PULP is published on the sovereign land of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, as well as Indigenous members of our creative community. We respect the knowledge and customs that traditional Elders andAboriginal people have passed down from generation to generation. We acknowledge the historical and continued violence and dispossession against First Nations peoples. Australia’s many institutions, including the University itself, are founded on this very same violence and dispossession. As editors, we will always stand in solidarity with First Nations e!orts towards decolonisation and that solidarity will be re ected in the substance and practice of this magazine.
Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
Sasha Blackman
Rosy Chim
Portia Love
Jayden Nguyen
Jess Watson
Sophie Wishart
Ege Yurdakul
Portia Love
Sophie Wishart
Ege Yurdakul
e views in this publication are not necessarily the views of USU. e information contained within this edition of PULP was correct at the time of printing. is publication is brought to you by the University of Sydney Union.
Issue 23, 2025
SENIOR EDITORS NOTE
In(2003), Maggie Nelson writes
“It’s been hot, the violets are tired.”
It’s been cold here.
Wind has rattled the agpoles on the streets and people have wrapped their arms tightly around themselves, pulling their jackets closer to their bodies.
Yet, the PULP o ce remains warm. Partly because we don’t know how to control the air conditioner that blasts boiling air at us each week. But also, the o ce radiates energy as the space is lled with the excitement, laughter, and disagreements shared between our incredibly talented team.
I am writing this on the day of our launch party for our twenty-second issue. e buzz is real! Excited to have my tarot read by the mystic readers and eat the USU cheeseboard, I can’t wait.
As you read this, our second issue as PULP 4 (Issue 23) has been published, winter is turning to spring, and we’ve found our feet as a team. I’d like to thank Portia, Rosy, Jess, Jayden, Ege, and Sophie for their creativity, enthusiasm, and dedication. From launch parties, to graphic design, and endless writing and editing, I’ve relished learning about your eeting quirks and I look forward to creating more and more with you!
As has happened since the beginning of time and will continue to happen until the heat death of the universe, I was introduced to e Chart by a Hinge date. In the early months of my rst year at uni, my friends and I muddled through Melbourne lez Hinge with crudelydrawn texta circles on screenshots. We’d just cracked our rst big case: a girl who had ghosted me was known to my new friend’s new girlfriend — and had started talking to my other new friend’s oldest friend — and was, reportedly, really lame.
My date contextualised it for me. “Have you seen e L-Word?” she asked, a er I presented her with this hopefully funny anecdote. “It’s like Alice’s chart.”
“Oh.” I was crestfallen: I’d only seen the rst episode. “I don’t think I’m up to that yet.” e Chart, I would learn, was introduced in the second.
The L-Word (2004) is a seminal noughties series about crazy lesbians living in LA. In it, Alice makes a chart of her friend (and later girlfriend) Dana’s romantic experiences to see how many people it takes to link them. e answer is four.
Under a YouTube video of this clip, @tomwotton9 commented, And so a legend was born! e legend of e Chart!
So goes the legend of e Chart. I was embarking on a queer rite of passage. I was eighteen, in a new city, horny, inexperienced, and had terrible taste. In my imagination, an inner-city Arts university promised a cornucopia of gay people. So where the fuck were they?
In the olden days, I would be forced to go to a gay bar in real life. Or at least skulk outside a queer bookstore. But a quarter into the 21st-century, my formative romantic and sexual experiences were taking place via my iPhone.
Hinge’s 2025 LGBTQIA+ D.A.T.E. report (Data, Advice, Trends and Expertise... Hinge, you are clever!) identi es that users on the platform are experiencing increasing “label fatigue.” I see this an interesting conclusion, not just because I don’t trust their self-reporting, but considering that dating apps are predicated on the use of recognisable labels.
e Hinge report muddies — or misunderstands — the reasons why our community uses labels. ey can be helpful, historically grounded signi ers. ey can also be restrictive. e beautiful thing about them is that you can take what’s useful and discard what isn’t.
e L Word (2004) - 1x02: “Let’s Do It”
In the report, Hinge advocates for a “labeluid approach.” What is uidity on an app where you use a slider to select your age range of interest? Does it justify showing pro les of straight cis men to those only interested in women and non-binary people? Of the 14,000 people surveyed for the report, the split between LGBTQIA+ and heterosexual respondents was not speci ed.
