Sullivan su14:s:pdf

Because E verything Sucks

YSAtolCe OHur T

About their upcoming TV Show, Single, Tour, Sunglasses, & Everything Else.

Also Richard Avedon

Best Donuts in LA Dan Deacon Interview 1

Editor-In-Chief Christopher Sullivan Art Direction Alin Dragulin Associate Editor Scott Hansen Managing Editor Claire Boucher Ad Director Neal Harrison Publishing Director Jam Rostron Marketing Director Adam Forkner Account Managers Busy Gangnes Melissa Livaudais Advertisment Alexis Krauss Director Advertisment Derek Miller Editor

Contributing Alin Dragulin Photographers Mac Boucher Julia Stotz Christopher Sullivan Tamara Houghten Nick Guzman Elyse Fitzgerald Ricky Tompkins Richard Avedon Jona Bechtolt Claire L. Evans Shawn Brackbill Contributing Jona Bechtolt Writers Claire L Evans Christopher Sullivan Laura Miller Hamish Bowles Ali Trachta Kely Smith

What’sInside

Cover Story | YACHT

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Christopher Sullivan: Bailing Out We all know that we’re told never to bail out on something.

To never leave a team behind in the dust. You don’t leave them to prosper independently. and you don’t leave it to avoid inevitable disaster.

And yet there are so many success stories based on just this.

I have done it before, I will probably do it again. I have no shame in this. As long as you communicate your plans and leave some sort of plan in place for once you get out of there.

Having been in different positions, some where no plan was left for me, I do much prefer a plan. There’s no shame in trying to pursuit your own endeavors. They may succeed, they may fail catastrophically.

I write this by the light of a few candles around the room and a decorative floor lamp, along with the omnipresent blue glow from my laptop. I recline, somewhat comfortably on this shitty second-hand sofa in my home, a lengthy commute from Downtown Los Angeles. I like it because despite the hellish drive, I live near the beach.

its absurd and ungodly temperatures you may mistake for a heat lamp at a dirty fast food joint, that in the winter challenges you to maintain proper blood circulation to your fingers. The cold is unimaginable. I’ve never been in Death Valley during the summer and I don’t plan on it.

I find it uniquely perverse how cold it is, and I can’t let anything tarnish this odd relationship I have with this little slice of landscape. It’s like a little inside joke between me and an entire national park.

This photo is from Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. A friend of mine took it next to me. What interests me about this photo is not the foreground, but the background. The colors of those background mountains are rare, and even though it’s just atmospheric distortion, it still creates a wonderful effect.

before the moon. But no matter what the reason, it’s a statement of beauty.

And that’s statement of beauty leads me back home, near the beach. On the world’s lumpiest couch. With a lamp that never stands quite vertical, and a cat that likes the corner more than it does me, the person that feeds it.

But it’s these little moments that make life worth living.

Get out and see places more. All over your state, all over your country, all over your planet.

Never stop being hungry for beauty.

It’s like how they say the smog makes the sunsets look the way the do. Almost like the sun is getting undressed right

I’ve always had an affinity for the beach. There’s something very intrisically calibrating about the beach.

I’ve never heard anyone get stressed out by watching the ocean. It’s something that is very natural. The ebb and flow, the surprise of how far each wave will reach, mixed with the predictability that another wave will come.

This book was edited heavily on a beach near my house. I don’t know its name; I’m not convinced it has been given one. But the low foot traffic and relative inaccessability makes it a perfect getaway just about fifteen minutes from my home.

Previous months were edited in the office, with the exception of our second month which was heavily reviewed in the desert. Death Valley in the winter is a suprising place. Here lies a place, constantly heralded for

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UpFront

Trends /// Culture /// Food

Laura is Making a Cookbook

Just because instagram’s queen is making a mostly raw, all-vegan cookbook “Raw. Vegan. Not Gross.” doesn’t mean you won’t like the food. Trust us.

I know. It’s a big deal.

I’ve known it was happening for over two months now, but I’ve been keeping it a secret because, well, FEELINGS:

1. I didn’t want to jinx it. But really it was more than that. I’ve tried and failed at so many things at this point in my career, that I have gotten very good at bracing myself for things to not work out. I had originally wanted Sidesaddle Kitchen (the inception of my tagline RAW VEGAN NOT GROSS btw) to be a wholesale business, selling sweet treats to coffee shops and markets. There were a few problems though: First, I was afraid to charge enough for my products because I was embarrassed that I was selling “yuppie food” that I couldn’t afford to buy if I wasn’t making it myself. I would sell out at farmers markets and still couldn’t pay my rent! Second, I was more interested in telling people how to make it themselves than selling it to them. People would ask me questions at the markets and I would get their emails and follow up to give them my recipes, tell them about how I crafted my signs, or send them links

to websites they should be following. FYI this is NOT how you run a business! I made wedding cakes, catered parties, and tried a hundred different things, but was never making money. All this is to say that I became very familiar with the feelings of failure and disappointment.

2. I’m a little scared. And by a little I mean a lot. Wait, am I not supposed to say that? BECAUSE I DEFINITELY AM. What if my recipes are boring?

What if my publisher thinks I’m a bad writer? What if everyone hates my book? What if everyone hates me?

What if the whole world starts doing #froobs and my #froobs are rendered obsolete? (jk I’d be pumped if that happened!) Really though, my sensitive introverted anxious self is having an anxiety-thon.

3. I’m not actually a raw vegan. I just love raw vegan food. I eat cooked food (GASP!) and that will be incorporated into the book because I think it is just more practical and cost-efficient than eating all raw.

And truth bomb here: I also will occasionally eat eggs from my parents’ chicken coop and even a cheese stick if one of my adorable nieces hands it to me. I think the introduction to raw vegan food can be hard because it seems very intense and exclusive to outsiders. My hope is that more people will come to see that plant-based

diets are not boring, dogmatic, or cult-like, because I see much more benefit for our collective health and environment if most of us eat a plant based diet than if 100 of us are extreme hard-core raw vegans.

4. Criticism Not long after I started doing the Raw Vegan Not Gross series for Tastemade I found myself afraid to say/do/make anything because I was so afraid of the criticism I’d get. People criticized my recipes saying they were too nut -heavy (they were right and I worked on that!) They criticized my voice (sorry haterz – I take after my gorgeous and graceful low-voiced mother and I’m not ashamed of that one!)

