i woke up to find that you added me on linked in by Taylor Silver
so i sifted through the dormant parts of my brain that still remembered us your hand was on my thigh in the back of a 1993 camry we were parked at the swap shop drive-in (did you know it closed down?) we listened to harvest moon and smoked a bowl of ‘golden goat’ then i unzipped the slim-fit jeans your mom got on sale but i got them half off before you slid a finger inside me, possessing the tactful finesse of a child who just discovered silly putty and out of nowhere there was a white light and the clock on the dash stopped at 12:56 little green men plucked us from the camry and then we were 10,000 feet off the ground 4
we were probed and prodded, drugged and bound by restraints they planted microchips that told me when to apologize and told you that my clit is a little higher up when they finished with their retinal scans, and blood tests they moved onto instructional videos: how-to’s on breakfast in bed and adjusting your sleep number then they beamed us back down, assured that we would fare better this time but unplanned obsolescence happened to us: i stopped apologizing and you started to dream about your T.A. it was our faulty rewiring that made us break up in that fucking camry anyway it says right here that we’re both proficient at excel so at least we have that
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Robots, Aliens and AI: Sci Fi Women and the Male Gaze
By Chloë Leeson Science fiction has been one of the biggest cinematic exports since its beginning, from Fritz Lang’s 1927 epic Metropolis, 1968 cult classic Barbarella, to more recently, films like Ex Machina, Lucy and Under the Skin. One commonality throughout science fiction is the male gaze. As a society, we’ve grown used to the male gaze in movies, so much so that often we might not even notice it. Cameras pan women’s bodies and men reign supreme, in control of the camera and in control of the narrative. But why are directors continuing with this regime of sexualising the women of sci-fi, when they are quite often found to be made of metal, wires or mucus-covered, lizard-like flesh?
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The question has been plaguing the minds of film-goers and feminists alike for years, and representation has not progressed much over the past decade. Sexy robots and aliens are moneymakers and their presence on screen is ever growing in popularity. Metal body parts of AI’s (Artificial Intelligence) such as Ava (Ex Machina) jut out, imitating a woman’s natural form; the metal plated sheen a tantalising hint at nakedness. Alien and mutant women are curvaceous and often depicted nude or scantily clad in the case of Mystique (X-Men) and Leeloo (The Fifth Element), because people can’t wear clothes in space, right? Even the human women up in the sky aren’t free from the gaze; Star Trek Into Darkness made big news stripping Dr. Carol Marcus down to her undies in a completely un-necessary scene in 2013. A widely known and celebrated film that jumbles all these ideas together in a direct look at the male gaze and its wants/needs all wrapped up in 80s teen comedy John Hughes brilliance is Weird Science. Weird Science follows Gary and Wyatt on their quest to build the perfect woman. Using a Barbie doll, their computers, various magazine clippings and the ritualistic wearing of bras on their heads they manage to create Lisa, the ideal woman. Beauty AND brains all rolled into one. Lisa’s being is an interesting one; initially presented as a sexy, slender V.O.B (vision of beauty) in a crop top and knickers, she quickly takes on a life of her own, using her wit and savvy to guide the boys on the road to ‘manhood’. She is at the boys’ disposal; she acknowledges this and cites them as her ‘creator’ but the boys are far too shy to take it further than a kiss. In the end, Lisa is used as a mechanism to drive the boys’ narrative but it feels juvenile and innocent; she guides them, boosts their confidence and eventually makes them realise that they should go after girls their own age. The boys appear thankful for her and see her as more of a mentor than romantic interest by the end of the film.
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One decade later and Ghost in the Shell arrives; a Japanese anime about a cyborg law enforcer tracking down an evil hacker. The film toys with issues of gender identity and gender roles through the eyes of a cyborg who has to adhere to neither in order to complete their task. The film is set to get a live-action remake starring Scarlett Johansson, an actress who is far from shy to get stuck in sci-fi. In 2014, Jonathan Glazer gave Johansson her most interesting role to date in Under The Skin as ‘The Female,’ a nameless woman prowling the streets of Scotland in a van seducing any man she speaks to. The film relies largely on real reactions: Johansson drove around in a wig and leopard coat donning an English twang and speaking to strangers who had no idea who she was. Once the men were seduced, dream-like David Lynch-esque sequences began with black rooms and liquid floors, and Johansson stripped down to her underwear, using her sexual prowess to capture these men. The Female is exploring the world for the first time, along with her sexuality. However, the sight of a naked ScarJo is not necessarily an alluring one; she has lumps and bumps and cellulite and a look on her face that says she knows something you don’t. This was not a movie for building male fantasies, but almost tearing them down. Building Artificial Intelligence has been a popular theme lately with the likes of Chappie and Ex Machina dominating cinemas. Ex Machina strictly looks into questions surrounding the way men perceive women, how we would perceive robots, if AI can really have consciousness, and can they be abused? Ex Machina’s AI Ava’s human face and slender womanly robot body blur the lines of robot and human, sexual woman and naïve young girl, learning about the world. Will there be a time when gender and its stereotypical roles do not come into play when creating these otherworldly beings, perhaps a C3PO for the selfie generation? Creations of such supreme intelligence do not need these limitations to succeed in their stories or be relatable to an audience.
