tool sheds, playing with watercolors. Who knew your network was full of eccentric characters? It turns out being stuck at home brought out the creatives in many of us. On one hand, we’re figuring out how to be more self-sufficient out of necessity. On the other hand, we’ve become more curious about topics outside of our typical realm. Is it any wonder we’re experiencing an online learning boom?Even before the pandemic, industry analysts had predicted the e-learning market to exceed $300 billion by 2025, pointing to course diversification as a competitive advantage. Now the market is even more hungry for online courses that are off the beaten path. “Harvard University free courses” ranked as one of the most popular Google searches lately, but a recent deep dive into Google Trends also shows search increases in topics you might’ve never guessed: “fashion styling online course” was up 2,250%, “online art history course” was up 400% increase, and “online acrylic nail course” was up 120%.If you’re thinking your expertise isn’t “mainstream” enough to earn profits, think again.Of course, market demand is critical. But the more “under the radar” your course idea is, the easier it will be for you to stand out. Think about it: people are out there searching for the very topic you were born to teach. We’ve scoured the internet, keyword search tools, and our very own Kajabi user database to handpick 10 unconventional niches in high demand right now. Hear it straight from Kajabi Heroes who have made it work for them:​1.HomesteadingFor city folks craving a slower paced, secluded lifestyle, the idea of living off the land might seem idyllic. They might picture Little House on the Prairie, the shabby chic farmhouse kitchens on Instagram, or the YouTube videos on growing vegetables at home. They have a lot to learn to make the pioneer lifestyle a reality. If you’re knowledgeable about subsistence farming, living off the grid, or living self-sufficiently, people are searching for your course.“There is a myth that only certain subjects and categories of content lend themselves to being taught online. Permaculture, an environmental science that is very much hands-on, tactile, and visceral, would seem to be a poor fit for virtual instruction,” said Mohamed Marei, cofounder of Accolade Consulting Group, a strategy firm that worked with renowned permaculturist Geoff Lawton to create “Discover Permaculture” on Kajabi. “But our experience suggests that—with rigorous instructional design, a fanatical commitment to the learning experience of our community of students, a bit of ingenuity, the right mix of technical solutions, and above all, a fantastic team—almost any topic can be taught online."Marei confirmed that each of the permaculture course launches have hit the seven-figure mark.Monthly global Google search volumeshomestead: 90,000sustainable living: 27,100off the grid:  27,100​Online dating and relationshipsWith the widespread isolation, more people are craving human connection—romance in particular. Match Group, the online dating giant that owns Tinder, Match.com, Hinge, and others, reported significant upticks in activity since the pandemic. At Tinder, the number of conversations, as well as the length of conversations, have spiked up to 30%, particularly among users under 30 years old. What if they could use some help setting up their profile? What if they had no idea what to say once the conversation starts? Could you be the savior to awkward online daters?Kate Mansfield, a dating and relationship coach in the UK, says she’s learned that selling a high-ticket course is “much easier” than a cheap one. The Kajabi Hero earns on average £40k per month.“The common misconception is that spiritual and personal coaching offers are harder to sell because there isn’t a clear financial gain to the outcome,” which Kate added, “is absolutely not true.” “If you can get people past their fear and coping strategies,” she said, “you can charge whatever you like, because ultimately true love is a priceless outcome.”Monthly global Google search volume for:online dating: 60,500dating coach: 3,600 relationship coach: 1,900​Personality coachingIn times of chaos, people are naturally inclined to turn inward. More people are taking the time to assess their relationships, careers, and lifestyles. What’s life going to be like after the hard times are over? Personality tests like the DISC assessment, Myers–Briggs, and the Enneagram are helping people who seek clarity.If you’re a psychologist, life coach, or career counselor with expertise on personality-based assessments, your online course could help thousands of people going through major life transitions. Maybe they need a push in the right direction. And maybe your course is exactly what they need. Monthly global Google search volume for personality test: 301,000Enneagram: 201,000personality type: 135,00​Home improvement projectsThe home improvement industry is booming right now. Suddenly, property owners are motivated to paint the walls, install new floors, and anything else to freshen up outdated looks. Those long lines you might’ve seen outside of Home Depot or Lowes are becoming more common. In a recent two-week period tracking social media posts about home renovation ideas, an Ameritrade article documented a significant spike doubling normal levels.Starr Tingle, owner of Sanctuary Homes and Remodeling, says the demand for home remodeling services has definitely blown up lately. “All these people are stuck in their home and they’re looking at it, thinking, ‘Why have I been putting up with this crappy 1980s bathroom?’ Or, ‘My kitchen’s not functional. It’s dark. It’s out of style,’” she said.Starr is building an online course on Kajabi, focused on how to be your own general contractor managing a remodel. “If they knew how to run the project themselves,” she explained, “they could literally save thousands.”If you’re a master at managing remodels or skilled at any type of DIY home project, people are looking to learn from you.Monthly global Google search volume for bathroom remodel: 135,000kitchen remodel: 90,000carpentry: 110,000woodworking: 29,900​Dog trainingIf you’ve ever considered starting an online dog training course, the numbers are strongly in your favor:68% of US households have at least one petUS pets include 90 million dogsExpect to see those numbers continue to climb. A big portion of non-pet owners either want or plan to have a pet in the future, according to the American Pet Products Association. Connie Cleveland, dog training expert and founder of The Obedience Road, has observed a big spike in new email subscribers lately. She’s been making a push to publish free content on Kajabi. “Just because there are no competitions to go to, no classes to go to, we can band together,” she said. “We can watch videos, we can do lots of stuff at home to make sure that they're still having fun training their dog.” Connie hopes that her free content will eventually steer people into joining her paid membership site, but she adds, “Right now, it's about how I can serve them in this current climate.”Monthly global Google search volume for:dog training: 110,000pet care: 14,800​Specialty photography As the pace of life has slowed down, people are giving a closer look to their surroundings and documenting through photography. They’re capturing new sights like mountains once shrouded by smog, coyotes wandering city streets, clear highways. Even banana bread fresh out of the oven has become photo-worthy. People are discovering beauty around them and they’re eager to share. That widespread interest poses a huge opportunity for photography teachers who specialize in landscapes, food, wildlife, and more.Michael Greenberg, a photographer who partners with other photographers to create online courses on Kajabi, believes in the power of teaching highly specialized courses such as landscape photography. One of his courses teaches night sky photography with an iPhone.“‘How to take pictures with an iPhone’ is hard to sell. There’s too much competition in that field because it’s too broad,” Michael said. “No matter how many free tutorials online you can find, if you sell a high-quality product, there will always be someone who wants to purchase it.”So far, landscape photography has proven to be a winning niche for Michael. One course had generated $105,00 from January to late April. His second course had earned $59,000 plus additional monthly subscriptions—in one month alone.“Every single person photographs sunsets and sunrises,” Michael said. “Nature appeals to a much broader audience—women, men, young old.”Monthly global Google search volume for:food photography: 14,800landscape photography: 27,100wildlife photography: 74,000boudoir photography: 74,000​Homeschooling (any subject)Long before stay-at-home orders, homeschooling in the US had been growing steadily since the 1990s, up to 3% of K-12 students nationwide. Now, parents have been thrust into this new world and struggling to adapt: “How do I get my high-energy kid to focus?” “How can I keep all of my kids occupied while I work?”If you’ve been in the trenches as a school teacher or educator of any kind, the time to start your online course for K-12 kids is now. Whether you teach science or woodworking, as long as you can make learning fun and interactive online, there’s a good chance a parent is looking for your expertise.Jamie Heston, a homeschool consultant and board member of The Homeschool Association of California, advises online course creators to actively market their courses directly to parents by searching for homeschool communities on Facebook Groups and Google Groups. “There’s a lot of interest, but also a lot of options right now,” Jamie said. “If your course is good, it will catch fire. It only takes a few homeschoolers enjoying your class to talk about it in these online communities.”Jamie recommends that course creators categorize their courses not necessarily by age, but by ability. Learning with a multigenerational group can lead to a meaningful experience for everyone.Melissa Norris teaches people how to raise, preserve, and cook their own organic food through her Kajabi site.“People from all walks of life, age, and location—kids at home to grandparents—are eager to learn how to grow and preserve their own food,” she said. “ Many felt isolated in their desire to do so and creating a virtual space truly makes us connected.”Monthly global Google search volume for homeschooling: 74,000​Adventure sports With the travel industry on hold and in-person training not an option, the adrenaline sports junkies are itching to spend time outdoors. They’re ready to learn techniques from the pros and spend hours practicing. Mountain bikers will always remember their first wheelie, and surfers will remember the first time they got barreled. How amazing would it feel knowing you taught those techniques to someone, maybe even the younger version of you?Monthly global Google search volume for:mountain biking: 450,000skateboarding: 33,100surfing: 90,500​Feng ShuiIn turbulent times, people seek new ways to achieve balance however they can. The philosophy of feng shui, which influences interior design and architecture in parts of Asia, is about creating balance, encouraging happiness, and clearing stagnant energy. As people are spending countless hours at home these days, they’re seeking new ways to transform their surroundings into a sanctuary.Amanda Collins, founder of the International School of Feng Shui, teaches the ancient art of Feng Shui and offers a master certification to become a Feng Shui consultant.From her home in Ireland, which sits at the base of a mountain surrounded by rivers and forests, Amanda coaches students from all over the world using Kajabi. Her students are based in Egypt, Dubai, the US, and throughout Europe.“Obviously, there’s something really special about teaching people in person,” said Amanda, who typically hosts in-person events twice a year. But her online courses allow her to be more accessible to students. People tell her they simply can’t get away, whether because they have young children or they can’t afford to travel, she explained.“I feel like when I create something online, it can affect people infinitely because people can keep watching it, keep spreading it, and learning it,” she said. “I think that’s such a gift.”Amanda has grown revenues from her online business by 25-30% every year.Monthly global Google search volume for Feng Shui: 135,000​Sewing, knittingTraditional arts and crafts are making a big comeback among young adults who are most likely drawn to the tactile nature of sewing and knitting—an experience that smartphones and laptops can’t offer. Creative hobbyists have discovered the freedom that comes with stepping away from the noise, working with their hands, and getting into a flow. As more digital natives continue to take over the crafting market, online crafting courses will become even more popular. According to the Association for Creative Industries, the majority of crafters (41%) are 18-34 years old and the next largest group (36%) are 35-54 years old.Sarah Vedeler, chief designer at Meaning of Life Designs, teaches how to design quilts and embroidery appliqué on Kajabi. “In the beginning, getting in front of the camera was terrifying! I would procrastinate for days,” she said. Sarah discovered a simple trick that helped her overcome procrastination: having her lighting boom arms permanently mounted on her wall, and having a camera set up on a tripod in the same exact place. Each time, filming her course gets easier. And over the long run, her online business has grown more profitable.“My first complete year using Kajabi had revenues almost double that of the previous year,” Sarah said.Monthly global Google search volume for:sewing: 201,000embroidery: 165,000knitting: 74,000​These 10 unconventional niches, along with real success stories, are a small sampling that prove you can succeed in almost any area. The internet connects us from across the globe. If you’re passionate and knowledgeable in a certain area, you’ll most likely find others want to learn from you.No matter what you’re teaching, here’s one last tip from Shanna B. Tiayon, cofounder of Black Suburban Homestead: “Design your course to meet people where they are. It’s about education for self-empowerment!” 

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

[my-house-of-fashion]

"I don't want my pictures to tell people what they should think" says Alastair Philip Wiper

https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2020/03/alastair-philip-wiper-photography-unintended-beauty_dezeen_2364_sq_c-852x852.jpg

British photographer Alastair Philip Wiper explores all kinds of factories, from pork slaughterhouses to sex doll workshops. He says he isn’t trying to shock or influence, just to show people where things come from.

Wiper photographs the facilities that make mass production possible. His images show the machines, the people and the processes used to manufacture the objects of our modern society.

But the Copenhagen-based photographer’s aim is not to make people change their behaviour. He simply wants to reveal a world that the vast majority of people never see.

Alastair Philip Wiper photographs industrial infrastructure, from factories to power stations

“I don’t want my pictures to tell people what they should think and how they should feel,” he told Dezeen.

“I just want them to look and have their own thoughts.”

Scale of consumption

In his new book, Unintended Beauty, Wiper shares images from the factories of Adidas, Playmobil, Bang & Olufsen and more. He also shows power stations and scientific research facilities, along with a dairy farm and a cannabis greenhouse.