They also criticized my weight, and, if you’re a woman, you probably know that this digs into the deepest crevices of your soul and brings up feelings of shame, hurt, self-loathing, the whole bit — it certainly did for me. But I decided that if I stopped doing this just because commenters told me my thighs were too big, I was missing an opportunity to offer a new voice. A bigthighed voice.

OK LAURA, ENOUGH FEELINGS.

The point is, I’m writing a cookbook and I am so excited to finally tell you that I want to explode. •

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UpFront

Trends /// Culture /// Food

Windows Surreal into the

Words: Hamish Bowles Photography: Victor

FIDM’s 5th floor windows celebrate the surreal work of Elsa Schiaparelli

Crespi in Vogue—had a stiff overskirt of Rhodophane (a transparent, glasslike modern material); a smart black suit jacket had red lips for pockets. Handbags, in the form of music boxes, tinkled tunes like “Rose Marie, I Love You”; others fastened with padlocks. Monkey fur and zippers (newfangled in the thirties) were everywhere.

Her love of trompe l’oeil can be traced to the faux-bow sweater that kick-started Schiaparelli’s career and brought her quirky style to the masses.

“Dare to be different,”[7] is the advice she offered to women. Pace-setters and rule-breakers waved that flag through the sixties, the seventies, and beyond.•

“Madder and more original than most of her contemporaries, Mme Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word ‘genius’ is applied most often,” Time magazine wrote of its cover subject in 1934.[1] Coco Chanel once dismissed her rival as “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” (To Schiaparelli, Chanel was simply “that milliner.”)

Indeed, Schiaparelli—“Schiap” to friends—stood out among her peers as a true nonconformist, using clothing as a medium to express her unique ideas. In the thirties, her peak creative period, her salon overflowed with the wild, the whimsical, and even the ridiculous. Many of her madcap designs could be pulled off only by a woman of great substance and style: Gold ruffles sprouted from the fingers of chameleon-green suede gloves; a pale-blue satin evening gown—modeled by Madame

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UpFront

Donuts to Go

Trends /// Culture /// Food

Words: Ali Trachta

Photography: Chris, Tamara, Nick, Elyse

They say sex is like a doughnut.

Even at its worst, is it ever really bad? Well, once you consume, in rapid succession, as many doughnuts as we have in the last few weeks, you start to believe it can be.

Of course there’s never a reason to eat a doughnut. No amount of self-delusion will allow you to believe that fruit filling is a dose of vitamins for the day. No, eating a doughnut is an act of pure pleasure-seeking, so if you’re going to have one, every bite should merit throwing a wrench in your otherwise cleanliving diet. Dry, bland pastry need not apply.

consistency that requires serious jaw action for each bite. Du-Par’s gets the glaze just right too -- hardened barely past the point of sticky liquid to form something shy of a crust. The bear claw isn’t your run-of-the-mill, boasting a delicious almond filling that’s reminiscent of baklava. And the fact that it’s served warm certainly doesn’t hurt. 6333 W. Third St., Los Angeles; 323-933-8446.

7. Ms. Donuts:

In the Echo Park/Silver Lake area, you could do a lot worse than this oldfashioned shop, especially when the line at Taco Zone is too long and you need some late night sustenance. The maple bar was a little on the dry side, but the chocolate was the exact opposite So as an act of public service, we scoured the -- in a good way -- with a texture that city for the best doughnuts around, all worth suggested it could have been cooked about the sugar crash you’ll inevitably experience 30 seconds longer, but we were glad it wasn’t. later. We focused our search on actual The Old-Fashioned doughnut is also a winner doughnut shops, as opposed to restaurants that here, with glaze so thick it softly crunches as serve them on the menu -- with the exception you eat it. 1353 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles; of one, because if you’re going to order a 213-484-0927. doughnut from a waitress, it seems fitting to do so at a 24-hour diner. Turn the page for our list 6. BabyCakes: of the Top 10 doughnuts in L.A. The doughnuts at BabyCakes (and actually everything else at BabyCakes) are vegan, 10. Maggie’s Donuts: kosher, gluten-free, wheat-free, soy-free, There’s one main reason to swing by Maggie’s, casein-free, egg-free and sans refined sugar. and that’s the custard-filled iced chocolate bar, In other words, any sane pastry-lover’s which is so, well, custard-filled, it’s literally nightmare. Or so you would think, but once bursting. Served split down the middle, you get you try one of its baked-not-fried doughnut a peek before you eat at the erupting cool vanilla varieties, the last thing on your mind will be epicenter, which couples perfectly with the soft anything its lacking. What you’ll taste instead and sweet doughnut shell. Some of the custard is delicious gooey sweetness, along with a will spill out onto your fingers, and you’ll lap it hint of lemon added for brightness. The salted up, and you won’t care how that looks. 2612 E. caramel doughnut, though a mess of dense Sixth St., Los Angeles; 213-383-1511. cake and sticky sauce, is really the best, but the coconut is also worth a try, since its flavor is mild enough for any non-coconut fan to get 9. Spudnuts: Out of the chains around L.A., Spudnuts is our behind. 236 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles; 855-462-229 top pick. It’s a basic shop with a hefty handful of locations all around L.A. and the Valley.

As such, it’s best to keep your order simple, 5. Bob’s Coffee & Doughnuts: too. If you’re gonna do chocolate, do it all the Bob’s has a vintage feel, as it should, since it’s way with the chocolate-frosted and chocolate located in the Original L.A. Farmers Market. chip-topped chocolate doughnut. Even better, And while not quite as old as the market itself, though, is the vanilla cruller, which is only it’s been flinging outstanding little circular lightly glazed, but manages to pack a really treats since 1970. Fitting to the ambiance, bright vanilla flavor. 2775 Van Nuys Blvd., Los Bob’s has plenty of classic doughnuts, like the Angeles; 818-896-4678 bear claw, the apple fritter and almighty glazed,

8. Du-Par’s:

Du-Par’s certainly isn’t a doughnut shop, but if you’re near the Grove location, it’s worth braving the highly congested parking lot to sample one of the few varieties this diner has on its menu. The classic glazed is a champion of its breed, puffed up to a thick, chewy

but it’s not so set in its ways, shaking it up with a few new-school varieties like Nutella. The maple was our favorite, even among its many worthy competitors in town, perhaps because it came with the bonus of alfresco dining. Or maybe just because it was perfectly chewy and delicious. 6333 W. Third St., #450, Los Angeles; 323-933-8929.

moist, slightly undercooked center. The glazed twist is also a treat in its own right. You’ll know that the moment you take a bite and the coating turns to sweet liquid. 2918 Sawtelle Blvd., Los Angeles; 310-4786930.

