#CURSE THE SOCIAL MEDIA ISSUE
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“Technology has really democratized self expression. Instead of a handful of people making their own records or writing their own songs, everybody can write them. Everyone can post a poem on the internet and have people read it. Everyone has accessan access that they never had before” - PATTI SMITH
THE INTERNET, AS YOU’VE probably realized, isn’t just for sharing knowledge anymore. We post pretty personal stuff online now, too: photos of ourselves sitting on the toilet and drinking a beer, thoughts that exploit our loneliness, last-ditch efforts to incite a potential romance. And while we continue to toy with the limits of over-sharing through social media, we end up manipulating our interactions IRL. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and I guess Vine now, too-- they’re all making us a little weird. We’re deseparate to validate our fleeting sentiments, our breakfasts. But it’s not all bad; there’s a whole lot of Internet worth accessing, a plethora of ideas worth sharing and infinite collaborations worth initiating. So if you think the Internet is fascinating, terrifying, fruitful, draining or isolating, you’ll probably find something relatable in here. -RR
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CURSE is an independently published non-fiction magazine out of Western Mass. It encourages conversation about local and global ideas through Op/Eds, interviews, art and photography.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS SIX
CURSEplaylist JAMIE ROTH
EIGHT
paul bergmann interview RACHAEL ROTH
TWELVE
music television / CHRIS VILLON
FOURTEEN pantheon of friends WILLIAM VAN
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EIGHTEEN using twitter for good NICOLE NIHAN
TWENTYONE home sweet home DAN NOTT
TWENTYFOUR kait brink doesn’t like squares DIANA WALDON
TWENTYEIGHT amateur hour RACHAEL ROTH
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CURSE PLAYLIST COMPUTER LOVE SONGS COMPILED BY JAMIE ROTH
01 Robot Rock// 02 Computer Love// 03 Fembot// 04 Internet Connection-(Flux Pavilion Remix)// 05 CPU//
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06 Online// 07 Computer Vision// 08 Self Machine// 09 Computer Love// 10 Computer Camp Love// 11 Computer Song// 12 Get Off the Internet// -6-6-
LISTEN: SPTFY.COM/BW
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AN INTERVIEW WITH
PAUL BERGM
Laura Doolin & Paul Bergmann of Eekis Photo by Brandon Harman
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ANN OF
EEKIS
THE SINGER, SONGWRITER AND GUITARIST OF EEKIS, A FOLK/COUNTRY/INDIE/ROCK DUO OUT OF LA, TALKS ABOUT ALLIGATORS AND THE INTERNET by Rachael Roth
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH SOCIAL MEDIA? I joined Myspace Senior year of High School as a “joke”, but I’m pretty sure I used it to casually “break up” with a girl, unfortunately. WHERE WOULD YOUR BAND BE WITHOUT THE INTERNET? I think we’d probably have the same number of people at our shows, and would be playing mostly the same venues for no pay, and would know the same bands. The internet didn’t really do much for us, because there’s a million bands out there already. We have some fans and have some good things coming because of our friends and people/musicians we’ve met in the neighborhood. I know there is an art to marketing your music on the internet and becoming an “internetfamous” band, but I saw one of those bands, and no one came to their show.
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DIGITAL OR VINYL? I sometimes feel like the act of “listening” to music is lost. I would prefer it if every time I listened to music, it was an event, even though I’ve listened to digital music most of my life. I think of times listening to records with friends as these softfocus, holiday-like memories that I wouldn’t want to give up. I should get a record player. YOU TOLD ME PEOPLE COMPARE YOUR BAND TO THE WHITE STRIPES, MAINLY BECAUSE OF THE DYNAMIC. WHO WOULD YOU COMPARE YOURSELF TO? WHO ARE YOU INFLUENCED BY? I mean, I listen to a lot of Bob Dylan. I always struggle with this question, because I feel like each one of our songs has some different obvious “influence” to any one person I meet. I mean, sometimes we sound like Johnny Cash, The Strokes, or Danzig. We sort of have a Cramps vibe solely because we are a guy-girl LA duo. I think we both dig bands with swagger, like the Stones or more currently Kurt Vile, and try to imbue that into our sound/style. That’s all. HAVE YOU ACHEIVED ANYTHING CLOSE TO YOUR IDEAL SOUND/ BAND WITH EEKIS? Not yet. I love Eekis, but there are things I want to do as a solo artist and things I want to do in a bigger, more realized band that are still in the works. But to date, this band is my proudest achievement, well, probably in life.
