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Below is a small selection of articles I've written and published with the New University, UC Irvine's award-winning campus newspaper.
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Don't Overthink it: Lessons in Laughs at the Coup de Comedy
Improv Revolution’s (iRev) Coup de Comedy Festival, their annual four-day fête for all things funny and improvised, delivered the usual itinerary of not-so off the cuff events: workshops, panels and performances all in shades of improvisational comedy. But this year, coinciding with the Coup, the inaugural Global Improvisation Initiative Symposium (GIIS) undercut the event’s playful hijinks with highbrow analysis. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the comedy stage: the pedagogy. An international coalition of scholars, psychologists, dramaturges, business people, actors and professors investigated the possibilities of improvisation beyond the comedy troupe on stage. Admittedly, the word symposium doesn’t inspire a laugh riot. To some, the sober lens of academia might even spoil the irreverent revelry presented by UCI’s student improv groups as they perform and conjure worlds off the top of their head.
But, beyond the staid optics of scholars dissecting “funny,” the GIIS does not in fact seek to dispel the magic of improv. Rather, they–like all good improvisers–lean in to the mystery behind those moments of connectivity, sympathy, and understanding between the players on stage and the audience members enjoying them. In essence, this highly pedigreed group of funny people show, or at least try to explain, how exactly the comedy sausage is made.
And this bookish approach to bring the academy to the comedy club, in addition to contextualizing the Coup’s overall relevance to the world beyond campus, celebrated the recipient honoree of the Revolutionary Comedy Awards, Keith Johnstone, a groundbreaking playwright, director, and actor known as one of the forefathers of modern improvisational comedy. His theories and methodologies known collectively as the Impro System reshaped how the theater understood itself and its role as a collaborative space for actors and audiences to connect through improvisational techniques. For Johnstone, the audience shapes the production as much as its actors do; and it is in this reciprocity where spontaneity, unfiltered and ego-stripped, sparks. Without these foundational ideas, the improv-battle format popularized by Whose Line is it Anyway?, which is fueled by audience participation, would not be. For the actors, Johnstone ironically champions the non-intellectual, the non-clever, the obvious. Johnstone, who laments formal education as punitive to imagination, writes in his seminal text, Impro, “The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.“
“It’s not about being clever, or being witty or funny,” said Patricia Ryan Madson, professor emeritus of drama at Stanford and improvisation scholar. “This is a myth. You’re performing risky actions in search of a miracle.”
To the uninitiated, the Coup’s traditional opening event of rapid fire short-form improvisation might perplex, may even upset, but most definitely will elicit laughs straight from the gut. UCI’s two homegrown improv groups, iRev and Live Nude People, fused into a super-sized troupe called Live Nude Revolution and made quick work of hyping the modest crowd at Winifred Smith Hall last Wednesday to launch the Coup. Absurdity: this is the cornerstone of Johnstone’s aesthetic approach. And, consequently, the cornerstone of Live Nude Revolution’s performance that night. Narratives don’t necessarily take precedent over the process of improv; that is to say, improv games have no end-point. “Improv is not about comedy. Improv is a Dao. It’s a methodology. It’s an approach to life,” said Madson. “The improviser is a person who, by definition, has agreed to let in whatever life offers,” she said. The key is to embrace the process of world-building, of conjuring something on a barebone stage, with the classic improvisational attitude of responding to every scene with “Yes, and…” ad infinitum.
And mistakes do happen. Johnstone lambasts the classical education system for teaching kids to fear mistakes, and ultimately fear themselves. Palpably cringe-worthy moments abounded during Live Nude Revolution’s performance; at some points, the stories, characters and premises reached a level of abstraction untamed by audience suggestions. But, impressively, the players laughed off any perceived weirdness with charisma that read almost cocky, but was resolutely rooted in another of improv’s core tenets: that mistakes are not closed roads. They’re moments of infinite choice and empowerment. Madson said, “It’s what comes the next moment where we have any power or control, and certainly where something wonderful can happen.”
“Coriolanus” Traces the Drama of Democracy in the Wake of War
Vengeance. Politics. War. Love. These elements have fascinated storytellers since the dawn of history. And arguably none other than the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, has articulated these themes in the most enduring, culturally persistent manner, and his work somehow finds relevance every theater season.
Last Saturday, Claire Trevor Drama staged the premiere of “Coriolanus,” one of Shakespeare’s later, more overtly political tragedies. It’s not too far an imaginative leap to draw parallels between this centuries-old political tragedy depicting the fickleness of the masses in a deeply divided, class-stratified republic and the real-world drama that has played out in the past few months on the national stage. At the center of the plot is a divisive, volatile election.
“Certainly the election came up when I was assigned this play in March,” director Paul Cook said. “The similarities occurred to me right away. But if we made the production so topical, it wouldn’t make sense if the election went one way rather than the other.” To deal with the obvious parallels, Cook sidestepped setting the play in obviously contemporary times; instead, he went dystopian.
Beau Hamilton costumed actors in ahistorical, apolitical fantasy gear — the lower classes wrapped in denim rags and the patricians resembling ostentatious extras in “The Hunger Games” films’ Capitol — complementing the understated futurism of Tyler Scrivener’s scenic design.