2. Stan’s Doughnuts:

4. Randy’s Donuts:

From blocks away, that massive doughnut structure on top of Randy’s beckons you, and on your way home from LAX, which is when many people see it, it’s hard to say no.

So don’t -- listen to your gut, literally. Randy’s has everything you long to see on a doughnut menu: glazed, cake, twists, apple fritters, bear claws, you name it, and none is a bad choice.

But out of these classics, the jelly doughnut is our top pick. Maybe we’ve maxed out on food porn lately, but doesn’t that hole through which it’s stuffed look like it’s puckering for a kiss? The jelly inside does not taste like it was made from muddled organic raspberries and sweetened with agave. No, it tastes like pie filling loaded with additives. But you know what? It’s delicious. And on the topic of fillings, be aware the “cream-filled” is actually custardfilled, which turns out to be all the better. 805 W. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood; 310-645-4707.

Stan’s isn’t even really a shop, it’s a stand that shares its space with an outpost of the Flame Broiler. But despite this culinary clash, everything else about the place works. Its counter is full of unique varieties like the famous peanut butter banana and the giant pretzel-shaped twists that can be hard to choose between. Former Squid Ink blogger Elina Shatkin steered us toward the apple fritters, which were about the best fritters we tried, especially due to a lingering cinnamon aftertaste. But the chocolate cheese, which is basically an iced cheese Danish, won our hearts with a decadence that bordered on comical. 10948 Weyburn Ave., Los Angeles; 310-208-8660.

1. The Donut Man:

Few doughnuts are worth driving some 30-odd miles to taste (if you’re coming from city center) but in the case of the Donut Man, gas up. And not just for their undeniable deliciousness but also for their sheer girth.

If you’ve heard of the Donut Man, likely you’ve seen photos of their strawberry doughnut, which oozes a filling of whole, ripe strawberries from a sweet biscuit-like shell. That’s a good one to try, as is the apple, 3. Primo’s Donuts: which, unlike most apple fritters, has filling Primo’s has been doing its thing since 1956, that runneth over much like its strawberry and despite now being hovered over by a cousin. Best of all, though, is the Tiger Tail, major freeway, it somehow maintains that is a glazed chocolate and vanilla braid that same simplistic charm we associate with looks as if they put devil’s food and regular the romanticized version of that era. It’s a batter in a soft-serve ice cream machine and tiny shop that serves maybe a dozen or so hit “twist.” Like many of the other varieties, varieties, but we recommend getting there it’s semi-ridiculously oversized, making the early if you want the good stuff before it runs whole doughnut experience at the Donut Man out. The favorite there, and rightfully so, is the feel like a culinary funhouse. 915 E. Route 66, buttermilk, a dense, glazed behemoth of a thing Glendora; 626-335-9111. • that weighs more in your hand than it looks like it should. But it encompasses all you could ever want in a pastry: a crunchy exterior with a

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GoodStuff

Yellow Pimsoll, Urban Outfitters

Bright yellow may not be your color of choice, but an aqua tank top and some hot pink swim trunks and you get a lot of eyes at the beach. Sure, you look a little gay, but some can just pull it off naturally. They make other colors as well, all $14.

Evolution Organic Orange Juice, Starbucks

Okay, yeah. We get it. We’re assholes. We got that juice craze thing that’s going around LA. Take it from Ellen, upstairs neighbor of our editor: “The best OJ ever, and I picked the oranges straight off the tree in Florida.”

Available at Starbucks and most grocers.

Neutrogena Oil Free Acne Wash

If you’re like some of us, you’re too busy to get back home to sleep, so you sleep in your car, in which case keep this in your bag of tricks because this really works to help freshen you up in the morning.

Herschel Laptop Case, Amazon

We’re not normally ones to drop this kind of money on a laptop case or a brand name, but after seeing some friends with them, this stuff stands up to a beating. (Also, we recommend the MacBook Pro inside, in case you were curious.)

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Braven Portable Speaker

Beats are overrated but there’s an unsung alternative, Braven straight out of Irvine.

Surprisingly bassy, right from the pulse it makes when it turns on. Pictured is the 650 model.

Lace Heels, eBay

TBH I don’t know fashion, but two coworkers won’t shut up about these Jeffrey Campbell knockoffs from Santee Alley for $35.

Decorative Plate, Urban Outfitters

Look, if nothing else it’s cultured right? It looks legit and authentic, but it’s from Urban Outfitters so we all know what’s up. Six bucks isn’t too bad though so we’re down for it.

Lingonberry Syrup, IKEA

So this is syrup. Think like syrup for a carbonated soda. Add water, flat or carbonated. It’s super light and summery and an unexpected and rare flavor in the US and is just super refreshing.

Custom Bracelet, Etsy

It seems like every two months there’s that new “it” gift for your girlfriend from Etsy. It’s the perfect little way to say “Hey baby, I pay attention to world and I do continue to love you.”

Banana Boat Sunscreen, Target

Standard features: SPF 50, the new modern standard apparently according to science; flip top to make applying cleaner and not pollute with aerosols; boat on the front of it.

Cow Creamer, Kohls

Here’s what we did with ours: we planted little flowers in them. I know it’s odd, but isn’t “quirky” the fun shit these days?

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cover story”” author

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YACHT on their new Amazon TV Show “Support,” on touring, on philosophy, on their recent collaborations.

When the letters YACHT are put together in sequence and printed in caps, it creates a shorthand code of sorts that means Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans are performing and making music, as well as objects, events, texts, video, products, websites, and other miscellaneous things.

Jona was born in Washington State, and Claire in the UK, and spent time while very young in France. They both currently live in Los Angeles, California, but grew up in Portland, Oregon, and consider Marfa, Texas to be their “spiritual home.” These three places come together to form what they lovingly refer to as the Western American Utopian Triangle.

They’ve made five full-length albums of music and a handful of singles, the bulk of which have been released by the wonderful DFA Records in New York. The previous releases were on a label called Marriage Records, which has now transformed into a contemporary art museum in Portland, Oregon. Their first album was released on States Rights Records, an incubator for music by the likes of Lucky Dragons, White Rainbow, Jib Kidder, and more.

