Love In The Time Of ctrl+alt+del by Crows Nest Zine

CROWS NEST Crows Nest Zine One

Love In The Time Of

ctrl+alt+delete

Contents editors Eloise Hendy @EloiseHendy

Figgy Guyver @FiggyGuyver

contributors Nolwenn Davies Colm Gleeson Figgy Guyver Eloise Hendy Nikoletta Majewska Fred Spoilar Rowan Stevens Eleanor Ann Ward crowsnestzine.tumblr.com facebook.com/crowsnestzine

COVER ARTWORK: Figgy Guyver 2 Crows Nest

hen we started talking about our first edition of Crows Nest, every walk down the aisle ended in coming face to face with glassy-eyed animals, clutching stuffed red hearts to their stuffed honeypot bellies. Every trip to buy milk became a stickily sentimental, candyfloss Clinton cards moment. Love was all around us. But with every shop surface decked in exhausted messages of romance, instead of feeling the warm Richard Curtis glow, we began to question what love really means in the modern world. When we only send cards on Valentines Day, but regularly swipe right, do the clichés of the past still stand? Love in the Time of Cholera saw love letters exchanged for half a century. Is it too cynical to think that Generation Y, in the time of control and delete, expect a reply in half a second? What do we talk about when we talk about love? In this first issue we want to explore these questions. Love poems have transformed as many times as The Kiss; since photography began we’ve been pointing the lens at lovers. From modern marriage to toilet cubicles, this edition peels back the kitsch wrapping to peer at the state of love in the digital age. What is love? Crows Nest doesn’t know, but we offer you these fragments.

the editors

March

Follower, I

married

him.

ittle girls are known to dress up in their mother’s shoes, smear make-up on their faces in comic, clownish imitations of everyday feminine facial masks, and play make believe marriage. The cutie-pie image of an angel-faced child in mock up wedding veil is almost as familiar as tiny toes inside stilettos. But am I being old fashioned? Sure, Kinder eggs may now be divided into pink and blue (pony and racing car innards respectively) but haven’t we moved on from boys and stick-swords and five year old girls with full wedding day plans? Isn’t the whole idea of fairy-tale marriage a bit old hat? In most of the Western world, arranged marriages, or relationships forged for familial economic or social advantage, have been rejected. The secular, democratic age is the also the age of romantic love, of unions based on pure passion and feeling. Yet, despite strict marriage rules being abandoned, and having more freedom to co-habit, divorce, or flit from one

union to the next, than ever before, the idea of marriage is still the overwhelming narrative for our understandings of love and commitment. Even more so than thirty years ago, when many of the status-quo bashing students of the 80s declined to walk up the aisle, the blushing bride is holding sway over the collective psyche. ‘Wedding inspo’ rivals ‘fitness inspo’ for newsfeed clogging dominance; Gypsy Weddings rules the television schedules; Kimye’s four-day-photoshopped wedding shoot reigns over Instagram. Kate Middleton. Why, in the days when divorce rates in the UK edge towards half of all marriages, are our pop culture queens slightly skewed Disney princesses? Why did Kim and Kanye’s kiss in front of ivory flowers garner 2.4 million likes? Why did Beyoncé call her most recent tour Mrs Carter? Why did rumours of trouble in the Carter world cause gossip columns tidal waves of concern? Perhaps most importantly, why do prominent women reliably get interrogated over when they will get hitched, as if the information was some kind of state secret? Maybe its because, at whatever level, most of us love what weddings are supposedly all about. We like parties and gossip and a bit of glitz, all of which weddings supply. The clothes, March