“Since Shakespeare is so, well, old, we had a lot more room to experiment and do something totally new,” said Cook.
The play unfolds on a small space, without a raised stage, and the audience totally immersed in the action. “I wanted to dispel the assumption that Shakespeare is removed, academic, dusty,” said Cook. “So, staging the play so intimately forces the audience to really engage with the actors and the story.”
On the blank slate of nondescript dystopia, he began to sharpen the point of this timely production. “I just thought about what the basic nuggets of truth were buried in the material. What are the important parts and what can I cut out?” This dark fantasia, removed from the logics of recognizable reality, also allowed Cook to cast women in roles traditionally performed by men, such as the protagonist’s wartime rival Aufidia (Aufidius, in the original text).
The students of the 2017 MFA program handily played the Bard’s cast of tragic characters. Amandla Bearden ripples with vigor as Marcius, the protagonist war hero turned reluctant politician whose fate seems pliant to the wills of the political machine, the capricious temper of the “rank-scented,” unwashed masses he loathes to serve and the single-minded aspirations of his mother, Volumnia, patroness of Rome. One of Shakespeare’s more complex female leads, Volumnia is brought to matriarchal life by Madison McKenzie Scott, whose imperial presence consumes every scene she occupies and stands up to Hamilton’s hyper-regal costuming. Her hypnotic delivery of Shakespeare’s verse makes clear Marcius’ struggle — to stay true to himself, or to fold to his mother’s familiar manipulation.
Ultimately, Marcius folds and runs for office, into the scheming arena of Roman politics. As Menenius, senator and supporter of Marcius’ bid for office, Thomas Varga’s slick charisma and sportive charm makes him well-suited for the part of the smooth-talking patrician. Nick Manfredi and Nicole Cowans played well off each other as the scheming, ambitious tribunes, Brutus and Sicinia, representatives of the citizenry to the consulate. Cowans’ Sicinia, another of Cook’s gender-bent characters, and Manfredi’s Brutus deftly captured the sneaky, refined finesse of these tribunes who seek to exploit the tense body politic for personal power by launching a smear campaign against the unassuming newly elected consul, Marcius.
Ousted from office and exiled from Rome, the deposed Marcius seeks solace with his long-standing rival, Aufidia, who seeks to invade Rome. Aufidia (Alex Raby) shines most opposite her nemesis Marcius, in scenes where Raby expresses her persuasive range— seething anger, to poised arrogance, to regretful sorrow. Her disappointment at Marcius once again caving to his mother’s pleas for him to return his allegiance to Rome points to the tale’s eventual tragic end.
What’s to be learned, then, from this story of ambition and the trappings of democracy? Cook, unconcerned with the events outside the small space, summed up the spine holding up the production: “When you try to force people in boxes, shit gets fucked up.”
conTROLLing the Narrative: Internet Trolls and the Digital Fourth Estate
Recently, the buzzword problem of ‘fake news’ and President Donald Trump’s attacks on the fourth estate have called into confusion the role of journalism during a Trump presidency in ‘post-truth’ America. Two weeks ago, then-President-Elect Trump engaged in a shouting match with CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, who pressed the petty tyrant about a leaked dossier tracing Trump’s financial connections to Russia spanning the past five years. In response, Trump dodged the question and dismissed Acosta and CNN as ‘fake news.’
Ironic, coming from the man who spearheaded the birther movement, who insists that (non-existent) millions of fraudulent voters cost him the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, who thinks global warming is a Chinese conspiracy.
Let’s be clear: fake news has a real meaning — misleading news narratives deliberately constructed with outright lies. But lately, it’s been warped to mean any number of different things: any news left-of-center, or too far-right of center. Really any news that a reader doesn’t want to acknowledge as factual.
The rise of fake news online is not self-contained, but rather a symptom of a larger trend of shape-shifting media consumption. In the past few years, the digital media ecosystem has upended once rigid lines between mediums, genres and styles. Myriad media distribution platforms, evolving technologies (like livestreaming and virtual reality) and the web’s unique remix-mashup sense of humor has untethered institutions from their stations. We track news on our watches, catch the ball game on our Twitter feed. In the past, news anchors brokered breaking nightly news from behind a lectern. Now, Pew Research indicates 62% of American adults use social media for news — real or fake.
Social media ‘news’ sites like Reddit and Facebook have totally redefined what it means to reach an audience. An audience was once a finite resource, something earned with time and money by new corporations invested in building brand reputation with ethical journalism and the infrastructure to disseminate it. Now, democratized platforms have effected a paradigm shift in news consumption: capture an audience with advertising and business models built entirely on monetizing our attention. We used to pay for quality news; nowadays, we expect an endless supply of free content. We assume that algorithms that reward sensationalism, novelty and agenda-ridden stories, regardless of veracity, have our best interests in mind. We read widely, but thinly, uncritically trusting, providing corporations massive ad revenue through high engagement and trolls fertile ground to hack our attention.
Phenomena like fake news could not arise without these conditions: a media ecosystem in flux, a web economy dictated by captivating attention, and the keen ability of hacker-minded cultural disruptors — trolls — to manufacture narratives that thrive in what has been called the ‘attention economy.’