In 2002 YACHT started as Jona’s solo venture, only to double in size when Claire joined in 2008. You should’ve seen the ceremony, it was beautiful. Speaking of beautiful, since 2010 YACHT’s live performances have included our very best friends Bobby Birdman and Jeffrey Jerusalem as players, collaborators, and irreplaceable additions to the enterprise.

In every form—solo, duo, and full-band—YACHT has been incredibly fortunate to tour around the world both alone and with bands that may well have introduced you to us. Some of their favorite tour mates have been: LCD Soundsystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Hot Chip, Architecture in Helsinki, Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, The Postal Service, and Chairlift.

They’ve been privileged to make remixes for Snoop Dogg, Kings of Leon, Phoenix, Neon Indian, Stereolab, RATATAT, Classixx, Mr. Little Jeans, and many more. We love making these.

Enough about us, how are you?

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In 2006, I switched from PC to Mac in the midst of an aesthetic sea change called Web 2.0. Overnight, all my buttons and toggles became aqueous, squishy blobs. For my entire young life as a computer user, that place had been populated with beige file folders and gray boxes; now it had metamorphosed into a world of glistening chrome, cool blues, and gummylike buttons.

For those Flatland dwellers unfamiliar, “Web 2.0” is the broad, jargony, and now largely meaningless term coined by the UX Designer Darcy DiNucci and popularized by Tim O’Reilly at the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. It articulated the transformative changes underway on the web at the time: how users were engaging with each other online, the birth of social media, the halcyon moment of wikis and folksonomies. As DiNucci explained it in 1999, as the web morphs from 1.0 to 2.0, it “will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.”

The term is also inseparable from a certain graphic design sensibility, which emerged to coincide with this new web. Apple was the greatest perpetrator: its operating system in the early 2000s, the period roughly coinciding with the popularity of Web 2.0, had a squishy, light-filled look.

Jellybean buttons in Mac OS X seemed to reflect a gentle whiteness; when clicked, shadows would fall across their curves.

It was tantalizingly tactile. Of Aqua—the glistening visual language of OS X, which still persists in small corners of Mavericks, the current version of the operating system, but will go out with the bathwater once OS X 10.10, or Yosemite, hits the market this fall—Steve Jobs said, “one of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it.”

Whether it was Apple’s doing, or if the phenomenon was driven by some larger and more ineffable zeitgeist, the lickable, dimensional trend manifested all across the Web 2.0. Menus, toolbars, buttons, slides, and toggles

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everywhere online existed in a world of glowing light and defined shadows. Not all of them were as appetizing as Aqua, but the shadows did have one important thing in common: they almost all fell in the same direction. To the right.

This is nothing new. Click a button on almost any user interface and examine the shadow it casts. These days, if it exists at all, the shadow is diffuse, more the suggestion of depth or convexity than anything particularly literal. But in the early days—as early as the first Lisa operating system and into the heady days of Web 2.0—they were drop shadows, falling nearly universally to the lower right-hand edge of the object. In the simulated three-dimensional landscape of the interface, there was a light source.

Let’s call it the “Virtual Sun.” If the buttons were to be trusted, the Virtual Sun hung above all screens, all web pages, always just slightly out of frame, in a hidden space between the top and the upper left of the computer.

The Virtual Sun served to remind users, on some roughly subconscious level, that digital space, like real space, is navigable, that it adheres to physics. The dimensionality of the web was designed to appear logical to us— because we are accustomed to a three-dimensional world, a world of shadows.

According to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for OSX, shadows give objects dimensionality and realism, and reflect how the objects would appear in the real world, if they were plonked down on a desk, a shelf, or on the ground.

The canonical drop-shadow—like, the Wikipedia image for dropshadow—is cast from a light source above and to the left. The real sun sets in the West; is the Virtual Sun, hidden just “West” of the screen, the inverse of our own?

Perhaps this placement has nothing to do with nature, but rather with a Western sense of linearity. After all, we read from left to right; our bias, when we think of linear progression, follows suit. The design of platform video games and English sentences alike hinges on the assumption that a movement to the right is a movement towards resolution. A shadow falling in this direction feels

IS PIRACY THEFT? YACHT’S OFFICIAL PIRACY POLICY Stealing is wrong. But downloading isn’t stealing. If I shoplift an album from my local record store, no one else can buy it. But when I download a song, no one loses it and another person gets it. There’s no ethical problem.

— Aaron Swartz The notion of theft was simple when it concerned a one-to-one correlation between people and objects, but files are infinitely reproducible in each iteration.

Files, like ideas, are built to propagate. As Aaron Swartz pointed out, when you download our record for free somewhere, you aren’t stealing it; how can it be stealing when an infinite number of copies remain, hanging in the aether?

The reality is, the Internet can’t be matched to brickand-mortar complements.

Piracy isn’t shoplifting–it’s a completely new phenomenon that deserves its own category.

As of 2012, 57% of the world admits to using pirated software. The most pirated

software in the world belongs to the most successful software company: Microsoft. This is a pattern that can be seen across all media. Shows like Game of Thrones, movies like Silver Linings Playbook, and artists like Bruno Mars top iTunes charts and bittorent trackers simultaneously. It’s difficult to really understand these correlations; the issue is now so endemic that there are no control variables left to examine. But we can see the general trends and relationships and know that this moment is intractable– that for better or worse, the landscape will never return to pre-Napster conditions.

People don’t pirate software, ideas, books, or media

for ideological reasons. They do so because it’s convenient, or to live outside of their own financial constraints. Case in point: piracy is most rampant in countries with emerging economies. The path of least resistance for the rest is purchase. We don’t glorify or condemn either strategy. At this point, the freedoms which define the Internet are the same freedoms which allow piracy to happen. They are completely interlinked; we, for one, are not willing to sacrifice the former in order to rein in the latter.

It’s impossible to stop our albums from being pirated via torrents and digital file locker sites. We could insist that our label engage in DMCA

takedown Whack-a-mole, but we’ve found that piracy actually helps us in some cases.

We understand why our music is pirated, and it has led us to far corners of the world where our albums aren’t available for sale. We’d rather you not pirate our records (honestly, we could really use the $7.99) but we’ve never met a computersavvy person with a completely innocent hard drive, either.