the décor, the embarrassing speeches and dancing, the idea of a happy ending. It is not that surprising that photos of Kate Moss, or Angelina Jolie, or Amal Alamuddin, which routinely sell for thousands, are worth ten-fold to magazine editors when they are decked out in designer wedding garb. And yet. The dominance of wedding and marriage narratives in our culture does not seem to be just a frothy smile at pretty people in pretty clothes. For it is not just the big day that preoccupies us, but also the run-up and the aftermath. It is not just the blushing bride, but also the fiancé and the spouse that fill column inches. Benedict Cumberbatch’s announced nuptials, Brangelina working together, Johnny Depp and George Clooney finally heading to the altar, Gwyneth and Chris consciously uncoupling, Jennifer Aniston There is the assumption that, as either spurned and jealous ex-lover or desunless you’ve perate wannabe bride. ‘levelled up’ and While it is overwhelmcoupled up, you ingly focused on the female camp, this obare firmly in the session is not entirely dating game gender specified, and ‘obsession’ is accurate. From childhood, certainly through adolescence, we are fed with the idea of love. Adulthood and contented happiness have become synonymous with coupledom. The ‘singleton’ may be portrayed as the wild and free one of the friendship group, the one unhampered by couples bickering, cheating and commitment fears, the one able to go out all hours and regale others with one-night stand stories. Yet, there lurks under these notions the prevailing idea of ‘searching’. There is the assumption that, unless you’ve ‘levelled up’ and coupled up, you are firmly in the dating game. All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely Players, or something.

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The modern age of casual flings and no-strings attachments, of Tinder and Grindr and mass online dating, hasn’t made marriage or monogamy things of the fairytale or fifties-housewife past, because we are still gorging ourselves on these narratives. We want it all - the fun and the freedom, and the promise of a soulmate Prince Charming or Cinderella at the eventual stroke of midnight. We want infinite choice from an eternity of options, only a mouse-click away, while also being assured that we are one-of-a-kind. One-of-a-kind that is conveniently also someone’s ‘other half’. Why can’t we be ‘complete’ until paired up? Loneliness is scary. The prospect of ‘being left on the shelf’ is not a nice one. But that is partly because we have constructed singledom, or serial dating, or polygamy, as social oddities. We have made our own bogeyman fears, by casting such an all-encompassing angelic glow on marital ‘bliss’. It is a conservative and restrictive story we are telling ourselves, imagining it’s escapism. We have more options than ever before; the world is getting smaller by the day. Rather than attempting to fit ourselves into wedding-gift boxes, maybe we should be questioning why the gift-wrap still holds so much allure. Maybe it’s time to blow the bloody doors off.

WORDS: Eloise Hendy ILLUSTRATIONS: Figgy Guyver ARTWORK: Rowan Stevens

March

the things you do to

usical phrases, particular patterns of notes, are sometimes like sentences. Think of Jimi Hendrix, particularly that solo in ‘Voodoo Child’ - it’s become a bit of a platitude to say that Hendrix’s guitar ‘speaks’. There’s a bit in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being that sticks in my mind for mentioning this idea. Tomas and Tereza are brought together by a musical phrase taken from the last movement of Beethoven’s last quartet (bear with me). The dominant motifs in the work are based around the two phrases ‘Muss es sein?’ (Must it be?) and ‘Es muss sein!’ (It must be!). The phrases are ‘spoken’ first by the violins, and then recur and are echoed by other instruments throughout the piece. When I first came across this idea in Kundera’s novel, and then listened to the quartet, I remember wondering, even as a violinist myself, how the pattern of notes could signify those particular words. If

8 Crows Nest

fall in love you listen to it, knowing the verbal phrase that stands behind the musical phrase, it all makes much more sense. This is something that happens all the time in contemporary music, albeit in quite a different way. Instrumentals are sampled, extracted from their original source and transplanted into new and unfamiliar surroundings. At some point, vocals are added, and inevitably lyrics. The instrumental sample abruptly becomes associated with a set of words, a linguistic phrase. Gap Magione’s ‘Diana in the Autumn Wind’ might sound familiar to anyone who has ‘whosampled.com’ in their internet history, but probably won’t to anyone else. But 37 seconds

