Ginger

Ginger Networked feminism

Autumn 2015

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Mission

Ginger maps networks of creative people. In keeping with the logic of a network, all of the contributors to this issue were referred by an editor or contributor from a previous issue. As a feminist publication, we are committed to supporting the work of self-identified women and queer/trans/gender non-conforming individuals and strive to share the experiences and distinctive voices of those who identify as such. Our goal is to produce a zine with a diverse range of forms, content, and viewpoints.

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Issue NO 2 contributors Dorotea Mendoza .... Page 06 Hannah Rawe .... Page 08 Jolene Lupo .... Page 12 Sofia Pont茅n .... Page 17 Rachel Wallach .... Page 20 Michaela Rife .... Page 23 Natalie Girsberger .... Page 28 Amanda L贸pez-Kurtz .... Page 30 Wolfgang Schaffer .... Page 34 Liana Imam .... Page 37 Jennifer Weiss .... Page 38 Katharine Perko .... Page 41 Maria R. Baab .... Page 42 Sonya Derman .... Page 44

Co-founders E d i tor

Markee Speyer D e si gn e r

Jacqueline Cantu On the cover: The Medium (2010), digital photograph by Jolene Lupo

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Dorotea Mendoza Long Distance

Everything Emporium wants payment. Threatening to take us to court. The first of that day’s text messages from the Philippines came at half past seven.

It was from Ligaya’s 16-year-old brother. Ligaya, a live-in domestic in New York City, carried out her morning tasks. She made breakfast, fed her twoyear old charge, and took Nickel, the blonde Cocker Spaniel, out for its morning walk before the bosses leave for their appointments.

Inside the elevator, the dog wagging its tail against her calf, Ligaya replied to the text, Told you not to shop on credit. She nodded good morning to the building doorman. His wine-colored uniform was a size too small and smelled like carpet cleaner.

While Ligaya bent down to pick-up the dog’s droppings, a second text came. Also P950 for college entrance exam.

Ligaya tied the waste bag and threw it in a trash bin where it topped a parfait of newspapers, empty paper cups and crumpled tinfoil. She texted back, Will send all you need today.

The Bank of Philippine Islands remittance center was a small three-desk office on East 53rd Street. Inside, someone was eating fried mackerel and rice with shrimp paste. No one in the cramped space minded the briny odor. Nowhere to sit, Ligaya maneuvered the stroller toward the back. She waited her turn, standing against the wall between the water cooler and a photocopier. There were 11 people ahead of Ligaya. Usually she would be the first in line. She worked and lived six short blocks away. She blamed her lateness on the new Maclaren Techno buggy, the contraptions and accessories she had to unwrap, assemble and attach—the adjustable five-point harness, mesh shopping basket, compact umbrella fold, water-resistant hood, shoulder pads, head hugger,

footmuff, seat liner, deluxe organizer, and a pannier.

Her bosses had insisted that she use these things immediately, get their money’s worth.

Back at the apartment, the tot and dog in their respective play pens, Ligaya texted her brother, Money in. Get from bank first thing in the morning. Pay store at once.

She took money. This message from the brother came at eight in the evening. Morning in the Philippines. Ligaya’s bosses were at a dinner gala. The she was Ligaya’s 18-year old sister. She had taken money before, gambled it. Twice she doubled the money.

Her contribution to the household, she had argued.

Another text from the brother, 4 men banged on door, looking for her. Men threatened papa. Ma losing it.

Ligaya dialed her sister’s mobile. All circuits busy.

She texted her, Where r u?!? No answer. She tried her brother’s mobile. All circuits busy. She tried the home number, made sure she pressed the long distance access, country and city codes. 011 62 3... All circuits busy. She texted the brother, ??? For more than an hour Ligaya tried to telephone and could not get through. No response to her texts.

Ligaya packed a shoulder bag, stuffed her passport and wallet in her purse. She placed diapers and snacks inside the stroller back handle organizer; in the pannier, dog food, bottled water and metal dish.

Ligaya handed the stroller over to the doorman, along with the dog and the two-year old. “I left a note upstairs,” Ligaya explained. “Please tell Mr. and Mrs. —.” She was out the door before the doorman could say anything.

She got a taxi on 3rd Avenue. Half in, she said, “Kennedy Airport, please.” The End

Dorotea Mendoza was born in the Philippines and grew up in New York City. Find her on the Web at doroteamendoza.wordpress.com.

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Hannah Rawe Lost&Find

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Lost Objects

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Brass objects

Sculpted objects

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Lost&Find stand at Giti Fashion in Park Slope. Photos by Ari Joseph

Hannah Rawe lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to sculpting lost objects, she has done illustrations for posters, poetry and children’s literature. She graduated with a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2007. She works as a sculptor at the American Museum of Natural History, and as a fabricator of various other props for the photo and commercial industry.

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Jolene Lupo Portrait of a Magician (2015)

Albumen silver prints consist of silver nitrate solution on albumen-coated paper, a wet collodion format of photography dating back to 1850. The analog process requires patience and technical knowledge not inherent to digital photography.

Here, we have digitally reproduced promotional images for Jason Suran’s sèance show, which will be performed in the same building in which Lupo shot the photographs.

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The Stopped Pulse 4” x 5.5” (2015)

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Jason Suran, Magician 4” x 5.5” (2015)

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The Séance 4” x 5.5” (2015) Jolene Lupo is a photographer and Manager of the Penumbra Tintype Studio in Manhattan. She specializes in the wet plate collodion process. www.jolenelupo.com

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Sofia Pontén Have a Body—Go to the Beach

To have a body is to be disconnected.

To have a conscience is to employ fantasy.

We dream about being connected to the universe so we apply human qualities and concocted meaning onto planets and stars. As an astrologer, I do this for a living.

We dream about being connected to computers (i.e. each other?) so we apply a way of thinking about our brains as computers. We become plus and minus, or substances and deficiencies. I wish we would stop talking about our bodies and our brains as machines.

“Did you know you can trick your body to feel happy by smiling?”

Maybe we want to be robots, programmed, manageable. We know it would fit the economy better.

“Organic” is for plants, veggies and fruit. T-shirts and wine. To put in and on our scientific bodies.

I used to think of my PMDD as a way to understand how I work. Now I’m trying to see it as an outcome of how a neoliberal capitalistic society built on patriarchy clashes with being a female-bodied person.

Why do I need to be medicated and written lengthy articles about where the word “monster” pops up more often than in 90s horror movies? Why not society.