We believe that information wants to be free, but is art information? Yes, but it’s also something more, something directly linked to the dreams and livelihoods of individuals like us who are trying to make it work in a digital world as liberating as it is hostile.

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“Free Wi-Fi” is not an advertisement of services, but a political statement.

– Jona Bechtolt conclusive. We might read light, like a sentence.

Bill Atkinson, who worked on the legendary original Macintosh development team in the early 1980s, creating user interfaces for Lisa and the original Mac, explains it this way:

“in Western text, the text begins at the top left, and that becomes the natural origin. As you type more, the text grows to the right and then grows downwards.

The natural origin for a window full of Western text is therefore the top left. By placing the window resizing control on the bottom right, the top left becomes the anchored origin, and the start of the text remains fixed as you resize the window. To

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reflect this top left origin, I placed the virtual sun above and to the left, with a drop shadow down and to the right.”

His colleague, the software designer Andy Hertzfeld, pegs the origins of the digital drop-shadow to Lisa, the Mac’s predecessor.

The team experimented with drop shadows on early prototypes of the Mac user interface, from the summer of 1981, to create the illusion of a menu or window floating above the desktop—to give depth. Hertzfeld believes, like Atkinson, that “the light source was in the upper left because that seemed the most natural, since your eye scans from left to right, top to bottom.”

Computer shadows are there to make us feel like the environment is natural, as though a click has something physical to it. We grasp, as a shadow moves, an intuitive sense of feedback: we know what is clickable, because we know how light moves through space. But real shadows swing and change.

A more accurate visual metaphor might have been light that moves naturally: buttons casting short, crisp shade right after noon, at dusk, a golden desktop streaked with long purple shadows.

Regardless, the Virtual Sun is the quietest and most subtle skeuomorph in the game. Without much pomp, it makes our chrome fittings glisten dully. It was the light

I felt nothing but the impulse to snap a dozen pictures I haven’t looked at since.

– Claire L. Evans by which Aqua bewitched us. Since the beginning, it has given depth to our desktop. But it is waning now, even beginning to set. We are in the midst of a great flattening, perhaps because we understand the physics of the digital world now, and have adjusted—as astronauts on a new planet might eventually learn to walk without gravity.

When Apple launched iOS7 last September, I felt as though my world had been steamrolled—it was a shift as significant as my introduction to Aqua in 2006.

My textural app icons, overnight, transformed into colorful dots on fields of white. This flattening is not exclusive to Apple: Windows 8, of course, is a universe of shifting tiles.

Netflix just axed the shadows on its logo.

“Material Design,” Google’s brand-new design language for Android, Chrome OS, and the web, is a hybrid of the affectless flatness of iOS interfaces and an extremely scaled-down use of shadow. According to Google’s design documentation, “surfaces and edges” in Material Design “provide visual cues that are grounded in our experience of reality.” Google’s shadows, although greatly diminished, still fall to the right.

We are growing apart from the desktop metaphors that held our hands through the early years of personal computing. Young children

now reach for multitouch devices without the foggiest notion that these shiny planes—their toys and teachers—once contained folders, leather-bound calendars, a world of two-dimensional shadows and light. When they’re old enough to understand it, the notion will seem ridiculous to them.

I said earlier that the Virtual Sun had set. That’s not quite true. If the few remaining dimensional buttons left in our interfaces are any clue, it’s likely high noon. The Virtual Sun isn’t off in a vaulted corner anymore, just beyond view. It’s directly overhead, blazing down on everything we touch. •

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Fahey Klein presents a major retrospective of the photographer’s work.

By Kely Smith

W

hat do Jean Genet, Jimmy Durante, Brigitte Bardot, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacques Cousteau, Andy Warhol, and Lena Horne have in common? They were a few of the many personalities caught on film by photographer Richard Avedon. For more than fifty years, Richard Avedon’s portraits have filled the pages of the country’s finest magazines. His stark imagery and brilliant insight into his subjects’ characters has made him one of the premier American portrait photographers. Born in New York in 1923, Richard Avedon dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section.

Upon his return in 1944, he found a job as a photographer in a department store. Within two years he had been “found” by an art director at Harper’s Bazaar and was producing work for them as well as Vogue, Look, and a number of other magazines. During the early years, Avedon made his living primarily through work in advertising. His real passion, however, was the portrait and its ability to express the essence of its subject.

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“All photographs are accurate.

None of them is the truth.”

–Richard Avedon

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Born in New York in 1923, Richard Avedon dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section. Upon his return in 1944, he found a job as a photographer in a department store. Within two years he had been “found” by an art director at Harper’s Bazaar and was producing work for them as well as Vogue, Look, and a number of other magazines. During the early years, Avedon made his living primarily through work in advertising. His real passion, however, was the portrait and its ability to express the essence of its subject.

As Avedon’s notoriety grew, so did the opportunities to meet and photograph celebrities from a broad range of disciplines.

Avedon’s ability to present personal views of public figures, who were otherwise distant and inaccessible, was immediately recognized by the public and the celebrities themselves. Many sought out Avedon for their most public images. His artistic style brought a sense of sophistication and authority to the portraits.

More than anything, it is Avedon’s ability to set his subjects at ease that helps him create true, intimate, and lasting photographs.

Throughout his career Avedon has maintained a unique style all his own. Famous for their minimalism, Avedon portraits

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are often well lit and in front of white backdrops. When printed, the images regularly contain the dark outline of the film in which the image was framed. Within the minimalism of his empty studio, Avedon’s subjects move freely, and it is this movement which brings a sense of spontaneity to the images. Often containing only a portion of the person being photographed, the images seem intimate in their imperfection. While many photographers are interested in either catching a moment in time or preparing a formal image, Avedon has found a way to do both.

Beyond his work in the magazine industry, Avedon has collaborated on a number of books of portraits. In 1959 he worked with Truman Capote on a book that documented some of the most famous and important people of the century. Observations included images of Buster Keaton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Pablo Picasso, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mae West. Around this same time he began a series of images of patients in mental hospitals. Replacing the controlled environment of the studio with that of the hospital he was able to recreate the genius of his other portraits with non-celebrities.

The brutal reality of the lives of the insane was a bold contrast to his other work. Years later he would again drift from his celebrity portraits with a series of studio images of drifters, carnival workers, and working class Americans.