in to the track, you find the famous ‘fall in love’ sample, a little musical phrase that has been used first by Slum Village, then Madlib, Chance the Rapper, Flying Lotus, BadBadNotGood, just to name a few. The musical phrase first acquired the words that have now become synonymous There’s a sort with the musical proof retrospective gression back in 2000 thanks to Slum Village. rearrangement Once you’ve heard their of the past version, it becomes going on here” almost impossible to dissociate the musical phrase with the linguistic one; ‘the things you do to fall in love’ becomes part of the progression of notes. If you go back to Gap Magione’s instrumental original after listening to all the sampled versions, it is irreversibly changed. Love moves in mysterious ways. Slum Village, and all the artists who have since sampled ‘fall in love’, have recreated the listening experience

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of Gap Magione’s original. Like rewriting a little moment in music history from the present day, there’s a sort of retrospective rearrangement of the past going on here. Sampling puts various musical genres into dialogue. Cut, spliced and reassembled, you might find a pastiche of jazz, funk, disco even ‘elevator music’, all in one track that is classified by Spotify as ‘hip hop’. No one genre is left untouched in the process. In 1991 the bass line of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ found an unexpected home. Borrowing one of the most famous riffs of all time, the hip hop group from Queens, A Tribe Called Quest, sampled the bass line in their single ‘Can I Kick It?’, which fast become one of the most famous tracks in hip hop history. Hearing Lou Reed’s song now is quite a different experience. As the bass plays its opening riff, you wait, expecting a particular drum beat that never arrives.

WORDS: Figgy Guvyer PHOTOS: Nolwenn Davies

March

In June It Would Be Bright By Now “Writers are liars” – Erasmus Fry, in conversation, 6 May 1986.

I would suffer the lacerations of these sunsets, Endure the magma pupil’s ethereal torch, Corrosion of the whirlwind sea-wind’s lash; The well-wrought fences’ tangled knot of roots Ripped from the jealous, grasping soil To leave me suture-less and split For this view – this hand – this kiss: For an ounce of pain as beautiful as this. But enough of that. It’s dark. You’re asleep. The air is warm with whispers, The night is sweet, And here I lie: Unable to find a single honest word.

WORDS: Colm Gleeson PHOTOS: Nolwenn Davies March 11

One for s o r r o w

12 Crows Nest

ARTWORK: Eleanor Ann Ward March

Breath caught in chests buried overseas Reaching out to empty points Arms breadth stretched to breaking point Only pointing to pointed places Smooth out these stabbing vacancies Fill the indented hollow The ghost memory of your shape I press my nose against black mirror panes Chilled eskimo kiss Cheek to almost cheek Skin away from skin Fingertips graze past places Saved like scrapbook bruises I try to remember how your hand feels in mine Hands unfolded Unfulfilled until intertwined Pulled to pieces by heart strings Wrapped around fingers faraway Sleepless until seen again

Distance

Sleepless until waking to heaven faced mornings Limbs entangled in ideal knots Long dreamed of nights breaking onto daytime dreams Nectar nothings sugar coat famished days Sweet heart flutters Kaleidoscope hues erase ashen afternoons Electrocutions banish faded greys Supine spine tingles Usher in the comic relief To mundane prosaic book ends The pavement cracked in-betweens The go-between between us The mediating skies Over irregular decline and rise Touchdown lows and take off highs Incessant to and fro I capture you in photographs Flat frames to act as cages Dim reflections of vivid traces Memento tokens waiting To be made shadows by your face

WORDS: Eloise Hendy 14 Crows Nest

remember how your grandfather lifted you, child, and how his young eyes beckoned to miracles for it was a promiseful world, hup-cha up and around how flyingly he would pilot you, safely swooping arms’ orbits oh when I am king dilly dilly a royal carriage you sparkling dew shall be green life ahead