The sensationalist, attention-seeking ethos of digital news distribution encourages a unique sort of manipulation — trolling. It began in 2003, when a teenager named Chris Poole created a website to expedite sharing porn and anime with his friends. 4chan was born. As the site grew more popular, Poole encountered a problem: he simply couldn’t manage the site’s growing content. So he deleted the archives, to the frustration of these early 4channers. They began reposting the images, tweaking them and adding text each time for entertainment. From this grew meme culture, establishing the formal top-text and bottom-text superimposed on random images that any longtime internet user would recognize. In the following few years, social media sites’ user bases soared, co-opted the 4chan-born memes, and an internet pop-culture evolved (see: Lolcatz, Newgrounds, Reddit).
Traditional media entities recognized growing competition — Youtubers and bloggers challenged established entertainment and news corporations, and it grew apparent that anyone with enough internet clout or savvy could influence media narratives. 4channers launched informal, leaderless campaigns to troll entrenched cultural institutions. Some did it for fun, others for notoriety, and a fraction pushed ideological agendas. One prominent, if not flippant example involved a band of /b/tards (browsers of 4chan’s miscellaneous forum called /b/) manipulating TIME’s 100 most “influential people” list to make it so that the first letter of each honoree spelled out “Marblecake and also the game,” an inside joke to the community. Another example is the now-classic meme, the rickroll.
But it’s not all lulz and games. 4chan birthed the politically-minded, vigilante hacker group Anonymous, whose members have popularized “doxing” — researching and publicly broadcasting personal, sensitive, identifiable information of an individual or institution — as a means of punishment. Anonymous has also run propaganda campaigns of outright hate and harassment against women, as evidenced in the Gamergate controversy, a dialogue that traditional news corporations engaged with seriously, as if there was room for debate. Another campaign sought to expose Scientology as a farcical, scammy religion. Another ties Anonymous to Wikileaks’ emergence in 2011, and thus the ensuing Arab Spring. And most recently Anonymous and their generic successors on Twitter, Breitbart and Reddit, have banded around the neo-nazi ‘alt-right’ movement, which has breached mainstream news sites with their meme-inspired campaigns to smear Hillary Clinton and elect President Trump.
The boundaries between education, entertainment, propaganda, news and activism have been distorted by a growing, decentralized network of new media-savvy provocateurs. Frankly, we’re all being trolled.
Shocktoberfest: ASUCI's Static, Stilted Standby
Last Friday night, over 5,000 people crammed into the Bren Events Center to revel in ASUCI’s biggest fall quarter production, Shocktoberfest. Thanks to the high-profile headliners, as usual, this year’s tickets sold out fast. Those lucky enough to get in inaugurated the upcoming basketball season before diving into the star-studded concert.
To kick the night off, UCI Athletics rolled out the Spirit Squad in full force: the dolled-up dance and cheer teams sporting sprightly spirit, the Anteater Band blaring brass and booming percussion and, of course, Peter the Anteater strutting around the court and working the crowd.
But despite resident broadcast announcer Robert Espero’s mic-savvy calls to action and free T-shirt-chucking, the crowd of ‘Eaters that night was less than impressed with UCI Athletics’ Midnight Madness. Even the cheer team’s stunningly aerodynamic routines seemed ill-matched to the event, which floundered somewhere between a pep rally, a cheer exhibition and an inauguration.
Most stayed seated, rising only to admire themselves twerking with Peter on the Bren’s suspended jumbo screen — should the camera land on them — to the band’s pepped-up remixes of dated top 40 hits and an incongruous club/dance mix of more recent chart-toppers. The music meant to ignite the crowd instead petered out under the too-bright stadium lights and anticipation for the headlining acts.
The familiarly heroic entrances of the men’s and women’s basketball teams elicited a more obvious crowd response; friendly shooting and dunking contests gave the crowd reasons to cheer. It was when the teams finished their charming dance number with UCI Athletics’ in-house hip-hop dance group MCIA that the lights were dimmed enough for the real party to start. Or, at least, ASUCI’s approximation of a party.
If the aim of Shocktoberfest is to inspire student unity through a huge dance party, then the Bren’s narrow auditorium seats and the concert’s VIP section deflated the high-minded dream. Of the over 5,000 attendees, only an enterprising and well-connected 200 or so, donning desirable holo-green wristbands, were permitted to mingle in true, united fashion in the walled and guarded mosh pit. A luxury mosh pit — only at UCI.
Vancouver-based producer Ekali took the strobe-lit stage first, and it didn’t take long for him to show why he’s one of the most sought-after producers of this year. His set was a masterclass in contemporary EDM — omni-referential samples cut up, reworked and laid over a heady drum n’ bass beat. Bren’s stadium-type seating made no sense to his set’s buildups and bass drops which evoked the feelings of a raucous, neon Coachella night concert. Compounding the awkwardly-compartmentalized crowd were at least a dozen cops in fully-armed regalia and event ushers stalking the thruways, obnoxiously glaring flashlights on partiers, demanding people not have too much fun lest they block the stairways. The fire marshall would have been proud of these literal fun police. After all, fire safety rightfully (lamely) trumps revelry.