Queer theorists tell us that sex — not biological sex, but having sex — is terrifying, because it destabilises our notions of identity. is is what the Hinge report fails to understand. Love and sex are scary and uid enough. You still need the age slider.
But I was in the thrall of e Chart. Sure, my rst-year Gender Studies lecture was like my Hinge explore feed come to life, but I wanted more. I wanted something di!erent. I wanted… a soccer player.
It was 2023 and World Cup fever was at an all-time high. I wanted Lucy Bronze and if I couldn’t get her, I was going to die trying. is was the regrettable period of time when my Hinge prompt was that a life goal was to be a WAG. Against all logic, self-preservation and feminist ideals, I was single-minded.
is is how I found myself talking to someone who said she’d been signed to Melbourne Victory. In my pure and noble heart, I believed her. ree weeks later I was ghosted. I moved home. Jumpscare! Now she was on Sydney Hinge.
e Chart will never be observed so acutely as in the dating lives of professional female soccer players, generally in the UK Premier League, but now extending to Australia. e amassed fandom means that by now everyone’s seen an edit of Leah Williamson.
And why not, if you discovered, like I did, that Irish players Katie McCabe and Ruesha Littlejohn dated for seven years while playing on their national side, and that pretty immediately a er they broke up, McCabe started a PDA-heavy relationship with Australian forward and Arsenal teammate Caitlin Foord — and that Littlejohn might’ve snubbed Foord’s handshake when Australia and Ireland played each other in the opening round of the Cup?
When absolutely everything, from podcast interviews to post-match pressers to Insta posts and replies in the comments, has been documented?????
You try to resist it. But the celebrity and the athleticism and the high buns cast a heady spell. And to watch something so recognisably painful and banal, just another Wednesday night at Birdcage — play out for international
sports stars is a particularly sweet kind of catharsis.
Hinge is its own universe. But the machinations of e Chart will occur, whether or not you’re brave enough to subject yourself to the possible ridicule of strangers on dating platforms. is is just what dating within a speci c community is like, though it is easier to feel connected to and more forgiving of that community o ine.
Cultural knowledge of e L-Word is also generally useful. It was the rst thing I talked about with my now-girlfriend when we met (in real life!) at a PULP launch party. Predictably, we had many mutuals. You can imagine my embarrassment when I found out we were on Hinge at the same time; abject horror when she said she might have sent me a like. A er everything, that was the last straw. So fuck you, Hinge.
Grace Lasschuit
e Allure of ULTRAVIOLENCE
In Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel and its 1971 Stanley Kubrick lm adaptation, , psycho-delinquent Alex and his gang of Droogs speak Nadsat — a ctional language which mixes rhyming slang with Russian-in uenced English. In the lm’s opening monologue, Alex, sipping on a glass of hallucinogenic milk, is excited to revel in an evening of “a bit of the old ultra-violence”. Ultra-violence is a Nadsat word referring to the extreme, desultory acts of barbarity that the young men in the text in ict upon innocent victims. Beyond Kubrick’s lm, the term ultraviolence traces a lineage of su!ering turned to artistic spectacle from Alex’s stylised assaults to Lana Del Rey’s (2014), where Lana sings, “he hit me and it felt like a kiss.” Kubrick’s and Lana Del Rey’s are two celebrated artistic endeavours which reveal a cultural tendency to fetishise violence against women. ese works prompt a deeper question of whether our artistic fascination with violence is a glamorisation, a critique, or a coping mechanism in an ultraviolent world.
e Old In-and-Out
In , a er one of his gruesome assaults kills a woman, Alex is incarcerated and must undergo the Ludovico technique as his only hope of rehabilitation into society. e method intends to make him so physically repulsed by violence that he is le incapable of reo!ending. While Burgess’ story condemns the undermining of Alex’s free will, Kubrick’s lm conditions audiences in its own way: through the power of aesthetics. Alex remains a problematic protagonist. He and his Droogs call sex “the old in-and-out,” a total objecti cation of the female participant. While his attacks on men are merciless, his assaults of women are purely to assert sexual dominance.
He cuts at garments to expose breasts, and turns a phallic sculpture into a murder weapon. Pursuing the vulnerable and unsuspecting, he is completely devoid of empathy.