I used to see astrology as a way to talk about differences in personalities and open people up to dialogue about themselves. Now I see it as a muchneeded place to breathe for young girls in a machine of “fix yourself”.

They not only want to know what the stars have in store for them. They want to know in what constellation they can be themselves.

“It will be good for your personal brand,” they told me. The word “brand” in Swedish means “conflagration”. I really hope that’s what they meant.

“Number one listicle: 1 cool way to trick your brain (and get clicks)” In the shop of stars we discuss spring, summer, fall and new year. Each season a new flavor.

Each season a new goal. I’ve never used the word “career” in my horoscopes even once.

Sörfjärden, Gnarp, Sweden, early 1980’s

In progressive Sweden, where women in hijabs drive busses and you don’t have to declare personal bankruptcy when you get sick, the teen magazine I

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work for, an equivalent of Seventeen, writes: “How to get the perfect beach body! Step one: Have a body.

Step two: go to the beach.”

I see a vast sea of beings sharing experiences but not knowing that they do. In solitude, being with your body as the only other body. To be the only body at the beach.

Have a body - go to the beach.

And if I have a body I go to the beach. When I can. If I can. As I can.

The enchanted beach. On the deserted hills of an island off the Bali coast, not yet exploited by tourism, kids drive their motorcycles on dirt roads for miles to take pictures of themselves at the beach. Get off the motorcycle, go down to the water, stand by the water, take pictures, go home. What is going to the beach anyway?

An ultimate western luxury. The sign of vacation.

Not popular until the industrial age, when a tan no longer meant “worker in the fields” and shutting eyes at the beach no longer meant homelessness.

Have a rich, wealthy, proportional body. Go to the beach.

Alone with your body at the beach, you and I keep photographing it. Your body is still in the technological proximity of other bodies. Constellations of bodies on the beach of internet. ”In solitude with your body” could be the title of a great book on American health care. My teeth hurt and I do pseudo-surgery on myself with a toothpick.

Who can afford to see a dentist? I have a body – it’s all I have. My beach is my bathroom. Ain’t got no beach.

I go to a New York emergency room just once. I bare my breasts and quickly regret it. For a simple inflammation they hook me up to an IV of antibiotics and want to submit me over night. ”We have to cut you

The beaches of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, known from history and from my childhood, provide water as clear and turquoise as the soul.

These are shores where fortress Europe is now built, built on bodies. Built on constellations of bodies. A shimmering promise of a sunrise on a new continent, swept away by overcrowded boats and drowning.

Order a frappe and snack on olives. You are what you eat.

Eat your body.

And my mind? In what beachlike landscape of dunes and blues is there a mental peace as great. On the outskirts of consciousness, where am I supposed to go?

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Swedish teen magazine VeckoRevyn’s Instagram, July 2015: “Step by step guide: How to get the perfect beach body! 1. Have a body 2. Go to the beach”

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up” – I have a cut-able body – ”or it will get worse”.

I sign the papers that I’m not following their advice and leave the hospital against their will. My body is not for you to squeeze and cut. It doesn’t get worse.

“Trick your body to heal – eat meat” Does your flesh heal well? In Swedish the word läkkött (healing flesh) is nothing unusual. It refers to how well your organic tissue heals. Do you have good läkkött, or bad läkkött. The healing flesh of your celestial body on the shore of an ocean full of refugees. The healing flesh as you enter a crowded boat in the hopes of surviving. Guarded by heavenly bodies on a heavenly vault spread thin over a night of slim chances.

Ain’t got no beach. Vehicles of souls moving around endlessly, roaming streets and beaches, destined and unsure of where to go. Have a destiny – go to the beach. There’s a blackout in the tiny tourist village on the coast of Croatia. We lie on the beach, looking at stars. I whisper secret messages to them as they twinkle, these heavenly bodies. These heavenly teenagers.

All these suns shining on uncountable beaches all over the universe. Libra is the one sign without a body. A heavenly body to comfort you on life’s lonely beach. The one sign balancing justice and negotiating. A sun bed for the day is €10. €15 plus umbrella. You can ask your astrologer for the week’s forecast.

Your body is not your problem. Your brain is not your problem. The clash of virtues they individually are allegedly trying to battle – maybe.

A constellation of tired bodies at the beach. Filled to the brim with vitamin D. Beach your body. Wash it off and clear your mind.

You and your one organic machine. You and your knight in shining armor.

Celestial bodies, filled with human narcissistic meaning, gas and solitude. On a universal shore of constant expansion, constant change, coming and going into black holes of wonder and awe.

“Your breathing is like a wave, moving trough your body” My breathing is my body going from organic to tricked. Trick your mind to believe in astrology. Trick your mind to believe in society.

Sofia Pontén, b. 1985, is a writer and novelist who just moved back to Sweden after 5 years in Brooklyn. She has a BA in philosophy and comparative literature and has worked as a producer at Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö, Sweden and as a collaborative writer with New York based artist Liz Magic Laser. In the spring of 2014 she was the Critical Writing Fellow at Recess Artist Workspace in New York. Sofia Pontén also runs Sweden’s biggest astrology blog, Scorpio Rising, with over 30 000 readers a week, for Sweden’s largest teen magazine VeckoRevyn. http://blogg.veckorevyn.com/astrobloggen/ • http://blendaj.tumblr.com • http://utanandranamn.tumblr.com

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Rachel Wallach

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Rachel Wallach Her name is Rachel Colored pencil doodler Compulsive knitter

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Michaela Rife Boom and Bust Towns

…the natural bounty of oil had, in the magical and mysterious process of being transformed into money, become a putrid and toxic waste. It was as if the Venezuelan ‘body’ suffered from bulimia; an excessive, orgiastic appetite was matched by periodic sickness, which contaminated the national metabolism.1 Thus begins Geographer Michael J. Watts examination of oil money’s boom and bust cycle. Focused on the effect of oil money in Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria beginning in the 1970s, Watts contends that oil wealth is a “mixed blessing” that leads to a particular sort of capital fetish: “oil money is effaced, and disguised, appearing as it were out of thin air.”2 Referencing Guy Debord’s theorization of the society of the spectacle, Watts writes that a key component of this fetish was the image: “from its inception, the oil boom was a spectacle, with new social relations mediated by images.”3 Oil and images are intertwined and imbricated; oil is more than mediated by images. Further, following the temporal component contained in Watts’ metaphor, this national bulimia is repetitive (“periodic”) and persistent, oil images often internalize capitalism’s so-called boom and bust cycle. To examine these claims I will look at two productions on opposite sides of the so-called “American Century,” one a largely forgotten film, the other an unaired television program. MGM’s 1940 Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy vehicle Boom Town arrived before America’s global ascendance, but on the heels of decades of oil gluts and busts; Blood & Oil, ABC’s nighttime soap, slated for the fall 2015 line-up, lands in the midst of pipeline protests and kayaktivism. Between the two lie countless oil wars and spills, crises brought on by apparent scarcity, depressions brought on by apparent gluts, the growth of the environmentalist movement, and artistic post-apocalyptic visions of post-oil societies. Boom Town and Blood & Oil are then both highly similar and highly different, yet by directly incorporating a boom and bust temporality, they may share an important and bizarre connection, a conflation of morality with the crisis cycle of oil production.