The venues he selects tend to be provocative, for instance, the Danish Crown slaughterhouse in Horsens. Wiper prompted an outcry from Dezeen readers after visiting this pork factory, with many shocked by the graphic nature of his photos.

Wiper’s provocative images include the Danish Crown slaughterhouse in Horsens

What was more shocking, according to Wiper, was not the process itself but the scale on which it took place. By revealing it, he hoped to make people think about where their food comes from.

“The overwhelming feeling that I come away with, that is constantly going on in my head, is whether we need this much stuff. Do we need this many shoes or this much pork?” he said.

“The world has been ramped up to a point where everybody thought that this ‘more, more, more’ was good, and suddenly we’re realising we don’t need it.”

Products of our imagination

Wiper says that, even though he has explored factories all around the world, he often encounters things he has never seen before.

On a recent visit to a condom-making facility in Denmark, he was stunned to find it in the back of a cheese factory. He also discovered handmade machines built several decades ago, still in good working order.

The photographer has also visited a medicinal cannabis greenhouse

These places tell a story of human ingenuity that may be unfamiliar to people used to city life, claims Wiper, but which is fundamental to the world we live in.

“These places are all products of our imagination,” he said. They’re representing what we want and what we can do as human beings. Even when there aren’t people in the pictures, they’re all the products of our minds.”

“There is a lot of humanity in that for me,” he added.

“How do we get people to think differently?”

The photographer tries not to form good or bad opinions of of the places he visits.

While he wants to people to recognise the impact of consumption, he is also concerned about the infrastructures that depend on these factories. Not only are they making the objects we buy, they also provide jobs to entire towns.

Scientific facilities he has photographed include CERN, home of the Large Hadron Colider

“There are parts of the world that were once very poor, but now have a much better quality of life because of these factories,” he added.

“Yes, the overall impact is something that we have to reduce. How do we do that without impacting these communities? How do we get people to think differently about the way that they consume? These are such complicated questions.”

Unintended Beauty is published by Hatje Cantz. Wiper’s photographs are also on show at the RIBA in London, as part of the exhibition Forms of Industry, open until 16 May 2020.

Read on for the interview in full:

Amy Frearson: How did you end up in this niche area of photography?

Alastair Philip Wiper: I studied philosophy and politics at university, but when I finished I had no idea what to do with my life. I met a Danish girl, moved to Denmark, and got a job in a restaurant, but I didn’t want to be a cook. Then I started to make some T-shirts, just for fun, and taught myself to use Illustrator, which helped me I get a job as a graphic designer. I was working for an artist and fashion designer who also didn’t have a in-house photographer so then I started taking pictures too. I taught myself and fell into it.

I decided I wanted to become a photographer, but I didn’t want to be a fashion photographer or a portrait photographer. It felt very repetitive. Then I saw some work by some older photographers work in the 50s and 60s. In particular, Wolfgang Sievers and Maurice Broomfield, who were photographing big oil refineries. This was totally fascinating to me. I could see myself going to see the most amazing things, shapes and graphics.

You’ve got to be really fascinated by the thing you’re working with

I went into this niche of industry and science, and pretty quickly I learned that the things I was experiencing and seeing were more important than getting a pay cheque. I think that’s the key to photography or any job really; if you want to do it really well, you’ve got to be really fascinated by the thing you’re working with. I wasn’t interested in science or art particularly, but it can be nice to come at these things with a new energy. You look at everything with different eyes compared to somebody that has been in that world their whole life.

Amy Frearson: Can you tell me about some of your first experiences of photographing factories and infrastructure?

Alastair Philip Wiper: There are two that stand out. One of them is the Odeillo Solar Furnace. In the beginning I didn’t know how to get in anywhere, so I had to find places where I could just turn up. I saw a picture of this building online in an article called “the 10 strangest buildings in the world” or something like that. I camped outside for two days, just watching the light changing on the mirrors. It was a kind of pilgrimage.

Then there is CERN, which is a place I’ve been back to three or four times. The first time I booked myself on a public tour, where you don’t see anything. So I asked the PR office to show me more, and they put me on a trip with an engineer to see some real things. That was a lucky break. I don’t know if they would do that these days.

One of Wiper’s first photography series features the Odeillo Solar Furnace in France

Amy Frearson: I presume getting access to these places is the biggest challenge?

Alastair Philip Wiper: After I got into CERN, I had a couple of other lucky breaks so that suddenly I had a portfolio that was starting to show that I could get inside places. But getting access is always the hardest, especially in the beginning. I have to talk my way in. These days I know the job position of the person I need to find, but in the beginning I had no idea. I thought a caretaker might sometimes let me in the back door, but that never happened.

Amy Frearson: One of your best-known photography series shows inside of the Danish Crown pork slaughterhouse in Horsens. It had a huge reaction from Dezeen readers. Why did you choose to photograph this type of factory?

Alastair Philip Wiper: I do a lot of self-initiated projects and I’m always looking around, thinking about the everyday objects that I consume. I want to know what factory they come from and how I can get in there.

Pork was an obvious one because I live in Denmark, and there’s a lot of pork consumed in Denmark and exported as well. I’m very interested in these kind of taboo subjects. I like things when things we interact with physically are a little bit controversial, when they have a macabre side or a dark humour. I maybe wasn’t thinking about that before I went but after I came out there was something dark about the whole thing that I just found attractive.

At the time I was quite into eating meat. I had been vegetarian when I was a teenager but I stopped because I really enjoyed food. My love of cooking and eating became more important to me than being vegetarian. But it made me feel like I needed to understand what I was eating and where it came from.

Amy Frearson: Did the experience shock you?

Alastair Philip Wiper: The process of seeing pigs going in and being slaughtered wasn’t particularly shocking, because of course I knew what needed to happen to get the bacon to my table and I felt quite strongly that people that ate meat should understand this. If you’re going to eat meat, you should be comfortable with that process and if you’re not comfortable then you probably shouldn’t eat meat.

If you’re going to eat meat, you should be comfortable with that process

The shocking thing for me about the slaughterhouse wasn’t that pigs go in there and get killed, that they have their guts taken out, chopped up and sold to be eaten. That wasn’t shocking to me. It was the volume, the scale, which was amazing.

I don’t want my pictures to tell people what they should think and how they should feel. I just want them to look and have their own thoughts.

Wiper visted South Korea to see a container ship under construction

Since then my attitude has changed a little, in that I’ve become more aware of the impact of meat on the environment. I didn’t think we needed to be eating as much meat. I still enjoy meat but I eat less meat. I only have it on special occasions.

For me the question is, do we need to consume as much? I think you can say that about pretty much everything we consume. As long as there’s a demand for it, there’s going to be places that are killing hundreds of thousands of pigs a week.

Amy Frearson: What other things shock or surprise you in the spaces you photograph?

Alastair Philip Wiper: When I first started going to these places, every place was incredible. I really liked seeing tangles of pipes and wires, that kind of thing. I need to see a really good tangle of pipes and wires to be impressed these days! But I still get really happy when I see things I haven’t seen before. I’ve seen a lot of places and I find similarities in all of them, but I also see things that I’ve never seen before pretty regularly.

Recently I was at a condom factory in the countryside in Denmark. I had been been looking for a condom factory to photograph and thought I would have to go to Germany, but a friend told me there was a condom factory in Denmark. I asked them if I could come and photograph it and they said yes, sure, but told me it wasn’t very big and it was very old.

It turned out to be a small room in a corner of a cheese factory. The cheese factory was owned by a company that has a few businesses, that buys businesses when they can see that there’s good value in it, no matter what it is. The condom factory had actually existed since the 1950s I think and the machines were homemade. At the time they had asked their engineer for a solution for condom packing, so he built one out of wood and put a motor on it. It still works and that’s probably the reason that this company is still profitable. If that machine broke, they would have to buy a new one and then suddenly, maybe it’s not worth it. This is pure conjecture, but this is how my imagination works.

They also had machines that blow up condoms, to test how much air can go in there, and a machine that is like a dildo, that takes it on and off hundreds of thousands to see if it breaks.

Most of the time I see people that are happy, just living a different life to the one that I do

I love the contrast between CERN, where the greatest minds in the world are trying to answer the biggest questions of the universe, the greatest machines human beings have ever seen, and then in my backyard I can find a condom factory that is equally as fascinating.

Amy Frearson: Do you think people are generally unaware that so much construction and industry goes on in the countryside? Is that something you hope to reveal in your pictures?

Alastair Philip Wiper: It’s not something I’ve thought about that much. I don’t differentiate between the countryside and the city. But of course I’m in factories a lot and the world I come from doesn’t see what happens in these places. While I feel like there is a big split between the communities that live in these towns and our cosmopolitan, big-city life, I don’t think I have ever seen anything terrible or been to a factory where people seem unhappy.

People that live in our world have this assumption that it’s horrible work and a horrible life in these places, but most of the time I see people that are happy, just living a different life to the one that I do. But it’s definitely a world that I wouldn’t get to see if I didn’t go to visit these places.

Factories he has photographed include Kvadrat Febrik‘s Innofa textile mill in the Netherlands

Amy Frearson: Have you ever photographed anywhere that made you think differently about a product you consume?

Alastair Philip Wiper: I’m not an investigative journalist or photographer. I’m not trying to show the good or bad side of these places, and I’m usually doing it with the approval of the company that owns the factory. I’m not trying to uncover things. It is also really hard to go into a place for a day and come away with a valid opinion of what is right and wrong. There can be things that are maybe a little bit shocking to us, when actually there’s nothing wrong with them, or there can be things that look totally fine, but actually are really bad. I try to be careful when I form opinions, but it’s not really what I’m trying to do.

The overwhelming feeling that I come away with, that is constantly going on in my head, is whether we need this much stuff. Do we need this many shoes or this much pork? The world has been ramped up to a point where everybody thought that this ‘more, more, more’ was good, and suddenly we’re realising we don’t need it. But communities are surviving on these factories. There are parts of the world that were once very poor, but now have a much better quality of life because of these factories. Yes, the overall impact is something that we have to reduce. How do we do that without impacting these communities? How do we get people to think differently about the way that they consume?

I hope that anybody would find it interesting to see the way that things are made

These are such complicated questions. I’m confused, I don’t know. Maybe that’s why I’m trying not to say anything with my pictures, to tell people how to think. It’s a discussion they can have with themselves. I’m thinking everyday about the way I consume, and how that impacts the world, in a way that I didn’t three years ago. It’s going to take a while to trickle down to everybody, but hopefully it will happen.

Amy Frearson: With your work now on show at the RIBA, do you think there are lessons for architects in your pictures?

Alastair Philip Wiper: I hope there is, but to be honest I know very little about architecture. I hope that anybody would find it interesting to see the way that things are made. Throughout history people have found creative inspiration through things that are made for practical purposes. I don’t think I’m doing anything new there.

Amy Frearson: Can you tell me more about the technical side of your process? What is your process of shooting and editing, and what equipment do you use?

Alastair Philip Wiper: I use a DSLR camera mostly. I shoot medium format sometimes, but I can’t always afford to shoot on medium format, because I need to work super fast and I beat my equipment up a lot. Normally I work very quickly, so I drop lenses and cameras! My most important tools, apart from the camera, are my tripod and wireless shutter release.

I don’t edit a lot. I try to give the pictures my look, by playing with the contrast and the colour, and I adjust the perspective, I don’t have any problem with removing something in the picture that I don’t like, like a bin, but I don’t do that very often, unless I need to. I try to keep everything as simple as possible. The less decisions I have to make, the better. If I do something, it’s only because I think it’s going to add to the picture. It’s not for the sake of doing it.

Amy Frearson: When you say you give the pictures ‘your look’, how would you describe that look?

Alastair Philip Wiper: I want to have a lot of clarity. It shouldn’t feel like it has a filter or a colour cast, it should be very neutral in tone and as sharp as I can get it. It should also be very colourful and bright. I don’t want to make unsaturated, subtle pictures, I want them to be bold, colourful and in your face.

The photographer has also shot the Absolut Vodka Distillery in Sweden

Amy Frearson: Does your approach change when you’re shooting for a commercial client, rather than just for yourself?

Alastair Philip Wiper: I never really change the way I shoot. I approach every subject in exactly the same way and I am very rarely asked to do anything else. I feel really lucky to have that.

Amy Frearson: How important is it to you to show the people that work in these factories, as well as the machinery and objects?

Alastair Philip Wiper: I think this subject can become a bit too clean, too cold, too paralysed. I want there to be to be humour and passion in there, because these places are all products of our imagination. They’re representing what we want and what we can do as human beings. Even when there aren’t people in the pictures, they’re all the products of our minds. There is a lot of humanity in that for me. That’s why I want the pictures to be bold and colourful and a little bit dirty. They don’t have to be too permanent and clean. There are interesting stories in all of these places.