Still, when Alex is ‘cured’ at the end of the lm a er a head injury, the e!ects of the Ludovico technique are reversed. As viewers we cannot help but celebrate. It shouldn’t be an easy task to convince spectators to sympathise with a deranged and unfeeling psychopath, but Kubrick imbues his evil with undeniable panache. e lm’s masterful audiovisual manipulation seems to stimulate something primal in the viewer.
As Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony plays, Alex writhes in bed with a woman, surrounded by clapping onlookers. Beethoven’s Ninth, the ‘Ode to Joy’, famously celebrates the kinship of mankind. (2012), Slavoj (i)ek asserts that Alex represents the antagonism that exists within every social order. His being, so connected to this piece of music, shows us what is denied in fantasies of universal beauty: the presence of the irreparably evil.
When we sit down to watch this lm, we become much like Alex undergoing the Ludovico technique (though hopefully without our eyes propped open), indoctrinated in front of a screen which shows us ultraviolence. Yet instead of it repelling us, the stylised lm world seduces. When su!ering is made beautiful it becomes consumable. tells us that moral good is subordinate to aesthetic manipulation, or at least that beauty creates allure to just about anything, even the brutal.
Lana Del Rey is the expertly marketed heteroglossic persona of Elizabeth Woolridge Grant. She has played everything from jean-short clad Americana goddess to a dichotomous Jackie Kennedy/Marilyn Monroe character. In she became the ultimate icon of feminine melancholia. The speaker of the album is pretty when she cries, and her devotion to her male lover is expressed not in spite of his mistreatment of her, but seemingly of it. On the title track, she croons a controversial throwback to The Crystals’ 1961 song . The tune blurs the line between romanticisation and critique of abusive relationships. Many argue it glamourises intimate partner violence and harmfully moulds her impressionable, young audience of women into believing that having a shitty boyfriend is cool. Though sonically praised, has been lyrically considered an anti-feminist album.
However, the album has also been interpreted as empowering through the “Sad Girl Theory” which perceives a fragile, submissive and romantic persona as its own form of female agency. The “Sad Girl” becomes a resistance to suffocating neoliberal ideals of female empowerment, critiquing an individualistic, career-focused culture in which gender inequality is still rife. By playing into this image and providing a woman’s perspective on an abusive relationship, Lana Del Rey disrupts power structures that privilege masculine control. While the speaker is in a controlling relationship, she still has agency over the narrative.
While alludes to in its title — a work where Kubrick aestheticises violence as a male auteur, the album departs from his phallocentric lens. Lana Del Rey honours the consumable violence that exists in the film, but repositions narrative authority to the subordinate feminine. Drawing from the lineage of ultraviolence as masculine spectacle, Lana Del Rey shows how the portrayal of violence in art evolves through time and gendered perspective. However, despite social change, our cultural fascination with violence has endured.
Ultraviolence: a work of fiction
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would advise us that becomes a spectacle in these works of art; a highly stylized pop culture image divorced from the consequences of actual violence. It is in these aestheticised images that we run the risk of desensitisation. But is it truly the case that we will accept anything if it is dripping in style? Or are these works of beauty meant to unsettle, to draw our attention to the enjoyment we experience in consuming what is undeniably wrong so that we can distinguish it from the real violence in our world?
Ultraviolence is a double-edged sword. It opposes the unrealistic cheer of glorified meritocracy, shining a light on rampant social issues. But it is also guilty of mythologising women’s pain, and celebrating antagonism. Should we feel guilty for enjoying violence, even that which is surreal or choreographed? Perhaps the truly unsettling thing about these works isn’t their ultraviolence, but how much we love to devour it.
Soraya Moore
Don’t Wear
Nike TNs
Vince Tafea
Gone are the days of my millennial older brother, when Nike TNs were a mark of swag exclusive to the disadvantaged Greater West communities of Sydney and at best a source of suspicion for the white middle-class Eastern and Northern suburbanite.
In this heartfelt ballad, Samoan and Māori musician Vince Tafea laments the undeniable gentri cation of TNs. A er venturing outside of Penrith (up the pahs brah) to USYD, he recognises that the genie has escaped the bottle.
Nevertheless, there is still a certain rhythm in his step as he walks along Eastern Avenue in his favourite triple black NTays. Such soul is not so easily replicated through a simple visit to Footlocker.
