ISSUE 3 #24MAG

#24MAG

ISSUE3 SEPTEMBER 2012

FAILURE

03 04 06 08 10 12 17 18 22 24 27 28

Letter from the Editor Sara Eileen Hames How Do You Define Success?

Interviews with twenty-four Contributors Sara Eileen Hames The Great Eastern Casey Middaugh A for Achievement, B for Effort Steven Padnick Life Cycle of a Neighborhood Rose Fox & Johanna Bobrow Dropout Ben Cordes Good Enough Ian Danskin Photo Essay Johanna Bobrow Why Isn’t This Easy?

Ian Danskin Review: Dark the Years Between Kevin Clark Incentive to Fail Steven Padnick Haiku Staff

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Illustration Daniel Horowitz Artist Profile: Lucia Reed Casey Middaugh Artist Profile: Nicole Tucker Casey Middaugh Photo Essay Bettianne Flanders Running for Office with Scissors Ian Danskin Dawn Photo Essay Johanna Bobrow Short Fiction: Total Systemic Failure Jack Cavicchi Meta Photo Essay Jack Cavicchi Interview: Jake Slichter Bettianne Flanders Transmedia Chain Staff Photo Essay Garnet Burke

Editor-in-chief Sara Eileen Hames Editor-at-large Rose Fox Art directors Jack Cavicchi Lucia Reed Photo editor Johanna Bobrow Transmedia chain editor Casey Middaugh Photographers Johanna Bobrow Garnet Burke Bettianne Flanders Videographers Ben Cordes Ian Danskin Writers Jack Cavicchi Kevin Clark Ben Cordes Ian Danskin Bettianne Flanders Casey Middaugh Steven Padnick Special thanks to Bryan Caine, Gina Costagliola, John Reid, and Eugenia Van Bremen.

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To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. For supporting documentation, sources, and additional content, please visit http://twentyfourmagazine.com/issue-three/

Letter from the editor Dear friends, Good morning. I am writing this at midnight. The first of you will hopefully read it at 10 a.m. Between now and then, we will go from rough to polished. We have half a magazine right now, and it is chaotic and beautiful.

The theme of this issue is failure, because we are a magazine primarily about the unifying experiences of creative professionals, and every creative person I know lives with the possibility of failure.

The previous two issues of twenty-four have technically been failures. We have yet to make our twenty-four-hour deadline.

In the tradition of the 24-Hour Comic, we could consider issues one and two to be noble failures; we did finish them, just a little late. They were not abandoned in the final hour. Do we then consider them successes? How critical is finishing on time to our concept, and to our very existence as a publication? Are we honor-bound to reveal our own blown deadlines?

Maybe we won’t have to answer those questions in the next ten hours; it seems our failure issue may be the first to come in on time. If that happens, it will be entirely because of the people working around me right now.

I chose this theme in part because I wanted to see if I could scare my contributors. They are not scared. Rather, they have risen remarkably to the challenge, and, precisely as with issues one and two, I remain ferociously grateful.

To Rose, who has been perfectly what every person here has needed; to Kevin, for spending precious time with us; to Steven, for writing it again the hard way; to Jack, for vision; to Ian, for his even-handed vulnerability; to Johanna, who keeps us in color; to Casey, who picks hard topics and then laughs about them; to Bettianne, who trusted us and joined us all unknowing; to Lucia, for helping us and our pages breathe; to Garnet, for coming, and for staying; to Ben, who only had to ask; and to each of our readers, without whom—as I have said before—this magazine would simply be a collection of people speaking into empty rooms: thank you.

With love & respect

So:

#24MAG3

HOW DO YOU

DEFINE SUCCESS? Interviews with twenty-four contributors Sara Eileen Hames

Ben

I define success as achieving a series of goals, and it helps if you have time to lay out the goals in advance. That can fit any sort of context, whether it’s career goals, life goals, goals of your love life, anything. I don’t necessarily buy into thinking of myself as a success. I think it is more about the journey than the destination, but the journey has more meaning if you can have something to look forward to.

Bettianne

I don’t think I do define success. If at the end of the day I can look in the mirror and be content with the person looking back at me, then I know that every experience I’ve had—good, bad or indifferent—is exactly an experience I had to have to get me to this point. For me, knowing that, if you had to put a name to it, that’s my version of success.

Casey

Oh fuck. Um. Oh god. I have no answer.

This makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

No, don’t turn off the microphone, I’m fascinated. It’s not the microphone that makes me uncomfortable; it’s defining success. I think... success is when it’s bigger than the sum of its parts—for projects anyway. Oh, that’s interesting.

Then how is your life a success? If it’s better than the sum of its parts?

Garnet

Living your life on purpose. Not specifically with a purpose: on purpose.

Meaning, everyone has a specific talent.

Success is just using your talents to achieve something that makes you smile.

We all know gaining success is going to be tough. In the end, you get a sense of relief. In the end the smile goes from here at your feet and up to your face and comes out. That’s the relief.

Ian

Sustainability. It is usually advisable, especially for independent people, not to think of being famous or notorious.

Really, it’s just a matter of getting to keep doing what you want to be doing.

If you’re a musician, is your goal to be rich and famous, or is your goal to afford to keep being a musician indefinitely?

That’s kind of the most I feel comfortable hoping for.

Jack

A prosperous end to an endeavor. No, I was just giving you the definition from the dictionary to be a jerk. Maybe: doing what you want with as little negative impact on those around you as possible.

Johanna

The production of something that makes people think or produces a reaction. I feel successful when I feel productive, when I am producing things—ideas, pictures, data, music—that hopefully have some effect on the world. It doesn’t have to create a positive effect; obviously it’s better if it does, but success can be, “I had an experience and there’s a tangible outcome from that experience.”

Kevin

One of my composition professors told me something that I really value: when you win something you go from celebration to “Oh yeah, of course I got that” in about three seconds, and when you lose something it ruins you for about a week.

It’s very hard to maintain an accurate perspective when things are going well, and it’s really easy to feel like you’re failing all the time. So don’t obsess over what success is.

Lucia

Surviving something that was a hurdle or something that I didn’t know I could achieve. But really, I don’t think it’s achievable. I think I’ll die without being a success at anything because I will always want more from whatever I’m doing. I’ll always want to go further into whatever thing I don’t think I can get through.

Rose

If you talk about yourself as “I am a success” or “I am a failure,” it becomes a part of your identity, like “I am an American,” or “I am a lesbian.” Then if something changes, that can be very distressing. I like my life, I like what I’m doing with my life, I like what my life has in it, and I suppose that in that sense I am a success, but I really prefer to think of myself of a person who is capable of finding success in any situation.

Sara

A month ago, if I had answered that question I would have said I personally define success as owning a business or making a good salary or gaining national recognition. But now I feel like I am learning how to redefine success as having the resources and the love and the community I need to on a day-to-day basis to keep living in a way that makes me happy.

Steven

A sense of accomplishment. Accomplishing things, doing things, finishing things.

It’s not just the effort of it that makes me feel like a success. Trying, I don’t feel like a success. Even though sometimes trying is the biggest success, for me it’s about the finish line. It’s about breaking the ribbon, breaking the glass. Success is in moments for me rather than states of being.

#24MAG5

The

Great Eastern Casey Middaugh

The first thing you need to know is that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a genius. A Victorian civil and mechanical engineer of unparalleled ingenuity and creativity, he revolutionized tunnel construction, railroads, bridges, viaducts, and steamships. The man was a master at solving confounding engineering problems. Genius. But our theme this issue is not genius, it is failure, which brings me to one of my favorite subjects—the SS Great Eastern.

The Great Eastern was designed to carry enough coal to sail from Britain, around Africa, to India, China, or Australia, and back again without needing to refuel. In order to carry this volume of fuel and take advantage of economies of scale, The Great Eastern was six times bigger than any other ship at that time. She was 692 feet long, 83 feet at her beam, and capable of carrying 4,500 passengers, 6,000 tons of cargo, and 12,000 tons of coal. She. Was. Huge.

Which is a problem, because she was being built on the Thames.

Normally ships built on the Thames are launched perpendicular to the river. The Great Eastern was far too long for this and instead was launched sideways.

The first attempted launch was on November 3, 1857, and beset with technical difficulties. Already far over budget, the shipyard sold thousands of tickets to watch the launch that Brunel had hoped would be quiet and private. The ship was too heavy to launch, and to add insult to injury was christened with the wrong name, “Leviathan.” Another attempt at launching the Great Eastern occurred on November 19, and a third on November 28. Finally, the Great Eastern was successfully launched on January 31, 1858, nearly three months after the initial attempt.

The launch alone cost £170,000, a third of the original estimated cost for the entire ship.

On September 6, 1859, the Great Eastern finally began her maiden voyage with four hundred crew members, but only thirty-eight passengers. Oops.

On September 9, the ship passed Hastings and blew up. Fortunately the ship was massively over-engineered, with bulkheads encased in inch-thick metal.