1 Michael J. Watts, “Oil as Money: The Devil’s Excrement and the Spectacle of Black Gold,” in Reading Economic Geography, ed. by Trevor J. Barnes et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 205.

2 Watts, “Oil as Money,” 206, 209.

3 Watts, “Oil as Money,” 207.

4 Noel Castree, Alisdair Rogers, and Rob Kitchin, “Capitalism,” in A Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46-47.

Capitalist “Boom and Bust” Time and Oil Before examining how particular productions tackle the temporality of boom and bust, it is helpful to consider what is meant by the phrase. Karl Marx believed that capitalism was not only bounded by boom and bust cycles, but that it was bound to repeat them in perpetuity.4 Yet as geographer David Harvey notes, Marx did not fully develop a theory of the capitalist crisis cycle.5 In his second companion to Marx’s Capital, Harvey notes: “But a crisis is always the starting-point of a large volume of new investment. It is also, therefore, if we consider the society as a whole, more or less a new material base for the next turnover cycle.”6 In this conception of time, both periods (boom and bust) perenially sow the seeds for one another. Harvey cites the Great Depression in the United States as a period of intensive “technological and institutional renewal in the midst of crisis conditions…that bore fruits after World War II [and lay] ‘the new material base for the next turnover cycle’.”7 In his own work, Marx outlined the boom and bust cycle in the context of the British cotton industry, which saw periods of crisis, stagnation and prosperity as the British Empire enjoyed monopolies and suffered competition from opposing colonial powers.8 Counter-intuitively, some cultural production (like Boom Town) attributes certain moral characteristics to the bust portion of the cycle. Just as capitalism naturalizes periods of economic depression as necessary to boom and growth, cultural portrayals of the content and happy poor naturalize poverty as merely a step on the way to wealth. Ironically, as we will see in Boom Town, the flip side of this alliance is the depiction of wealth as morally bankrupt, often allowing for audiences to

5 David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010), 224.

6 David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume 2 (London: Verso, 2013), 136.

7 Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume 2, 137.

8 Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 224-225.

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cheer on economic failures, apparently for the good of the characters.

In his study of time in literature, Russell WestPavlov outlines the shift to industrial and absolute time, which severed the sense of temporality tied to the changing seasons. Following Fredric Jameson, he hints at the incompatibility of capitalism’s reliance on future profits to retroactively settle present debts in the case of seasonal crops.9 This apparent incompatibility of the capitalist conception of time with nature is also strange in the case of oil, a natural but finite resource. This incongruity of temporal conceptions can be seen in the rhetoric surrounding oil gluts and oil scarcity, and yet, as Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis state regarding oil’s temporality: “Oil is very literally time materialized as sediment, buried deep in the ground.”10 This scale, a geological time frame, is strange when wedged into capitalism’s rapid crisis cycle where booms and busts can have little to do with actual oil. Here it is helpful to return to Harvey on Marx, specifically on capitalism’s metabolic treatment of nature.

“Individual capitalists,” Harvey writes, “working in their own short-term interests and impelled onward by coercive laws of competition, are perpetually tempted to take the position of Apres moi le deluge! with respect to both the laborer and the soil.”11 The connection between human labor and nature (soil) is an important one, in capitalism both are necessary and, in theory if not in fact, endlessly renewable. Introducing oil to this equation highlights some differences and similarities, particularly concerning its relationship to labor. Though this relationship changes throughout the period framed by Boom Town and Blood & Oil, oil wealth does not tend to denote the same hard work that factories or agriculture do, as previously noted by Watts. In her study of oil and culture in America literary scholar Stephanie LeMenager confronts the perception of oil as a replacement for labor. She explains that American popular culture has a complicated relationship with the figure of the lucky oil strike, this figure lacks the patina of hard work so foundational to the country’s myth of self, yet there is something appealing to the

9 Russell West-Pavlov, Temporalities (London: Routledge, 2013), 132.

10 Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis. “Visions of Eternity: Plastic and the Ontology of Oil.” e-flux journal 47 (September 2013): http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/visions-of-eternity-plastic-and-the-ontologyof-oil/ 11 Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 321.

12 Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5-6.

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fabulous wealth. LeMenager references Mark Twain’s description of gambling in the earth for riches, which would promise a future free of labor and an eternal wealth.12 This conception of labor is integral to petroleum cinema and television, though characters may be persistent, their wealth is eventually won by luck, by rolling the dice in the fickle oil game.

Furthermore, in oil culture, Twain’s eternity would seem to transform from one of endless wealth to one of endless booms and busts.

Boom Town: Gushers and Gluts Boom Town, subscribes to that eternal cycle, and it is deeply wrapped up in characterizations of Big Oil. But in this melodramatic cinematic world, the protagonists are only happy when their oil fortunes have failed and correspondingly miserable when they strike it rich, never more than when they embody Manhattan-based oil corporations. It is important to note the historical context of this Hollywood film, released in advanced of the American entry into World War II, a conflict fuelled by six million barrels of domestic oil, on the heels of both the Great Depression and tremendous oil gluts.13 Furthermore, the recent history of oil in the United States lent itself to boom and bust stories, encapsulated by the famed turn-of-the-century gusher in Southeastern Texas, Spindletop. Historian Kathryn Morse characterizes the period from the 1880s through the 1920s as the heyday of media portrayals of gushers: “Reporters described both the exhilaration of nature beyond human control and nature’s providence in granting Americans such vast energy and wealth.”14 Gushers were spectacles, both in reportage and visual culture, railroads even delivered crowds directly to Spindletop to witness the geyser in person. As Morse states: “gushers represented bigness, energy and wealth in dramatic visual form.”15 But just as gushers promised fantastic wealth they also portended danger and threat in the form of (very common) fires and explosions.16 The visual of the gusher then serves as something of an early understanding of oil’s boom and bust cycle, the end contained in the beginning.