Among Us
Vince Tafea
u vented, u was wrong cos i trusted u wit comms u was among us now ya gone sussy baka all along
Blistering rocks formed by unsaid words
scrape my stomach leaving molten imprints that burn me.
e pressure builds,
innards churning and knotting and waiting to spill out.
I can’t tell where the line between dream and materiality lies.
e cracked web of blood on the broken skin of my knees reveals more than futile phrases.
Does make-believe have substance too?
It must, because everything left unsaid sears my organs.
I am branded with absence, its presence ringing in my ears and curdling in my throat.
But words are futile.
So I am left with these scorch marks.
If I were sliced open, these sentiments would splatter over everyone that I have fooled.
Take me away. Allow the uid to gush and spurt. Bleed me dry.
Sasha Blackman
in conversation Face to Face:
At its surface, Portrait Exchange resembles a life drawing class. ere’s paper, pencils, and people watching and drawing. However, the closer you look, the more you realise that this resemblance is only formal. Its function and intent are something di!erent altogether.
ere’s no teacher, no single subject, and no anatomical demonstration or technical critique. e role of the artist and the sitter dissolve into mutual observation, and it is this dissolution that de nes the event.
ree days a er a handmade poster cello-taped to a telephone pole caught my eye, I arrived at the event’s current abode, El Faro gallery. A er walking up a ight of stairs o! King Street, towards a lighthouse mural in blue, I saw Jaslyn Brown, the event’s founder, standing near the entrance by a lightbox strewn with portraits, checking people in. Fairy lights were trailed over the smooth concrete oors, which were also adorned with an eclectic collection of patterned rugs and tasselled pillows. ere was a single table in the middle of the room. It was square in shape, wide and close to the ground like an oversized co!ee table, laid with pencils and pens. On its le was a DJ set, yet to begin its ambient song — instead the room was lled with quiet chatter between the few people who were already there.
ere was no xed point of attention, no podium or stage or person on display, the room unfolded laterally, unstructured and informal, open to improvisation. However, this was not the case when the event began three years ago.
I got the chance to sit down with Jaslyn a week a er I attended the event and picked her brain about the origins and evolution of Portrait Exchange. Inspired by her previous job as a life drawing class facilitator, Jaslyn said “I saw no reason not to do it”. It all began at a roo op bar in Glebe. ere, Portrait Exchange followed a much more linear seating approach. People would sit across from each other at a long table, and she’d guide the sessions more deliberately. But since then, Portrait Exchange has shi ed across venues. Jaslyn noted, “it’s funny how a space can really impact the feel of it”. At one point, it took place in a vintage clothes shop in Marrickville where amongst the chaotic crowd of clothes and awkward, tight spaces, it “felt more like a party. [..] e structure was blasted into pieces… but in a beautiful way.” In its present iteration, the open gallery space at El Faro, which she moved to in December of last year, allows for stronger focus on the act of portraiture. e freedom to draw the unsuspecting subject from across the room balances uidity with calm and allows people the opportunity to access everybody in the space, both visually and socially.
Historically, the portrait has functioned as a symbol of permanence, prestige, and power. From the Fayum mummy portraits that supposedly guide souls into the a erlife, to the Rococo oil paintings that adorned palatial walls, portraiture has always implied worth.
e subject is o en a gure of authority, their features immortalized through the labour of a trained artist. Even in life drawing classes, vestiges of this hierarchy remain: one person is seen, the rest look. Observation is one-directional. Portrait Exchange dismantles these conventional roles. Everyone draws, and everyone is drawn. ere is no assumption of expertise.
In rejecting this hierarchy, the event repositions the portrait as an act of encounter rather than capture. When I asked Jaslyn what most di!erentiates Portrait Exchange from life drawing, she said, “You’re involved, you’re being drawn. [...] ere are plenty of really amazing life drawing classes, [life drawing] has a similar function but what really makes it di!erent is you’re actually receiving art at the end of it for you speci cally… on everyone’s own terms how they want to engage with it.”
e absence of a xed subject creates a sense of social leveling which contrasts with traditional settings. Where the artist is o en authoritative or objectifying, here it is reciprocal. No participant is more worthy of representation than the other; the event removes the portrait from its historical role as a marker of historical signi cance or power and returns it to something more immediate, a record of attention.
is accessibility is both philosophical and material. Jaslyn spoke to the mythology surrounding art and how, for many, there is a widely held belief that everyone who is an artist is born as such. Jaslyn described how part of what makes Portrait Exchange so important to her is that it isn’t just an art event, but also a re-entry point for people estranged from drawing. As someone who has gone through ebbs and ows with her own artistic process, she empathises with the fact that there are few low-pressure environments available for people to enter (or re-enter) into the art world.