But Ekali’s set managed to transcend the strictures of stratifying ticket prices and panoptic policemen, making nosebleed-seated ‘Eaters dance with almost as much enthusiasm as those crammed up at the stagefront. And the crowd, wherever they sat, cheered with fangirlish gusto once Vic Mensa, rising rap phenom from Chicago’s Southside, took to the stage.
Where Ekali chops vocal samples into stuttering dance numbers, Vic Mensa demands to be heard clearly. He is, at turns, a disaffected, cross-faded rockstar — sex and drugs and careless ennui — and a politically-charged entity outspoken about police brutality, especially of the sort that victimizes unarmed black men and women across the nation’s metropoles.
As he performed his song “16 Shots” (the title an oblique reference to fellow Chicagoan Laquan McDonald, who in 2014 was killed by a police officer; a total of 16 bullets fired) Vic Mensa laid on the stage as if it were a crime scene, in an act of protest to the sound of siren wails and police radio chatter. A bit awkward, considering the team of policemen prowling the perimeter of the Bren. The crowd, in sync with him, raised their smart phone flashlights in the air like lighters, or stars in mourning.
But just as soon as the atmosphere turned somber, the performer switched gears to sing “Stoner,” a new song about his cavalier tendency to smoke too much weed.
Content to leave the heavy lyrics to Vic Mensa, Atlanta-based duo Rae Sremmurd injected some much-needed, party-centric fun to the show as the finale, elevating Vic Mensa’s introspective party boy to a fantastical level. Providing much-needed levity, Rae Sremmurd coaxed the crowd to their feet with their charismatic single “Start A Party,” and deftly segued into another platinum-certified chart topper, “No Flex Zone.”
Enrobed in tattoos and muscle, the Southern brothers energetically and easily earned the crowd’s admiration, at one point tossing water bottles into the writhing mosh pit to hydrate their fans for the next hour of trap-inspired pop music. Swae Lee, one of the duo, went face to face with the front stage crowd, much to the delight of his fans and to the dismay of the leery security guards.
What can be said about Shocktoberfest than hasn’t been said before? This year’s lineup was accessible, edgy contemporary hip-hop, with nods to Shocktoberfest’s EDM past. But what is a set without a setting? And the setting, convenient as it is, leaves much to be desired.
ESPN Takes on the Drone-Racing Major Leagues
In the past two years, drones have experienced a tipping point, emerging from their place as a hobbyist niche to mainstream toy, ripe with economic potential. Chances are you’ve seen them buzzing about low airspace, recording stellar panoramas, or perhaps shuttling a parcel from a warehouse to your porch. Now, the early 21st century’s darling invention is redefining televised spectator sports as we know it. Enter: the Drone Racing League (DRL).
Last week, New York-based DRL announced a partnership with ESPN to broadcast 10 episodes that chronicle a tournament of 25 elite drone racers, vying for the title of world champion slated to air this October. This deal represents the most recent cresting wave in the wake of a veritable cultural phenomenon: the normalization of drone tech for civilian use. Just last month, the White House hosted its first-ever drone workshop, a summit that brought together drone industry leaders and government agencies in a gesture that signals the government’s recognition of an industry at the cusp of its maturity and preparation of clear regulatory pathways to facilitate widespread use. Earlier this March, Dubai hosted the first-ever World Drone Prix, which boasted a cash pot totaling $1 million. Meanwhile, drones have become increasingly affordable, and the industry fertile with competition. In this context, breaching the syndicated entertainment industry seems the logical next step, as evidenced by ESPN’s $12 million bet on DRL.
In an interview with the Guardian, DRL’s founder and chief executive Nicholas Horbaczewski claims that the watershed ESPN deal and similar deals with European broadcasters Sky and ProSieben preface his ultimate goal of bringing drone racing to millions of screens across the world.
The first official trailer depicts high torque shots of drones racing through an LED-lit, pop-up warehouse track, like cyborg hummingbirds in some Philip K. Dick fantasy. Requisite dubstep included.
Racers don virtual reality goggles, giving them a first-person view of the race as they navigate their custom-built machines that accelerate to about 60-80 mph through three dimensional obstacle courses in a promising instance of seamless digital-physical game design. Competitors are shown tinkering and soldering microchips to gutted quadcopters on work tables reminiscent of a mythological tech prodigy’s Palo Alto garage. It’s scruffy and unpolished and, to a degree, badass.
The heavy emphasis on DIY robotics evokes the tech heroism of “Robot Wars” (which coincidentally has been revamped this year), while peculiarly mixing the sedentary strategizing of eSports bred with the speed demon pace of F1.
What’s evocative about this brand of drone racing is not its spiritual predecessors, but rather how its fans engage with the sport. Drone races simply don’t merit, nor accommodate, stadiums of roaring spectators. While the pilots experience the cyber reality of white-knuckle drone flight in their seats, real life spectators are left squinting at four or five zipping blurs. Collective fanaticism happens on social media communities like Reddit or YouTube in the form of highly-edited clips of races past, consumed by individuals through individual screens, unbound by the limits of space and time.