The explosion killed six of the firemen in the engine

boiler rooms, ruined the saloon, and wrecked several passenger cabins, but did not sink her.

While this hugely over-budget ship was financially ruining her builders and owners, blowing up and killing people, and carrying less than one percent of her passenger capacity on her maiden voyage, construction had begun on the Suez Canal. No one needed a ship that was six times too large to fit into any existing dock.

The Great Eastern was a massive commercial failure, but technically innovative and far ahead of her time; the first ship to exceed her size wouldn’t be built until 1899. The project showcased Brunel’s defining characteristics of impressive engineering skill and lack of financial acumen.

She. Was. Huge.

Brunel’s “Great Babe” limped along, carrying a few passengers across the Atlantic now and then, until 1864 when she was sold at a loss for £25,000 and finally found her destiny. The Atlantic Ocean is 2,600 miles wide and the Great Eastern was large enough to carry thousands of miles of telegraph cable. She laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 and continued to cart cable around the world until 1888, when she was finally broken up.

It took two hundred men two years to take her apart for scrap. The five million rivets used to hold her together did not come undone easily.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel changed the face of shipping. The cellular double bottom design he invented for the Great Eastern is still used in ship-building today. But Brunel never lived to see the ship’s long-delayed success; the explosion at Hastings and the stress of the financial catastrophe contributed to the stroke that killed him nine days after the ship blew up. He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London and remembered fondly all over the world.

#24MAG7

A

for achievem

Steven Padnick

8 #24MAG

I’ve never dealt well with failure.

Growing up, I never had to deal with failure. Not to brag, but I was a gifted child, and acing academic challenges came naturally. I can memorize large chunks of text by rote, solve complicated geometry problems in my head, and marshal arguments for historical essays like a champ.

Since kindergarten, I’ve been praised for my intelligence and talent. I was the kid who consistently got As for achievement and Bs for effort.

“If only Steven would really apply himself,” my teachers would patiently repeat to my parents. “He’s so bright and has so much potential, but he only does what’s asked of him and he doesn’t try to do more.”

“Why should I work harder,” I would counter, “if doing what comes easily to me is enough to get an A?” To me, working harder than absolutely necessary was a waste of my time, and I had cartoons I’d rather be watching.

Looking back, I realize I learned the wrong lesson. What I learned was that if I was going to be good at something, I was going to be good at it instantly. What I hadn’t realized was the dangerous corollary: if I found anything difficult, then I would assume it was impossible.

I’m not alone. Several studies chronicled by Carol Dweck in “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids” (Scientific American,

vol. 18, no. 6, December 2007) show that children praised for their intelligence rather than their effort attribute their successes to their innate talent rather than their hard work. Similarly, they attribute their failures to innate shortcomings rather than to a lack of effort. Any challenge that cannot be immediately overcome is catalogued as inherently unsolvable, so the smart kids just give up. This behavior is known as “learned helplessness.”

Helpless is exactly how I feel when I fail, no matter how big or small the challenge is. It doesn’t matter whether I’m failing at a hard video game, disappointing a date, or even showing up late to a party.

If I’m not perfect, I feel queasy and panicked, empty inside, like I am completely worthless. I internalized the idea that failure meant there was something wrong with me, in the core of my being, and that if I failed then I was a waste of carbon. I developed an unhealthy fear of failure, and an unnecessary aversion to risk.

“Any challenge that cannot be immediately overcome is catalogued as inherently unsolvable, so the smart kids just give up.”

Growing up, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to tell stories and use words to create worlds in the minds of people everywhere. I love being imaginative, making up people and places and dialogue. Oh, how I love dialogue, the sparking of two agendas clashing against each other.

Writing is hard, though. Writing means spending days and weeks by myself, writing plays and novels and short stories that are not good. At all. Not good enough to show a professional editor, an agent, a friend, or a family member, or even to

ment

B

for effort

look at a second time. I know that I won’t be able to write a good novel on my first try, and I’m terrified that if I spend that much time and effort on something that fails—if I’ve based my living, my career, my identity on that effort—the floor will open up beneath me and I will fall forever.

After college, this fear was too daunting, and I spent ten years being not a writer. A short story here and there, a stab at a first draft of a detective novel, were all quickly abandoned so I could focus on my day job as a comic book editor. I told myself that working in publishing was sort of like being the writer I didn’t want to risk becoming.

I was a good editor. I did what was asked for me, showed up on time, and turned in my work. After ten years, I was exactly where I set out to be: I had a series of books under my watch and I was building on my success. And I did not care. I didn’t fear failing because I didn’t really care about succeeding. All the success meant nothing at all to me.

Finally I quit. Quit my job. Quit my career. Quit that life entirely. And after too long a delay, I threw myself bodily into being a writer. I’m still scared, and failure

still makes me sick to my stomach, but I’m done being too scared to even try.

“I didn’t fear failing because I didn’t really care about succeeding.”

I will fail. I will fail a lot. I will fail over and over and over again. I will spend hours working on terrible, boring novels. I have to accept that, and I have to embrace it. I will learn to enjoy the hours spent bent over my computer, typing away at trash—and I’ll grow to love the trash, the wasted words, the notes unused, the dead ends and the blank pages. I will go mad trying to spin straw into gold and banging my head against the wall until I learn to love the feeling of brick against skull.

I’m redefining success. I’m aiming for the A in effort. And if I work hard and spend the time, if I throw words onto the page until I crack and then keep going, if I don’t get discouraged, if I pick myself up when I fall down, and if I learn to love the work, then I can’t fail.

#24MAG9

Words by Rose Fox

Photos by Johanna Bobrow

Life Cycle of a Neighborhood The sturdy and strong populate the nascent neighborhood, exiled or adventurous, willing to trade distance from the city’s throbbing heart for low rents and rough freedom.

The neighborhood acquires character, which time and distance distort into reputation.

Reputation is always out of date. The supposed bohemian paradise is long since settled and staid. The supposed haven for criminals is kept in good order by the neighborhood watch and the local gossips.

The children of the wealthy, seeking adventure without danger, venture into the neighborhood and discover the reality masked by the reputation. They praise the neighborhood’s quaint and unique character and then settle in, irrevocably changing that character.

The neighborhood’s original occupants scatter: some voluntarily seeking a new haven, some swept rudely away by various mechanisms of authority. The newcomers lack their devotion to the neighborhood and its improvement.

Buildings and culture fall into disrepair. Those with means leave for greener pastures.

Those without—and those who still remember the neighborhood that was—remain.

Slowly, patiently, they raise a new neighborhood from the ashes of the old one. The cycle begins again.

Ben Cordes Toward the end of 2011, I faced one of the hardest decisions of my life. The doctorate degree that I’d been chasing for the previous three years (or seven, counting my master’s degree) was stalled out. I was struggling to establish a research program that would lead to a dissertation. The dream of becoming a college professor, which had been my motivation for going into grad school, wasn’t getting any closer, and the seas between here and there looked awfully rough. I’d been treading water for a year without any new ideas or progress.

There were two things keeping me in graduate school. First, I really loved teaching. I found that I had passion for helping to train new engineers for their careers. My department gave me the opportunity to run my own classroom, write a curriculum for a class no one else wanted to teach, and work with students.

I ate it up. I was also following a family tradition: my brother had his Ph.D. and was starting a career as a biology professor, and my mother held a master’s in education and had worked in the school system in my hometown.

My other motivation was a fear of failure. I had embarked on this voyage of postgraduate education and I was determined to finish it. If my goal was to become a professor, quitting the program meant admitting that I was not going

to achieve that goal. I feared the stigma associated with quitting: from my family, from my friends, from future employers.

And what on earth would I do with myself if I did decide to leave? I certainly didn’t have any idea what sort of job I would look for, and the economy being what it was (and still is), I wasn’t confident that there were many jobs in my field that I would be good at. If I altered course, I had no idea where I might land.

I had entered on this voyage of postgraduate education and I was determined to finish it.

Things came to a tipping point in December. With the prospect of another spring semester looming, I began to seriously consider dropping out of graduate school, though it was impossible for me to hear the expression “drop out” and not think of failure. But over a glass of wine with my father on a cold night near Christmas, I realized that I could just as

easily describe my current situation as a failure. I was unhappy with where I was, unhappy with the course I had charted, and unhappy about floating through life.

I still felt strongly that teaching was a good career choice for me, but it was clear that the way there was full of misery. I figured out that I’d tied my definition of success directly to my goals and forgotten to make sure that I enjoyed the voyage as well as the destination.

In February of 2012, I told my advisor that I was leaving graduate school and returning to the engineering industry. He was very supportive of my job hunt, and within a few months I was shaking hands with my new boss at a software company a few subway stops away from where I live. Today, I go to work every morning engaged with the challenges I face, the people that I work with, and the mission of the company. I don’t know where I’ll be in five years, but I’m happy with where I am right now. And at the moment, that feels like success.