For as environmental historian Mark Fiege notes, 13 Mark Fiege, “It’s a Gas: The United States and the Oil Shock of 19731974,” The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2012), 372-374.

14 Kathryn Morse, “There Will Be Birds: Images of Oil Disasters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” The Journal of American History 99 (June 2012): 125.

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even Spindletop ran dry.17 One could say that the first quarter of Boom Town works in the shadow of the impending gusher. Gable and Tracy play Big John McMasters and Square John Sand, Texas wildcatters who have teamed up in their search for oil in the years just following the First World War. Though they find themselves in the middle of a boom, McMasters and Sand struggle to find oil, eventually stealing drilling equipment from a local businessman, but to no avail. Evidencing West-Pavlov’s description of capitalism as a perpetually future-oriented system, they eventually convince the same businessman to invest in their predicted gusher. While Sand supervises the drilling, McMasters takes a trip to town and meets Betsy Bartlett (played by Claudette Colbert), and the two fall in love. Unfortunately and unbeknownst to McMasters, Sand is also in love with Betsy, and it is for her that he names their new gusher. Given their love for the same woman, McMasters and Sand agree to go their separate ways. While the romantic storyline is granted importance within the narrative structure of the film, the predominant structuring device is the constant boom and bust cycle the oil men are trapped in. One is successful while the other languishes in poverty, before fortunes are reversed, and this alternating and cycling continues throughout the film.

Boom Town is a prime example of a work that predominantly portrays its characters as happy and moral only when they are in the bust cycle. McMasters’ marriage corresponds to these cycles, where he is unfaithful and Betsy unhappy when they are wealthy, while their marriage recovers when they return to prospecting and poverty. Despite its rather simple structure, the film does hint at the material effects of an oil boom. In fact, Sand and McMasters meet for the first time on a plank serving as a makeshift bridge over a street turned to mud by the constant pumping of oil wells. Even more poignantly, on the night of their meeting, Betsy strolls with 15 Morse, “There Will Be Birds,” 125.

16 Morse, “There Will Be Birds,” 126.

McMasters through a church filled with oil derricks.

He explains that when the boom came the congregation opted to pump oil here, from directly under the pulpit. They soon encounter an older wildcatter who tells McMasters that his wells will be pumping long after he is gone. He believes, like a good capitalist, that his particular wealth can be eternal.

McMasters seems to agree as he tells Betsy that the man struck it rich in Pennsylvania, Louisiana and now “he might hit it again tomorrow.” In a small moment, but one that foreshadows their own marriage, Betsy responds somewhat incredulously “but he seems happy though”, as though she can’t believe that someone in such a boom could be happy.

In fact the wildcatter that the pair encounter in the church was likely headed for hard times, given the instability of the oil market. Competition from alternative fuels and the rush to extract oil anywhere possible lead to a glut, diminished by the staggering energy needs of the First World War. Concern over depletion lead the Federal Government to set aside petroleum reserves intended as a national safeguard. As such, oilmen were also encouraged to look abroad, demonstrated in Boom Town when the characters spend one of their boom and bust cycles in Latin America. In the late 1920s more oil was found in Oklahoma, California, and Texas, leading to a huge market glut that drove prices down to $0.02 a gallon at the height of the Great Depression. In response to this real abundance of material in an age of eco17 Fiege, “It’s a Gas,” 370.

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nomic bust, states and corporations began regulating the daily output of wells, which drove prices back up, helped along by a Congress-imposed tax on imported oil.18 This short history hints at the fact that the oil business was never composed of simply enterprising individuals, scraping by in hard climates, rather it was big business and had been from the late-nineteenth century. But as LeMenager notes in relation to James Dean’s handyman-turned-oil baron in the 1956 film Giant, characters drenched in oil wealth are not sympathetic.19 Historians Lifset and Black describe the irony of modern America’s aversion to Big Oil, which was characterized (not unjustly) as an “uncontrollable, unregulated monolith.”

The irony of this iconography was that just as corporate oil seemed so intractable and above the everyday level of business, the commodity— particularly gasoline—became a perpetual part of Americans’ everyday lives throughout the twentieth century. Corporations housed all over the world, led by tycoons and laborers whom Americans would never see provided the gasoline that carried drivers to offices and factories or to their children’s baseball games. Reconciliation was needed and feature films provided an important vehicle by which consumers came to terms with petroleum.20 Boom Town is an early example of this, nowhere more than in the figure of Gable as Big John McMasters, who is at his moral worst when he embodies Big Oil. Towards the end of the film the government brings new anti-trust charges against McMasters when, shockingly, Sands testifies on behalf of his long time enemy. He argues that McMasters’ mandate for oil operators to pump less oil was based on preserving the life of the oil fields, and that his character is that of a wildcatter (the entrepreneurial spirit). A confused defense to be sure, but it gets at two important things, the idea that oil as a resource has a temporality all its own, and the idea that oil prospecting has a moral character. As Lifset and Black explain, the apparent financial stability of the corporation is characterized as morally negative,

18 Fiege, “It’s a Gas,” 372-373.

19 LeMenager, Living Oil, 5.

20 Robert Lifset and Brian C. Black, “Imaging the ‘Devi’s Excrement’: Big Oil in Petroleum Cinema, 1940-2007,” The Journal of American History 99 (June 2012): 138.

21 Lifset and Black, “Imaging the ‘Devi’s Excrement’,” 138.

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while the boom and bust cycle of the wildcatter is morally just.21 In fact, McMasters’ ultimate redemption comes in the form of bankruptcy, in the bust.

But the closing shot of the film has McMasters rejoining Betsy, Sand and their original investor to drill a new well and begin the cycle all over again. A postscript to the film might mention that the gleeful hope with which the protagonists close the film was unfounded, for they were firmly in the Big Oil age.

Coda: Blood & Oil In 2015 we remain under the thumb of Big Oil, and yet dramatizations of the industry have achieved mainstream success in the time since Boom Town, notably evening soap Dallas (1978-1991), which pitted oil against ranching in a melodramatic land use competition. A 2012 reboot attempted to recapture ratings success, with the same base structure, though with the addition of a “clean drilling technology” subplot. The moral upper hand was then given not to oilmen languishing in a bust cycle, but oilmen still searching for the ultimate strike that would simultaneously save the planet. Blood & Oil seems poised to combine all of the above. Press from ABC promises the following ingredients: the booming North Dakota Bakken shale economy, a “self-made oil baron [who] made billions and lost them too,” and a young married couple with “with big dreams and sky-high ambition” planning to build their fortune from nothing.22 Counter to energy company PR that seeks to render resource extraction invisible, we may also be treated to visible oil, in the form of gushers and accidents. Is this an attempt to recapture the oil aesthetics of the Boom Town era?