To Jaslyn, this ist o en a matter of access and of resources, so she wanted to provide a space to resolve this. Jaslyn believes that everyone has something to gain from drawing, “if not from the drawing, from the process of connecting with someone new in that way.”
What makes Portrait Exchange distinct is not only that it disrupts traditional structures, but that it does so in service of connection. Here, drawing is not a display of mastery but an act of attention. Participants must observe closely, o en for several minutes, someone they have never met. “It’s a weird kind of platonic intimacy,” Jaslyn noted. “It exists in its own category of experiences.”
Unlike conventional drawing which o en emphasizes anatomical accuracy or artistic re nement, Portrait Exchange is unconcerned with outcome. e portraits produced were varied, some gestural, others precise, many ambiguous.
eir value lies not in technical skill but what they record: a moment of sustained focus. O en, you wouldn’t realise someone was drawing you until you felt a gentle tap on the shoulder and saw a stranger beaming at you, leaf in hand. Each paper felt like a fun house mirror. “Sometimes I think the person was drawing themselves more than they were drawing me.” is blurring of self and other is not accidental. In an age de ned by mediated interaction and self-curation, being closely observed by a stranger with no screen, no lter and no expectation is disarming. Jaslyn hopes that her event can serve as a grounding and centring antidote to the fragmentation of society in the current digital age.
e event carves out a rare space where presence precedes performance, and where the gaze becomes a means of mutual recognition.
Portrait Exchange brings the act of drawing out of the academy and into the everyday. It o!ers the opportunity to make art and to participate in a grounding experience of reciprocity and attention. e event’s informality does not denote a lack of seriousness, but a conscious resistance to the exclusions o en embedded in artistic spaces. By removing hierarchy and decentralizing expertise, Portrait Exchange invites participants to consider the portrait as not a symbol of prestige but as a gesture of recognition.
A very honoured thank you to all the lovely artists that dedicated some time to depicting yours truly, and for more information on Jaslyn’s work and the upcoming Portrait Exchange events, please visit the Portrait Exchange Instagram: @portrait_exchange
“In St Helens Town, where the breezes clap /there stands a bold and noble tap”
“Oh tap how we’ll always remember/ your steady ow in unseasonably warm September”
“So long as legs can trek, our throats must wet/ so long lives this tap, we have life in us yet”
In the Tasmanian town of St Helens, a mundane tap, blessed with no particular quality, has amassed a collection of Google reviews expressing the people’s appreciation — the people being the random assortment of backpackers passing through the area.
Many relate to the experience of waking up at night: stumbling to the bathroom to drink water straight from the tap and groaning loudly enough for our atmates to be party to our inconvenience. For most of us, this is the extent of our appreciation of water in our everyday lives. For those on the road through St Helens, however, water taps are rhapsodised about, compared to famous love sonnets, their praise worth the expenditure of precious vacation time. e idea of expressing gratitude for natural resources is woven through the values of outdoor subcultures and in a digital age is shared online.
When I think of subculture, I picture punk — piercings, mohawks, Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious — a far cry from a crusty hiker with a ziplock bag full of sandwiches scrawling poems on Google reviews in 2025. Today, subculture is a contested idea. In the eyes of Mirielle Silco!, writing for the New York Times in 2024,
“Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed. What teenagers are o!ered today is a hyperactive landscape of so called aesthetics… ese are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum.”
Like an embossed page worn beyond meaning by the repetition of touch, the meaning of subculture has been lost to the internet’s frenzy. rough this perspective, the poems on the review page of a tap on Google Maps are probably nonsensical brain rot.
But squatting on the tarmac next to e Tap, I want to believe something else: that thriving on creativity, outdoor subcultures have found a haven from consumerism in niche crevices of the internet. If we return to punk, we see that it emerged in the throes of the 1970s English recession, but is also linked to a very real, environmental fear of a landscape of smoke and scorched machinery. Here in Australia, where the land is still scarred from the 2019 res, is it not possible that the growing popularity of outdoor subcultures, or even a tap, is a wish to embrace a more nurturing connection between people and the environment?