Dropout Some high school students are taught they will go on to college and from there to traditional white-collar jobs.

Others are actively steered away from that path. College degrees may be seen as a measure of personal success, but clearly success is not always dependent on a college degree, no matter how one chooses to measure success. Certain career paths, such as engineering, are seen as requiring the training that comes from postsecondary education, but those assumptions have also been challenged in recent years.

The contributors to twenty-four’s third issue have followed a variety of paths through the world of postsecondary education; we asked a few of them to describe their experiences and their trials and tribulations along the way. #24MAG13

“

“

I was still getting the permission I needed to be an artist.

Casey Tell us about your post-secondary education. What program did you start? Did you finish?

I got a master’s degree in music leadership from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It was meant to take two years, and though technically I failed the first year, that didn’t seem to have any real consequences and I graduated on time.

Why did you leave? Did you feel pressured to stay? Do you feel pressure to go back?

It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t finish. Even though I wasn’t going to be a musician, I was still getting the permission I needed to be an artist, to create things myself instead of playing other people’s work. That permission was important enough to me that I could withstand any amount of social awkwardness and weird, seemingly politically motivated grading.

Tell us a story that sums up your experience with your degree program.

I figured out while I was doing my master’s degree in music that I did not want to play music any more, or at the least did not want to define myself as a classically trained double bassist any longer. My degree performance was the best expression of my ambivalence I could come up with at the time. The piece was called “The Three Elements” and explored what I felt to be the three elements necessary to a classical performance: the musician, the instrument, and the score. Let’s ignore “The

Score,” because that was the least emotionally charged piece.

“The Instrument” was a dance piece that I made with a choreographer based on contact improvisation. The bass is similar in size and shape to the human body, so we used it as such. The dance was vaguely narrative in structure and ended with the bass crushing me to the ground where I lay as though dead until the end of the evening.

I quit playing the bass the day I graduated.

“The Musician” was developed with a French hornist friend of mine who was dealing with severe stage fright issues. We chose a solo piece that she was having particular trouble with, and instead of using the written piano accompaniment, we recorded and layered her inner monologue complete with all the “breathe” and “god I suck” and “fuck” thoughts that came along with performing on stage for her.

I interviewed her about why she was a musician and what she got out of it and layered that into the audio tracks as well.

The audio followed the shape of the piece so that it was at its loudest and most frenetic at the climax of the piece. The movement ended with my friend looking up at the audience for the first time, making eye contact, and then walking off the stage while the audio track said, “And it’s all worth it... I guess.”

She played the entire piece completely naked; it was the most vulnerable we could make her.

Are you happy where you are now? Have you considered going back?

I’m not eager to go back to school. My sister just graduated with a master’s in public policy, and I would love to take her speech and leadership classes, because they sound extraordinary. Maybe later in life I’ll get an executive master’s or something like that. What I want to do for the next several years, however, is just keep working, keep making new work, keep practicing my craft and figuring out how to talk about whatever this art is that I make.

“

Degrees are a meaningless signifier for most people, but I was still screwed without one.

“

Ian

Tell us about your post-secondary education. What program did you start? Did you finish?

After high school I went to City College of San Francisco, a community college, for two years, and then transferred to California College of the Arts in 2004. Not everything transferred over, so I entered as a sophomore. The year I entered, they changed the name of my department from Film/Video/ Performance to Media Arts, so I was a media arts major.

Why did you leave? Did you feel pressured to stay? Do you feel pressure to go back?

I dropped out when my family ran out of money. When I graduated high school, we were staunchly middle-class. Soon after, my parents divorced and divided up their assets. Dad had moved to Nebraska to open a restaurant with his brother, and by the time I was a senior it had bankrupted him. My mom was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and went on permanent disability. Even with loans, we didn’t have $35,000 a year. I took a year off and we got money from friends, but I still didn’t have enough for my last semester, so I dropped out with four classes left to take.

Tell us a story that sums up your experience with your degree program.

I was temping in Warwick, R.I., a few years ago, doing some pretty dull data-entry work. Most of the full-time staff were doing more or less the same work the temps were. It was clear that if I hadn’t been a temp I would have needed a degree to work the job, though most of my coworkers had unrelated degrees—at least one was a theater major. The work itself didn’t require more than a seventh-grade education, just reading and typing. It drove home that degrees are a meaningless signifier for most people, but I was still screwed without one.

Are you happy where you are now? Have you considered going back?

I’m actually putting together my portfolio to transfer to MassArt. I’ll lose a lot of credits, but between my Pell Grant and my AmeriCorps Education Award, I can afford to go with no loans and no money out of pocket. I’ll admit, it’s kind of a point of pride at this point. But having been a freelancer for a while now, I have a very clear idea of what skills I didn’t learn that would benefit me now. I would actually recommend art students taking a year off to freelance before finishing their degree. You need to learn which skills are critical in your field and where your weaknesses are.

#24MAG15

Tell us about your post-secondary education. What program did you start? Did you finish?

After graduating high school, I attended NYU. I went through three majors at two colleges within NYU and then went on medical leave and never went back. Some years later, I did a year at City College of San Francisco, and then most of another year in CUNY’s online baccalaureate completion program.

Why did you leave? Did you feel pressured to stay? Do you feel pressure to go back?

NYU’s College of Arts and Science had a dreary core curriculum that I hated. I was able to arrange a transfer to the Gallatin School, a DIY program with a lot less structure, but when I decided I wanted to major in computer science and mathematics, they sent me back to CAS, leaving me a junior stuck in the same core curriculum classes that had bored me as a freshman. I became so miserably depressed that the school counseling center approved my request for medical leave. The real world turned out to be awesome, so I decided not to go back to the ivory tower. My father, who had dropped out of school, and my mother, who had almost done so, supported my decision, for which I remain very grateful.

In 2002, I had no job and no prospects. With my family’s financial backing, I decided to go back to school at City College of San Francisco and study architectural design, which I’d always loved. Alas, a year of drawing—on top of conducting most of my social life on the internet and trying to run a sideline business creating artsy friendship bracelets—led to a nasty bout of tendinitis in my right arm, and the family money dried up. I regretfully left school and went back to work.

In 2006, back in New York, I decided I would try one more time to get my B.A., thinking I could maybe go on to grad school from there and have a better time than I had as an undergrad. I enrolled in CUNY’s online baccalaureate completion program—and a few months later I got a call offering me my dream job. With clear evidence that I didn’t need a degree to get a great job in a field I love, I left for the third and (probably) final time.

“

“

The real world turned out to be awesome, so I decided not to go back.

Rose Tell us a story that sums up your experience with your degree program.

After I’d had my year of medical leave, someone from NYU called and asked whether I was coming back. I laughed at them and hung up. I had a job! I was making money! I lived on my own! No way would I go back to the stifling ivory tower. Now I keep the medical leave approval notice in the folder with my high school diploma, and I’m equally proud of both.

Are you happy where you are now? Have you considered going back?

I have a great life. There’s really nothing in it that would be improved by me putting in the time, money, and effort to get my degree, and I’m honestly not sure I’d be capable of it even now that I’m older and more willing to suffer short-term annoyance for long-term gain. I’ve left five years’ worth of credits on the table—some of them quite expensive—but I refuse to fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy.

To the extent that I failed at being a college student, I don’t mind having done so. It wasn’t the right situation for me to be in, so there’s no reason for me to care about succeeding at it.

I’ve succeeded by the measures that matter to me.

Ian Danskin Writing a song usually starts with noodling around on the guitar. I’m not an excellent guitarist. Eight years of lessons, but I don’t remember much. Most of what I know I learned from living with a musician for three years. So I know what sweep-picking is, but I can’t do it.

With enough noodling, I’ll usually find some short sequence of notes that I like, at which point I open up my sequencing program, Piston Collage.

Piston Collage (usually abbreviated as PxTone) is for making music that sounds like the Super Nintendo.

It makes sense to me in a way that most trackers and sequencers don’t. Its interface is intuitive for me, a blessing since I can’t effectively read sheet music anymore. When I’ve got something I like, I sequence it up and listen to it on loop. PxTone makes it easy to add and subtract notes, and to put the music in rhythms I wouldn’t think to play live.

I go back and forth between guitar and sequencer, sequencer and guitar. I can’t improvise in PxTone and I can’t arrange on guitar. I can, with some effort, take my partial knowledge of each and make something close to whole.

Truth be told, I’m not a very good animator, either.

I’ve never properly learned Flash; I mostly still draw one frame at a time, and only just learned how to edit multiple frames at once. My lines squiggle, so I’ve developed a sketchy aesthetic to make it look intentional. My cartooning is strictly stick figures. For anything more realistic than that, I use rotoscoping: tracing frames of video footage, which I usually shoot by myself. I shoot with a cheap camera, and the footage is ugly. But no one sees the video; it gets traced over and deleted.

I work in mixed media. If I were to pick a single discipline, I’d embarrass myself. So when I find a deficiency in one field, I borrow a skill from another. I don’t collect tools so much as half-full toolboxes.