Yet with all the egalitarian ethos of the Internet unifying its fanbase and the advent of retail drones, DRL-style drone racing remains an extremely exclusive club. The overhead fees include working knowledge of circuitry and radio tech, sourcing hard-to-find parts to construct your machine and handling brick-sized batteries that allow your drone a whopping 10 minutes of flight (and are prone to spontaneous combustion). Despite these seemingly unnegotiable prerequisites, venture capitalists remain undeterred and continue to pour millions into augmented and virtual reality.
As DRL partners with ESPN, drone racing might follow the path of Major League Gaming. No doubt eSports’ meteoric commercial success, which garnered about $500 million in revenue this year according to Newzoo’s 2016 Global eSports Market Report, has fueled this move to appeal to the millennial market. With executive producer powerhouse Mark Burnett (the mind behind “Survivor,” “The Voice” and “Celebrity Apprentice” to name a few) heading the show, this 10-episode series will likely wax dramatic, ushering in the digitalization of sports with narrative-driven presentation, to capture the hearts of the elusive, relatively affluent, growing target demographic: the millennial nerd.
Should Anteaters expect an annexed drone stadium to our shiny new Major League Gaming arena? I, and a slew of venture capitalists heartily say “yes.”
Post-Human Pop Stars
Picture this, if you will. You’re sitting in the front row of a packed auditorium abuzz in the dark. Cued by the stage lights, Whitney Houston walks to her mark on stage near Christina Aguilera. She faces you and, eyes aglow, begins the first verse of “I Have Nothing,” as if she hasn’t been dead for four years.
Studio audience members at the season finale of “The Voice,” which aired last Monday, witnessed this uncanny performance that featured Christina Aguilera singing with a holographic Whitney Houston. However, editors of “The Voice” scrapped the footage because Pat Houston, the late diva’s sister-in-law and executor of her estate, decided the hologram was not fit to broadcast.
But Hologram USA, the tech company behind the discarded spectacle, won’t back down from the Whitney project so readily. Hologram USA is one of a few companies refining the art of digital resurrection and plans to launch a nationwide tour this year featuring Whitney’s hologram as the centerpiece. Whitney is just one of the latest in the company’s digital arsenal of patented entertainer data-ghosts. Billie Holiday, Buddy Holly, Liberace, Judy Garland and potentially Prince compose just some of the roster of hologram icons the company owns the rights to.
Acrovirt, a holo-tech company with similar aims, articulates the technology in existential terms on their Indiegogo page; partnered closely with the Quintanilla family and estate, Acrovirt plans to capture and convert Tejano music martyr Selena Quintanilla’s biological and psychological particulars into what they call her “digital essence,” an autonomous digital entity that acts and learns like its “human donor,” to tour nationally and bring their tech to the market.
Holograms of dead artists first punctured the public consciousness back in 2012, where Hologram USA rendered Tupac on stage with Snoop at Coachella, and rocketed back to headlines two years later at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards when a competing company called Pulse Evolution summoned the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, to dance. Controversy arose when Hologram USA sued Pulse for $10 million for allegedly infringing on patented technologies used to make Michael happen.
Promising to maintain Whitney’s “absolute authenticity,” Greek billionaire and Hologram USA’s CEO Alki David told Billboard that Whitney’s tour wouldn’t simply be a concert, but a celebratory narrative of her tragic life in theatrical detail, her history of drug addiction distilled to Vegas headliner.
And therein lies the rub. Although sold as elegy, the tour aims to capitalize on Whitney’s legacy by manipulating her total likeness, setting a precedent where a star’s handlers can continue to profit by exploiting memory. When you can literally program your star, a return on investments is almost guaranteed. The Michael Jackson lawsuit and Acrovirt’s insistence on infiltrating the marketplace proved that the logics of profit, marketability and patenting will rule the future of American holographic entertainment.
Of course, these endeavors happening stateside aren’t the first of their kind, at least in terms of technology and popular reception. How could anyone forget when Japanese phenomenon Hatsune Miku — arguably the first posthuman pop star — hit the States in 2011?
When Miku hit our shores, American media obsessed over her cipher body and regarded her as the holographic harbinger of the death of the pop star. What makes Miku a new media marvel is not that she’s a hologram singing the song of the end-of-times; rather, she represents the next logical step in the union of digital and pop cultures.
Social media has democratized music production and distribution, putting artists at the mercy of their droves of online fans. Miku’s iconoclastic non-existence is simply part of the collaborative, participatory momentum of Web 2.0, and takes its fan-centric ethos further. What’s revolutionary about Miku is that all of her songs are written by fans. Unlimited by traditional strictures, fans are collaborators with the opportunity to produce the media they consume.
With a name ripped straight from a techno-utopian novel, Japanese software company Crypton Future Media released the Hatsune Miku program in 2007, the third in a suite of Vocaloids — kawaii avatars that sing through voice-synthesizing software. She was received with overwhelming positivity and an outpouring of creativity. Crypton licensed Miku under Creative Commons, empowering artists to fantasize using her likeness. Vocaloid software is installed on hundreds of thousands of PCs globally and guarantees that the fans keep the rights to any songs they produce. Crypton also launched a social media site dedicated for Vocaloid media production where fans collaboratively write songs in probably the most dynamic open-source pop music experiment to date.