Subcultures were rst studied in Chicago in the 1920s in relation to gangs. In 1936, a leading scholar in the Chicago School of Sociology, Robert Parks, proposed that a city operates like an ecosystem with “clusters” of people gathering in di!erent zones.
rough comparing teenagers to bu!alo, Parks delivered a gem of wisdom — that youth subcultures are more than sites of criminality, they are active responses to inequality. Although later studies continued to shi the focus away from delinquency, subcultures remained characterised by their political and social deviance from mainstream culture. It is hard to buy into the narrative that the rise of social media means the death of subculture when subcultures are, by nature, sensitive and develop in response to the social conditions and concerns of the time.
In my eyes, subcultures are about creativity.
When Green Day surprises audiences with a political lyric change, when a furry selects their fursona, when a bunch of hikers extol a water tap, each enacts an alternative reality. But Peter Murphy (2012) argues that our phone screens have starved us of creativity, u ng our brain spaces with kitsch communication of super cial meanings.
As Browne (2014) summarises, the result is “the loss of that sense of irony imagination displays and the moral compass which derives from it.” Subcultures rely on the imagining and performance of utopian group identities.
If Murphy’s argument holds, then, it is reasonable to believe that the entrails of subculture are splattered on the internet oor.
But the irony of the creative convergence of the technological world and the outdoor community de es this narrative. Leaving an intertextual poem on Google Maps, directly a er a three day hike and nature detox, is an exercise in absurdism, sure, but also community. Social media carves out a space for communities to form through participation in abstract spaces beyond the realm of physical perception: through creativity.
Let’s pursue the example of outdoor subcultures. Mirielle Silco! ’s scathing criticism of TikTok subcultures tacked with the word ‘core’ would almost certainly extend to the rising popularity of outdoor subcultures and trending gorpcore aesthetic. Gorpcore, a name recalling an acronym for trusty hiking staples, Good Ol’ Fashioned Raisins and Peanuts, is a fashion trend championing outdoor wear. Tracing the roots of gorpcore, we nd Japanese fashion labels, functional urban clothing in 90s hiphop, and outdoor subcultures like dirtbag. Dirtbag was born in the Yosemite National Park in the 1950s when a group of hikers deserted their conventional routine and established camp, scavenging food and living o! the land much like the bushcra ers or survivalists of today. Nowadays, trail runners, and avid Strava users identify with the name and the ideas it embodies. As outdoor subcultures become more visible, it makes sense that they are more vulnerable to commercialisation. Writing about music in 2021, Jo Haynes and Raphaël Nowak describe how subcultures become a “currency of cool” which brands exploit for pro t. But does this appropriation of style mean that the original subcultures from which they are derived are lost?
Does the rise of gorpcore have to also be the death of dirtbag?
I want to believe that the growing popularity of outdoor subcultures is not merely Gen Z’s submission to brand manipulation but a re ection of political conscience. e practices of outdoor communities defy the wasteful consumerism of the mainstream through principles of “leave no trace”, mindfulness of water use and environmental activism. Carrying your used tampons and empty chip packets is certainly a more frustrating and smelly e!ort, but it is working to reestablish the natural world as a primary responsibility.
Since the dawn of time, teens are scorned and misunderstood by their parents, people search the cavities of public spaces for free toilets and taps, the wheel turns. e prophets foretelling the death of subcultures are not as revolutionary as they may think. eir arguments mirror those seen in the past, when people grieved the mainstreaming of punk even as the metalheads, rockabillies and goths ourished. In 1999, April Erickson argued that punk never abandoned our streets but instead moved into suburbs, responding to new issues rippling through the world with the same core values of authenticity and DIY mentality. In the same way, we can view the cyclical nature of subcultures as death and erasure or responsiveness and evolution.
“A hydrational dream from folklore lore”, Priscilla Toa describes e Tap. Trip lore, written on Google Maps, becoming tangible in laughter in a car. Subculture thrives on the creativity, the cultiness, randomness of it all. Circling back to the roots of its name, subculture, the outdoor community does not directly rebut its parent culture but appropriates it to give it new meanings.
Our thirst for subculture has not been quenched, but nds new pathways to ow, as liquid as ever.
Glass
She arrives in red. In a dull blouse, maroon slacks, and grim lipstick. As she walks into my kitchen, her stilettos stab my oor.