Some clients seem to think I can do anything. I haven’t found a way to tell them, “No, I can’t do anything. I can only do everything.”

#24MAG17

A photo essay by Johanna Bobrow

W

hy Isn’t This Easy?

Ian Danskin

The most common word you will say if you play Jumpman is “fuck.”

You’ll say it because you suck at Jumpman. Your blocky orange character controls like a bar of soap in on a prison bathroom floor. The inertia is incredible.

Hold an arrow key for a quarter-second and you’ll go sliding across the ground with physics that would better suit an air hockey table, and the only way to stop is to apply equal force in the opposite direction.

You suck at Jumpman. Get used to it.

Many obstacles would be comically unchallenging but for the deliberately awful controls—it’s like trying to do a single push-up while wearing fifteen wool sweaters. Pixelated green enemies kill you if they touch you. Flashing blocks kill you if they touch you.

Enormous yellow bouncing balls kill you if they touch you.

You don’t die in Jumpman. You explode.

I don’t care whether you’re a Catholic priest; play Jumpman and you’ll swear like a fucking sailor. You’ll swear more often than you blow up. And you’ll blow up a fucking load.

And you will be laughing as you swear.

The secret to Jumpman is that the penalty for failure is nil; in fact, there are a few rewards. You can rotate most levels by 90 or 180 degrees, causing enemies and giant bouncing balls to fall haphazardly as gravity re-orients itself. It is often beneficial to ignore your character and just maneuver the giant ball into all your enemies, often exploding yourself repeatedly in the process. Every time you explode, you reappear a moment later at your start point. Your enemies stay dead, but you do not.

Jumpman, a free indie game by Run Hello, is part of the masocore genre. Masocore games are masochistic, spine-breakingly difficult games, with a prevailing (though not universal) wisdom that failure need not equate with punishment. Failure in Jumpman is a setback of less than a second. This is also true of popular masocore games Super Meat Boy, Give Up Robot 2, and VVVVVV. Levels tend to be small, often a single screen. A level may take fifteen seconds to run through

perfectly. A perfect run may take eighty failures to achieve.

But you can do eighty failures in eight minutes. There are few training levels—eighty failures are all the training you need.

Eighty failures in eight minutes and you can do something impossible.

And when the next level loads, your eyes boggle, and you, priest, minister, Mormon missionary, say, “I am so fucked.”

And you say it with a smile.

Being fucked is fun.

Spencer, a therapist I saw some years ago, asked why I had so many issues with failing. I almost never finished a work of art that wasn’t a school assignment, and then usually in a mad panic, days before the deadline, a sheet of paper taped to my wall, frantically making piles of charcoal and eraser dust on the carpet and pissing off my roommate. Why did I always want my time free to work if I was going to waste it on the internet? Why did I resent hours spent at dayjobs for taking time away from art I probably wouldn’t make?

(I am putting words in Spencer’s mouth; he would never be so strident.)

I told him that being afraid of failure meant being afraid to try. I had structured my life so I’d always have several ambitious, half-started projects going, enough that I could peck away at one whenever I needed the illusion that I was working, but never anything in such a state that it could actually be completed and released to the world’s judgment. I could feel like an artist without ever having to fail.

The creeping depression that had brought me to his office was the feeling that, if the payment for being zero-failure was to be without accomplishment, then the failure in my life was life itself.

“Can you think of any time,” Spencer asked me, “when you actually failed at something?”

I had to think.

Eventually I came up with this: My first relationship was emotionally and, very briefly, physically abusive. My first girlfriend and I got together when I was nineteen. Warning signs that it was going to be a horrible relationship occurred about one month in, but we stayed

together until I was nearly twenty-one. It was more or less a solid year and a half of crisis, as she went from one temporary living situation to another, depending on me for all emotional support and slowly destroying every relationship in her life.

She’d pick a fight with me every night, I’d eventually get four hours of sleep, this would go on for months. I cracked several times, but also felt a steady weariness—a general grinding-down. I realized that I didn’t want to kill myself, but for the first time I understood why people who felt this way all the time wanted to kill themselves.

But I stayed. I had a very young notion that when two people love each other, they can always make it work. They have to make it work. To leave someone you still love is to fail them.

By the time I broke up with her, I said, I didn’t believe that anymore.

Then, in that way that therapists do, Spencer slowly coaxed the lesson in that out of me, mostly by saying, repeatedly, “...and therefore?”

Therefore what? Failure didn’t kill me. In order to end the relationship, I needed to believe that love alone couldn’t sustain a relationship with someone who mistreats you and, on rare occasions, punches you in the face. That perhaps such behavior was a turn-off. That “making it work” can’t be one person’s job in a two-person relationship. These were lessons in maturity, but they were also coping mechanisms. Believing in them was necessary to get out.

I failed. But in retrospect, failure looked a lot like the other thing.

It redefined what it meant to fail.

This is as close to a breakthrough as therapy gets for me.

that came to mind, and to reject the survivor upon revision. A blot of paint or chisel-chip in a block of marble obliterates the thousands of other paintings and sculptures that could have been. This is what it means to design. Most of these alternatives are considered for seconds and then forgotten, until the final product feels as though it came from nowhere. As if the right choices were my first thoughts. And I often ask when I start the next work, “Why isn’t this as easy as last time?”

Often, masocore games track statistics. Give Up Robot 2 told me that, by the final level, I had died over eighteen hundred times. Super Meat Boy kindly follows every perfect run with a replay that superimposes all your attempts on top of one another: copies of your character race across the screen, each ending in a burst of blood, perhaps a hundred or more times, until only one is left, the one that lived.

Upon victory, the game reminds you of all your failures.

“This is what it took to get here,” it says.

Without penalties, masocore gaming lets me explore this single theme: the ultimate success that comes after a thousand failures.

Why can’t I go back to when it was easy?

It was never easy.

I wish I could say I’ve never looked back. Within a couple of years I was living in New England and working on a large independent game project with a coder in another country, feeling like a proper developer. But I was making little actual progress.

Some lessons need to be learned through repetition.

Masocore games appeal to me, first and foremost, because they’re incredible. But they start to mean something to me more personal than fun.

My breakup was not without fallout. Past the liberating first months, I was a wreck. I had to figure out how to be single again, and how to earn back the friends I’d alienated. Failures in real life are messy where Jumpman’s are clean: you die, you are reborn, you try again. As many times as it takes.

There is a purity to this process. There is always a way to win.

You have infinite tries, infinite time. There is a joy in death.

Being fucked is fun.

These lessons are harder to pick out in real life, among all the noise.

I often forget that the creative process is one of self-doubt.

To write one sentence is to reject a half-dozen inferior ones

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R

eview

Kevin Clark

Dark the Years Between Edward Flaherty.

Simon & Schuster/Gallery, $24.99 (768p). September 2012.

For Sir Arthur Evans, the palace at Knossos was the discovery of a lifetime.

Like all archaeologists, Evans projected his own values, and his own fantasies, onto the civilization he’d discovered. He postulated a bucolic, pacifist society, an appealing escape from the increasingly industrialized and warlike Britain of 1900. Some of the story Evans told has held up; he was a very good archaeologist.

But some of it turned out to simply be the story that Evans wanted to tell.

Dark the Years Between, folk musician Edward Flaherty’s fiction debut, similarly tries to use accurate history as a springboard for a powerful story that will resonate with contemporary audiences, while also retelling the epics of Homer. Flaherty picks up from the end of The Iliad and takes Odysseus into the major geopolitical events of the Bronze Age Collapse, paralleling the adventures in The Odyssey. In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, Flaherty described the Odyssey as “the Men in Black II of epic

poetry”; despite this flippancy, it’s clear that Flaherty knows his Homer, as several of the most dramatic episodes in the novel are designed to mirror key scenes in the original epic. It’s an ambitious project with a broad scope, which in a first novel from a musician looks a great deal like hubris.

The Bronze Age collapse has fascinated archaeologists for years. In the space of a few decades, most of the major civilizations of the Ancient Near East disappeared or were sacked; Egypt shrank from an empire to a parochial and isolated kingdom entering a new dark age. Luckily for Flaherty’s dramatic conceit, the Bronze Age collapse roughly aligns with both the traditional and the possible historical dates for the Trojan War. Reading Homer today, we see a defining story of a culture that completely ignores the major geopolitical events of the period. It’s as if a novel were set in France in 1943 and never mentioned Nazi

occupation. Dark the Years Between is most successful as a solution to this problem. By synthesizing a fairly standard reading of Odysseus’ character with the current understanding of the Bronze Age collapse, Flaherty has put Odysseus in a believable historical context. But just as Evans wanted “Minoan” Crete to satisfy his bucolic fantasies, Flaherty—who has played several benefit concerts for Occupy Wall Street—tries too hard to work an egalitarian message into the failures of the Bronze Age civilizations.