When she told me she was happy, I stopped Raised a hand to cover my face with a feigned cough Thought: ‘Does she not know that happiness is where we are not? that we have tottered, razor-walking, and fallen into a lukewarm bath? that love means variously: Birthday head, half-price (Saint) Valentine’s chocolate, a gilded dream on movie screens, always thinking of them when you masturbate, joined-at-the-waist financial parnership, and sterile cups of tea? the Second Coming an old, exhausted favourite joke, the Apocalypse a daydreamed headline: BOY SLAYS ZOMBIE ROYAL FAMILY WITH 12-GAUGE SHOTGUN! TRAPPED IN A NUCLEAR BUNKER WITH BARBRA STREISAND! that death is coming and you might just thank it? i tried to smile and hid under the blanket. WORDS:

Fred

Spoliar

ILLUSTRATION: Figgy Guyver March

In Clutch

Your eyelids rest against each other, skin barely filming the curve. Your lips part â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a glacial shift of slackening jaw and tilting chin. Your breath is delicate and intricate as cobwebs, gentle piston of your soul that pulses, pulls, drawing the air closer like a blanket over our shoulders. I listen to you as we move and you rise like steam.

WORDS: Colm Gleeson PHOTOS: Nolwenn Davies 16 Crows Nest

Resting Place can i curl up under your collar bone in that hollow place just beneath the ink of your tattoo can i crawl into your nooks and be cradled held tight in the crook of your heart it is cold out here the air scrapes, slices whistles through skin can i just rest my head for a while in between your angel wings they could be blades if you turned me the sharp side but keep them briefly blunted let me sleep let me lay my body down

on your arm i am weary of travelling the road is not smooth, i am sore can i wrap myself round the nape of your neck put my crown up close to yours can i cling on to you until daybreak the darkness reaches out to my core can i hold on to your littlest finger make your hairline my ceiling and footprint my floor can i hang on your lips can i unlock your hands let me need you let me stay here til dawn WORDS

ARTWORK: Eloise Hendy March

Post-Coital Tristesse

PHOTOS: 18 Crows Nest

Nikoletta

Majewska

Nikkoletta??

March

ARTWORK: Rowan Stevens 20 Crows Nest

Her

hat does love look like? What should it look like? Who gets to decide? Her is described as a love story, and it opens with a declaration of eternal love, spoken from the lips of a Joaquin Pheonix apparently drained of all his usual rugged, brooding quality. The world is coloured dreamy pastel shades. Yet this fluffy, candyfloss feel, conjuring every Valentines Day greeting card, chocolate box message and romantic movie closing-scene, is a sugar coating on a film that is far from cliché. The initial comforting embrace of the familiar is illusory – despite the hazy, Instagram filter cinematography, Spike Jonze’s love story is, at most, bittersweet. It is as much a science-fiction contemplation of technology as it is a romance; it is as much about loneliness as love. But then, maybe this is ultimately true of all romantic narratives, which promise to welcome lost souls into the land of happy-ever-after. Perhaps we just choose to remain with the sugary layer over our eyes. Phoenix’s profession of undying love is not his own, nor is it unique. His character Theodore Twombly composes hundreds similar every day, at his office desk, for his heavily ironic office job at ‘BeautifulHandmadLetters.com’. He finds words for those

who can’t, adding ‘personal’ touches for people he will never meet. This pastel version of LA is clearly a deeply sentimental society, which eagerly outsources love. Twombly is a thoroughly postmodern urban man. Post-divorce, living alone in one of the city’s many sleek, minimal apartments, in one of many high rise buildings, he checks his emails on his commute from work and plays video games late at night. The personal touches he adds for others do not seem to have been extended to himself: his flat is as sterile as an Ikea showroom. Jonze and Pheonix have created a perfect portrayal of contemporary loneliness. In an overpopulated city, Twombly is isolated. All our fears about conversations becoming mere connections, our lives increasingly becoming a breathing hybrid of Facebook and LinkedIn, with our experiences filtered through blue-light screens, are condensed in Twombly’s solitary existence. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Jonze and the central relaPheonix have tionship between created a Twombly and his husky-voiced perfect personal comportrayal of puter system, Sacontemporary mantha, is that it never strikes as loneliness too far-fetched. This is Siri a few upgrades down the line, a Turing tested disembodied entity that reads emails, reminds of appointments and also has the capacity to think independently. For Theodore, Samantha is an ideal blend of secretary, friend, lover and therapist; she fills all the gaps his self-contained life has left gaping. They speak through an almost hidden earpiece – on the beach, at a fair, lying down in bed at night. Theodore opens up his wounds from his broken marriage and they begin to heal. Is this love?