Stories, humanity, humour and eccentricity are all my inspirations for doing this. I’m just blown away that people make all this stuff, that they build machines to build machines. It’s crazy.

The post "I don't want my pictures to tell people what they should think" says Alastair Philip Wiper appeared first on Dezeen.

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#Interior Decorating #interior design

[rafaelthompson]

10 Minutes With—2020 U.S. CoffeeChamps Edition: Jalen Kelly

We talk to Kaldi’s Coffee lead barista Jalen Kelly about competing in Coffee In Good Spirits and more.

BY CHRIS RYAN BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE

Cover photo courtesy of @hawkeyejohnson

Editor’s note: The 2020 U.S. Coffee Championships season is in full swing. In the next several weeks, we’ll continue to interview some of the competitors who have already qualified for the national competitions taking place in February and April about their coffee careers, approach to competition, and much more.

One positive outcome of coffee-competition routines is that they have the potential to inspire others, either to be better coffee professionals, try competing themselves, or maybe to another goal. For Jalen Kelly, seeing Polish Barista Champion Agnieszka Rojewska compete—and win—at the 2018 World Barista Championship provided him with all the inspiration he needed to enter the competition scene. After judging Barista in 2019, Jalen—who works as a lead barista for Kaldi’s Coffee in St. Louis— started competing this year in Coffee In Good Spirits (CIGS). He took part in the Glitter Cat Bootcamp for CIGS, then finished in third place in the competition at the Nashville, Tenn., qualifier, advancing to the U.S. Coffee In Good Spirits Championship in Portland, Ore., in April. We talked to Jalen about his coffee background, his inspiration, and much more.

Jalen Kelly is a lead barista at Kaldi’s Coffee in St. Louis. Photo by Michelle Hohl.

Chris Ryan: Please tell us a bit about yourself!

Jalen Kelly: I was born and raised in St. Louis and I’ve lived here all my life. Outside of coffee I’ve had a love for all things creative, and when I’m not making coffee I freelance graphic design and photography work.

How did you start working in coffee, and what do you like about it? What’s your role at Kaldi’s and what’s your day-to-day like?

I started working in coffee at a shop on a local college campus, where I started to fall in love with the science and the art behind coffee preparation. I love that coffee has a way of bringing so many different people together. Having coffee as a common interest helps connect people of varying backgrounds, and it’s honestly such a beautiful thing. I work as a lead barista for Kaldi’s, training new baristas and keeping my café’s coffee program within standards.

Jalen performing his CIGS routine during the Glitter Cat CIGS Bootcamp. Photo by @hawkeyejohnson.

How and when did you get interested in competition? Why did you decide on CIGS rather than the other competitions?

I was interested in competition extremely early in my coffee career. I was watching videos on coffee when I came across Agnieszka Rojewska’s 2018 routine. I had no idea there were competitions until then, but I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. I decided on CIGS after judging Barista last year. I initially wanted to judge Barista, learn the ins and outs, then try my hand at it. I started playing with signature beverage ideas and eventually that led to an interest in cocktails. One day my boss said I should try my hand at CIGS and then I just dove headfirst into it; being able to transform, highlight, and accentuate the flavors of coffee with spirits was an eye-opening experience.

Can you talk about why you applied to Glitter Cat, and how your experience prepared you for competition?

I applied to Glitter Cat because I always felt like an outcast; there was an assumption that I either didn’t belong behind the counter in cafés or that there was no way I could be interested in coffee past a caffeine buzz. I felt that my background could paint a different picture on the coffee industry and on competition, but there was no one willing to see it. Glitter Cat helped me see that there were other people like me; people who felt ostracized, who dealt with similar issues as me, people who had their own stories to tell. The Glitter Cat instructors were amazing; all of them were from diverse backgrounds and their knowledge of coffee and spirits helped all of us grow as competitors and professionals. I was able to come up with one of my drinks at the bootcamp thanks to help from each instructor. My fellow Glitter Cats are now like family; we laughed, cried, partied … we just lived in the moment, and it was such an amazing experience.

Jalen developing one of the drinks for his CIGS routine. Photo by @hawkeyejohnson.

What was the experience like of actually competing, and how did it feel to advance to nationals in CIGS?

I barely ate the entire weekend in Nashville. I was so stressed out that my appetite would vanish as soon as I started eating. Once I got on stage, things changed. I called time and let the words I rehearsed flow as naturally as I wrote them. I moved with purpose and made each drink exactly like I practiced—everything felt natural. I was honestly shocked to place third; I watched the other competitors and I was just like, “There’s no way I’m topping that.” As soon as I heard my name called, all of my stress just turned into adrenaline. I was buzzing with energy and couldn’t stop smiling. I’m sure I made roughly 20 laps around the event space.

Jalen doesn’t just take part in coffee competitions—he’s also a seasoned parkour competitor. Photo by @hawkeyejohnson.

Finally, what are some of your interests outside of all this coffee stuff? Outside of coffee I love to cook and write music, and I hope to release a full-length album sometime soon. Also coffee-competition season blends right into parkour competition season, so when I’m not making coffee cocktails I’m running and jumping on obstacles eight feet in the air.

The post 10 Minutes With—2020 U.S. CoffeeChamps Edition: Jalen Kelly appeared first on Barista Magazine Online.

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[thecreativeseries]

Interview with Illiaria Ronchi Architect and Photographer

Firstly, can you start with a little bit about yourself?

I was born in Italy, close by Milano, 30 years ago. I grew up in a small village surrounded by nature, and I was so lucky to have parents who loved travelling: I was a bit more than 1 year old when my parents brought me by car to the UK. I remember my dad always around with a film camera and an old enormous video camera.

Because of my childhood, I believe I have always felt my hometown too small for me and dreamed of exploring the world. This is why as soon as I started university I enrolled in Architecture programs in Madrid, Macao, Paris, ending up, after graduation in the Netherlands, where I have been living for 4 years now. Currently, I am working for a large architecture firm in Amsterdam.

You are an Architect who also takes beautiful images, can you tell me about your job and how photography became a part of your life?

Photography has been part of my life way before than architecture. I remember I got my first film camera from my dad when I was 10, while all my friends were getting video games. I liked the idea that I could frame my memories forever, of course, back in the day's cellphone were not a thing yet.

I did my first real photography course at 15 and assisted my ex-boyfriend at 21 during professional fashion shootings. Even tho I never liked it that much, I owe a lot to that since I learnt the big part of my post-production skills.

Weirdly enough, I was never interested in architecture photography, but I have always loved to picture landscapes, wilderness and animals. Photography was clearly a way for me to escape from my reality and adventuring in the unknown.

In this way, my job and my interest for photography look very disconnected, but I must recognize that my love for minimal and straightforward architecture influenced so much my image taste in the past couple of years. Gaining confidence in my work creative drive helped me a lot to define my photography style.

What drew you to study architecture as a career, and what do you enjoy most about it?

Can you believe me when I say that before enrolling in university I wanted to pursue probably 10 different careers? I decided to study architectural engineering because I felt it was an excellent profession to keep creativity in my life, to build something useful for people, flexible enough to adapt to the changes of our society (environment problems included) and to allow me to travel and live everywhere without having to reinvent my career. And I must admit, after 5 years of practising, that I made the right choice: just recently I have seen my very first two projects completed. I can't even explain the feeling of seeing something that you have worked on for months coming back to life: seeing all your effort in front of you and being enjoyed by people is the best part of our profession and makes you forget about the overtime work and the fights over the -always too low- budget.

What inspires your creative vision?

In my vision, the common denominator of photography and architecture is celebrating the beauty of nature. I would like the products of my creativity to be something so pure and simple that anyone can understand independently from their social and cultural background. Therefore, there is nothing better than getting inspired by the natural shapes, the geometrical patterns, the elegant lines, the materiality, the sounds that our planet can offer to us.

Which photographers have inspired you, and how?

In my first years into photography, I was deeply in love with the images of Steve McCurry and Frans Lanting. I used to dream of being an explorer and a NatGeo reporter, discovering the unknown and spreading awareness about our beautiful planet. With the years, I started to believe that we must convey something of ourselves in a picture and not just report a reality, this is why I particularly love the work of @helloemilie and @bejamin. They can really celebrate the beauties of our planet and hook you in their images in perfect contemplation.

What genre of photography brings you the most joy?

I have experimented with different kinds of photography, so now I can admit that nature and landscape can fill my soul with joy more than anything. Primarily I feel successful when I look at an image, and the combination of colours and light makes me remember exactly what I thought in the moment of capturing it. Of course, I can still appreciate different genres, and you will find them in my Instagram account, but when I look at a picture of the ocean or a deserted landscape, I almost feel like the image is talking with my soul.

How do you maintain your creative drive?

I believe creativity must not be forced. It is ok not to feel creative sometimes, and the best thing to do in those cases is just doing something else. It happened a lot that I didn't take my camera for months, or I asked at work to do practice stuff; those times the best to do was focusing on myself or outdoor activities or even another form of arts. Travelling, diving in new cultures, talking and learning from people from all over the world and especially having a "me time" while surfing, always fills me up with an energy that I mostly channel in photography and design.

Finally, do you have any advice for aspiring Architects?

After working in different countries, I noticed that architecture is never as you have imagined while you are studying it. During university, I had this vision of architecture as a science that would help people to build a fair and sustainable society. Unfortunately, the real -money wise- the deal is entirely different. My best advice is, for who shares my same point of view, don't give up! Don't be discouraged by low salaries or companies that work like construction machine. Don't be afraid to refuse a position in a company that doesn't fit with your creative drive: if you love and believe in what you are doing, your creativity will flourish, and your design will benefit from it and appreciate by people.

#Architect #Interviews #Photography

[sailorrrvenus]

Shooting Dreams and Nightmares: An Interview with the Bragdon Brothers

Great photography tells a compelling story. Weaving narrative into photos and photo series is a challenging task — the storyteller cannot simply make the world conform to their imagination as the author or painter can. Photographers only have one frame to convey meaning — motion and action have to be paraphrased and the moment of transformation captured.

The limitations of physical reality and framing a decisive moment to tell a tale are what makes being a good photographic storyteller so hard. You need to think laterally, as your story relies heavily on the imagination and subconscious mind of the audience, much like infiltrating someone’s dreams.

Gareth (above, at left) and Gavin (above, at right) Bragdon are two street photographers who do this artfully. It’s unusual to find someone who performs this effectively, let alone two brother’s whose work compliments each other in a style that blends dreams with nightmares, emphasizing the surreal aspects of the everyday. There is a meaning in here, but just like in a dream the meaning is unclear and muddled- strange things are illuminated people become alien lifeforms, and life the world becomes a surreal and scary place.

I interviewed them to divine some understanding of these surreal images they create.

James Cater (to Gavin): On your old blog you wrote that “I can easily see commonalities between my handwriting, photography, music, drawing and so on…for example, I tend to favor delay/reverb which to me would be the sonic equivalents to photography’s slow shutter speeds, multiple exposures, blur and the like.” This is an interesting way for an artist to find their element in photo taking — by looking outside the photographic art to find their ‘punctum’ as you called it. Things have definitely developed since this, but what kind of art outside of photography continues to influence your style?

Gavin: I would definitely say movies/TV…in fact, maybe more so than other photography itself. Books as well. My favorite genre for all of those tends to be science fiction as well horror if it’s well done, you know focuses more on the eerie, uncanny, surreal, atmosphere and so on. And at least nowadays, consciously or subconsciously those are the sort of things I try to capture.

And I think it reflects the real world at the moment. We are living in a sort of sci-fi/horror. Everything seems off-kilter, unwinding, surreal, not quite real, this twilight zone. You got Donald Trump, of course, Britain is committing suicide with Brexit because it’s collectively lost its mind, you got other similar movements popping up in other countries. There’s also the effects of climate change becoming more and more tangible. We’re in a very weird and dark place right now.

(To Gavin) Many of your photos look like they are from stills the X-Files. How are you influenced by the paranormal or surrealism?

Gavin: As far as the former goes, when my brother and I were kids we spent a lot of time reading about the paranormal- ghosts, UFOs, cryptids and so on. I suppose that came from the fact that unlike many other kids our age, we never were able to watch say Friday the 13th or the Freddy Kruger movies. I think all kids have something of a need for horror and scares of some kinds, so for us, the books and shows about the paranormal supplemented that. The only difference was that, supposedly, what we were into was non-fiction. And there is something very surreal about the paranormal versus Hollywood horror.