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By Sarah 9
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Synchronicity: When the Universe Interweaves with the Physical “I’ve been influenced by these forever but I’ve never actually taken the colors from someone’s aura and put it in a painting.” My mom and I were sitting with Jenny Morgan at her art studio in Bushwick as she explained to us the giant, colorful painting in the corner. The piece was inspired by an aura photograph of Syrie Moskowitz, an actress-model who is frequently the subject of her artwork. “I’ve been influenced by these forever but I’ve never actually taken the colors from someone’s aura and put it in a painting.” Aura Photography is a technology that captures the auras or biofields of the subject being photographed. The process implements biofeedback and is printed in a Polaroid-style fashion. “The photographs are read as a sort of fortune or some form of a divination,” Jenny Morgan and her Morgan explained. “No matter who I aura-inspired painting. go with, it’s really magical! They interpret these things on an intuitive level. It’s this perfect form of art and divination.” I asked her about her beliefs on reality and existence. “I accept dreams, imagery, and hallucinations as a reality…as like an actual thing that exists outside of a certain dimension. I don’t think that as an epiphenomenon of our brain…I’m kind of in the belief that there’s a lot of different realities and that it all has a validity and I don’t really know what that means for me yet.” *
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In a fast-paced world ruled by order and structure, unexpected events like coincidences are magical blips in the algorithm. Carl Jung describes this as synchronicity, or the coming together of two events that cannot be explained by cause and effect but is meaningful to the observer. A spiritual perspective will tell you that synchronicity is a sign of divina divination, a paradisiacal occurrence where God or the universe is winking at you. A scientific perspective will explain that it is merely a consequence of the brain’s predisposition to seek patterns. Either way, there is no denying the transcendental, serene feeling of just belonging to the universe when meaningful coincidences happen to you. Coincidences expose the brilliant peculiarity of the universe to you. You escape the material world and enter Oneness. *
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Last September, I was browsing through magazines at a bookstore when a bright fuchsia image caught my eye. It was the glossy cover of JuxtaJuxta poz, which featured a painting by the artist Jenny Morgan. I had never heard of her before, but later that month when visiting my local Museum of Contemporary Art, I learned that her work was going to be featured in an exhibit on realism. This shocked me. My hometown (Jacksonville, Florida) isn’t a hub of culture by any standard. I fell in love with her artwork. As a viewer, I was initially allured by her keen attention to detail. She renders the human figure scrupulous scrupulously—wisps of wild flyaway hairs dancing around visages in exactness. Robust veins protruding from a mother’s hands. Mouths organically portrayed half-open, making it feel as if you’ve caught a glimpse of someone frozen in between breaths. But it is at second glance that one begins to feel what really makes Morgan’s paintings so spellbinding. Her subjects have eyes that seem to gleam with soul, whose bodies seem to radiate with a spirit that tran transcends their fleshy semblance. There is a deeply mystic vibration to Morgan’s work that feels cosmic. Keeping with the themes of coincicoinci dence and the metaphysical, it seemed to be kismet that I would run into her, of all people, at the JFK airport on a Friday morning in October. I had already been emailing her for an article that I wanted to write about her, but the conversation was faltering. I was waiting for my mom outside the bathroom when I spotted her. 26
“Hi!!! Sorry to bother you, but…are you Jenny Morgan?” I felt my face flush from the adrenaline and disbelief. “My name is Rona Akbari, I’m the girl from Jacksonville who was emailing you.” She replied yes and expressed her surprise, too. She apologized for not responding to my last email and we talked about how uncanny this was. It felt like every cell in my body had died and regenerated. “Would you want to just do the interview at my studio in Bushwick?” She asked me. I was bubbling. While we were in her studio, she explained to me, “Everything that comes in and kind of appears in my life, I take it on a symbolic level. I kind of see it as being a self-reflecself-reflec tion, and if it hits me in a certain way, like when coincidences happen, it kind of hits you… it’s that spark. That spark is getting larger in certain ways and I can respond to certain people or situations with more of an intuitive knowing.”
Me, thrilled, next to Jenny and her painting.
“All We Have Is Now” is Jenny Morgan’s solo show, which opened May 14th at Driscoll Babcock Galleries in Chelsea, NYC. Please see it because she is so genuinely cool and lovely and magical and so is her art.
By: Rona
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By Marta
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I might not be ok by Molly Gorelick
Labels are comforting, so I keep looking up symptoms of a disease that I definitely don’t have. I am the pioneer of my own vessel, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t ever get lonely. Immortalize my regrets in a plaster cast so that they outlive my physical presence. Everything tastes bad, but I’ve always liked being sick. There is nothing more romantic than asking another person for medication. Survival is not as pure as I need it to be.
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By Heather 44