It is a currently plausible theory that Hatti and other Bronze Age nations fell in part because of rising inequality in their societies, a crushing tax burden, and whole populations moving into the mountains or turning to naval piracy (becoming known collectively as “Sea Peoples”). And certainly inequality is one of the most pressing issues underlying much of modern American political discourse. But it isn’t a large part of Odysseus’ personal journey—given that

he was a king and an admiral, or the equivalents at the time—and the passages of Dark the Years Between that focus on geopolitics are the weakest, never successfully making Flaherty’s case. This is a novel with a moral, and it’s not clear that it needed one.

If the wide-angle lens that Flaherty uses to look at the broader international system of the late Bronze Age creates the weakest passages, the action sequences based on episodes from Homer and Virgil are the strongest. Historical context may be interesting to some, but the drama of The Aeneid and The Odyssey shines through Flaherty’s modern version and gives it life.

As the novel opens, it’s Odysseus, not Achilles, who is angry with Agamemnon over the conduct of the Trojan War. It’s Odysseus whose hand needs to be stopped by Athena from pulling out his sword and cutting down his king. Odysseus’ goal is to get the Mycenean Greeks onto the international stage, an equal power with Hatti, and Agamemnon’s vision is too narrow for Odysseus’ taste.

Throwing a bronze wrench into Odysseus’ plans, the Phrygians cross over from Thrace into what is now Turkey, skipping past Troy, and sack Hatti. Odysseus learns of this from some Hittite refugees fleeing the carnage and immediately changes his focus. If roving tribes are destroying major civilizations,

the war needs to end, and quickly.

Odysseus invents the Trojan horse, and in a scene out of a John le Carré novel, he blackmails a Trojan spy into accepting the gift, suggesting that the Greeks inside will take the city without sacking it and then go on to take the spoils of Hatti from the Phrygians. Of course, the Greeks sack the city and the spy is betrayed. Odysseus may be clever, but he is not kind, and spies are always disposable.

After the sack of Troy, Odysseus and Agamemnon face off again. Odysseus wants to move inland and challenge the Phrygians, but Agamemnon wants to take his army and go home. Odysseus is reduced to raiding down the coast with a single ship, heading toward an inevitable rendezvous with the Sea People. Moments like this fit Flaherty’s agenda almost too well, propelled by the plot more than the characters’ decisions.

When he meets the Sea People, Odysseus realizes that these newly empowered voyagers could lift him higher than Agamemnon ever would, and he trades his seafaring prowess for a seat in their growing coalition.

This is also the first time Odysseus, a hereditary ruler, is confronted with the economic refugees who are destroying his way of life. Some have leaders, but others form (suspiciously modern) collectives. All have willingly withdrawn from the civilization of large centralized states, yet that lack of infrastructure didn’t stop them from destroying wealthy and powerful Hatti.

It’s fascinating to watch Odysseus,

a thoroughly unreconstructed Bronze Age monarch, interact with these characters. Each brings a very different approach to the problems of the time.

Sometimes the breadth of thinking is a bit hard to swallow, as it’s difficult to picture all these progressive perspectives spontaneously arising in the late Bronze Age. Flaherty couldn’t actually put Wall Street “occupiers” on pirate ships in 1200 B.C.E., but he certainly tried.

One of the highlights of the novel is Odysseus’ attempt to save the city of Ugarit. Archaeologists have determined that the Sea Peoples did sack Ugarit and burn it to the ground. The area wasn’t resettled for over 1,000 years. In Dark the Years Between, Odysseus tries to prevent this atrocity and broker a peace.

He doesn’t want to destroy cities for the sake of a quick pillage; he wants a centralized powerbase and a military force with which to expand his power beyond anything that would have been possible in Ithaca. In Ugarit, a Canaanite city-state, he thinks he sees his chance.

The historical king of Ugarit, Hammurabi, appears for a tense negotiation with the Sea Peoples on their flagship.

Ugarit is outgunned. As Hammurabi wrote to an ally on clay tablets fired and preserved in the city’s destruction, “All my troops and chariots are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka... Thus, the country is abandoned.”

Hammurabi knows he has to cut a deal, and Odysseus knows that a permanent home in a city in the Levant is his best chance at greatness.

But his comrades betray him.

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Instead of agreeing to his plan, they kill Hammurabi, tie Odysseus to a mast, and make him watch as they sack and burn Ugarit. The destruction of a city has taken the place of the beckoning sirens, and this time tragedy cannot be avoided. Odysseus’ utter failure to gain power—and to convince others to see things his way, one of Homer’s character’s greatest strengths—makes for the novel’s strongest scene.

Attacking Troy didn’t turn Greece into a great kingdom, and joining the Sea Peoples didn’t give Odysseus a chance at real power. Odysseus, always the strategist, decides to cut his losses and head for home. But as he approaches Ithaca, he sees the castle on fire. Thinking back on The Odyssey after reading Dark the Years Between, this is not all that implausible.

The suitors of Penelope could have sacked Ithaca at any time. Those long nights they spent eating and drinking weren’t a raucous party. They were physically threatening to Penelope and Telemachos.

In this retelling, that threat is realized.

Odysseus once again abandons his plans and heads back out to sea. By now he knows that the Sea People are heading down the coast of the Levant towards Egypt. Perhaps, Odysseus thinks, he can save himself by turning on the Sea Peoples who turned on him, and betray them to the Egyptians.

His southward journey to Egypt mirrors the classical journey to the underworld. The most charitable reading of this analogy is as a sly reference to the weird mysticism that imbues many European accounts of Egyptian history and culture, rather than as Flaherty buying into the unfortunate cliché of the mystical foreign nation enlightened by a wise man from a “civilized” land. Either way, it’s hard not to be suspicious of how perfectly Flaherty has positioned Odysseus at the center of important world events.

Rameses III is pharaoh when

Odysseus arrives. Historically, he was a strong ruler who fought off the Sea Peoples and defeated them in the Nile delta, but not until they landed; the Egyptians had a weak navy and a terror of sailing out of sight of land. In Dark the Years Between, this sets the stage for Odysseus to once again lever his experience with the sea into a grab for power. Rameses greets Odysseus and his single ship with a nervous mixture of religious pronouncements and cryptic rituals, including the odd foretelling of Odysseus bearing a single oar inland to his death. When Odysseus displays his knack for strategy and knowledge of the Sea Peoples’ navy (which, of course, he designed), Rameses promises him a place of power in the Egyptian state after the Sea Peoples are defeated.

We know from the historical record, particularly in Egypt, that the Sea Peoples were made up of groups of refugees from all over the Mediterranean, though the origins of these ethnic groups can’t be nailed down precisely.

They came not just as warriors but with their families, their goods, and their whole lives. Historically, Rameses III gets the credit or blame for destroying them. In Dark the Years Between, Odysseus lays the plan, and Odysseus calls the shots—literally, in this case, as flaming arrows rain down upon the ships.

In another dramatic reversal, this triumph doesn’t get Odysseus very far.

Through his experiences with the Sea Peoples, Odysseus gained an understanding of the economic oppression that turned them into refugees. Now he doesn’t just want power in Egypt; he has a reform agenda. And Rameses knows that Egypt is far too conservative to ever let true reform happen. After the Bronze Age collapse, Egypt withdrew into itself, missed out on technological advances, and remained basically a Bronze Age

society. In keeping with that historical fact, Rameses expels Odysseus and sends him south (again, the direction of mysticism and fate) into the desert, with a single oar upon his shoulder.

That’s how Flaherty ends the novel.

It’s a strange ending, walking off into the desert, but Odysseus has taken part in all the major battles and cultural shifts of the era, so by Flaherty’s agenda there’s nowhere else for him to go.

Dark the Years Between is an ambitious novel in historical scope, in the literary sources it engages, and in trying to reconstruct a notoriously complex character to suit a particular conceit.

It succeeds the way that Evans’s vision of Minoan Crete succeeded in 1900 England: as a mix of genuine scholarship, plausible conjecture, and a beguiling but entirely fictional concept that suits the politics of the times.

The novel leaves the reader with many questions about Odysseus as a character.

The inconsistent desires that take him from scene to scene are more about where Flaherty wants him than where he wants to go. As a thought experiment about what the Trojan War and its aftermath might have been like for the people who experienced them first-hand, however, it is a satisfying exploration of the possible.

Steven Padnick

The perverse nature of failure in business is that it can be much more profitable than success. Not necessarily in an outright The Producers–style way, though that’s an option, but in allowing a flaw in your service and then charging more for the ability to fix it. There’s profit in allowing a chimera to attack, if only because you can charge for producing Bellerophon.

This is particularly a problem with “free” online networks (where “free” usually means “ad-supported”). For example, early this month, Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s product director of ads, told Ad Exchanger that only 15% to 20% of people who “like” a Facebook fan page actually see anything that gets posted to that page. Facebook is happy to solve this problem—if the maintainer of the page pays money to sponsor a post.