One can imagine that the money and drama of a fracking boomtown attracted television executives to this story, but it remains a bizarre choice. ABC describes the apparently fictitious Winslow, North Dakota as a town with 100% employment where the champagne is flowing. I suspect they are referencing self-proclaimed “Boomtown, USA” Williston.23 And though this location has drawn its share of comparisons to the nineteenth-century gold rush, it has also come with countless reports of the social and

22 American Broadcasting Company. “Blood and Oil.” http:// abcallaccess.com/show/bloodandoil/ 23 Bartley Kives, “Welcome to Williston, North Dakota: America’s new gold rush city.” The Guardian. July 28, 2014. http://www.theguardian. com/cities/2014/jul/28/-sp-welcome-williston-north-dakota-americanew-gold-rush-city

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environmental hell wrought by a fracking boom.24 Furthermore, by Blood & Oil’s September premiere, it may need to change its description to “bust town,” as Al Jazeera reports that the bottoming oil prices so welcomed by consumers have tanked Williston’s economy.25 To look at Blood & Oil from the vantage of Boom Town begs the question: will the film’s insistence on the alignment of happiness with the bust and malaise with the boom persist in this later form?

ABC’s preview video suggests that our sympathies are intended to lie with the upstart young couple, gambling in the oil game against an apparently monopolizing oil tycoon. I suspect that, as in Boom Town, we will be asked to both cheer for the young character’s success and condemn the morally corrupting influence of oil money.

opposite side of the oil business: a fracktivist. She’s a bleeding-heart environmentalist — with a brain.

Job one is to stop the drilling before it destroys the land, which includes sacred Native American burial grounds the oil is buried two miles under.” Their need to include “with a brain” as a qualifier to this female environmentalist character is disconcerting in and of itself. When added to the clichéd “Native American burial ground” as the only hint that an indigenous voice exists, viewers are left with virtually no hope for a truly contemporary tale of oil and greed. Blood & Oil’s creators and scriptwriters would do well to engage with the very much living network of native peoples protesting and organizing against the Keystone XL pipeline, and the successes of the international movement Idle No More.26

Yet Blood & Oil is unlike Boom Town in two crucial ways, it is a serialized television drama and it exists in a time of heightened public environmental consciousness. The former promises to allow Blood & Oil to internalize the crisis cycle more thoroughly than a bounded feature-length film. Depending on its success, viewers may be following the moral and economic peaks and troughs of Winslow’s residents for months, if not years. More disheartening is the climate Blood & Oil is introduced to, mere months after its pilot airs, the United Nations will gather in Paris in an attempt to avert global environmental catastrophe, diplomatic efforts that many believe are too little too late. The only indication Blood & Oil gives that it will portray an alternate view of oil extraction is the following line from its press release: “Hap’s [the oil tycoon] daughter, Lacey, is on the

These oversights are either the result of blind spots or worse, willful ignorance and obfuscation.

Beneath the obvious guilty pleasure/ evening soap veneer of Blood & Oil, we must demand what the omission of perspectives means, and what a continued acceptance of boom and bust as inevitable, of oil cloaked in moral valence, means for us today?

We must confront the possibility that Blood & Oil may be playing the same game described by Lifset and Black, providing a human face to big petroleum.

If ABC has its way, Americans might be cheering on frackers this fall.

24 Only skimming the surface from the New York Times’ coverage.

On blowouts, spills and regulation or lack thereof: Deborah Sontag and Robert Gebeloff. “The Downside of the Boom.” New York Times, November 22, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/23/ us/north-dakota-oil-boom-downside.html?_r=0 On being a woman in a boomtown: John Eligon, “An Oil Town Where Men are Many and Women are Hounded.” New York Times January 15, 2013. http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/us/16women.html A small part of the story of oil and native land in the United States: Deborah Sontag and Brent McDonald. “In North Dakota, a Tale of Oil, Corruption and

Death.” New York Times, December 28, 2014. http://www.nytimes. com/2014/12/29/us/in-north-dakota-where-oil-corruption-andbodies-surface.html 25 Wilson Dizard, “Slowdown and Out in Williston, ND.” Al Jazeera America, April 27, 2015. http://america.aljazeera.com/ multimedia/2015/4/north-dakota-hard-times.html 26 Indian Country Today’s Keystone coverage is a good place to find current reports on indigenous resistance to the pipeline and other environmental issues: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ story/keystone-xl

Michaela Rife is an arts writer from Wyoming, currently working on her PhD in Art History at the University of Toronto. Her research considers portrayals of land use in American visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present. She has written and presented on environmental art topics across Canada and the United States. Some of her writing can be found online at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

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Natalie Girsberger Shine on You Crazy Diamond (2014)

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Nat Girsberger is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She also works as a filmmaker of experimental and narrative films, as latest featured in the Mister Vorky film Festival in Serbia and Wallplay for LIAR magazine. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring her own experimental artistic tendencies. Having grown up in Switzerland and moved to New York upon turning 18 to pursue film, she documents the city and all that it entails through unique eyes.

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Amanda López-Kurtz SH*T GOLD: crowd-sourced origin stories of an open-mic night

If you happen to be in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle on a Monday night, chances are fairly good that you can see for yourself what a group of people shitting gold looks like. You could even join in on the action, too! You could find yourself at SH*T GOLD, an openmic night for dancers, performance artists, actors, rappers, writers, singers, storytellers, et al, taking place at Velocity Dance Center.

Given that the current landscape of arts programming is littered with application processes, invitationonly residencies, and pay-to-play “opportunities,” I’ve attempted to explain the SH*T GOLD phenomenon and its awesomeness.

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Alyza DelPan-Monly, Lorraine Lau, Kaitlin McCarthy, and Owen David performing in SH*T GOLD: Freeze Frame.

Photo by Drew Santoro

Urban Dictionary does not offer a definition for the phrase “(to) shit gold.”

It does contain an entry for “shitting gold bricks,” but it’s kind of a lame definition that has more to do with growing money on trees than the hilarious good fortune one must possess to be able to defecate gold (however painful a process that might be).

I cannot think of a more apt metaphor for the creative process. To “shit gold” speaks to the value of regular and repetitive physical processes that produce very specific anythings and everythings.