I wear black. My house wears black, too. e curtains are closed, the lights are dim, and the urn sits on the kitchen table, watching.
She walks to the urn and traces its graphic. “Mum never liked owers,” she says.
“You want a drink?”
She looks at me, lips like a zipper. I open my cabinet to grab a glass, and thin light touches the shelves.
He takes the glass from his cabinet, then waddles to his fridge. He walks like he is renting his body for the day. His face is still puggish; his eyes still do not t his skull. He is determined to grow uglier with age. Holding the glass, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand. Snot globs. “I got water, milk, uh, OJ,” he says. “Have you seen the will?” I ask. He rests the glass on his counter.
“Nah,” I wipe my hand on my thigh. “I’m not a lawyer.”
She shakes her head. When she does that, I see her at every age, like projections layered on top of each other until she is all of herself. Her incisors sharpen.
I turn away, pick up my OJ, and pour.
“She le it all to you,” she says.
“I want to—” I pause. Twenty years ago, near my brother’s cricket set, I poured too much sodium bicarbonate into my papier mâché volcano. Now, I am careful with anything reactive. “—to talk with you about contesting it,” I say.
“Contest…course you do,” he says. en, something about how I am disagreeable, or how I have always been competitive, or how I am.
“Pass the glass,” I half-ask.
Her hand waits semi-open below my glass. She picks it up — no, she picks the skin beside her thumbnail. “You can talk to them,” she says, “say it’s unfair, and that you’ll give me half.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Well, under the Succession Act—” She sits up straight, starts up the jargon. All I hear is I’m better than you. Her words clang onto the table like the long, plastic sides of darts thrown aimlessly at a board. Where she thinks she is sharp-minded, she is only sharp-toothed.
I fuzz my eyes, turning her into a blur. She is using too many words; she is using too much Latin. en, she says she loves me.
“You’re speaking a dead language,” I spit.
“If you listened to—” I say. He frowns.
I start again. “But you just won’t—” His features recede into his esh.
“You always—”
His brow and chin protrude. e space between us closes in, expands, warps. I continue — or try to. “And you never—” He leans forward, big and ugly. I tear a strip o! my cuticle, then push my thumbnail into the table’s edge. e wood gives way. It can all change, if one presses. “You’re just so—!” en, he stands. Bumps the table. Grips it with his fat, calloused ngers. e glass cup wobbles. Spills sideways. Juice vomits out. He stares me down.
“Christ you’re useless,” I half-shout, reaching to pick up the glass.
“I don’t want to take it from you, Jake.”
“Well I don’t wanna give it to you.”
On The Run
Kerem Ege Yurdakul
u are sleeping. i know u’d be quiet if u were awake anyway.
i remember those nights: intimate gatherings, smoking pot under the tunnel, our firting echoing up the stairs. now i’m somewhere else entirely: diferent nature, diferent people, a diferent kind of banality, and a diferent kind of boredom.
ever since you passed away, maybe even before, i’ve been seeking a home — for a pair of arms to bury my face into.
i’m feeling lost, and no amount of rolling around in bed or watching the walls for hours seem to give me the answers.
i needed to see the world through your eyes again. so i decided to take a diferent approach.
i gathered my camera and chased your memory across the city, i took pictures like breadcrumbs back to who we were.
i’ve aged, and i’ve left you behind to stay the same age forever. i know nothing will make leaving okay. i just needed to see this strange, new world with ur pure perspective once more & gathering these images was the breath of fresh air i’d been craving for months.
you crazy diamond, i hope you can see me from wherever you are, and that this letter can fnd you beyond the physical realm.
spark that inspiration in me again, yeah? wherever you are, read this letter and come home to me.
-Your beloved Kerem Ege
i want to meet u halfway. this separation hasn’t worked for either of us. i was gone for a while. i think we both believed the other was dead until i saw you crying under that tunnel. i will always be there for you, and i’m sorry you had to face this alone. our silence always carried more wisdom than our words ever did. now, after everything, i’m glad i found you here, hiding in this void. this eternally silent, painful-to-look-at void. i’ve missed you, my oldest companion. i missed our laughters before i started searching for it in other people. we both made mistakes, but i still trust in our forgiveness. i’m glad that, despite everything, you haven’t let the world steal that from you, not like it stole everything else.
Inspired by ‘Bad Girls’ by Blood Orange (2012), shanty, 2025.