Incidentally, we were/are planning to do a documentary project on “paranormal culture” if you will, in Scotland, you know tagging along with ghost hunters, UFO watchers and the like. Because of circumstances involving my brother’s illness, its been shelved for the time being but as soon as he’s in a better state its something I really look forward to jumping into.

(To Gavin) Do you have any experiences with extra-terrestrial life forms, or do you have any beliefs that some may consider ‘fringe’ or conspiratorial?

Gavin: I tend to be agnostic about the paranormal/unexplained. I tend to think there is “something” that happens, like what we think of as ghosts or alien spacecraft are things that are real in a way – that something is happening, and not just a bunch of lies or sightings of Venus/swamp gas (some of the skeptical explanations are just as ridiculous and far-fetched as the explanations of some of the most out there “believers”). But of course, yeah, there is a lot of bullshit out there.

Ghosts and UFOs and so on seem almost like glitches in the Matrix…they don’t belong in our rational, scientific natural world and yet there they are. What are they? Are they what they seem at face value? I mean even if none of it is real, I still find fascinating to think that maybe there is a thin membrane between our natural/rational world and others that leaks over sometimes. If it is all a modern form of mythology, then it’s a fascinating one.

I can say I have a short handful of what would be considered paranormal experiences, things that I can’t explain otherwise. And believe me, I wrack my brain for alternatives because I don’t want to go around believing I had an “experience” for the sake of it. I have seen what I believe was UFO once, its small fry stuff, but it’s one I really can’t explain. Basically, it looked a bit like a star flying around in erratic patterns around a larger and brighter star before the former seemed to disappear into the latter, which then just stayed there like a star or planet would. It’s a weird one and doesn’t even quite make sense as an alien spacecraft much less anything natural.

(To Gavin) How did you shoot this? Was it come across by accident with no explanation? What is the back story to this pic?

Gavin: I did indeed come across this by accident, as to what is really going on…I feel in this case it is best to say a magician never reveals his secrets. In some cases, I think the photo is best served by keeping the back story to one’s self, to keep the mystery. This is the kind of shot I really really actually hope to find every time I go out and shoot. A scene that, when framed correctly, is truly surreal and creates its own bizarre reality as a photograph separate from what really transpired in life. I really wish I would come across stuff like this more often!

(To Gavin) How did you light this? Who is this person in the photo?

Gavin: This is actually a staged shot. Back in college, I was working a project about, incidentally, the paranormal and I was trying to create photos that sort of resembled allegedly real photos you find in books on the subject. This is my brother on a rooftop in Malta. I put the flash behind him and put the camera in P-mode on a high ISO. The camera exposes for the ambient light, so doesn’t know the flash is there so thus things the flash hit end up being overexposed and seem to glow. The eyes are just basic “light-dots” I added in Photoshop. My PS skills are quite basic actually.

(To Gavin) Is this lit with a flash? Or just natural light? How did you achieve this hyper-realistic look?

Gavin: Natural light. Very straight ahead shot, point and click. I didn’t do very much with it in post-processing so I figure the hyper-real look is just from the layers in the scene.

(To Gareth) From an except I read on your bio from Forward Thinking Museum, you mentioned that you were learning photography in the hope of becoming a photojournalist, I read also in a 121clicks article recently that you have been struggling with a diagnosis of Lyme disease. How has this impacted your aspirations?

Gareth: It’s honestly a bit painful and unimaginable at this point to think I once such aspirations. The interview with Forward Thinking Museum was done back in 2013. My symptoms had suddenly started in February of 2012. I was having hundreds of skipping heart beats a day, breathlessness, random dizziness attacks. All the doctors assured me these symptoms where simply being caused by “anxiety” and “panic attacks.” I constantly felt like I was one missed heartbeat away from death. Despite this, my fascination with photography was only growing and my will power was stronger than my fears. When I look back at my old B&W pictures I can really see that weird mixture of passion and physical discomfort of the time reflecting off the pictures themselves. Living like that was hell and I still have no idea how I managed to capture those pictures, study photography, work or be in a relationship well dealing with that shit. I was sick but I was also healthy enough to still dream. What I did not expect is how much worse I was going to get over the coming years. By 2015 I started having daily headaches and migraines and by 2017 I was deathly sick having memory problems and crippling fatigue. It was not till the eleventh hour that my invisible illness that made my body into a torture chamber was finally exposed and diagnosed. Right now I’m undergoing treatment, but it’s been very difficult and is a slow process. For right now all of my dreams aspirations are being kept in a metaphorical shoe box until I’m better.

(To Gareth) When I read the quote, “I think the streets will prepare me for future battlefields,” it made me thought of a Bruce Gilden video, where he is walking around NYC and talking about the really dangerous place is ‘right here’. In any disaster area, working as a journo, you have a press pass that gives you permission to take photos. But being just a shmuck with a camera means anyone can do what they want to you. With your in your face style of photography, what are some of the most interesting reactions you have inspired from an uninvited flash to the face?

Gareth: Shooting this way, of course you’re not invisible but most of the time the reactions are fine. Sometimes people laugh or say thank you if you compliment them, sometimes it elicits a conversation. Bizarrely enough, there are quite a few people who don’t seem to notice it. However and inevitably you will get the odd bad reaction. One time I shot this guy smoking a pipe. He literally punches the camera into my face and starts having this big go at me, saying he’s a lawyer, he’ll sue me blah blah blah.

I stood my ground saying what I was doing was not illegal but physically assaulting someone was, which is what he just did to me. Usually when you get a bad reaction or whatever I try to be apologetic or defuse the situation not always “stand my ground”, but when someone acts like that and starts getting physical over their photo being taken, then no. Anyway, I was later informed that this guy was a lawyer — in fact, an infamous one well-known for his hard unionist and anti-Catholic leanings. He’s been caught out singing sectarian songs and jokes. He’s a bigot. After learning that, I did not feel bad in the least for ruining his day.

(To Gareth) In your series “Breathing Mannequins” you bring a high fashion style to the streets. It seems with this series that the intention is to make photographs that contrast human skin to the unnatural covering of clothing. What inspired you to look at people this way and how did you learn to shoot in this way?

Gareth: When I was first exposed to street photography I was attracted to its unpredictability and the unforgiving nature. I remember trying to find the “decisive moment” when I first started shooting the streets and completely failing to capture anything compelling. It was not until a Halloween night when I decided to use the pop-up flash on my camera that I discovered the potential of the flash. Soon afterward I purchased a flash gun and a set of flash triggers.

Much of my inspiration to capture subjects up close and off guard came from looking at the work of a local street photographer and friend Paul Cruickshank. I was drawn in by the feeling of energy and intimacy in his pictures. Armed with my flash gun and lots of courage I began getting closer to subjects. The black and white lighting storms soon led to interesting results and further pursuit of that aesthetic.

When I was shooting in black and white I was thinking in black & white and looked for people and things that would fit the dark and eerie look. It was not till I reluctantly switched over to color that I begin to see the visual potential of the subjects that peacocked their way down Edinburgh’s busy high street. I was also simultaneously being inspired by the surrealistic color work of Guy Bourdin. I believe his work had an even greater impact on me than most of the well-known street photographers.

(To Gareth) Do you yourself wear clothing that draws attention to yourself, that sacrifice practicality for fashion?

Gareth: No, not deliberately unless my clothes are falling apart. I used to wear this leather jacket where the sleeve was torn to shreds, but I was too skint to replace it for ages. One of my friends said it looked like I’d been run over by a car. That’s as flashy as I get with my fashion.

(To Gareth) How much warning did you get to take this- did the umbrella reverse itself just as you hit the shutter?

Gareth: Not very much warning. I was crossing the street and the umbrella reversed itself right in front of me and it was thanks to fast reflexes that I was able to catch this at the drop of a hat.

(To Gareth) Did you know this guy before you took the photo? It looks as if you were just having a drink with him?

Gareth: This was in Monmarte in Paris. There was a camera crew around this guy and I just jumped into the middle of this crowd and took the photo. Had no idea who he was but was later told he is something like a famous owner of cabaret clubs or something like that. Some celebrity anyway.

(To Gareth) What is the story behind this wretched creature?

Gareth: I caught this just as its owner was about to pick it up into a taxi cab. It’s some sort of particular breed. No idea which.

(To Gareth) How was this lit? How did the copper react to you flashing his horse?

Gareth: Lit with an off-camera flash from under the horse’s snout. It was years ago I took this, but I don’t recall the cop really reacting. I guess sometimes you have to be careful with horses. Horses can scare the shit out of me sometimes.

(To Gareth) When putting together your portfolio or an exhibition, what do you look for? What are the themes or feelings that speak to you to create a series like Under Grey Skies?

Gareth: When we put together things like that, I suppose not only are we trying to pick strong individual photos, but also have a sort of consistency to them. Not necessarily something literal, or something you can express with words, but the sort of thing you can see coming together when you’re actually in the act of putting it all together. I suppose the same can often be said of when we have series like the one you mentioned. Like when those photos are taken, we’re usually just out to take photos, not necessarily with a particular theme in mind, not consciously anyway. It’s later on that you notice when you have enough of these pictures does the “theme” become apparent.

(To Both) What is a vivid dream that you can pull from recent memory?

Gareth: I had this really vivid dream recently that involved a really strange lighting storm with these sort of UFOs in the sky and everyone looking up at them and then this apparition of a girl appearing in the hallway. It was really eerie and a bit omen-y. Then the dream moved on to going to the theater with my brother and parents and having a bad feeling about it and getting us to leave in a taxi, only for it to bring us back to the theater which then gets attacked by these guys with samurai swords. One of those dreams where you end up feeling really weird when you wake up.

Gavin: I had a dream where I found out Karen O died from meningitis or something. I was proper tore up about it.

(To Both) Lastly, this wouldn’t be a photographer interview without a gear shot, so show me what you shoot with!

About the author: James Cater is a digital and analog photographer, film lab operator, and model. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of Cater’s work on his website and Instagram. This article was also published here.

source https://petapixel.com/2019/04/01/shooting-dreams-and-nightmares-an-interview-with-the-bragdon-brothers/

[pauldeckerus]

Shooting Dreams and Nightmares: An Interview with the Bragdon Brothers

Great photography tells a compelling story. Weaving narrative into photos and photo series is a challenging task — the storyteller cannot simply make the world conform to their imagination as the author or painter can. Photographers only have one frame to convey meaning — motion and action have to be paraphrased and the moment of transformation captured.

The limitations of physical reality and framing a decisive moment to tell a tale are what makes being a good photographic storyteller so hard. You need to think laterally, as your story relies heavily on the imagination and subconscious mind of the audience, much like infiltrating someone’s dreams.

Gareth (above, at left) and Gavin (above, at right) Bragdon are two street photographers who do this artfully. It’s unusual to find someone who performs this effectively, let alone two brother’s whose work compliments each other in a style that blends dreams with nightmares, emphasizing the surreal aspects of the everyday. There is a meaning in here, but just like in a dream the meaning is unclear and muddled- strange things are illuminated people become alien lifeforms, and life the world becomes a surreal and scary place.

I interviewed them to divine some understanding of these surreal images they create.

James Cater (to Gavin): On your old blog you wrote that “I can easily see commonalities between my handwriting, photography, music, drawing and so on…for example, I tend to favor delay/reverb which to me would be the sonic equivalents to photography’s slow shutter speeds, multiple exposures, blur and the like.” This is an interesting way for an artist to find their element in photo taking — by looking outside the photographic art to find their ‘punctum’ as you called it. Things have definitely developed since this, but what kind of art outside of photography continues to influence your style?

Gavin: I would definitely say movies/TV…in fact, maybe more so than other photography itself. Books as well. My favorite genre for all of those tends to be science fiction as well horror if it’s well done, you know focuses more on the eerie, uncanny, surreal, atmosphere and so on. And at least nowadays, consciously or subconsciously those are the sort of things I try to capture.

And I think it reflects the real world at the moment. We are living in a sort of sci-fi/horror. Everything seems off-kilter, unwinding, surreal, not quite real, this twilight zone. You got Donald Trump, of course, Britain is committing suicide with Brexit because it’s collectively lost its mind, you got other similar movements popping up in other countries. There’s also the effects of climate change becoming more and more tangible. We’re in a very weird and dark place right now.

(To Gavin) Many of your photos look like they are from stills the X-Files. How are you influenced by the paranormal or surrealism?