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March

The clever collaging of flashback and current moment paints a poignant contrast between Theodore’s relationships. His marriage, before it soured, is all morning cuddles and crisp white sheets, while his rose-tinted days with Samantha are necessarily missing any physicality. Yet even this does not make the love story unbelievable, rather it gives it a deeper poignant resonance. In the days of long distance loves and Skype relationships, the lack of physical touch is emotionally touching. Under candyfloss coloured skies we are called to question how we relate to people, and what ‘people’ really are. Is this love? Is this just the idea of love?

Technology is increasingly obliterating boundaries. We are accessible in ways unimagined even a single decade ago. Cybersex, sexting, even ‘teledildonics’ are terms entering our everyday language. Is this good or bad? Is there any way we can know, and should we even try to work it out? Who decides? Are we numbing ourselves to and shunning ‘real’ connections in favour of virtual worlds? Perhaps. Yet it seems that, despite technology developing at a frantic pace, whatever the changes or upgrades, we are still searching for ways to share our lives, to be less alone.

WORDS:

Eloise

Hendy

Eternal Sunshine

here’s a certain tyrannical power, a reckless abandonment, in emptying your computer trash. ‘Are you sure you want to permanently erase the items in the Trash?’ Your computer asks. Remember, ‘you can’t undo this action’. Whenever I coolly hit ‘OK’, I imagine myself as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Except the contents of her trash are not screen-shots-that-crowd-your-desktop, or drafts of emails you never sent, her trash is Joel, an ex-boyfriend, but also her kind-of-soulmate who she drags and drops into the trash, and permanently erases from her memory.

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The setting is New York, the year 2004, and the culprit is Lacuna inc., a ‘mind erasure’ company that comes into your home, wires up your brain and removes the unwanted memory while you sleep. They then send out a perfunctory message to friends and relatives on what looks like a chillingly subverted wedding invitation: ‘Clementine Kruczynski has had Joel Barish erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to her again. Thank you.’

A friend of mine recently starred in a play that included the line ‘you know how sometimes dreams have really good cinematography?’. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind feels just like that. It’s a dream you had a couple of weeks ago where perspectives were twisted, gravity slightly defied and, in that moment just before you woke up, things spiraled into a wild cadenza of flashing memories and synesthetic images. The lighting in the film recalls the spotlights, LED strips and bare tungsten bulbs that might illuminate nocturnal dreams. Things are never quite right; you feel anesthetized, or as if you’re hallucinating.

ing like the memory isn’t theirs, facts can be recalled but emotions dwindle, the memory becomes like an observation. It’s not being used outside of PTSD yet, but you can see how the drug could be used to let you fall out of unrequited love, or a destructive relationship. There’s a shop in Edinburgh called Crew Mind Altering, which I’ve never actually been inside but has posters tacked to the windows asking questions like ‘have you ever wanted to modify your mind?’. I always think of the building as the real Lacuna Inc.; this, worryingly, might not be a daydream fiction. But why shouldn’t we The lighthave control over ing recalls the this sort of thing? spotlights, LED We’re living through a decade strips and bare in which we’re tungsten bulbs finally coming to that might illu- terms with the minate noctur- medical side of mental health. nal dreams Regulating emotion with drugs can be beneficial. So isn’t the next step picking and choosing what you have stored in your brain, which memories you decide to retain? Well no, because most fundamentally, memories aren’t just your own, they’re shared. If we learn anything from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it’s that erasing a memory comes with a host of complications. Relationships are tangled up in an enormous web of interconnecting memories and associations which technology can’t yet be trusted with.