The horrific, embarrassing beauty of shitting gold is that the end result both is and is not the point.

Whether the product is gold or shit, creating a work of art is a targeted crapshoot. And who’s to say that gold is inherently more interesting than shit anyway?

It seems that a more common outcome of the artistic process is that in-between product, a few parts treasure and at least a little bit of trash. The phrase ‘shit gold,’ particularly within the context of performance, undermines that other expression about creative processes, “practice makes perfect.” To expect a perfect end when the means of production are so very messy, personal, and subjective is to take away all the fun of the process itself. Practice never makes perfect. Perfection does not exist and if it did it would be SO BORING. So let’s take up the practice of shitting gold and bear witness to one another’s funky fresh artistic outputs.

Let’s attempt to put into language what we love about that open-mic performance night we call SH*T GOLD.

What follows is an amalgamation of conversations, emails, and answers to questions culled over many months between many SH*T GOLD participants.

Participants have self-selected whether to contribute anonymously.

TELL US WHO YOU ARE AND YOUR SH*T GOLD ORIGIN STORY. A1: Performance artist, dance enthusiast, activist.

SH*T GOLD was started by two dancers who wanted a place to encourage artistic risk taking within the context of community. I think…

A2: Compass Noce, artist of all forms and media.

SH*T GOLD came from the golden goose, of course.

A3: I am an artist in her 30’s with equal parts skepticism and blind faith in dance. A former programming coordinator at Velocity initially implemented the idea, but then the programming was taken under the wing of a group of folks who collaborated on themes and additional events under the SH*T GOLD umbrella.

KM: I’m Kaitlin McCarthy, a dance and performance artist in Seattle, WA. I’m a critic both in a dance journalism sense and in that I am driven to engage with the world critically. SH*T GOLD was the idea of Erica Badgeley and Britta Peterson. They thought we needed a venue to practice performance. Both moved out of Seattle shortly after founding SH*T GOLD. A4: I am a movement artists interested in community based work and collaboration. SH*T GOLD came from a desire for informal opportunities to try

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things out and share, a need to escape the curatorial confines of getting work produced, and a need for space to practice ones’ artistic practice.

A5: I am a dancer, performer, choreographer. Mid 20s, Velocity person, Capitol Hill neighbor. Erica Badgely started it.

EB: I’m Erica Badgeley, a dance artist from Seattle currently living in Salzburg, Austria. I started SH*T GOLD in early 2014 with fellow dancer Britta Peterson in the hopes of generating a consistent venue for performers to practice performing without the pressure of creating a large production. Both of us took our lives to other cities, but I’m happy to have left a small legacy behind, thanks to the hard work of the folks who took over.

The concept of SH*T GOLD started in my head after a conversation with Vanessa de Wolf over coffee.

We were discussing the overly official feeling [On the Board’s program] 12 Minute Max had taken on, and wondered how to create a lower-pressure venue for people to try out fresh, possibly less-formed ideas. I was inspired by my Open Mic nights in college, a once-a-week opportunity to just perform and practice doing what I love to do. The idea came to fruition about six months later when Daniel Linehan performed in Seattle. He mentioned Ivo Dimchev’s small studio Volksroom Brussels which has an “Open Monday” night where anyone can apply and perform without pre-selection. When I proposed to [Velocity Dance Center’s Artistic Director] Tonya Lockyer that I’d like to see something similar happen in Seattle, she put me together with Britta. I went back to my old Facebook messages with Vanessa and found this title: SH*T GOLD. It stuck.

DESCRIBE WHAT HAPPENS AT SH*T GOLD AND WHERE IT TAKES PLACE. A5: Founders, late night, hard wood floors, pillows, strangers. People gather to support. We want the performers to succeed, whatever success may be.

There is space to shrug things off, to struggle, to practice performing, to try new things, to share gifts and have a good time.

KM: Names are drawn out of a hat. They get 5 minutes to do almost anything. A lot of it is shit, but so

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what? Expecting nothing is what allows this to happen. There is witnessing. There’s a lot of participation. There’s a community of people who have come together through a common interest in experimentation and performance. It’s been a pretty traumatic year for this country and the instantaneousness and present-ness of the art created at SH*T GOLD means it can react in a shorter timeframe that a lot of performance.

It happens by the seat of a few people’s pants.

Someone gets the light board working. Curtains are drawn over the mirror. Cushions thrown on the floor.

People gather in from the night. This is the intimacy of Velocity’s Founders Theater. Sometimes a performance will leave the space and ask the audience to follow out on to the sidewalk or into the women’s restroom or into a back studio. It’s late Monday night and nobody really cares what we do.

EB: People put their names in a hat. They go in the order their names are drawn out. The hosts emcee in-between acts. Everyone brings a bit of food to share. The performance is open to where ever the performer wants to take it. I haven’t been there for a while; does that sound about right?

A3: People share something they’ve been working on, thinking about, dreaming up. Sometimes the contract between audience and performer gets a little muddled for better or worse. There are also emcees that serve as additional presenters, filling in the gaps of space and time with attempts to entertain, support, and move things along. SH*T GOLD happens anywhere. But the SH*T GOLDs I’ve participated in have taken place in black box theaters, museums, and sidewalks.

A7: The format of SH*T GOLD can be modified, but basically performers show up and names get drawn to determine a “show order.” Usually performers get 5 minutes for their work. What happens is up to them – solo dance improvisation, choreographed group work, poets and rappers, break dancers, performance artists with props, sets, costumes. The structure of SH*T GOLD can be changed, though, because everything at SH*T GOLD is an experiment.

SH*T GOLD is free and open to the public. Velocity Dance Center donates studio space, which is major towards making this program happen.

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RECALL A FAVORITE SH*T GOLD MEMORY A2: Dude ate an onion.

A7: Owen David performed a solo while wearing a big dog costume. It included lovely movement material to the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog and a monologue about whether or not he and his partner should adopt a dog to take their relationship to the next level.

Dylan Ward and Nathan Blackwell (“Dude eating an onion”) performing in SH*T GOLD: The Music Video. Photo by Drew Santoro

OFFER UP A PERFORMANCE SCORE THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE AT A FUTURE SH*T GOLD.

A5: I enjoyed the day that we did split screens and different dances happened simultaneously. I also enjoyed when Frances taught us a square dance.

Group activities are really fun and get the audience involved.