Throughout the 1960s Avedon continued to work for Harper’s Bazaar and in 1974 he collaborated with James Baldwin on the book Nothing Personal. Having met in New York in 1943, Baldwin and Avedon were friends and collaborators for more than thirty years. For all of the 1970s and 1980s Avedon continued working for Vogue magazine, where he would take some of the most famous portraits of the decades. In 1992 he became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker, and two years later the Whitney Museum brought together fifty years of his work in the retrospective, “Richard Avedon: Evidence”. He was voted one of the ten greatest photographers in the world by Popular Photography magazine, and in 1989 received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. Today, his pictures continue to bring us a closer, more intimate view of the great and the famous.

Avedon died on October 1st, 2004.

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Interview

Dan Deacon America Dan Deacon is coming to terms with the fact that the world may very well continue on past December 21, 2012.

But for the last 15 years, he tells me recently over coffee in Brooklyn, he romanticized the notion of an apocalyptic end.

“All our problems would be solved, because there would be no more problems,” he says, laughing at the thought. “But that’s not the answer. That’s like throwing out your dishes because they’re dirty-- even if your dishes are filthy as fuck, you clean them.”

That might sound like a push to embrace personal and societal responsibilities, but Deacon does not want to tell anyone how to live their life. His forthcoming album is called America, but it’s explicitly apolitical. The record merely offers the inception of an idea-- that America can be beautiful-by drawing inspiration from the aspects of the country Deacon loves. Shifting landscapes. Cross-country train rides.

Psychedelic deserts.

“I’m looking for more meaning in what I do,” says the Balitmore mainstay of America, his first record that primarily makes use of acoustic instruments over synthetic ones. The album is split: Side A comprises pop songs, while Side B is a cinematic, 21-minute piece called “USA” that’s broken up into four parts. It’s crisper-sounding with more sweeping nuance and room to breathe, and an orchestral portion of the “USA” suite called “Rail” was inspired partially by the 2011 piece Deacon wrote for the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.

But he wanted America to be “more like a rock record” than an electronic one, so he enlisted veteran engineer Simon Heyworth (King Crimson, Nick Cave) to master it.

Deacon tends to jump excitedly from topic-to-topic in conversation, his enthusiasm and nerves often brimming together. We spoke about homogenation of culture, body image, deceptive doctors, and the devastating events that inspired his anti-corporate spirit. Dan Deacon is coming to terms with the fact that the world may very well continue on past December 21, 2012. But for the last 15 years, he tells me recently over coffee in Brooklyn, he romanticized the notion of an apocalyptic end. "All our problems would be solved,

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because there would be no more problems," he says, laughing at the thought. "But that's not the answer. That's like throwing out your dishes because they're dirty-- even if your dishes are filthy as fuck, you clean them."

That might sound like a push to embrace personal and societal responsibilities, but Deacon does not want to tell anyone how to live their life. His forthcoming album is called America, but it's explicitly apolitical. The record merely offers the inception of an idea-- that America can be beautiful-by drawing inspiration from the aspects of the country Deacon loves. Shifting landscapes. Cross-country train rides.

Psychedelic deserts.

Deacon tends to jump excitedly from topic-to-topic in conversation, his enthusiasm and nerves often brimming together. We spoke about homogenation of culture, body image, deceptive doctors, and the devastating events that inspired his anti-corporate spirit.

Pitchfork: When we spoke earlier this year about your performance at the Occupy Wall Street rally in New York, you mentioned wanting to work within a more pro-America stance. How does that relate to the title of America?

Dan Deacon: On my past records, I chose the names because I liked the way they sounded phonetically. Especially with Bromst, I wanted a title that had no other meaning. I wanted the title America to have meaning, but I wanted it to mean a million different things to a million different people.

And America is that way. For some people, it doesn't matter at all; for others, it embodies something they dislike about the world. When a lot of Americans think about American culture, they sort of don't consider themselves American. There's a disassociation with the word. America is defined often by the military, by the government, by the corporations. To me, it's important to be a positive voice in it and be like, "No, America is also this." There's no underground scene like the American DIY. There's no aspect of it taken from other cultures. This is quintessentially American.

Pitchfork: Was there anything in particular that made you start thinking about America like this?

DD: When you look at Occupy and the various social movements happening right now-- and the opposite, the revisionist history within politics-- it's important to care. You can't try to better something that you don't care about. I want the music to be enjoyable and for people to have a good time, but I don't want it to just be that.

If you listen to Spiderman of the Rings it's pretty much a party record. And that's fine. That was the lifestyle I was living.

I thought when 2012 came, we'd be smashed in by an asteroid and the poles would shift. I wanted the world to end. I had no future. I was living one day at a time. It had been years since my mom had passed away. But after she did, it always seemed like nothing really mattered. You lived life, enjoyed it, did what you could with it. But there was this weird darkness in me that I tried to get out through this crazy Wham City lifestyle.

After I started playing larger shows, I noticed people were coming fucked up, like, on ecstasy. It made me feel like shit that I was enabling this culture I wanted nothing to do with. I struggled for a long time. [With Bromst] I thought,"I'll write these songs that are more mathematic and celebratory rather than pure adrenaline sugar." And America is an extension of that idea. You can still rage to a lot of these songs, but there's a level of awareness, which is something I tried to expand.

I was madly in love with the Ken Burns documentary about the Civil War, "The West", while writing and mixing the record. It's a mixture of the beauty of the land with atrocities that occurred for indigenous people, this mix of pride and shame. That was a huge influence.

Pitchfork: Does this record feel more mature to you?

DD: Definitely. I used to write lyrics at the very last possible moment, but for this record, they're much more a focal point. And the music was built from things I love about the country, like the landscapes-- driving cross country and spending hours watching the scenery slowly skip from farmland to mountains to the coast and back again. And the tension I felt before a show, going up to a house and wondering if people would come. And the next day, driving an hour through the desert. The long instrumental builds on "USA" sound like a psychedelic experience in the desert to me.

"After I started playing larger shows, I noticed people were coming fucked up on ecstasy. It made me feel like shit that I was enabling this culture I wanted nothing to do with."

Pitchfork: What are you singing about on "True Thrush"?

DD: The lyrics are about confusion and loss of self-not knowing if you're making the right decisions. The chorus is about homogenization of culture. Even though I'm making music that I think is different and unique, I kept wondering: Is it contributing to this post-Myspace, uniform lifestyle where even being "weird" can be put into a box? I think about that a lot. People who are weird are being homogenized so that it's easier to sell shit to them. It's disheartening, because I feel like a lot of people yearn to not be a part of a system.