While data-compiling tech companies like Hologram USA bank on cults of nostalgia and grief for fallen celebrities, Crypton and Miku enthusiasts everywhere are nurturing a more lateral, open-source media ecosystem and dismantling the preferred top-down mode of artistic production that idolizes winner-take-all, patent-privileging fame.
On Ripped Jeans and the Human Condition
Dotting the throngs of ‘Eaters during that ten minute traffic rush between classes, fashion victims of all stripes strut in ignorant bliss up and down Ring Road. An uncanny vibe settles in as fall quarter did. I’d figured it was the time-warpy daylight savings change, until walking on the catwalk one afternoon, a moment of lucidity hit me like a hayfever sneeze: it was the pants. Dozens of brutalized pants riddled with scars and scrapes and— like the plot twist of a bad Twilight Zone episode — I realized as I glanced at my own mangled-denim legs, obnoxious knee holes.
Framed by frayed holes in distressingly distressed jeans, the kneecap has reared its vaguely-old-man-baby head in the ‘Eater sartorial consciousness as the “it” thing to rock this season. It’s patella couture; kneebones are the new cheekbones, at least for a couple months.
The sheer logical insanity of ripped jeans inspires media-wide rants every few seasons or so. I don’t know if owning these pants myself might invalidate me from commenting. What I do know is that they’re indigo, match anything and fit perfectly. But they look like they’d been previously worn by a human cat scratching post. At the mall-store register, hypnotized by high-sample high-tempo techno bass, I knew the pants were a great idea, like one knows that marathoning the entirety of Battlestar Galactica over 5 days is a great idea. But by the last episode, much like my pants, I am left torn, worse-for-wear, and unbeholden to mortal logic.
Some context: In 1991, MTV mass-marketing amplified the angsty post-punk melodies of a little band called Nirvana from Seattle’s nascent alt-rock/grunge scene to the roaring mainstream. The media riptide swept from obscurity Seattle’s boho-hobo culture — its fashion, specifically, which might be best described as burnout folk-chic: flannel from Goodwill’s fresh-from-the-morgue collection, combat boots and shredded denim.
As I realized our place in the cultural schema, I felt a weird sort of kinship with my fellow victims of yuppiecore consumerism. The why’s and the means of producing these clothes totally elude us. The first generation of ripped jeans were folky, thrifted punk-passion-projects, but now as UCI’s jeans-of-choice we prefer them mass-manufactured in some Guatemalan or Bengali fabric-plant where the words “union” and “working conditions” are NSFW.
Robots sandblast precise ratios of fabric, then laser them into precise chic submission, just how the punk-progenitors did it in Seattle, I guess. Garment factories and the global assembly line run on the industrial indentured servitude of young girls — smells like teen spirit.
But the clothes’ acknowledgement, ‘Made in Bangladesh,’ instead inspires daydream visions of lo-fi, low-rent, low-commitment Nirvana. Zero cultural effort, zero consumer guilt.
Every weekday, the Ring Road runway shows how far off base we’ve gone. I see these pants paired with any and all clothes: baggy UCI pullovers, tees, button-ups, spaghetti straps; like they’re fashion-MSG. The early 90’s legacy of Seattle’s street-bred alternative culture, I don’t think we ever had a real shot at expressing without the auspices of MTV. We collectively look like guests’ plus-ones fresh out of an Urban Outfitters after-after-after-launch party.
Some more looks I think we’re actually pulling off: Sleater-Kinney tribute band air-guitarist. Sick RenFair costume of a hanged drawn and quartered torture victim. Larval-stage yuppies eagerly appropriating and cashing in on subcultures that have nothing to do with us, in the name of a fashionable superiority complex…?
So, how can we understand distressed jeans without feeling like scummy posers? Through something characteristically UCI. Let’s have a seminar. I wonder if anyone can apply a GE category V class, logic or computational reasoning — to justify purchasing a new pair of perfectly-purposely not-new jeans, once the old ones pass some point of no return: too ripped to be cool, not ripped enough to be shorts. After intensively commodifying the female form, these jeans are probably the ultimate manifestation of the nonsensical, arbitrary, impeccably manicured hand of the fashion industry.
If not through strict number-crunching, then to the Humanities. Perhaps ripped pants are a meditation on the essence of man’s multiplicity: like the pants, we’re fundamentally contradictory creations — whole and lacking, chaste and kinky, new and worn. Human ingenuity makes sense of hypocricies. Ingenious embedded networks of fashion, money and culture weave the fantasy of the status quo: culture transforms shredded pants into fashion markets these pants into money establishes them into culture. So sleep easy. Those chewed-up, marked-up, knee pants are of no cause for alarm. They’re dope, remember?