In this way, a flaw from the user’s perspective becomes more profitable than any permanent solution, since the flaw can be a continual source of revenue.

Facebook is hardly alone in profiting from failure.

Yelp pages are highly vulnerable to internet trolls who leave offensive reviews and downrate businesses.

Rather than prevent this abusive behavior from happening, Yelp offers to clean up the mess they leave—for a fee billed to the business owner.

Then there’s Zynga, which produces highly addictive social games like FarmVille that over time become a chore to play unless the player is willing to buy in-game currency with real money. If the player chooses not to pay, Zynga provides “free options” like IQ tests and promotional CDs that turn out to have exorbitant hidden fees.

To be clear, this sort of perpetuated failure isn’t simply preferential treatment for those willing and

able to pay more. It’s not equivalent to a better table for people who tip the mâitre d’, or more file space for those who pay for a pro account. It’s not even the bigger seat, better food, and shorter lines for flying first class. This is a failure to deliver the basic service that the company is supposedly in the business of providing.

It’s a scam, pure and simple, in the style of the Spanish Prisoner. The twist is that the person being asked to pay to fix the flaw is not the person who cares most about the flaw getting fixed. That leaves the 85% of fans on Facebook who are missing posts, or the Yelp users whose search results are skewed by fake reviews, stuck in a flawed system because they can’t affect the profit margin one way or the other.

Except they can. Social networks like Facebook are only nominally free, because each user actually is paying Facebook, not with money but with their attention. Facebook sells their page views and usage data to advertisers. In a sense, Facebook makes its money by selling its users, using basically the same model as broadcast television and free weekly newspapers.

Since this happens behind closed doors, users may not realize how valuable they are to these networks.

Companies can only profit off of failed systems as long as they have de facto monopolies on their users. If more users realized that they were getting intentionally bad service, they would have an incentive to leave for competitors with better reputations for doing as advertised. In an ideal world, this fear of losing users and revenue to the competition would keep companies communicating honestly with their users and providing good service—at least, more than 15% of the time.

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H

aiku

Twenty-four hours: An absurd time to complete Nearly anything.

—Ben

His face in my hands Wish for a way to tell him It doesn’t matter

—Jack

Over-achiever Why must you write so damn much?

Slow down and just breathe

Peripheral vision Makes a bowl of carrots look Like Cheetos

—Rose

—long-distance contributor Erik Peters I researched and wrote About a boat of great girth: Isambard’s failure

—Casey Punchy punchy punch Punchy punch punch punchy punch I might need a nap

—Ben

I’m tired of writing The air conditioner hums I like these people

—Casey Balloon people have no souls But they do capture Some of our essence

—Ben

By the way, Rose called She says that your article Still has no ending

—Ben

Unnecessary Grades, numbers, ratings, only The look on her face

—Jack Stiltwalkers flee the Oncoming sunrise, fearing The light. So do we.

— Johanna

Lucia Reed

Strength & Photography Casey Middaugh

Lucia Reed has the best story about joining twenty-four magazine of any contributor. I’m certain of it.

Our fearless editor-in-chief, Sara Eileen Hames, wrote a piece for the Guardian about the experience of making the first issue of twenty-four. It is this piece that Lucia saw in London. Well, she didn’t see it; her mother did and saved it for her. Well, not saved exactly, but they were able to fish it out of the recycling in any case. Lucia then emailed Sara and was invited to join the staff.

Isn’t that marvelous? All I did was go to college with one of the first issue contributors. But to see an article? And follow up on it? From another country?

And then to end up as co–art director for issue three? I told you she has the best story.

Lucia is a photographer, among other things.

The other things include a passionate interest and practice of jeet kune do, the “way of the intercepting fist,” which was Bruce Lee’s martial art. (I originally

completely misheard her British accent and assumed she said that jeet kune do was from Brusley, which I figured was a village somewhere near Kent.)

After five years of boxing in the U.K. and dabbling with kickboxing and krav maga in New York, she was introduced to jeet kune do. “It’s just changed my life,” she says. “Suddenly I have a home in my martial arts school”—something she felt she’d been missing since she moved to the U.S. Lucia finds that pushing herself physically can be emotionally draining; at New York Martial Arts Academy, she’s strengthened by support from instructors and other students. Jeet kune do is a street-fighting martial art and studying it can make you aware of your vulnerability. On the other hand, Lucia says, fighting can bring “closeness with someone, even though you’re trying to hurt them.” The art is intimate, humbling, and grounding, creating an environment in which she feels safe.

When Lucia was looking for a new photography challenge, she naturally turned to the Academy.

Photographing martial arts is technically difficult, as the indoor lighting and the moving bodies are not especially conducive to clear images. But that doesn’t bother Lucia; “I love taking pictures of things that I care about,” she says.

Lucia is now bringing her care and strength to issue three of twenty-four magazine, and we are so glad that her mother thought to note that article in the Guardian.

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NICOLE TUCKER

Art & Landscape Casey Middaugh We knocked on the door of Nicole Tucker’s apartment and a small, curly-headed firecracker opened the door. His name is Jaeger and he is three. He had small slips of torn paper that were sometimes triangles, sometimes rockets, and once a butterfly. He took my notebook and wrote “giant” and “bob bob bob.” His favorite things include trees, cheese, and the color black.

I adore him.

I also adore Nicole’s apartment. I want to soak in it. Luxuriate in it. Merge with it. There is love seeping out of the walls.

Each room is a different, deeply saturated color. A plant grows out of a cream-and-gold teacup in the bathroom next to the toothbrushes. The study is bookended with life-size skeletons, guarding their extensive library. Nicole is a landscape designer with degrees in sculpture and landscape architecture. When she and her husband bought their apartment, they were warned that it had a very long hallway. They were delighted and have filled it up with art created by their family, friends, and Edward Gorey.

Nicole believes that art is for

everyone, and she is committed to being useful. For a while she created art installations but found that the waste and the small, self-selected audiences weren’t fulfilling for her. So she sat down and read Zen and the Art of Making a Living. Two exercises hit her over the head: Look around your house. What do you have the most of? She had fifty-two plants. Strawberries and morning glories were growing in her bathroom. An eight-foot-tall avocado tree graced her living room. She had homeless plants she rescued and nursed from the street, and dozens of varieties of cactus. She thought maybe she should pay attention to that.

Especially when combined with her second answer...

When you’re depressed and have $2.00, what do you buy?

Nicole’s answer was “seeds.”

She took her answers and spent the summer doing landscape maintenance. She “legitimately left things healthier.”

Her care of those gardens not only left things in better aesthetic shape but meant that the following year those trees and bushes would grow back sturdier and stronger. She took that success and went back to school, eventually ending up as the head gardener for the town of Westport, Conn.

After several jobs, years, and the birth of her son, Nicole had returned to her hometown of New York, where she founded Green Apple Land Arts. She does garden coaching, landscape design, and crafts whimsical terraria. A rooftop garden she recently designed and built for a grandmother includes a border of roses, both to smell nice and as a guardrail to keep the eighteen-month-old grandchild safe. The woman spends much of her time on her couch, so Nicole bordered the skylight above with blueberry bushes that bear fruit in the summer and turn red

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in the autumn, beautiful all year round.

Clients in the Bronx had Nicole design a garden and coach them in its upkeep. At the end of the summer they asked her back.

“Is there a problem with your garden?” “No, just come see.”

Their squash was taking over the driveway and they wanted help to know how to make their “jungle” a little less prolific the next year.

I asked Nicole whether her art background came into play with her landscape design. She looked at me like the question was ridiculous. Her visual art background infuses her home; of course it underlies everything about her work. I revised: what does she consider to be her artistic medium? Plants? Gardens? No, Nicole said: “My medium is space and making spaces.”

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Bettianne Flanders

The Past in the Present This building has survived the overgrowth and stands as a reminder that from a strong foundation, built with time and attention to detail, comes lasting beauty.

Sit with me on this bench, a child to my left, an elder to my right, and let us teach one another the meaning of each of these sayings.

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Urban Solace

Through the urban jungle lies an oasis.

One person’s daily commute turns into another’s picturesque landscape.

Seek Hide and

Hide away with my five-year-old self, chasing the sun and feeling almighty in our fortress tree.

Behind the bars, beyond the fences, people and nature strive.

r o f g n i s n r o n s ru E with scis C I F F O Ian Danskin At one General Assembly for Occupy Boston, before they were evicted from Dewey Square, a Tea Partier took the mike. One doesn’t expect to see Tea Partiers at Occupy. Anarchists, yes, and the homeless, and aging radicals who’ve been going to protests since before I was born. But the Tea Partier stood before us, and, in friendly tones, he suggested we break down the camp.

He said if we wanted to change things, we should be running for office.

That was hard to hear. Naturally you don’t spent much time at Occupy if you worry what a Tea Partier might think of you. But it frustrated me because I thought we’d done that. Three years earlier, I thought we’d won the biggest office in the country.