A3: Six months of classes and establishing history and relationship that ultimately culminated in an improvisational duet performed at SH*T GOLD. A1: SH*T GOLD: Good Morning Baltimore. The hosts guided a conversation about the riots in Baltimore.

There was time for performance, but there was also time for dialogue.

A8: The final SH*T GOLD of the season (The Deep End*) was quite happenin’ with many great acts. It allowed for the “regulars” to expand their work inventively and beautifully, and invited new people to showcase something in Seattle.

KM: I remember an all around magical SH*T GOLD culminating in Bel Gardner gathering everyone in the women’s bathroom, teaching us a song to sing together. The proximity was exhilarating - all smashed in together – and the obliteration of the taboo nature of that space was, too.

A5: I think it would be fun to do SH*T GOLD with a set piece and to play on it.

A3: Many waves or iterations of 5-minute performances happening at the same time in the same space.

A8: Host-less event. There is no one person running SH*T GOLD. Artists may introduce their own piece, or not. No breaks. Come and go as you please.

KM: I think a silent SH*T GOLD would be really interesting. Or a SH*T GOLD in an outdoor space somewhere.

EB: Something outside on the big field behind Velocity!

FINAL WORDS A7: Participating in SH*T GOLD is awesome. It doesn’t require any money, paperwork, work samples, or having to ‘network’ your way into a performance opportunity. The only requirement is showing up. I wish there were more programs like SH*T GOLD where practicing performance is as easy as being present.

EB: Victoria Jacobs eating a rose, or something to that effect, while running around the stage in one of the early SH*T GOLDs.

A5: I think Miguel Gutierrez has a saying about how brilliance is as ordinary and common as mud. I always think of that with SH*T GOLD, the idea that you can poop brilliance, especially if you poop regularly.

A4: Watching someone paint gum splotches on the sidewalk.

THE END

Authored by Amanda López-Kurtz with contributions from Erica Badgeley, Owen David, Kaitlin McCarthy, Drew Santoro, and other anonymous contributors.

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Wolfgang Schaffer Untitled Summer (2015)

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Wolf Schaffer is a Brooklyn-based photographer. • wolf.schaffer@gmail.com

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Liana Imam Forgery II

Later on, when we no longer speak, I know only the best of days, our most perfect moments. I imagine telling this to her: These were all the perfect magic things your boyfriend did for me. I imagine her powdered face. It hates me for reasons that have nothing to do with me, not specifically, not really.

These were days like: three-star dinners in someone else’s borough; Valentine’s Day at Roosevelt Island, tramping in low shoes through half-melted snow; whispering through the part of a warehouse you should have a hardhat on for.

Afternoons in sunny bars and we are writing a screenplay, a webseries, some Millennial joke or is it our real dream. We are writing some wild drawn-out exquisite corpse with an endgame never clear, not for anyone involved. Try as we might we cannot help but seem involved. Is it the intent or is it the perception?

I meet men with his name and against them it’s weaponry. I slit throats when I say it. I ask them if they like the Frick. I know they could never have been to the Frick. Who would go but us?

It was never names with us. It was always baby, baby, baby.

I think of being on our way away from any bar, of him saying, let’s just go home, though it wasn’t my home, though it was. The 6am Pabsts in his vast bed while we waited for the laundry after coke; reading to him, backbent over the mattress edge, listing toward the one shaft of thin lamplight coming from the bookcase. We spoke of doing this in every park but it didn’t pass. Instead— homebound, boxer-briefed, my slim handsome one-man audience—he would just hear me, folding our sweaters or lifting weights.

And then despite all this, there is a later, a later during which I try not to think of it as too much of an omen that it has rained every day we don’t speak. I try to think of it as simply what it is: April.

Liana is 27 years old and lives in Brooklyn, has worked in various stations within the food & beverage world there for the past five years. Her work can be found in PANK Magazine, Armchair/ Shotgun, and Decomp. For supplemental ramblings: lianajimam.com

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Jennifer Weiss Loretta’s Leaves (2015)

gouache on paper, 14” x 11”

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Jennifer Weiss lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Through the use of bright undercoats and layers, she experiments with ways to extract naturalistic subject matter from abstract forms. She is inspired by nature, the repetition of its forms, and endless possibilities of color. Her paintings are in numerous collections in New York and London.

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Katharine Perko Notes to Self

Black clutch???

Candle for Erin Find moms watch The brigade Bip and bop

gfree soy sauce ziplock bags leggings?

Soap $41

Miss Adele Smith

foundation moisturizer brow liner

Calderone’s Combined and Uneven Apocalypse Find big dog lock Cartographies of the Absolute Oxford annotated bibs!!

Zone One for Laura Tuesday!!!

Send wedding script Suhah al myram Water earth fire movies Aaaaarg Foxframe 105 mamfou the Yorkshire ripper Born in Flames by Lizzie Borden Murder at the Vicarage Vivrant thing Norwegian by Night Everything wrong with The Millionaire Next Door Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires Secrets of the Millionaire Mind 1 hr; 551 Cals 18 min; 118 cals saline nasal spray (Costco) dr. mary says lose weight no drinking no night eating

tell her about Anne Helen Peterson pine rope tarp???

Brother owes $100 Flowers Tobacco Bagels Lox Cream cheese 3 sparkling wines cash Wole Soyinka Slow media Slow photography External HARDRIVE

ECHO DE PARIS LA POPULAIRE L’HUMANITE BATAILLE Books for Meghan Books for me Umbrella Ahmed’s response to JAMO re allegorical colonial fiction Twitter and gossip and politics Gas pop Icy hot Psst Spinach Lil container for dressing Cookies Maybe mozz Drawer Fire escape branches Screen that doesn’t close Door stopper Shower door Lawrence Wiener Marcel Broodthaers Renew books

The Spotted Cat Marie Laveau Tuck and Patty Wayne Tucker Vaughn’s Heart Attack Band Melon Choc chips Toothpicks Butter 3 lemons coffee

Katharine Perko studies and teaches English literature at Stony Brook University.

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Maria R. Baab The Six Words that Raise the Question, “What is it, really?”

Why the fear of commitment should make you run ( ...or at least lace up your shoes) Here’s the long story short. I was recently seeing a guy who fell off the face of the Earth after about a month of what we’ll call “emotional tag.” He looked at me like the sun rose in my eyes, we laughed, had great conversations, mind-blowing sex, and confided in one another about our pasts and emotional pitfalls.

After a few weeks of going with the flow, I decided to tell him that I developed real feelings of caring and admiration in the midst of “having fun.” It’s a common symptom of the modern romantic paradigm; people become casually involved, genuine feelings surface, and then one person retracts faster than a cock in cold water.