Gavin: As far as the former goes, when my brother and I were kids we spent a lot of time reading about the paranormal- ghosts, UFOs, cryptids and so on. I suppose that came from the fact that unlike many other kids our age, we never were able to watch say Friday the 13th or the Freddy Kruger movies. I think all kids have something of a need for horror and scares of some kinds, so for us, the books and shows about the paranormal supplemented that. The only difference was that, supposedly, what we were into was non-fiction. And there is something very surreal about the paranormal versus Hollywood horror.

Incidentally, we were/are planning to do a documentary project on “paranormal culture” if you will, in Scotland, you know tagging along with ghost hunters, UFO watchers and the like. Because of circumstances involving my brother’s illness, its been shelved for the time being but as soon as he’s in a better state its something I really look forward to jumping into.

(To Gavin) Do you have any experiences with extra-terrestrial life forms, or do you have any beliefs that some may consider ‘fringe’ or conspiratorial?

Gavin: I tend to be agnostic about the paranormal/unexplained. I tend to think there is “something” that happens, like what we think of as ghosts or alien spacecraft are things that are real in a way – that something is happening, and not just a bunch of lies or sightings of Venus/swamp gas (some of the skeptical explanations are just as ridiculous and far-fetched as the explanations of some of the most out there “believers”). But of course, yeah, there is a lot of bullshit out there.

Ghosts and UFOs and so on seem almost like glitches in the Matrix…they don’t belong in our rational, scientific natural world and yet there they are. What are they? Are they what they seem at face value? I mean even if none of it is real, I still find fascinating to think that maybe there is a thin membrane between our natural/rational world and others that leaks over sometimes. If it is all a modern form of mythology, then it’s a fascinating one.

I can say I have a short handful of what would be considered paranormal experiences, things that I can’t explain otherwise. And believe me, I wrack my brain for alternatives because I don’t want to go around believing I had an “experience” for the sake of it. I have seen what I believe was UFO once, its small fry stuff, but it’s one I really can’t explain. Basically, it looked a bit like a star flying around in erratic patterns around a larger and brighter star before the former seemed to disappear into the latter, which then just stayed there like a star or planet would. It’s a weird one and doesn’t even quite make sense as an alien spacecraft much less anything natural.

(To Gavin) How did you shoot this? Was it come across by accident with no explanation? What is the back story to this pic?

Gavin: I did indeed come across this by accident, as to what is really going on…I feel in this case it is best to say a magician never reveals his secrets. In some cases, I think the photo is best served by keeping the back story to one’s self, to keep the mystery. This is the kind of shot I really really actually hope to find every time I go out and shoot. A scene that, when framed correctly, is truly surreal and creates its own bizarre reality as a photograph separate from what really transpired in life. I really wish I would come across stuff like this more often!

(To Gavin) How did you light this? Who is this person in the photo?

Gavin: This is actually a staged shot. Back in college, I was working a project about, incidentally, the paranormal and I was trying to create photos that sort of resembled allegedly real photos you find in books on the subject. This is my brother on a rooftop in Malta. I put the flash behind him and put the camera in P-mode on a high ISO. The camera exposes for the ambient light, so doesn’t know the flash is there so thus things the flash hit end up being overexposed and seem to glow. The eyes are just basic “light-dots” I added in Photoshop. My PS skills are quite basic actually.

(To Gavin) Is this lit with a flash? Or just natural light? How did you achieve this hyper-realistic look?

Gavin: Natural light. Very straight ahead shot, point and click. I didn’t do very much with it in post-processing so I figure the hyper-real look is just from the layers in the scene.

(To Gareth) From an except I read on your bio from Forward Thinking Museum, you mentioned that you were learning photography in the hope of becoming a photojournalist, I read also in a 121clicks article recently that you have been struggling with a diagnosis of Lyme disease. How has this impacted your aspirations?

Gareth: It’s honestly a bit painful and unimaginable at this point to think I once such aspirations. The interview with Forward Thinking Museum was done back in 2013. My symptoms had suddenly started in February of 2012. I was having hundreds of skipping heart beats a day, breathlessness, random dizziness attacks. All the doctors assured me these symptoms where simply being caused by “anxiety” and “panic attacks.” I constantly felt like I was one missed heartbeat away from death. Despite this, my fascination with photography was only growing and my will power was stronger than my fears. When I look back at my old B&W pictures I can really see that weird mixture of passion and physical discomfort of the time reflecting off the pictures themselves. Living like that was hell and I still have no idea how I managed to capture those pictures, study photography, work or be in a relationship well dealing with that shit. I was sick but I was also healthy enough to still dream. What I did not expect is how much worse I was going to get over the coming years. By 2015 I started having daily headaches and migraines and by 2017 I was deathly sick having memory problems and crippling fatigue. It was not till the eleventh hour that my invisible illness that made my body into a torture chamber was finally exposed and diagnosed. Right now I’m undergoing treatment, but it’s been very difficult and is a slow process. For right now all of my dreams aspirations are being kept in a metaphorical shoe box until I’m better.

(To Gareth) When I read the quote, “I think the streets will prepare me for future battlefields,” it made me thought of a Bruce Gilden video, where he is walking around NYC and talking about the really dangerous place is ‘right here’. In any disaster area, working as a journo, you have a press pass that gives you permission to take photos. But being just a shmuck with a camera means anyone can do what they want to you. With your in your face style of photography, what are some of the most interesting reactions you have inspired from an uninvited flash to the face?

Gareth: Shooting this way, of course you’re not invisible but most of the time the reactions are fine. Sometimes people laugh or say thank you if you compliment them, sometimes it elicits a conversation. Bizarrely enough, there are quite a few people who don’t seem to notice it. However and inevitably you will get the odd bad reaction. One time I shot this guy smoking a pipe. He literally punches the camera into my face and starts having this big go at me, saying he’s a lawyer, he’ll sue me blah blah blah.

I stood my ground saying what I was doing was not illegal but physically assaulting someone was, which is what he just did to me. Usually when you get a bad reaction or whatever I try to be apologetic or defuse the situation not always “stand my ground”, but when someone acts like that and starts getting physical over their photo being taken, then no. Anyway, I was later informed that this guy was a lawyer — in fact, an infamous one well-known for his hard unionist and anti-Catholic leanings. He’s been caught out singing sectarian songs and jokes. He’s a bigot. After learning that, I did not feel bad in the least for ruining his day.

(To Gareth) In your series “Breathing Mannequins” you bring a high fashion style to the streets. It seems with this series that the intention is to make photographs that contrast human skin to the unnatural covering of clothing. What inspired you to look at people this way and how did you learn to shoot in this way?

Gareth: When I was first exposed to street photography I was attracted to its unpredictability and the unforgiving nature. I remember trying to find the “decisive moment” when I first started shooting the streets and completely failing to capture anything compelling. It was not until a Halloween night when I decided to use the pop-up flash on my camera that I discovered the potential of the flash. Soon afterward I purchased a flash gun and a set of flash triggers.

Much of my inspiration to capture subjects up close and off guard came from looking at the work of a local street photographer and friend Paul Cruickshank. I was drawn in by the feeling of energy and intimacy in his pictures. Armed with my flash gun and lots of courage I began getting closer to subjects. The black and white lighting storms soon led to interesting results and further pursuit of that aesthetic.

When I was shooting in black and white I was thinking in black & white and looked for people and things that would fit the dark and eerie look. It was not till I reluctantly switched over to color that I begin to see the visual potential of the subjects that peacocked their way down Edinburgh’s busy high street. I was also simultaneously being inspired by the surrealistic color work of Guy Bourdin. I believe his work had an even greater impact on me than most of the well-known street photographers.

(To Gareth) Do you yourself wear clothing that draws attention to yourself, that sacrifice practicality for fashion?

Gareth: No, not deliberately unless my clothes are falling apart. I used to wear this leather jacket where the sleeve was torn to shreds, but I was too skint to replace it for ages. One of my friends said it looked like I’d been run over by a car. That’s as flashy as I get with my fashion.

(To Gareth) How much warning did you get to take this- did the umbrella reverse itself just as you hit the shutter?

Gareth: Not very much warning. I was crossing the street and the umbrella reversed itself right in front of me and it was thanks to fast reflexes that I was able to catch this at the drop of a hat.

(To Gareth) Did you know this guy before you took the photo? It looks as if you were just having a drink with him?

Gareth: This was in Monmarte in Paris. There was a camera crew around this guy and I just jumped into the middle of this crowd and took the photo. Had no idea who he was but was later told he is something like a famous owner of cabaret clubs or something like that. Some celebrity anyway.

(To Gareth) What is the story behind this wretched creature?

Gareth: I caught this just as its owner was about to pick it up into a taxi cab. It’s some sort of particular breed. No idea which.

(To Gareth) How was this lit? How did the copper react to you flashing his horse?

Gareth: Lit with an off-camera flash from under the horse’s snout. It was years ago I took this, but I don’t recall the cop really reacting. I guess sometimes you have to be careful with horses. Horses can scare the shit out of me sometimes.

(To Gareth) When putting together your portfolio or an exhibition, what do you look for? What are the themes or feelings that speak to you to create a series like Under Grey Skies?

Gareth: When we put together things like that, I suppose not only are we trying to pick strong individual photos, but also have a sort of consistency to them. Not necessarily something literal, or something you can express with words, but the sort of thing you can see coming together when you’re actually in the act of putting it all together. I suppose the same can often be said of when we have series like the one you mentioned. Like when those photos are taken, we’re usually just out to take photos, not necessarily with a particular theme in mind, not consciously anyway. It’s later on that you notice when you have enough of these pictures does the “theme” become apparent.

(To Both) What is a vivid dream that you can pull from recent memory?

Gareth: I had this really vivid dream recently that involved a really strange lighting storm with these sort of UFOs in the sky and everyone looking up at them and then this apparition of a girl appearing in the hallway. It was really eerie and a bit omen-y. Then the dream moved on to going to the theater with my brother and parents and having a bad feeling about it and getting us to leave in a taxi, only for it to bring us back to the theater which then gets attacked by these guys with samurai swords. One of those dreams where you end up feeling really weird when you wake up.

Gavin: I had a dream where I found out Karen O died from meningitis or something. I was proper tore up about it.

(To Both) Lastly, this wouldn’t be a photographer interview without a gear shot, so show me what you shoot with!

About the author: James Cater is a digital and analog photographer, film lab operator, and model. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of Cater’s work on his website and Instagram. This article was also published here.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2019/04/01/shooting-dreams-and-nightmares-an-interview-with-the-bragdon-brothers/

[meloncubemag-blog]

Laurel McLeod’s Experiments in Studio Art

My interview with Laurel has been my most spontaneous interview for the ‘Cube yet. I met the friendly artist Thursday afternoon at a meeting for a mentorship program that we are both involved in, collaborating on an upcoming exhibition together in April with several other artists based in Guelph. Our impromptu chat over hot beverages and fruit cups at The Cornerstone flitted over what sorts of art mediums and conceptual questions we are drawn towards most, comparisons of our experiences studying at OCAD and UofG, and Laurel’s environmentally sensitive approach to her artistic practice.  

I learned tons about navigating the undergraduate Studio Art program at UofG through Laurel’s descriptions of her classes, and both the technical and conceptual influences that drive contemporary drawing and painting practices in unconventional directions.

* * * *

So how did you find yourself majoring in Studio and minoring in Art History at the University of Guelph?

I’ve always been interested in art but I actually started school at Guelph for Biological Sciences. I was taking art history courses, so I decided to do a minor in art history. Then I started getting more into art, and I realized… “What am I doing in Biology?” Which is when I decided to fully pursue studio art.

It’s a big change to go from completely biology to completely art!

Yeah, for sure. A good change! I paint but I also took a digital media course, animation, and I’m into photography right now.

What types of photography do you learn at the university?

Last year we were doing digital, but right now we’re going large format photography and using 4 x 5s. We put the black cloth over our heads to see the image, and then develop the image in the dark room.

Does the sitter have to pose for a long time?

Nope! It doesn’t take long to capture the image at all, the development process is longer. There’s actually a dark room at school.

Could you tell me more about your painting projects?

Yeah! So last semester I got more interested in making works that were based around things found in nature. So I made a series of paintings that are 9x12, and I made thirty of those. What I did was I placed canvases outside with a bit of black pigment on top, and I let the wind disperse the pigment and they all ended up with different forms on top. Then I took those back to the studio and recreated them myself… So I was trying to talk about “what if people replicate what nature can make?”

Interesting! Did you find that you could replicate the forms close to what nature had made?

Hmmmmm, sometimes (laughs), not always.

What have you been working on lately?