Obama’s campaign was like nothing I’d seen in my lifetime. I was born during the Reagan administration. I thought elections were where you voted for one guy to keep the other guy out of office.

You didn’t expect to believe in someone.

I met Libertarians who had voted for Obama. I knew anarchists who had gone door to door for him. People came out for Obama who had never voted in their lives. They’d had a taste of something they’d stopped expecting: the idea that things could actually change.

Three years later, the economy was still bricked. We were still at war with undefined terrorists. We were still using Reagan’s tax policies. The planet was still getting hotter. Politicians still tried to win elections with money and not policy.

The lines in the Democratic primary had been drawn between Clinton the Democrat and Obama the reformer.

Many of us were shocked to have pushed the reformer straight to the White House and gotten roughly the same presidency we would have expected from Clinton.

We didn’t think we would see a campaign more progressive than Obama’s, so many of us threw in with Occupy. It was time

to take to the streets.

I honestly wonder whether Occupy would have snowballed as much as it did if McCain had been elected. The taste of hope doesn’t wash out of the mouth easily. We were rejecting the current government, but in a weird way it felt like we were picking up where Obama’s campaign left off. We were ready to reform things ourselves.

As November rolls around, it looks likely that people will vote for Obama to keep the other guy out of office. But they believed once. I don’t know if they will again. What could a progressive say now that we haven’t already heard?

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A SHORT STORY JACK CAVICCHI

Dr. Kwang was going into shock and I still wasn’t due to be born for another five hours.

The stark white and gray of the room—the whole world, for all I knew—only had two real breaks in its smooth minimalist perfection: the puddle of muddy green and brown vomit in the corner, and the bright red splash of blood that bloomed at Dr. Kwang’s mouth and pooled in a vivid circle on the ground in front of me.

The circle looked like a comic book dialogue bubble.

I suspected it said he was going to die very soon.

I had been shown comic books early on. I think it was important to the doctor that I see them, since he believed that they were the mythology of his culture.

He’d shown me the old mythologies too; the Bible, Hercules, all those strange stories of heroes and villains and gods.

Though I’d been programmed to think in several languages and understand math, and I’d begun to

comprehend humor, I hadn’t been programmed to feel scared yet. I calmly floated in my tank and watched my father die.

He coughed again. The circle of blood grew a bit, forming a halo around his head.

I examined the clues at hand and concluded there was most likely a faulty filtration system in Dr. Kwang’s hazchem suit. The processes that had gone into the construction of my womb and placenta would have been highly toxic and wildly dangerous under any circumstances, and doubly so given that Dr. Kwang had been working with undocumented and illegally obtained materials.

His suit had gone past the recommended timeframe between cleaning and maintenance cycles. An organism, or perhaps a variety of organisms, had most likely gotten past the faulty filters and started growing. From there it quickly got into his lungs and began to work on destroying his body.

Dr. Kwang was already a frail man. He’d been cured of cancer a few years before, but his body had never fully recovered. His system was teetering on the brink of failure. I calculated that he’d only last a few hours more.

As I watched his body convulse, the world suddenly started to go black. The computers were sending me to that other place again. It was a cycle of consciousness, semi-consciousness, and the crisp blackness of the information induction system. Soon the white room was gone and the world was only numbers and facts and new emotions.

When I came back, he was dead and I was very different. The various schema of education and personality construction had nearly finished, and I was almost a person. I was just real enough to weep for what I saw.

The thin man’s skin looked jaundiced and wet. His eyes were open and almost completely red. The blood was taking on a brownish tinge around him. He was gone.

I wondered whether I would still be born. I wondered whether there were some last few operations he needed to perform on the computer banks around us.

Was there some Frankenstein-like lever he had to pull before I could really live?

Around me was a supersaturation of nanobots and nutrients, protean proteins that formed a faux amniotic fluid that was building me and feeding me. In my head were long chemical names like poems I could reel off. Well, I could reel them off in my head; I wasn’t sure whether I could speak yet. I opened my mouth and touched my throat.

Somewhere in the building, I felt an alarm go off.

Minute vibrations were acute when one floated in liquid. A door opened somewhere. I realized I didn’t know how large the building was. I imagined I was underground, but only because there were no windows.

Looking around, I saw computers all around my tank, a larger mainframe in the corner, a desk with half-eaten food on it, a door that was closed, a sink, and another door that was open to reveal a bathroom.

Near the sink was a mirror, and I could just barely see the reflection of the large transparent tank I was in.

I realized that by human standards my eyesight was very good. I could see myself in the mirror, a vague floating shape. I watched my hand, palm out, rest on the wall of the tank.

Then the world flicked out again and there was the darkness and crackling electricity of the induction. I wondered briefly who I would be when I woke up.

When my eyes opened things were sharper. The fluid in the tank had cleared a bit and now was mostly saline. There were more vibrations and sounds; things were happening in the building. The doctor was still dead.

The vague sounds were focusing. Footsteps in a hallway nearby. Shouts. Deep voices, the chirps of

some communication devices, then silence.

The temperature of the liquid around me was so close to my own body temperature that I couldn’t really tell where my body ended and the liquid began.

Suddenly, though, I felt a chill. My skin prickled, goosebumps rose on my arms, and my nipples were almost painfully hard.

The first low thud against the door sent vibrations through the tank so forcefully that I heard the liquid at the top splash against the walls of thick glass. Then there was another thud, then silence.

I wondered whether feeling cold was part of the last stages. Was it something I was taught to feel in my last induction? Was it part of being scared? I thought I was scared, as well as very aware of being alone.

The doctor with his halo of brown congealed blood: did he give his life for mine? There was something like a mythological story there, perhaps. I’d sprung from his bloody head like Athena.

I thought another induction came, but it was too sudden, too brief. Everything went black and then I was against the back of the tank, my body feeling new sensations: pain, shock, anxiety, the urge to fight or flee.

The wall, where there had been a door, was a black mess. The room was full of smoke and some of the lights had gone out. There were people coming into the room from a hallway I could now see through the hole in the wall. The people wore all black, with lots of buckles and pockets.

They carried Heckler & Koch MP7s with gas vents and sound suppressors, grenades, shotguns, night vision goggles—a whole list of things I knew that most NATO military units carried. The facts were there in my head, like Latin and astrophysics, detailed labels and schematics.

They rushed the room in standard two-by-two formation, checking each other’s’ blind spots, opening any doors or cabinets, securing the perimeter and then standing guard. Most of them were pointing their guns at me.

I could see my reflection in the scopes of their guns and the visors of those who wore more elaborate helmets. With new knowledge, I catalogued my characteristics: female, Korean, 1.6 meters tall, dark brown eyes, unwrinkled skin, floating in a tank of clear fluid, hair a cloud of inky black around my head.

Some of the soldiers murmured briefly into their walkie-talkies. They spoke German with a Swiss accent.

“The room is clear. Send her in,” said the one closest to the door.

The woman who walked in, carefully climbing over debris with the help of a soldier, had almost the same face as the one I saw in my reflection, with differences that I believed were attributable to age. Her eyes were rimmed with wrinkles and her mouth was a lightly painted red frown. #24MAG47

My heart raced. Fear was there, but vague; mostly I felt curiosity. I knew so much from my induced education, yet everything was new.

As I watched the woman walk closer, I felt the cold black of the induction cycle starting. I panicked as the room, the smoke, the men, and the woman with my face all disappeared, and then it was only the lightning of information—only something was wrong.

When I came to, everything was so cold, a cold that was huge and overwhelming. I was on the floor, two meters from Dr. Kwang’s body. Around me was pinkish water. I was wrapped in a gray towel.

The woman was in front of me, kneeling next to me.

Her frown was now tighter-lipped and her eyes were mournful. She was very beautiful and that made me happy because I thought I might be beautiful like her in time.

“Try not to move,” she said in English.

I opened and closed my mouth, but although I knew how to speak I’d never done it before. The air stung my eyes and I realized that there was pain emanating from my chest.

“You made a sudden movement, I’m not sure why, and you banged on the glass,” she said softly. “One of the men fired his weapon out of surprise, then another out of reaction. You were shot, three times.”

I swallowed. I knew my lungs were filling with blood. I saw a solder pull out a large medical kit. I knew I was going to die.

“I remember when I looked like you,” she whispered. “I was so alive and the world was so new.”

I understood many things all at once. Why Dr. Kwang made me. Why people made laws against it.

The last induction had been the penultimate one.

How cruel that it was just in time to let me understand everything I was losing.

An alarm went off somewhere, a harsh klaxon, and a vaguely feminine digital voice repeated, “Total systemic failure.”

There were shards of glass in my legs and hands.

The cold was fighting against the warmth of the blood gushing out of my chest. It wasn’t fair. It was just as she said: I was so alive and the world was so new. I wanted to tell her to take me out so I could see the sky, the sun, the world for just a minute.

I felt the cycle start again, though it was too soon.

The black was coming to push information into my brain.

The world went dark.