Pitchfork: You've said that Bromst was about the dangers of agriculture company Monsanto and food politics.

And the last time we spoke you mentioned that one of the songs on this album is about radical environmentalism.

DD: I think it's important for me to consider how much of my comfort actually comes from somebody else's discomfort-- how much my comfort is a direct result of slavery. When people think about slavery, they think think about the 1850s. They should read Tomatoland, about modern-day tomato farming. It basically talks about how farming is slavery. People are increasingly starting to become aware of things-- like, who wove the fabric in this

shirt? Who brought it across the ocean? Where did the wood [for the table] come from?

Normally, when I write, I am by myself, and I tend to drift into thought. A lot of those thoughts can get very dark. Every once in a while when I'm driving or staring out the window, I can't help but see the buildings burning or smoke in the distance-- a horrible vision, like looking across the street and imagining the windows shattered out and idling.

Pitchfork: But you were talking about being more optimistic about the world.

DD: I think I've become more focused. I'm really interested in conspiracy theories and social conditioning on a mass scale. Thinking about the anti-war pressure applied to American culture during Vietnam-- music was pivotal in mobilizing the youth to be outspoken against their government, showing that the status quo was not the way. It removed the American lifestyle from this Church-like rigidity, and made it malleable. Weirdos are important.

When John Lennon was changing the love movement, he was popular to the point that he got deported. Of course the government is going to team up with big business, like the recording industry, and be like, "We don't want protest music.

Make it uncool for people to have substance to their music."

Even if you look at Springsteen's political songs, they're often recontextualized-- "Born in the U.S.A." sounds like patriotic rhetoric when it's the opposite.

I grew up with bands like Beck and Sonic Youth and Nirvana-- it was cool to not care. But we live in a time period where you have to give a fuck. If we just allow the destruction of our lifestyles, our habits, our cultures, our movements, our environments, our relationships to other cultures-- it's going to be a time of dark ages. How are we going to stop that if we shrug our shoulders? That is insane to me. But I'm not going to be like, "Hey, global governments and CEOs, end your love of greed and embrace the warmth of love." They'd be like, "OK, smoke some more weed you fucking hippie."

Pitchfork: You seem to have a lot of ideas about anticorporatism. When did you start thinking that way?

DD: My mom died of cancer in 1997. I was 17 and very confused, angry, sad, and distraught, just thinking, "How could she have died of cancer? What was the cause of it? Why didn't she get cured?" We didn't have health insurance. My whole family's never had it. My mom and dad ran a small business that was just the two of them.

In high school, I started researching cancer rates. I related any paper I could to these studies. I started coming across population control conspiracy theories, trying to find out why the rate of cancer in this country was the way it was.

I started thinking about how huge of an industry cancer was.

How it was a product of industrialization.

I don't think there's an active plot-- like people in cloaks sacrificing virgins and writing their creed in blood-- but I do think there's something to be said about the idea of [big business] people being like, "Well, this'll cause a lot of illness..."

It's hard to say this without sounding like a psychopath, but America and Europe need diseases and death.

Look at third-world countries-- their cancer survival rate is outstandingly high. It plants doubt in my mind. For a long time, with these medical establishments, I started seeing deception. I used to think about the way we were treated, because we were getting government assistance. The doctors would dangle these treatments in front of us. They kept things

from us, which infuriated me. They did radiation treatments in the wrong part of the body, which caused the cancer to spread. That was when I started to realize there was this corporate complex within society.

It was December 21 when my mom died, so all of a sudden, December 21 entered my life. I fell in love with the end of the world. All our problems would be solved, because there would be no more problems. But that's not the answer. That's like throwing out your dishes because they're dirty. Even if your dishes are filthy as fuck, you clean them. I guess the theme of the record is to wash your dishes.

"It was December 21, 1997, when my mom died, so all of a sudden, December 21 entered my life. I fell in love with the end of the world."

Pitchfork: I read that you built out a studio in Baltimore specifically for the purpose of recording America.

DD: This is the record I spent the longest time with in the studio. The room was built specifically to record the orchestral track "Rail", which is made up of 99% acoustic instruments, but treated like computer music. I needed to create an environement that would keep the nuance of the instruments-- there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of layers of violin, cello, trombone. So we built an anechonic chamber-- this floating room within a room. I found this insulation that's basically recycled blue jeans. It has the least environmental impact, which is important to me.

Pitchfork: Why did you decide to call that track "Rail"?

DD: I almost called the album Rail. I did a five-day trip from Seattle to New York in 2006, from December 23 to December 28. I didn't have an ID so I couldn't fly, and I didn't have a credit card. It was back when I was way off-the-grid. I knew I was gonna miss Christimas. I started thinking about the train-- a beautiful, antiquated, romantic way of traveling, over Christmas. It would be incredible.

And it was. The train was empty. Traveling through Washington and Montana, you looked out the window on either side, and there's no sign of thought or humanity, just pure, unadulterated earth. You hear the driver call through the train constantly. The progressive nature of it-- seeing the landscape shift-- is what that track has. The different timbres shift and grow, and then there's a big shift, like when the city you've seen growing in the distance is finally there. "USA" is the embodiment of that mindset. "Bradford Cox and I were talking about doing a split, using the worst names we've gotten [in the press]. It was going to be called 'Anorexic Monster and Mongoloid Man Child.'"

Pitchfork: What is the last part of the suite, "Manifest", about?

DD: It's almost like turning back to the coast after you've crossed the country. But the lyrics talk about body image and shape-- figuring out where I fit in regards to the way my mind

perceives me.

Pitchfork: Are the ideas regarding body image intentionally related to the idea of America?

DD: It's more of a within-me thing. I think about it more than I used to because, in a lot of the reviews written about me people are like, "This fat bald guy!" I can understand-- you read a review of music, and you usually hear about how they look. Men obviously have it much easier than women, but if you don't look like the standard male, you get it as well. It's a different type of objectification of sexuality. I didn't expect it in the indie media as much, but it hurts. It's hard to not think about it.

I was talking to Bradford [Cox] about the insane people who write about us, and it's fucking crazy. We were talking about doing a split, using the worst names we've gotten [in the press]. It was going to be called "Anorexic Monster and Mongoloid Man Child." That's what we were both called, in this one French magazine. How could you write that?

Pitchfork: Are there any other ways you feel you've matured since the last album?