More than One: Sex educator and polyamorous lifer Wry sheds light on his path to many loves
(this interview was conducted as part of a larger, collaborative project surveying LA's sex positive revolution. check out the website by clicking here)
photo: Lauren Mechling
A West Hollywood institution for all goods playful and sexy, The Pleasure Chest does more than purvey the finest crafts of the medical-grade silicone industry. The Pleasure Chest regularly hosts sexual education events, inviting guest speakers to preach and clarify topics ranging from the common sense of cunnilingus, to anal sex 101, and to managing polyamorous relationships. With a backdrop of latex onesies and vials of high-grade lube, a sex educator of 10 years who simply goes by Wry hosts a panel of distinguished girlfriends—also stylishly stage-named Wicked, Nova, and Scorcch—to speak on the ins and outs of their polyamorous set up.
After the panel, Wry was generous enough to weigh in one-on-one about the polyamorous life through his eyes. Turns out, three's company, and two's a pain.
Could you define polyamory as you’ve come to understand it? What does it look like?
I see it as kind of a catch-all term to describe the multitude of communication styles that occur in a relationship. At the same time, it’s a sexual orientation, it’s a relationship style on a praxis level. It’s a culture. It’s a communication style that can be coopted and adapted into non-poly style. It’s simultaneously all of these things. The only prerequisite is that you have multiple loves. Beyond that, it’s all up to you and your partners.
We’re a hidden sexual minority. You can’t see it. There is no clothing or flag that we’re flying. But, this generation did not invent the threesome! When you look around your city, we look just like anybody else. The reality is that there are millions of people doing this, they’re just not visible like the LGBT community is, despite the overlap between those two sub-cultures. What’s really helped me and so many other people find solidarity is the internet. It hooks you up to the poly community, which is usually so insular that it’d be impossible to connect without online social networking.
So, you see polyamory as a sexual orientation? Like, being gay or bi?
I think the biggest requirement: the feeling that it’s something deep and impulsive. I think I’d be really awful at a gay relationship, for example. I just can’t be with a guy sexually. I think to some extent, we’re born on a spectrum of intrinsic relationship style. Everything else beyond that is some kind of cultural inhibition that shames you into being monogamous.
I fall into the extreme side of polyamory. I yearn to bond with multiple people. I’m a chaser. It’s gone from me 10 years ago, looking for a woman, any woman, that I was gonna marry! I was like, “I don’t care who you are, but you’ll be my wife!” To using trial and error. But, as I develop my relationship with Wicked, I choose to do less error.
How did you come to realize that you had to romantically love multiple people at the same time? What kind of problems did you have in the beginning of your experimentation with polyamory?
A big turning point for me was when I realized that I didn’t want to have children.
That made me rethink everything. When I made that decision, I was deeply involved in a long term relationship and suddenly, this girl’s “maybe”—y’know, in regards to having kids—was definitely, and definitely MY children. It was clear to me that I didn’t want to be a part of that. But, I was in a deep emotional relationship with her. In the end we just weren’t compatible.
Out of love, I dumped her.
After that, I had to really think about what kind of future wanted to look like. That white picket fence burned down. I made a promise to myself was that I’d experiment, date around and see what was out there. So, for two years, I put myself out there, having sex with any girl I could. What I found out was that I was incapable of staying no-strings, or casual. I found a girl who I really connected with, but I also realized that I didn’t want to stop connecting with other women. We talked about it, and she felt the same way. That was my first open relationship. We did a don’t ask don’t tell situation—each new partner was mentioned to the other, but that was the extent of what we had to tell eachother. Upfront on a first date, I’d tell them that I wasn’t looking to be exclusive, that I had other lovers, and that she’d have to be cool with that. So far a while, don’t ask, don’t tell was the communication they wanted.
But things got to a point when it was painful to use that situation. It got to the point where, when it was my birthday, and I’d have to uninvite people to my birthday to avoid any of my lovers meeting. My birthday’s really inspire me. It was painful to have to split my life up into small and separate realities. But, after opening up, I decided that everyone’s invited! And if you opt out, if you don’t wanna go, that’s on you.
It seems like polyamory is having to constantly be dynamic and that the state of the relationship would be under constant surveillance. How do you deal with that? Did feeling burnt out ever tempt you back into monogamy?
No way. For me, monogamy was painful, difficult, and unnatural. I’d get into a relationship full force, and I’d go through a couple months of having a total blast with this girl. Then four or six months down the line I’d invariably feel trapped, not due to anything the girl did. She could be the best damn dream girlfriend in America, but I’d still feel like I needed to connect with other women without the guilt of betrayal that monogamy programs into you.
Like I said, I’m extremely polyamorous. If Kinsey made a poly scale, I’d be a 7 out of 6. But, like the Kinsey model, there are people in the middle. These things are seen as so hard, fast, polar opposites. It’s like, open or closed. It’s not that false dichotomy. There’s middlegrounds to this.
About managing relationships, it’s all about having a game plan. For me and Wicked, we’ve established a system that’s casual and doesn’t demand much emotionally. What happens is that, the next time we see each other—after a few days, a few weeks—we have this sort of communication ritual that we do. I come over, we have a drink, and we tell each other, “Oh, I met up with and had sex with so-and-so.” We just talk and update each other about things we need to know.
My previous relationships didn’t have that structure of communication. It’s an easy way to broach the subject, to break the ice.