This is where it gets dicey. There are many factors why this could happen, right? Maybe it’s the timing, maybe it wasn’t expected, maybe they’re just not into you beyond physical gratification, maybe Mercury is in retrograde. It is all acceptable. There is an answer that (I think) was a valiant and progressive response to emotional goading in decades previous that has become so normalized it has lost its novelty, and is no longer acceptable as an excuse for emotionally stunted behavior.

He had been a little distant before I took the emotional plunge. I wondered if he needed reassurance that we were on the same page or if he’d completely lost interest and I was riding an imaginary high. I didn’t take it personally when he didn’t say he felt the same way. I thought that his change of heart likely had nothing to do with me...life is messy, people get stressed, and I was not the center of his or any Universe. After a long, seemingly honest, fully clothed conversation, he stopped reaching out. He stopped wanting to see me by way of evasion; there’s that emotionally stunted behavior I was talking about. For a couple of weeks, I dodged eye contact and pleasantries when I saw him (which was often). I wasn’t about to pretend we were cool, and that nothing had

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happened between us; I was confused and my feelings were hurt.

It was only after I reciprocated the neglect I’d felt from him, that he told a friend of mine the six words that sent me into an emotional tailspin: “I have a fear of commitment.” Some people hear this sentence and they flee, no questions asked (I envy these people).

Some people (*sheepishly raises hand*) are compassionate (or masochistic) enough to want to understand what set of circumstances could bring someone, to such a closed off emotional state.

“Ok, that’s a THING, right??” I discussed it with my girlfriends over coffee like prime ministers discuss foreign affairs. I read articles on the “fear of commitment”. I talked to other men to gain male perspective.

I tried to make sense of what I’d initially accepted as a legitimate reason for someone to treat me with flagrant disregard. Men and women alike have heard these words from their significant others. This isn’t just an issue with men, and there is always a deeper meaning to the phrase.

There are a number of legitimate reasons why people fear commitment in relationships. There are the obvious fears: getting hurt, hurting others, losing oneself, being with the wrong person... maybe all from having been in an unhealthy relationship in the past. I lose my patience with the rampant use of the six-word blanket that has become a standard in the dating world because it is used as the easy way out.

The problem isn’t that the fear of commitment isn’t real. I’m sure there are people with diagnosable fears of commitment . My problem is that when someone says “I have a fear of commitment,” in the context I’m discussing, it isn’t entirely truthful. I’ve met people with “a fear of commitment” who are insanely committed to their work and have no qualms with making plans with friends or traveling the world or having pets (all signs that commitment is not their issue). I

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wonder how we can still be so dishonest with ourselves about the origins of our own discomfort and duplicitous with others about our intentions with them.

The dating game has changed drastically. We live in a culture where you can open an app and swipe your screen to find “matches”. For every one person you aren’t interested in dating, there are potentially fifteen other people within a ten block radius of your “Current Location” who are interested in being as emotionally detached as possible. (If you haven’t read the article in the September issue of Vanity Fair, I highly recommend the read.) It is certainly a convenient method to hook-up, but I think that having this method of no-strings-dating at our fingertips blurs too many lines, and is a far too easy fall-back plan. Dating and serial fucking, are two different things, and it feels like we’ve hit a place where we refer to frivolous hooking up as dating. I am someone who wants to get to know people and see if we have chemistry and shared interests, and maybe start a relationship if it feels right. Part of what made me so mad about this guy was that when we first started seeing each other he said he was open to seeing where things go. You can’t have a “fear of commitment” and also “be open to seeing where things go”.

Don’t get me wrong—I am not saying that people who don’t want to be in committed relationships are sociopaths who prey on emotional validation from other people. Dating is a process that helps us discover what we do and do not like, and helps us figure out what we are looking for in a partner. Many people are honest about their intentions from the gate, and that gives the other person the opportunity to decide if they want to engage, or not. The commitment-fearful just go with the flow, open up and even partake in the intimacy that happens between couples, and the second their partner vocalizes feelings, the fear of commitment steals the show, and the person who

can’t handle emotion exits stage left. Talk about having your cake...

In my story, there is a moment of clarity. I had the opportunity to chat with my love interest again. He wanted to apologize for the way he had treated me.

The truth is, I hadn’t asked him for a commitment; a fact we could agree on. I had only expressed a deep interest in him. He felt pressure based on his fear that he couldn’t measure up to the great person I believed him to be. Ultimately he was afraid that if he continued to let himself have feelings for me, I would “wake up” and see that he wasn’t what I’d thought and leave him with his heart in his hands. More telling than that was when I asked him if he loved himself, he said, “No.” There was the bottom line for me. He didn’t think he deserved love, not even from himself.

Matters of the heart are never easy. We are emotionally complex beings. Relationships, no matter how casual, hit snags and require uncomfortable dialogue sometimes. What I have learned this year on my own journey of healing is that when somebody doesn’t love themselves, there isn’t any amount of love in the Universe that can make that person happy or convince them to love themselves (and in turn, love anybody else). You can’t compete with some things, and that kind of self-loathing, soul numbing mentality is one of them. That is where you run. I think its one of those “one day you’ll look back and be glad that you did” situations. Not because you dodged a bullet, but because in that moment, you loved yourself enough to realize that you deserved to be happy, and that you were worth loving, without getting caught up in someone else’s vortex of insecurity.

Maria Baab is a New York City native who has hailed from Brooklyn since before it was cool. She is a poet, screenwriter, singer/songwriter, and photographer, who loves collaboration. A lover of good tea, sunflowers, and physical fitness, Maria is committed to living her best life and embracing the absurdity that the Universe has to offer. She grew up in Carroll Gardens and currently lives in Greenpoint with two roommates and can’t wait to have a dog (and other animals) someday.

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Sonya Derman Click each painting to play the accompanying audio.

Good You Look (2015)

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House Self Compassion (2015)

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Bad News Friend (2015)

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Crystalline (2015)

Sonya Derman is a visual artist born in New York City. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art (London) in 2012 and her BA from Carleton College (Northfield, MN) in 2006. Primarily working with painting, writing, and performance, she has performed and exhibited in London, Berlin, San Francisco, and New York City. She received a Julian Trevelyan grant in 2012 and was an artist in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2013. Alongside her studio-based work, Derman is a teaching artist interested in collaborative projects and facilitating innovative engagements/dialogues with contemporary art. www.sonyaderman.com

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