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Eternal Sunshine, and Lacuna Inc. isn’t all sci-fi far-fetched fantasy. Neuroscientists are already using a memory-altering drug called propranolol on PTSD suffers to lessen the emotional distress associated with certain events. Patients are given the drug before they are asked to recall the particular distressing memory by writing a narrative of the events. Over the course of a few weeks of treatment, the memory loses its emotional impact. Patients report feel-

WORDS:

Figgy

Guyver March

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Behind

closed doors... T

he ability to communicate is often seen as what divides humanity from the animal kingdom. Language is a more tightly held possession than the ability to make fire – without it we are lost and isolated. Our thoughts and feelings might make us human, but without means of expression our emotions and rationality are useless. Without words we are powerless, trapped in a solipsistic, inaccessible world. Without words we become babies, or beasts. Language is what elevates our base, bodily natures to something higher. Entry to language is entry to human society. Even without getting theoretically technical, in a post-Saussure age we all know language is inescapable. So maybe it is not surprising that when we are forced to remember our affinity to the animals we so resolutely define ourselves against, we often strain against the bit with words. When we are forced to surrender our mind’s control of our bodies, and let our innards rule, we get more than a little uncomfortable. Shave the legs, hide the nipples, tame the lust, blame farts on the dog. Don’t make eye contact at the urinals and lock the door when you shit. It is the head and the heart that get priority in our schemes of hu-

manity, rather than the bladder and bowels. So, when better to scrawl your name, to defend your humanity, than when you’re breaking the body taboo, and letting your bowels momentarily take charge? Public toilets are interesting spaces. The most private acts, in the public sphere; necessary yet not readily discussed. Places of pause, where the public face briefly slips. Take a piss, wash hands, re-apply make up. Re-enter the outside world. They are our united unmentionable-in-polite-society zones. Which makes the graffiti in them an interesting breed. It is a special kind of self-affirming graffiti, with its own distinct label; ‘latrinalia’ has been subject to scrutiny, and not just from drunk ladies making bathroom friends (the toilet socialising taboo only falters when inhibitions are already noticeably lowered). What is striking is that, in this pause-place, this non-place of daily dirty deeds, the most common graffiti reaches to the heart or the head. What are you almost guaranteed to see in bathroom stalls saturated in scrawls? Lofty quotes and bawdy jokes. ‘Kate loves James’ and a half-remembered Oscar Wilde quote. Mash-ups of high and low, thoughts and feelings, to prove we are more than beasts. We mark our territory through carved letters and ink. I was here. I am. At our most vulnerable moments, when we are most exposed, most grotesquely comic, most beastly, we call out from our inaccessible worlds. I was here. Is it surprising that countless doors bear Wilde’s words? “We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

WORDS:

Eloise

Hendy

March

Mating Habits during my attempt on this hotmilk pretense of coffee someone has placed beside me his pockmarked girlfriend and between us his sallow interceptive self. they are eating beans and I am reading about the not less repulsive red sputum of Beckettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s darling mother? cousin and yes it is yes the sky is a shroud. library cafĂŠ 20/1/15 12:30-1:30 pm

ARTWORK: Eleanor Ann Ward WORDS: Fred Spoliar 26 Crows Nest

Thank you to Carrie Alderton, Mary Burgess, Rebecca Dickson, Henrietta Gill, Patrick Guyver, Rebecca Guyver, Holly Hartley, David Hendy, Morgan Hendy, James Ireland, Katy Kehoe, Hugo Lau, Emma Lawson, Sam Prance, Frances Roe, Mike Roy, Heather Scouler, Susanne Shoemaker, Fred Spoliar, Colm Summers, Rowan Stevens, and Eleanor Ward. This edition would not be possible without your help and support. Thank you.

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