But that’s really, us. I bet that every one involved in a non-monogamous set up has their own different parameters, their own rules. Some couples have a threshold of acceptable behavior. Like, making out with another person doesn’t have to be talked about, but anything beyond that needs to be brought up. Sometimes, blowjobs are negotiated as unnecessary sharing. The thing about poly is that it’s inherently customizable. You just need to be able to communicate what you desire from a relationship.
How do you deal with the jealousy that might blossom when you know your partner is having great sex with people who aren’t you?
It’s really a mantra of call and response. There’s jealousy, then communication, jealousy, communication. Sometimes your jealousies reveal your incompatibilities. And sometimes it’s hard to face those. It’s important to accept the reality of your wants, and the reality of the relationship. You have to be compatible with your partner, and if you’re not you have to explore the possibility that you’re not. And that’s usually where jealousies start to arise—when you’re incompatible.
Flog the Pain Away: Therapist Kate Loree explores the healing potential of BDSM
photo: Hollywood Music Magazine
(this interview was conducted as part of a larger, collaborative project surveying LA's sex positive revolution. check out the website by clicking here)
One of the tenets of sex positivity is the absolute inclusion of all forms of sexual expression, ideologically eliminating any preconception of “normal”. But, in your practice, do your clients in alternative relationships form a sort of bell curve where one or two dynamics are fairly common or prevalent? (perhaps even normal?)
My practice is pretty much 97% sex workers, kinky, poly, porn stars. Every now and then, I’ll have a transgender client. The folks that come to me, in terms of polyamory—that identify as non monogamous or poly—are your traditional married couple with a hierarchy, their spouse being primary and their boyfriends and girlfriends following that.
I’ve been working with people who’d gone through sexual abuse for about a decade. I work with a team in a hospital facilitating group therapy, where a lot of clients have trauma and sexual molestation history.
I guess my purpose in life is to reduce sexual shame.
Notably the APA revised the pathologization kinks and fetishes in the DSM V, deeming proclivities that do not elicit distress or angst are perfectly healthy. What role does psychiatry and psychotherapy have in medicalizing or mediating the public’s erotic lives?
The field of psychology has played a big part in shaming this practice. It wasn't too long ago when the DSM, the bible of psychiatry, said that you were mentally ill for your private preferences. But the field is slowly coming to realize that many healthy individuals and couples engage in BDSM safely. Irrational doubt seems to be instilled in people by society. Some people outside of the BDSM community assume that if a male is a Dominant,he must be abusive. And, if a female is a submissive, she must be a victim or weak, as setting the women’s movement back 40 years.
The reality is often the polar opposite of that stereotype. For instance, many subs, both male and female, have high power jobs and cherish being able to escape their stressful responsibilities while under the control of a Dom. With this thought in mind, perhaps you’ll look at our politicians and CEOs a bit differently now.
The BDSM community does not condone non-consensual activities. Instead, BDSM is an erotic expression that may or may not include sex and involves the consensual use of bondage, intense sensory stimulation, and fantasy power role-play. Discipline is played out within the context of dominance and submission, and those roles they map out.
Do your patients who survived traumatic experiences find some solace in spaces that a BDSM scene sets up? It’s intensely vulnerable, highly sensory, and seems like it must require thorough negotiation and rules, especially when playing with a trauma survivor. How can someone go about exploring BDSM without hurting someone else?
BDSM is an intense practice, precisely because it is one of intense connection. To quote Lee, the main character in the BDSM themed movie, Secretary, “I feel more than I’ve ever felt and I’ve found someone to feel with. To play with. To love in a way that feels right for me.”
As a psychotherapist, I can only back BDSM community members who set the safety bar very high, especially as their activities become more extreme. No one should ever require medical care (beyond a small Band-aid) and the ideal is psychological healing rather than damage. In terms of its impact trauma, at its best, BDSM could provide a beautiful and powerful healing experience. At its worst, a BDSM experience could be completely re-traumatizing. For some people with trauma histories, BDSM should be entirely avoided and is too risky. If triggered, a person with a trauma history could go into a panic attack or a negative dissociative state. If the sub goes into a negative dissociative experience, the dom could interpret that state as perfectly normal sub behavior. For others, simply negotiating a scene in advance and weeding out potential triggers might be enough.
So let’s talk about the potential for healing. Trauma is stored inside of us as a body memory. Some schools of psychotherapy like Somatic Experiencing and the Trauma Resiliency Model work to reprocess and release that bundled trauma. Similarly, BDSM play can produce a healing emotional release and provide a corrective experience. Some subs have described amazing corrective experiences that help them rewrite their original trauma. Their play might be loosely reminiscent of the trauma, but the scene creates a new and positive outcome. This new outcome begins to rewrite the original damaging body memory.
There are some standards that I uphold as prerequisites to safe, sane, responsible BDSM practice. One important foundational skill is high emotional intelligence, intuition, and ability to be honest. Another is the practical knowledge of equipment and gear that they’ll be using, and their effects on the body. Knowledge of the body’s physiology and its limitations is absolutely necessary, as is knowing the limitations that state law might have on a scene.
Most importantly is that a solid relationship must be established between the participants. Trust and love can open avenues to healing our minds, bodies, and spirits.
May Day, Los Angeles
A photo essay about the 2015 May Day demonstrations across Los Angeles.