DD: I would fucking hope so. I don't think I'm any less youthful, but I'm a little less naive, and I'm looking for more meaning in what I do. There is definitely a time in your life to raise the blinds, party, and fucking go into the abandoned building to see what's in there, a time to dive into the dumpster head first. I'm glad I had that experience, but I don't want to keep repeating myself. If I don't experiment, I'm not gonna make new mistakes. If I don't make mistakes, I'm not going to grow from them. It's weird how people hate getting older.

People love mountains, and mountains are old as fuck. They are the oldest things there are. •

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I M M A L E T Y O U

Finish...

Claire L. Evans: On Tour Forever I

’ ’ve just returned home after a long tour. I’m in a band, one of those travelling circuses of night salesmen, and we ply our shows all over the world. When we’re offered a gig, we usually say yes, as much for the experience as for the money. One day, presumably, people will stop asking. In the meantime, the long months away make the cities and sensory impressions blurry.

Musicians on the road make up a kind of parallel world, criss-crossing each other all over the planet. We tend to eye one another warily in backstage rooms and festival catering tents, like co-workers meeting somewhere unsavoury. Our lives are familiar, and yet we hurry past, too close to our peers for real comfort. Outside this parallel world, I rarely meet people who travel as much as I do, or in quite the same manner: which is to say always and quickly, seeing very little.

Who would choose to?

On this last tour, we passed through dozens of cities in Australia and Asia, cities with exotic names that many people can only dream of, and boring ones, too. Plenty of distant places are just as mundane as home, but still their diversity is flattened out by the brutal efficiency of our schedule. We have a single night to get to know a place, and only sometimes the morning, before we hit the road again. I skip through time zones, caught in an impossible pursuit — to be everywhere at once. It’s strange, but travel teaches me more about time than it does about place.

For instance: you can cover a lot of ground in a month’s time.

The sheer density of minutes in a day is stagger-ing. You can wake up in Kuala Lumpur and then rest your head 220 miles away in Singapore. You can begin a day travelling by taxi in Indonesia with a driver who would take you to the moon for $3, and finish it waiting in the rain for yellow cab at JFK airport, where all the money you have left will hardly get you to Manhattan.

Touring isn’t an extravagance — live shows are how we get by.

We’ve been a band for ten years, and never, in the wobbly arc of our career, have record sales come even close to covering our food and rent. I can’t speak for everyone, but this seems about par for the course for those in the middling-celebrity strata of the indie music hierarchy. It’s much worse for the basement bands and the upstarts.

Occasionally, things come along that afford us some wiggle room: maybe a festival paycheck, or a spot on television or in a movie. But mostly it’s the workaday trudge of tour that sustains us. And in the vagaries of a creative life, it’s the tour that feels the most like a job. We clock in, load up, fulfil our contracts, sign paperwork backstage and, hopefully, some records at the merchandise table. We keep receipts, we book flights, we pay taxes. Our nights don’t end with groupies or lines of cocaine. My greatest indulgence is a beer sucked down in front of the TV in a hotel room as I struggle to catch up with the programmes that mark the passage of time in other people’s lives.

Friends often ask which were my favourite places to visit, but the truth is I can’t hold them all in my mind. What makes a place nice to visit, anyway? The pleasure it provides for its visitors? Who am I that Thailand must delight me? I’m horrified when a country is described as having a ‘warm people’, as though each citizen must please the sweaty strangers who choke the streets. Thailand — or any other place — can only exist. And by existing can only remind the traveller that other modalities are possible, that no way of living is a natural consequence of being alive on this planet.

That should be enough.

Travel is inherently narcissistic. Even if we’re looking to be knocked off our axis, we’re still in the business of selfimprovement. People want to go to faraway places and return changed. A lot rides on this expectation. We hunt for perspective, for miraculous connections, but when these moments happen, we don’t always recognise them — or we look in the wrong places. There is a collection of jungle villages around Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali, which is as remote and humid and disorienting as any foreign place.

The landscape is clogged with temples spewing incense, and yet long lines of Western tourists snake out the doorway of the single mountain temple that featured in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love (2006). It’s easy to laugh at these people. It’s easy to say that they are missing the point, but are they? Maybe they’re just mainlining into the essence of what travel is always already about: pat revelations about the self. When we were in Bali, we went to a different temple, and our dirty tennis shoes looked ridiculous beneath the stiff embroidered sarongs we were commanded to wear. I felt nothing, except for self-consciousness and the impulse to snap a dozen pictures I haven’t looked at since.

The strangest dissonance of this life is the uneasy balance we strike between chaos and routine. During our shows, we throw the force of our energy into manifesting an unbridled, spirited experience for the audience. They expect this, every night. They’ve paid good money, and, like any travellers, hope to return home with a story. It’s not quite the mountain temple, but to the ecosystem of acolytes that emerge at our shows, the band is a vehicle for enlightenment, or, at the very least, experience.

The concert is a finite moment in time. It has intent. The band is summoned to the proscenium; any implication of our grubby tour van, any residue from last night’s show, any evidence of our existence outside the stage is erased by the sheer collective will of the crowd. We are rendered placeless, timeless, without context.

It’s taken me 10 years on the road to realise this. Just as it boggles me to imagine that the places I’ve visited continue to exist in my absence, the audiences we play for firmly believe that we are ephemeral. To admit that we perform in other cities, night after night, violates the terms of an unspoken covenant in which we exist solely for them and they for us. But we must keep moving, and so must they, countless trajectories of human life careening outwards from the moment the lights go down. A concert, in this sense, isn’t kinetic: it’s stillness itself, a world briefly paused.

One of my fondest tour memories is going to the movies in North Platte, Nebraska. After weeks of beer-stale rock clubs, only such an everyday pleasure can reset your barometer to normal. Suddenly, everything can become magic again. At the end of the night, the cashier — a small-town misfit, not unlike those I’ve met in countless venues from Riga to Xi’an — gave us a garbage bag filled with the theatre’s leftover popcorn. He didn’t know us; he just knew we weren’t from North Platte, and that was enough for him. The popcorn was stale and cold and buttery, and the town was closed for the night. We lugged the bag, nearly the size of a person, to a moonlit field out back.

Like teenagers, we tossed it at one another in great handfuls under the wide, feathery sky, before emptying the whole bag on the grass for the birds to eat. The next morning it was gone, and so were we.

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