META BY JACK

Bettianne Flanders Jake Slichter, drummer of Semisonic and author of So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star, sat down with me early this evening to discuss how his work with Semisonic affected his creative process. In his words: “It took me a while to figure out that what I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do for work, didn’t necessarily line up.

At open mikes, as a singer/songwriter playing my guitar, I never felt like me, and yet I really wanted to be a songwriter. I worked temporary jobs during the day and recorded songs in my basement at night. I was always self-conscious as a public figure, especially on stage.

Semisonic was an opportunity to do something different. I moved from songwriter to drummer, and that allowed me to take a backseat on stage. The other way hadn’t worked, so this was an opportunity to put the focus elsewhere for a while.

Performing with the band made me so disoriented, freaked out, and scared that I was hanging on for dear life. After ten years touring together, the guys knew I was a bit jittery, but I’m also a quiet guy who doesn’t talk about my feelings a

lot, so they never knew the extent of the anxiety.

When I started with Semisonic, Dan and John had just come off a great deal of professional success with their previous band. They had landed a record deal, received critical acclaim, and had a huge following. I was really playing catch-up, and felt that way until we started having new experiences together that were specific to Semisonic.

Following the release of “Closing Time,” we started the transcontinental touring and that was a really new experience for everyone. It was at that point I started to have fun with it. I was no longer on the defensive. I put myself into the process and became an offensive member of our team. I wasn’t worried about surviving but reaching. I would imagine five-year-old Jake saying, “Hang in there and have a good time!”

During that time we were flying between Minneapolis and Europe every other month, playing sold-out shows in London. Now was my time to write songs, to become a better drummer. I got to thinking that maybe, in the next few years, I’d marry a movie star, have

success on a megastar level, you know?

At that time, I guess I had Springstein’s version of fame in my head: “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king. And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.”

On a flight to London, I had this conversation in my head: “I’m so lucky.

I’m in a band with a big hit song, soldout shows, sitting in business class on a flight to London. I’m so thankful.” Then I thought, “You asshole. It took that to make you thankful?!”

I just did a one-eighty and looked back on where I was. I did an inventory of all the things that I had that weren’t about riding business class: parents, hot and cold water, teachers, mentors, friends.

I got home and wrote fifteen thankyou letters to various people, almost in a panic—some were older folks and so I worried their time was short. I wrote these thank-you letters and sent them out. From that point on I had a slightly different take on things. Everything shifted from “when will I be the next Bono” to “I have it pretty great and I’m just gonna enjoy the ride as long as it goes.”

I still got the opportunity to write

songs and it was the songs that came from my own personal experiences, “El Matador” and “This Will Be My Year,” that helped me understand that great songs come from writing what you know.

Every time I hear those songs, all the feelings I wanted to convey through the music and lyrics, I hear it. The memories are as vivid today as they were when I wrote the songs.

The thing that makes a book compelling is not necessarily the story but how it is told. For me, at least, books simply do not leave the mark on my soul that songs have. I had to reconcile with that but I’m proud of the effort and work that went into the band, and my book.

The main things in my life I would call successes have come from finishing.

Literally finishing. Be a finisher. I have lots of friends with multiple novels they haven’t sold, but they have to be proud of being finishers because there is nothing better. You’ve succeeded when you’ve managed to cultivate a ruthless trust in your own intuition.

TRANS

MEDIA CHAIN

One of the many wonderful things about twenty-four is the wide variety of artists gathered together in this process. Then, of course, we are cooped up in an apartment pressure cooker and told to create.

The transmedia chain originated in issue two, where we started with a piece of music that was used to inspire a photograph that in turn inspired a story and so on. We were lucky, by happenstance or by accident, that as the chain extended it was filled with variety and contrast. It was excellent.

Ah, but failure. Is it possible or even advisable to attempt to recreate the success of the first time? Midway through the issue three chain, I thought perhaps things had become too ordered and similar. Maybe this time the chain wouldn’t work and we would fail. Which, apropos though it might be, was not a particularly appealing fate.

Variety and contrast—the clear differences in field and style and aesthetic—were the things I was hoping to find and exploit through the transmedia chain.

At the end? I think it worked.

—Casey Middaugh

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

Semisonic, “Closing Time”

The importance of the creative process is that it is a process, a journey through the world with a very specific set of eyes—your own. Treasure the gift that is creation. Value the change it brings into your life.

Creativity is something within every one of us. Find your inner four-year-old and let them come out to play.

Bettianne

BEN

This piece of the chain is a video. Watch it at twentyfourmagazine.com/issue-three

#24MAG53

“Are you almost done?” you shout from the road.

I understand your impatience. We left late, the wedding starts at seven on the dot, and how often does your sister get married? (Well, twice, at least, but we don’t mention that). But leaving late meant that we had to get breakfast on the road, and no stops for rest.

Can I help it that I have a small bladder? Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten the grande, but I was driving and I couldn’t afford to get sleepy and well, here we are.

“In a minute, honey,” I say, squatting behind some yellow brush. There’s no one on the desert highway— we haven’t even seen another car for two hours— but you know how I am about peeing in front of strangers.

Heck, we’ve been living together for two years now and I still scream at you if you walk in on me in the morning.

But if I hadn’t stopped the car here, and insisted I had to walk at least thirty feet from the road, and found this shrub to provide me a modicum of privacy, then I never would have seen the glint of silver in brush, a shiny bit of metal that blinds me at first.

I finish my business, zip up, then reach into the brush. I pull out a silver balloon, with a little string attached. And I follow the string to a piece of cardboard, on which a child has written in silver pen: HELLO I AM SAM I AM SEVEN AND 3/4 I HAVE A DAD AND A MOM AND A BROTHER AND ANOTHER BROTHER I HAVE A BUNNY NAMED FLOPEARS I AM IN 1 GRADE WHICH IS NOT AS FUN AS KINDERGARDEN BUT DAD SAYS IT GETS BETTER DAD SAYS NOBODY DIES AS LONG AS WE REMEMBER THEM SO I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER ME

I read the note three times. I wonder what prompted Sam to write to strangers, to make sure he or maybe she was remembered. I try to remember if I knew I was going to die when I was seven. I wonder how long ago Sam wrote this, and if Sam is still alive. I think about tracking Sam down and telling him I remember him and love him too.

I think about the odds. This balloon flew into the world and landed in the middle of the desert where no one would have found it had someone not drunk too much coffee when someone else’s sister was in a hurry to get married again. I snap the note from the balloon and take it with me.

Back at the car, your annoyed expression melts away when you see me. “Are you okay?” you ask, grabbing my shoulder.

“You’ll remember me, right?” I ask. “If I die, when I’m gone, you’ll remember me?”

You throw your arm around me and pull me into you. I bury my face in your neck and drink in your scent. You squeeze me tight and whisper in my ear, “Of course I’ll remember you. I think about you every day and I always will. You are part of me and I will always be with you.”

When we pull apart I realize I have stained your shoulder with tears, and you’ve done the same to mine, but we are smiling, and I realize we are giggling. We get back into the car, and as I hit the gas, you say, “You think the weirdest things when you pee.”

STEVEN

JOHANNA

CASEY Clyde wasn’t entirely sure what his Tuesday was going to hold. The wind was blowing from the south and that reminded him of his family. He’d left them years ago to join the circus and hadn’t been back to visit since.

He missed his brother most of all. Simon, at least, had been kind and treated him with indifference borne of love and familiarity.

The wind ruffled the tufts of Clyde’s ears and he turned back to the caravan.

The room he shared with the performing dogs was unpleasant at any time, but never more so than when Clyde was filled with homesickness. Betty, an elderly dog dressed as a cheerleader for comedic effect, was having some bladder issues. Gerald and Fido were fighting again and all Clyde wanted was some peace and quiet.

The phone rang. Clyde wearily picked his way across the stained carpet to answer.

“Hello?”

“Clyde? Is that you? Is that really you?”

Clyde choked back a sob. It couldn’t be... it couldn’t.

“Clyde... It took me a heck of a long time to track you down. I’ve got news, buddy! Um... this is kind of tricky to say. But... well, I wanted you to be the first to know since you’ve always inspired me so much. Taking those tufts of yours and really, you know, making something of them! Well... I’m going to clown school.”

Clyde couldn’t stop the grin growing across his face.

Tuesday was going to be just fine. Just fine.

#24MAG55

JOHN/JOHANNA

IAN/JOHANNA

#24MAG57

To the editor: I am heartened by the care with which the article “It’s Good to Be Young” in your August issue portrays the lives of pregnant teenagers, neither glossing over their difficulties nor downplaying their joys for the sake of drama. Such cautious, thorough, and balanced journalism is all too rare these days. I hope you will bring similar thoughtfulness to your coverage of other controversial issues.

ROSE

Kate Fernhop New York City

GARNET

END OF TRANDMEDIA CHAIN

TWENTY-FOUR MAGAZINE

59

GARNET BURKE

60

TWENTY-FOUR MAGAZINE

THANKS

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