I’m working with preserved moss in my works. It’s all based on a lot of nature and influenced by zen paintings. I guess there is not a ton of attachment to every piece for me personally, but I’ve been trying to figure out the materials more. I’ve been trying to use materials other than paints to create my paintings.

How did you come across the idea to use preserved moss, and is it easily accessible to you?

Back home (in Oakville) there is a garden center and I go there all the time now. My professor had suggested to me “Maybe try to look at zen paintings and imagery?” So I did, and eventually that morphed into this project.

Do you receive valuable feedback from your peers?

Yeah, we have critiques every few weeks, for every project there is a crit. My painting class has about nineteen students, mostly girls. In my final year class we have independent projects, and so we will talk to each other and the professor about our works.

Is there a focus on techniques or do students also discuss conceptual approaches to more experimental works?

I think for a lot of the students it is focused on technique because they are strictly painting, but for me the process and the meaning behind it is also important because I’m not using traditional painting methods. There aren’t a lot of people using moss (laughs), so there has to be a message there, right? Everyone’s work is so different.

Do professors ever influence you to create works in a certain style?

For sure, but in a good way. They help me develop solid works, but don’t impose their views on my work. If that was the case, I believe I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing, or enjoying it. I’ve definitely been influenced by my professors to go bigger with my artworks and do the best I can.

I was making a lot of small pieces, mostly because I was doing so many of them. Now, I feel like I can go bigger because I’m making so few. I feel like it’s ‘worked’ going bigger, and now I just want to keep going bigger!

How does the university teach you to price a painting?

There’s a few ways to do it…You can take the measurements of the height and width and price it that way, or you can take into account the materials and time and also considering if you’re putting it in a gallery or not. So you have to really think about where it’s going, and who’s seeing it.

What would you say to people who say, “I can’t draw, I’m not an artist”?

Everyone starts drawing when they’re little. We all have paper, we all have crayons, right? When do you decide then that you can’t draw? There are people who really like to draw and they have naturally just been drawing and don’t feel the need to ‘learn’ it in the same way if that makes sense?

For sure. I also find it interesting how we all draw the same thing when we’re little, even if we grow up in different countries.

Yeah! Like the clouds, and the sun, and the sky is always on top…

It must be a universal language of doodling. How long does it usually take for you to conceptualize a drawing and present it?

Lately I’ve been trying to spend more time to think about how a piece reads, or the framework of it, and make sure it’s conceptually sound before I even start it. So that takes longer than the drawing process, which is usually pretty fast. It’s very process-based. I can take paper and put some materials down and leave it, step away from it. Then I come back to it, add a bit of stuff on top, and then I’ve got a drawing. The drawing is pretty quick in that sense but the thinking behind it takes more time.

Do you document the process?

I haven’t been documenting the process itself in photos and videos, no. I have been going back to them and drawing on them a bit…

So once it’s ‘done’, it’s not really done, and you often go back to rework a piece?

I'm interested in the idea of chance involved when working with natural processes. That being said, yes, I do go back to a piece and add to it if I feel it isn't quite done. Often this involves melting more materials on top of the drawing, which allows for more colour and material interaction. These drawings are currently on show at the Boarding House Gallery. (below) 

* * * * 

Keep up to date with Laurel McLeod’s projects on her website  

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#artists

[flauntpage]

Thinks: Tim Ingold

Fiber Metaphors Weavers Don’t Hate: An Interview with Tim Ingold

  Keeley Haftner: So to begin I’d like to go way back. You’ve been the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen since 1999, but when you first embarked on your education you began with the study of natural sciences. Your father was the famous mycologist Cecil Terence Ingold, which piqued my interest as a closet wannabe mycologist. As our readers may not know, you have a fungus, Ingoldian Fungi, named after you on account of his research!

Tim Ingold: I do, yes!

KH: I was wondering if Terence’s profession had any influence on your latter academic interests, particularly with regard to ecological approaches to anthropology?

TI: It had a very strong influence, although he wouldn’t admit it. My dad, who considered himself to be a good empirical scientist and a very firm atheist, never really understood why I went into anthropology. Yet he really loved his microscopic fungi. He was completely in love with the beauty of nature and wanted to celebrate it through drawing and researching, through examining all the mechanisms by which they worked. He was a very rational man, so he would have never accepted this idea. So that’s what rubbed off on us as his children. We didn’t learn about the technicalities of the fungi but we learned what it meant to be to be in love with the things we study in the world. Two other lessons come to mind: the first being that he was one of the first to emphasize the importance of field study in botanical sciences when he was teaching in the 1930s. In those days everything was done in laboratories and students studied things pickled in jars, and the idea that one would go out and look at plants or fungi in their natural habitat seemed rather strange. So obviously that’s something that I picked up. The other thing is that there is a very close relationship, I think, between mycology and anthropology.

Ingoldian Fungi

KH: How so?

TI: Because in the botanical sciences mycologists are the awkward squad. Fungi don’t behave as organisms are supposed to; they’re very weird. They do odd things, you can’t describe their boundaries easily. It’s difficult to talk about them as if they were bounded organisms surrounded by an environment, because they’re just all these fibres that go every which way. If the fungus had been taken as the prototype for a living organism, then the whole of botany would be different. So if you’re a mycologist you have to think in rather unorthodox ways about boundaries and relationships. Moreover, the critique that mycology makes of mainstream bioscience is almost identical to the kind of critique that anthropologists make of the standard model of mainstream social science. Because anthropologists are also saying that when we’re studying people, we can’t think about them as bounded entities. They’re just bundles of relationships. I wrote an article in the mid-nineties in which I introduced a notion of the “mycelial person” and tried to draw a parallel between the fungal mycelium and they way we think about relationships in anthropology.

KH: I saw you speak at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts where you described your research regarding architecture as a form of weaving, which of course relates to other metaphors you’ve used from fiber arts like thread lines and knots. Can you talk about your weaving analogy, and what thinking about architecture in this way does to shift our perception of the built environment?

TI: Well, I got into architecture by accident. I started doing this work on lines in the mid-2000s for reasons that had nothing to do with architecture. I was interested in writing and the history of musical notation.

KH: Yes! And you’re a cellist as well, is that right?

TI: Yes I’m a cellist as well, which also comes into it. So this stuff on the boundary between anthropology and music is what really got me into lines in the first place. But then, people would say to me, “do you realize that what you’ve been talking about is architecture?” I didn’t, but people from architecture departments kept inviting me to talk, so I learned about it through experience. I was also supervising a PhD student from an architectural background at the time, namely Ray Lucas, now a distinguished scholar in his field, so we had lots of long discussions about lines and architectural drawing. I discovered that a big issue for architects is that mainstream architecture was still thinking in terms of building blocks, whereas I was into weaving and knotting. Then I discovered, as every student of architecture knows, that this debate goes back to one in the nineteenth-century, between Gottfried Semper and his opponents. Semper was actually the first to assert that architecture begins with weaving. His work had been sidelined because it went against the mainstream, but is now being rediscovered. So this whole discussion has quite a pedigree in architectural history. Well-known writers in architecture like Kenneth Frampton have been writing on “tectonics,” and Japanese traditional architecture is of course very much a woven form. I went to Japan to speak to architects, and discovered that there is much interest in these ideas in contemporary Japanese architecture as well. So I found an open door to the architectural imagination of the moment, which was quite exciting.

Reema Abu Hassan, Weaving Architecture, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, 2014.

This affects the way we think about the built environment by forcing us to rethink the nature of the ground and of surfaces in general. If you have building blocks, then you think of the ground as a kind of platform, and you put things on it like a child building with bricks. You want to build a big tower, so you start with a level base, and then you add brick after brick and build something up. That’s the standard model. But if you start with the idea that you’re not “building” but “weaving with lines,” than the ground ceases to be a baseline or foundation. Instead you get a unity of earth and sky. And where they meet is not just a simple surface, but a very complicated and interesting place where everything is happening. So all these things come together in thinking about fibres and lines and knots.

KH: Looking at your research in a broader perspective, it seems you have always had a fairly interdisciplinary approach to writing. You began early on with focus on the intersection of what you’ve called “The Four As”: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. It seems to me that this sort of intersectionality is very critical in our twenty-first century, and one would hope that more researchers understand the importance of disciplinary overlap. As someone who has been thinking about this for a long time, have you seen a shift toward interdisciplinary thought since embarking on this research, or do you see academic research as remaining quite siloed on the whole?

TI: Yes and no. The negative part of the answer is with anthropology, in that the last people to show any interest in what I’ve been doing, by and large, are my anthropological colleagues.

KH: (Laughs)

TI: They’re stuck in a kind of rut and I often get the feeling that they’ve gone in one direction and I’ve gone in another. A lot of this comes down to a separate debate we’re having at the moment, concerning the relation between anthropology and ethnography. I’ve tried to argue that these are quite separate things. I’ve argued that anthropology is fundamentally a speculative discipline concerned with the conditions and possibilities of the human world – how we could live and should live – and therefore that it can adopt an experimental approach. The classical approach in anthropology has been ethnographic, which is largely retrospective. An experimental approach is more speculative, more artistic in that sense, and part of the argument about linking anthropology to art and architecture was to show that we could think about future possibilities and not just past states. Classically, art and archaeology point in quite different temporal directions. I’ve been trying to turn that around, but there’s still a long way to go with anthropology. All the interest has come from art and architecture. They’re very happy about it, because they think anthropology is great!

Tim Ingold, Lecture: “Telling by Hand: Weaving, Drawing, Writing Photography” at Text and Textiles Conference, University of Aberdeen, 2012. Photography by: Patricia Pires Boulhosa.

KH: Yes! In my own experience, your ideas have really entranced a lot of artists and architects. I’ve been thinking about that seduction, and why makers respond to your work. So I’m wondering firstly, did this come as a surprise to you, or was it obvious to you early on that cultural producers might respond to your ideas?

TI: The answer is that I was completely taken aback. It was a great surprise. I’ve always felt slightly in awe of artists and architects – that I’m a mere anthropologist. So when they started getting in touch with me and saying “I’m interested in what you’re saying,” I was delighted! The level of interest did come as a surprise because I had no background in either discipline, and I don’t really know much about them. I felt a bit like an intruder. But is seemed to be an intrusion that was welcomed, and that was very nice.

KH: Well, I wouldn’t say that it’s very surprising to me. From my position one of the reasons your research is so seductive to makers is because you place such an emphasis on thinking through making, which is something that artists have always done, whether they’ve had the words for it or not. Your research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board was undertaken in conjunction with a fine art department in Dundee, and very directly combined approaches from fine art and anthropology using a practice-based approach to learning and making. Did you find your students responsive to this approach, and did it lead to any surprising outcomes?

TI: It goes back a long way, to when I was still based in at the University of Manchester. I was there from 1975 to 1999. During the mid-1990s, a number of our PhD students in anthropology also happened to have backgrounds in architecture or fine art. So we thought we’d form a little group and have an informal seminar, which was very exciting. During that seminar we discovered that if wanted to talk about issues on the border between art, architecture, and anthropology, we would have to be doing something practical. Otherwise you just get stuck in a rut. So we started doing practical things, and that’s where it all came from. Then I moved to Aberdeen in 1999 to develop an anthropology program and a department of anthropology from scratch. I had to build this thing up, so I needed some sort of vision for what it was going to do. I had two ambitions for it: that it would become the leading centre in the world for anthropology of the northern circumpolar peoples, because that’s my other hat. My northern circumpolar hat…

KH: Yes, I’m aware of this hat. (Laughs)

TI: (Laughs) And the other ambition was to continue with this project that was started in Manchester. The project you mention was a joint effort between us in Aberdeen anthropology and the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, and it ran from 2002 to 2005. My undergraduate course on “The Four As” was developed as part of the project. Students were reading from all four disciplines, but we also made models, went into the field, did trips and so on and so forth. Obviously there were lazy students who thought of these as fun things to do, but there were good students who produced amazing work. They tended to comment on how different this was from any other course they had done. Many things came from it: further grants, various PhD projects, and so on. It is hard to pin down particular findings. The thing I would stress is how it’s affected my understanding of the relation between research and teaching. This interest in education was the topic of my most recently published book, Anthropology And/As Education (2017).

Exhibition Poster for “Fieldnotes and Sketchbooks”, Aberdeen Art Gallery, 2005. Available from: Wendy Gunn, 2016.

KH: I can say that coming from what has historically been the production side of human culture, we artists often fall victim to conventional ways of thinking of matter as material onto which we can impose form. You’ve spoken about metallurgy and attending to the flow of materials – that this is a creative process that is more like dialogue than dictation. Can you talk briefly about the “hylomorphic” model of creation, and why it is important for us to view matter in a different light?

TI: I think it’s very important to view matter in this light! There’s a particular diagram somewhere toward the beginning of my book Making (2013), where I show the difference between thinking about objects and images and thinking about material flows and flows of awareness. It means turning things around ninety degrees. Instead of thinking of an interaction between an object and image, you consider the object as just one pent up moment in the flow of materials, and the image as just one pent up moment in the flow of awareness, and then see how those two flows correspond. Now I can look back and it seems obvious to me where these ideas came from; you can even find chapters in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari where they’ve said such things already. In the old days nobody took materials seriously, and material culture scholars were only interested in objects. The idea of moving from objects to materials was very controversial when I first came up with it. Now it is old hat.

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what triggered this idea, but it probably goes back to my reading of Henri Bergson. Everybody’s talking these days about Bergson, and also Whitehead, but I read him in the early 1980s and was completely bowled over. This guy said everything I had been trying to say! His ideas sank so deep into my consciousness that I’ve been thinking with them all these years without realizing that’s what I’ve been doing. Originally I was looking for something else in the library and discovered his Creative Evolution by accident. When I first opened the book I started sneezing, because nobody had opened it for decades. The dust! (Laughs)

KH: (Laughs) Well, as you say, these ideas are becoming more and more fashionable. You’ve said that “things are not reducible to objects,” which seems to me to echo ideas found in Object-Oriented Ontology, New Materialism, and Speculative Realism. Many of these theories are attempting to do away with an anthropocentric viewpoint. Do you align yourself with contemporary writers like Timothy Morton or Graham Harman, or do you see yourself as quite distant from what these philosophers are up to?

TI: I see myself as very distant from them. I don’t like Object-Oriented Ontology! I think it’s dreadful.

KH: Tell me about it! I want to hear more about that. (Laughs)

TI: (Laughs) I don’t like Graham Harman’s writing, and Timothy Morton’s drives me insane. I met him once and I found him arrogant and pretentious – like his writing. So I’m definitely not in that camp. I’m not quite sure how to start with it… It’s partly just that I think this kind of philosophizing is tedious and unnecessarily obscure. It’s just not rigorous. You name something, whatever you feel like, and it’s an object. The rain, my curtains, this thing that I put my coffee cup on… ah, what the hell … it’s an object. This seems to me utterly pointless. But more than that, the kind of world the Object-Oriented Ontologists conjure up is fossilized. Nothing moves. There seems to be no sense of ontogenesis, of the development of being. Thinking of things ontogenetically is absolutely key to my thinking, which also resonates with that of Gilbert Simondon, another philosopher whose work is coming more to our attention these days. As far as I can see, in OOO there is no understanding or consideration of ontogenesis at all.

Tim Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 2011.

Thus the world they’re displaying is fundamentally dead, whereas I think the world we should be interested in is fundamentally alive. I read something by Harman, where he said anything you like can be an object, except time. Time is not allowed to be an object. He was talking about rain falling on a tin roof, and saying that the rain is fundamentally in itself and the tin is fundamentally in itself. But so far as I can see, the rain is not just drops of water; rain is drops of water falling down. It has movement. You can’t have rain if drops of water are standing still! As soon as you bring the movement in then this whole sense of “things in themselves” no longer makes any sense. So it’s like the world is completely frozen, which seems wrong. And I think its wrong politically as well. It leads to what has happened rather similarly in anthropology with the so-called “ontological turn,” where you can more or less name anything and it’s a world for you, and you can have as many worlds as you like. I’m very insistent – and I’ve written about this – that there aren’t multiple worlds. There’s one world, and it’s the only world we’ve got. We need to look after it, and everything we do matters for it. I’ve really been trying to push the notion of “one world” – not in a British Airways or corporate capital sense – but one world of infinite difference. It’s full of difference and yet one world all the same. You can have a world of difference because things are forever becoming. And that’s really terribly important to me.

KH: I’m glad to hear you speak from that perspective! At the beginning of your speaking about OOO you began talking about this trouble with language, one which I think perhaps all academics share, which is the problem with, in your words, the “overwrought, puffed up and self-serving phrase-mongering of so much that nowadays passes for scholarship” …

TI: Absolutely! (Laughs)

KH: (Laughs) I’d say, comparatively, that the accessibility and clarity of your writing feels like a breath of fresh air. Does intellectual obscurity and protectionism still dominate in your own field or the fields in which you research, or have you noted a shift toward legibility?

TI: I don’t know; I hope for such a shift! It’s hard to say if it is happening or not, because as always there’s good writing and bad writing. I couldn’t say if the proportion of good writing has increased or of bad writing decreased. I’m a little pessimistic. I do believe there is a crisis in academic writing. It’s not just obscurity, although there’s plenty of that. It’s a crisis that’s been brought on to some extent by pressures that are beyond the control of individual academics. We have pressures in the United Kingdom for research assessment and demands on productivity. Basically, if you’re a young scholar and you want a job, you have to pump out papers for publication in approved journals, which means these papers have to take on a particular form, and have to be packed with bibliographic references so that none of the peer reviewers can complain that you’ve left something out. This is utterly destructive of any kind of literary creativity, and it’s doing terrible damage to academic writing. People know it. Scholars know it. They would like to write differently, but are sometimes bullied – certainly pushed and pressured – into producing their journal articles. And once they’ve done that, once they begin teaching, they don’t have any energy left. So yes, there is a crisis.

Much academic writing is appalling. It doesn’t carry any sense that it’s really the author who is writing it – no sense of their hand or their heart! It sounds detached and phony. We have a lot to do to fix it – part of what I’ve been trying to do is find another way so that we can say “this writing is scholarly,” even if it isn’t academic. But to do that is to work against the institutions of the academy and the politics that hold these institutions up. I think we have it worse in the UK, but it’s spreading to other countries.

KH: One of the ways in which your own writing is humanized, besides through language and content, is through the use of examples, artworks in particular, to describe and in some cases to illustrate your ideas. I’m thinking about your use of Henri Matisse’s “Dance” (1909-10) to describe the importance of lines and blobs in social connection, and your writing about the work of an artist like Carol Bove – her “The Foamy Saliva of a Horse” – a piece you’ve included in your recent collection, Correspondences (2017). You’ve called yourself a fan of art, and I’d say perhaps you’re a bit more than that, but I’m wondering what leads you to choose the particular artworks that you do, and why is art a useful demonstrative tool for you?

Carol Bove, The Foamy Saliva of a Horse, Exhibition at The Common Guild, Glasgow, Scotland, 2013. Photography by Ruth Clark.

TI: A lot of art is not. (Laughs) It’s the same for everybody. There are some kinds of art that one responds to, art that speaks to you and that you feel you could have a conversation with, and there are some kinds that just don’t register at all. You can’t ever generalize about art. It’s such a variable thing. Some kinds of art, I think, are intuitively very anthropological, even though they don’t announce themselves as such. But most of the art that quite self-consciously calls itself anthropological doesn’t really work. Often the artists that I come to work with or write about are people to whom I’ve been introduced, not of my own initiative but on the initiative of someone else. A curator might get in touch with me and say, “we’re doing an exhibition of this artist and I think you’d like it,” and usually they’re right. They know something of my work, they know something of the artist’s work; they’ve seen a connection. For example, about a year ago I went to Turin to visit the studio of Giuseppe Penone, a renowned founder of the Arte Povera movement. A curator for an upcoming exhibition of Penone’s work in Philadelphia had asked me to write an article about his work. So we arranged for me to meet him, and I found it enormously interesting. I got lots of ideas from it because he was working particularly with trees and aspects of the growth of trees. With Carol Bove, the people running a gallery in Glasgow called The Common Guild got in touch with me and said “we need a couple of people to write for the catalogue for this work.” So I went along to look at the exhibition, and indeed, I found it enjoyable to write about. In my Correspondences book there are several others like that. So I’ve had artists chosen for me.

KH: Right! That’s very convenient. You don’t have to wade through the muck like the rest of us. (Laughs)

TI: I don’t have to waste my time, making lots of mistakes!

KH: Well Carol Bove is one of my favourite artists, so you were well met on that. Is there anything else you’re working on, recent or otherwise, you’d like to mention?

TI: As I mentioned my newest book, Anthropology And/As Education, has taken me into the field of education, which is where I’m going now. It is the result of all the things I’ve been doing up to now, to try and break down the boundary between teaching and research, and to recognize the fundamental pedagogical issue of what education is. I didn’t think at the beginning that this was going to be such a fundamental issue, but it is certainly fundamental now. At the moment I’m finishing up a big project funded by the European Research Council, entitled Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design. It is a five-year project that ends this May. So I have to wrap that up, and then the big plan is that I’m going to retire this year. Of course that doesn’t mean I’ll stop doing stuff. But I can stop carrying all these administrative responsibilities so that I have more time to do my own thing. The plan is that once I get all this art and architecture stuff out of my system, I shall I go back to being an old- fashioned ethnographer. I’ll go back to fieldwork in northern Finland I did in the 1980s, and write it up properly.

KH: (Laughs) But I thought that was a bad word, ethnography!

TI: (Laughs) It’s not a bad word in itself. The problem is mixing it with anthropology. I’m going to simply write a historical book about this area that I got to know rather well, because I owe it to the people who live there. It’s been a guilty thing that I’ve carried with me for decades, and people have been wondering why I haven’t done it. So I need to do it. (Laughs)

KH: (Laughs) Alright, so you’re tidying up matters so you can properly play!

TI: I’m tidying up, yes.

KH: A well-deserved retirement. Take care!

TI: You as well!

  Tim Ingold is an anthropologist based in Aberdeen, Scotland. You can find his complete bio here.

An Opening to Imagine the Present: A Conversation with Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian

“What is there?” An Introduction to OOO and Art (Part 1)

Field Static : A Catalogue Essay

Episode 610: Karolina Gnatowski

Plant Humans of the Future: An Interview with Saya Woolfalk

Thinks: Tim Ingold published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[anautisticdragon-blog]

"You're not understanding me, because if you were, you would agree. Let me try again, maybe you'll understand me if I just put it simpler, then you'd agree."

Manufactured Idiocy

I try to build bridges between myself and NTs all the time, one such effort was a neurotypical friend I picked up from an interesting community of people I cavorted with for a time, before the social interactions just got the best of me. I tried to believe that he could come around and not see everything from a tribal perspective, that he wouldn't always be trying to convert people to his tribe through fallacy, trickery, and force. It didn't work out. We're no longer friends. You see, the issue I have with NTs is the one that gave rise to the alt-right; An NT isn't able to accept that someone might disagree with them. It's just not within their power to accept that a person can exist outside of the tribes they believe they're in, and that that person can still be an equal. You must either be converted (forcibly, through pressure and bullying) into their tribes or you're somehow lesser. I ee this often in neurotypical debating tactics, and it's something I've come to think of as manufactured idiocy. It's where the NT tries to force the other person to feel unintelligent for not agreeing with them. The NT will claim that you're not bright enough to understand their explanation, that you can't grasp what it is they're saying, that somehow this is happening due to a failure to convey something in terms simple and comprehensible enough for their opponent to understand. You see, in their view, if they could do that then their opponent would naturally agree with them, or at least say that their opinions are valid, and all would be unicorns farting scented rainbows. The NT, being on the sociopathic spectrum, will use character assassination and try to undermine someone's self-esteem as these, to them, are valid tactics. The point is getting the person to agree, not the mutual sharing of information. Whereas on the autistic spectrum, when you have a person who's truly autistic (and this is an easy way to tell), you can have two people who'll be able to share ideas back and forth, disagree, and then not think of one another as lesser for doing so. I can hear the NTs out there now 'that's a fantasy, that's not how humanity ever works!' No, that's an autistic person's reality. My autistic partner and I do it all the bloody time, we disagree on some things but we respect one another as we are, both of us, cognizant of the importance of the diversity of thought. Innovation doesn't happen without the diversity of thought. The disagreement was about the kind of creativity I personally find appealing. I'll stress this, it wasn't about the 'correct' form of it, nor was it about the 'only' form of it, but rather the manner that I, personally, find to be the most appealing. It was an argument that arose from the most ridiculous source, because it always is with neurotypicals, they can make an absolute binary tribal-oriented focus out of any nonsense. You see, because I had a preference that wasn't their preference, I deserved to be struck down, smote for my opinion. How dare I? How dare! I said that I enjoyed creativity that arose from the fluke, that the optimisation of that fluke was less interesting to me on a personal level. I had to say this as the NT in question was pressuring me to be interested in how they were putting elements of a Minecraft mod pack together, in ways which I had done, and I'd known other people had as well. They believed there was something special in their way of following things to their logical conclusion that no one else had, as NTs love being special snowflakes. I find that NTs always have a propensity for that flavour of egomania, unfortunately. I explained to them that it was the fluke, the discovery, where someone found an entirely new use for something that was interesting to me. This lead them off on a mad spiel about how optimisation was as true a form of creativity as any (I never said it wasn't, you see), and that I should accept their gloriously brilliant, fantastic, creative mind and praise them for their efforts. Again, NTs tend to have an ego problem and if you don't feed their ego they can get quite nasty. Whereas, conversely, other spectrums (such as the autistic spectrum) are more prone to experiencing self-esteem and low confidence issues. i tried to explain to them that when an artist is simply mass-producing their work and never really trying anything new, it isn't interesting to me. I find that there's a lot of this on deviantART where artists will always use exactly the same side profile for everything, never bothering to learn about photography to practise different camera angles. I pointed out that my partner's favourite art pieces were the ones where they had attempted to set aside what they know and try stuff, and hten -- through a fluke -- discovered ways to make their art more interesting. In this way their artistic talent grows. That's what I find interesting about creativity. Apparently I absolutely need to equally value the person who takes that fluke and optimises it a little and see it as every bit as creative as the person who did that. It's like, yeah, you could just copy someone else's fluke and get the results that way but that isn't as interesting to my mind (personally, to me, I had to absolutely stress as a disclaimer) as the person who was just mucking about and found they could do something. An example I gave is that say you have an environment artist in a video game, clambering around the environment they created to see if they could find their way to places they shouldn't be able to. They reach a plateau and, even though it wasn't intended for the player to get there, they keep that path open so that others can see it. Then, the person gets an idea, it's certainly fulfilling to get here but what if it could be more rewarding? They plop a chest down there, fo rthe player to find if they manage to clamber up this insane, unintentional obstacle course. And lo, jumping puzzles are born. The person who comes along and optimises the jumping puzzle later to ensure that the geometry is correct and that the player has the smoothest experience is quite important, yes, but that's just taking what was already there to its logical conclusion. It isn't the same, for me, as the person who had the idea to put a chest atop that plateau in the first place. That's the kind of thing that inspires me, those stories are compelling as it's something impressive about how the human mind works. I find the fluke to be intriguing, and I personally feel that's a very important piece of the puzzle to solve in the process of crafting a thinking AI. This leads to a spiel about math and formula. I'm a computer programmer, he isn't, so this is especially funny to me. I sat there feeling devastated as he insulted my aptitude and told me that I didn't understand heuristics, formulaic systems, or anything like that. If I understood them as he did, I’d agree. Same as if I understood science the ‘correct’ way Creationists, Dark Matter Prophets, or Flat Earthers do I’d agree with them. Which I really don’t. I guess I don’t understand science, then! Poor me. Poor uneducated, stupid me.

It got to the point where I was just sadly shaking my head as I felt really hurt by this, it was just so petty of him to undermine me in this way, to try and attack me and bully me into accepting his viewpoint by insidiously attacking something I take pride in. I'm easily hurt, I have self-esteem issues. I wonder if I were neurotypical if that would've worked. Instead, I called him on his shit. I told him that insulting me and claiming that I couldn't understand math just because I didn't agree with his personal preference (I hope you see how WTF this is) is incredibly toxic and manipulative. I was tempted then and there to just call him on what he was behaving most like -- a vile sociopath. Instead, I asked him for exact examples to prove to me that I just couldn't understand his point. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Why? I don't know. I guess I just want to believe in people. There's that optimistic part of me that genuinely wants to believe that NTs aren't as horribly manipulative, Machiavellian, and borderline sociopathic as I've continued to find they are. In this way I will admit that I am an idiot, because I'm running the same experiment over and over and expecting a different result. I suppose I just want to believe in humanity, I want to have faith in us. I don't want to be any kind of misanthrope, I feel this plays on my guilt a lot. It leaves me open to attacks like this. So I gave him every opportunity. He gave me vague hypotheses that I pointed out didn't match reality. I kept asking for examples and finally he brought up the Tracer controversy. There was an opinion going around that Blizzard actually created that situation in order to get people angry to drive interest toward their game, and knowing that Blizzard does tend to be like that (they did make the most thoroughly, intentionally addictive game we’ve ever seen), I couldn't deny the possibility. So that's the example he gave me. The thing is is that even if it was indeed intentional, it was merely the same kind of system that propaganda has used for aeons. It's the very same trickery that British politicians used for Brexit! Just look up 'Nigel Farage anti-migrant poster,' and it's the same systems that Nazi Germany and Cold War America used to successfully propagandise their respective populaces with. It's why telling an American that they're not a 'patriot' is an insult worthy of hatred, these days. These systems have been knocking around for a long time, now, they're hardly new. I pointed this out to him and I told him that, no, I didn't think that it was ingenious, clever, or new. It was just building on something that already existed. I didn't see anything that appealed to my creative preference, there. I don't think he was expecting that, so this further devolved into attacks upon my intelligence and very nasty efforts to undermine my character. Clearly, if I wasn't this 'orrible bloody troglodyte, I'd agree with him. This is exactly what 9/11 Truthers, Dark Matter Prophets, Flat Earthers, Creationists, Skeptiks, the Alt-Right, or any cult-like group does and it's why I dislike them. In these wonderfully neurotypical groups, there's a common element you'll find: If you don't agree with them, you're either an idiot or a lesser creature. It's all down to the tribalism of the neurotypical spectrum, a tribalism that isn't shared by other spectrums. As I'm on the autistic spectrum I'm not so obsessively tribal in my perceptions, and when it does occur I tend to be very self aware of it and I try to fix it. I don't just double down on that tribalist attitude. This is exactly what neurotypicals do, though, isn't it? If they're confronted with how tribalistic they are, they just double down with their tribal-oriented focus rather than attempting to be self aware. My observations seem to find that the neurotypical spectrum is lacking in certain aspects of the 'Theory of Mind,' which fascinates me. That's interesting, isn't it? Oh, that's so interesting! It's almost like the NT view is that their minds are the correct default and fully apply to 'Theory of Mind' (whereas they really don't) and other spectrums don't. The truth is is that different spectrums apply to different parts of the 'Theory of Mind,' some better than others. What I find is that in the case of the neurotypical spectrum, their mindset lacks awareness of their own tribal-oriented biases and focuses, they're fully unable of even thinking outside of those boxes (and god have I tried to get them to). Other spectrums don't seem to have this problem. So, as an interesting artefact of their lack of self awareness, we see what I call Manufactured Idiocy where their cognitive dissonance will have them try to make their opponent seem less intelligent and erudite, even where that's completely contrary to reality. I invite people of other spectrums (including autistic persons, like myself) to talk to NT people and see if you can spot this. It's just one artefact of their lack of self awareness about their own tribalism. And I had to finally call off this acquaintanceship today as it was too harmful to my health, as even my heartfelt efforts to try to just agree to disagree fall flat. I'm tired of having an NT undermine my intellect and character at every turn. An autistic person wouldn't do this. I suspect that other spectrums wouldn't either, in my experience this is very specifically an NT problem due to their tribal-oriented biases and focuses. If you disagree with na NT they will try any nasty, insidious, manipulative tactic to get you to agree. Which includes, as we've covered today, manufactured idiocy. I'm sure that in their cognitive dissonance the NT I've called this acquaintanceship off with thinks that I'm a subhuman troglodyte for not agreeing with them. That isn't mutual. I still like and respect them. I just don't like their attitude. Nor do I like their lack of self awareness about this. The entire point of making this article, really, is so that people are aware of this and this particular tactic so that they don't fall for it due to low self-esteem. My BS alarm was ringing loudly when he tried to pull this on me, so... I'm sharing. I'm just tired by this point, so yes, this is going up on my personal rant blog. I suppose I wouldn't feel this sensitive about it, but this happened after another altercation not very long ago. One where my cat had just died and he actually used that to his advantage, he exploited my vulnerability at that time to try to bring me around to joining one of his little tribes. When you're not on the NT spectrum it's interesting just how opaque and nauseating these manipulation tactics are. And that's the reason why I'm sure of my opinion about how minds are actually separated. One which other psychologists are waking up to. My opinion, for those not aware, is that introverts aren't separate from the autistic spectrum, they're merely on an even shallower end of it than Aspies. It seems like Aspies are the middle of the road between introverts and being fully autistic. In my opinion, there are numerous spectrums like this, and one such spectrum is the NT spectrum itself. On the most shallow end you have affiliative extraverts who're the least manipulative, then you have agentic extraverts who're the halfway point, on the extreme end you have sociopathy as part of the same spectrum. This explains the differences in empathy. For example, if an Aspie sees news of a person dying on television, they might not cover their mouth and make a song and dance about it as part of a social construct, but they will be the ones thinking about that a week down the line and wondering how society could be changed to stop these tragic events from occurring. The agentic extravert, for example, will cover their mouth, gasp, and look sad but if you ask them about it an hour later they won't have any recollection of what you're talking about. It's just gone. It's my position that the NT spectrum is simply just more manipulative and less empathetic than other spectrums, which is why they have this tribal focus to begin with. The tribal-oriented biases and focuses are what fuel their manipulation, it's all about hierarchy and wanting to be the 'top dog,' which is very common amongst autistic thinkers. I can pull the most obvious example, here, and cite the toxic philosophy of 'alphas and betas' often spread around by neurotypicals. You won't hear autistic people spread this philosophy as it's really unpopular with us. I spent some time researching this, too. I read around Wrong Planet and what I found was that autistic people were profoundly confused and vexed by it, none of them really knew what an 'alpha' male was. There was a lot of consternation and discussion as they tried to figure it out. It's just second nature to an NT though as everything in the NT world is hierarchies and tribes, it's just how minds on the neurotypical spectrum work. Anyway, I'm tired. I'm done with NTs. I'm still feeling sensitive about the loss of my cat and the last thing I need is to put up with underhanded, shady, manipulative tactics like manufactured idiocy. I miss my fucking cat, I'd rather be focusing on that than the bullshit the neurotypical spectrum tends to hoist on me. If you need more resources, though? Look up 'alpha bodybuilder' to cover the hierarchical stuff; 'Autistic people aren't failed versions of normal' to see an example of the NT perception that being different from them is the same as being innately inferior; And just about any video by TL;DR (Teal Deer) on YouTube for examples of manufactured idiocy. I really wish I wasn't so certain about all of this, but every time I try to find contradictory evidence (I try to fight my cognitive biases at every turn), I’ll find mountains more evidence that supports my views instead. I’ve really, really tried, here. The whole reason I bothered to hang around an NT even after they fucked with me when my cat died is to try and prove to myself that I'm wrong about the neurotypical spectrum, that it's not just a case of terrifyingly extreme sociopathy at one end to much more watered down sociopathy at the other. I actually had this post up not so long ago where I was furious at them for even trying to bully, manipulate, and fuck with me right after my cat died. I pulled that post. I pulled it because I felt bad for them, even though I didn't name them by name, so no one would even know who they are. I should've just left it up. That's an NT person for you, though. "Oh. You're feeling bad about the loss of your cat? I'm sorry (not actually sorry). Here, let me try to persuade you about an opinion of mine under the nasty pretence of consolation. Oh, you're not buying it? Here, let me just bully you and fuck with your mind while you're feeling vulnerable. Just let me convert you, I'll actually console you, then. And I’ll do this again at every opportunity in the future, too. It’s my nature." It's the tale of the scorpion and the frog, told time and time again. I'm sorry but I don't have the energy to explain it here for you, if you want to read it you can use that info to do a web search. Wikipedia has an article on it. Hm, an image might do. Those on the neurotypical spectrum are scorpions and this is their nature, they cannot change their nature, it's just how they're genetically coded to be. I'd say it's interesting that Disney hasn't made a film about this adage but I suppose it would strike too close to home for their mainstream audience. Wouldn't be too popular if the audience saw themselves in the scorpion, eh? So... fuck ‘em. Fuck neurotypicals. Fuck them and their horrible tactics. Fuck their unchangeably sociopathic nature.

#neurotypical #autism #politics #sjw #alt-right #so very tired #the time i spent worrying about this nt wanker instead of grieving for my cat is something i'll always regret and never forgive #nts just aren't worth my time any more #i'm not young any more so i have no patience for their manipulative shit #anyway... #yes i do think that procgen is exceedingly dull and won't improve until we can teach an ai the concepts of art and the creative fluke #no man's sky should've taught everyone that #sorry minecraft fans