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BY THE WAY...EEKIS. WHAT’S THAT ABOUT? We wanted [to pick] a name [where] we didn’t have to think about if anyone else had it, and it’s the name of my first stuffed animal, an alligator named Eekis. IF YOUR BAND WAS AN ANIMATED BACKGROUND (LIKE WHAT PEOPLE USED TO HAVE ON MYSPACE A LOT) WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE? I think it’d be like a dark Western Pokemon-themed forest background with Eekis (the alligator) as our Pikachu and lots of other little friends and foes dotted throughout the forest, maybe a couple evil cowboys lurking in the background. (Team Rocket.) p
EEKIS IS PAUL BERGMANN & LAURA DOOLIN . HEAR THEM AT PAWLMUSIC.BANDCAMP.COM
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GLAMOURAMA
CUSTOMCUTTINGCREATIVECOLOUR 413.586.8643
WE NOW USE & CARRY DAVINES PRODUCTS NATURE MEETS TECHNOLOGY
7 OLD SOUTH ST NORTHAMPTON -13-
#OPINION
PANTHEON OF FRIENDS
William Van
acebook comments and Instagram exchanges have become the building blocks of our friendships, the foundational pillars of our interactions. In-person relationships spur discomfort and require immediate reactions. Looking people in the eye during a conversation adds unnecessary intimacy to what you’re saying-significant eye contact has no place in idle chatter. Getting caught staring at someone’s eyes or forehead, the mouth even, may give the recipient the wrong idea. You’re either paying too much attention or not enough.
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Connecting online avoids all of these issues. Your computer’s gentle, omniscient light draws your attention to the screen ahead, a tactical exercise in genuine, attentive gazing. It’s far less intimidating and always encourages distractions. Better to keep your distance than to put your relationships at stake. Online communication could be deemed less ‘personal,’ but I’d argue it is much more frequent and engaging. Be they instances of boredom or preemptive warnings of future conversations, pointless pieces of personal information (ominous as they may be, i.e. “We need to get a drink and talk”) are the structural skeletons of healthy friendships. It’s quantity in this case, not quality. Sure you might misinterpret the message (“We need to get a drink and talk,”) depending on the placement of
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an exclamation point that sends you into an eddy of selfanalytical possibilities about what you have or haven’t done, but you’ll be prepared. What might be initially lost in the absence of tone will later come to light, (dimly if possible.) To provide additional layers of meaning to online friendships, it’s best to categorize them, forging a hierarchy of people and classifying the importance of each person you’re currently interacting with. Lifelong friends from home, while they’re high ranking officials in your personal life, might get demoted to infrequent messages. In many cases, lifelong friends don’t inspire self-conscious analysis, as time has petrified your connection with them through years of physical proximity. New friendships, or an abundance of casual acquaintances in the digital age, on the other hand, are developed by topical conversations, such as the current climate, work schedules and the inability to catch that drink they want to have. Consider the categories you’ve pigeonholed them into! Once you’ve established their dossiers, allow the appropriate amount of time to pass before you actually have to see them in person again. You’ll soon see friendships become much more manageable through the safety of your computer’s objective reasoning. Put in your calendar, “Get drink and talk with so and so,” or even, “Don’t forget to call so and so to plan to talk and drink.” Put in your grunt work; ‘like’ their photos on Facebook (not too many and never too frequently; you can’t ‘like’ all their photos or they’ll suspect your insincerity.) Comment on updates if they pertain to you or if you genuinely happen to find them interesting, and never take it personally when they feel the need
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to announce they’re getting a drink and talking with everyone besides you. Pleading ignorance is always a neutral bet when finding out about others’ lives. Even if you have seen their news discussed online already, commented on by lesser friends, lower than you on their own hierarchy of associates, act as if it’s the first time hearing about it upon meeting. They won’t notice your feigning interest if you’ve already decided how to act when you hear the ‘news.’ Sympathize with them! You understand they’ve been given feedback by mere bottom feeders that haven’t seen them in years. However, the bottom feeders still felt compelled to add their insight, despite possibly never having been real friends with them until Facebook arrived. Eventually it will become apparent that in all things, especially maintaining true friendships online, less is more. Limit your exposure to everyone altogether and relish in watching the empty, shallow relationships of uncomfortable eye contact and shameless banter from the seclusion of self-imposed exile. The few times a year (if that, don’t go overboard on your exposure, threatening your elusiveness,) you do meet up, you’ll be fully prepared for every conversation with well rehearsed reactions, offering any additional pleasantries, happy birthdays, and condolences that you couldn’t have possibly dealt with in person. Revel in the numbing prison you’ve built around yourself, thus preventing your submersion in torrential waves of human emotion and convince yourself that online friendships are more substantial than the ones you sustain in person. p
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#OPINION
USING TWITTER FOR GOOD (AND NOT FOR EVIL)
Nicole Nihan
earning how to become an effective teacher these days is tough. I'm new to the game and only know about a handful of educators on a personal level, so it's not easy to casually make professional connections at most social venues. That’s not to say that people are hesitant to share their “expertise” on the matter. Everyone seems to have an opinion-- and 80% of them are critical.
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Every Average Joe at the bar is willing to tell me why teachers
suck once I’ve mentioned I teach biology. Often they say things like, “My high school teachers had no qualifications,” or, “My high school teachers could have cared less about high school students or being a teacher, it was just a job.” The latter really rubs me the wrong way because, to put it lightly: educating is my passion. I wake up in the morning looking forward to going back to high school to work with the students who I truly believe are our future. Sadly, I often find I’m the only one out there who feels passionate about what they do everyday. Where must passionate individuals turn to find support and information? How do we continue to develop professionally once we’ve left college and entered the “real world?”
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I refuse to believe that passionate people are extinct. There is not much of anything I enjoy more than sharing a bottle of wine with friends and discussing plans for changing the world. I feel that some forms of professional development can be accomplished in a similar fashion. Apparently, though, my choice form of communication is dying out, and everywhere I turn to find professional development support I am directed to the world of social media. This, in turn, has led me to create a Twitter account – possibly the hippest of social media trends. Let me tell you, I was skeptical. Like I said, I’m a bottle of wine & respective argument/passionate discussion type – but Twitter has become my new favorite tool for professional development. I’ve been careful to limit my followers and who I follow to people, organizations, and foundations that share information related mostly to science and education. (I am human, though--I follow my girl Gaga and fantasy man Justin Timberlake, too). Joining the world of Twitter has kept me updated on current biology and education-related trends, allowing me to proudly toot my horn with updated facts and arguments when challenged (by the few and far between contenders) at the bar or over a cup of coffee. Through Twitter, I’ve found articles that engage, infuriate, and challenge my personal opinions. I’ve connected with educators and biology geeks from all over. I’ve been asking myself the same questions over and over again recently: is this where professional development is heading? In the future, will our bosses expect us to have Twitter accounts to keep us up to date on
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current events? Will we be relieved of the painful staff meetings in uncomfortable chairs where we are forced to view a poorly created Power Point presentation on ways to improve our value as an employee? God, do I hope so. I believe it’s time we start using social media to better ourselves, to increase our knowledge and awareness of the world around us, and to introduce ourselves to the beliefs of our peers and our enemies. If you shutter at every ‘selfie’ photo that appears on your Facebook newsfeed or your Twitter wall, join me in creating conversations that spin social media outlets in a more positive light, as the educational tools they have the potential to be. We live in a time of instant access and constant communication. Let’s vow to start using social media forums as ways to spread knowledge and create dialogue. Each one of us has the potential to provide educated (or uneducated) opinions via cyberspace. Let’s start consciously providing critiques, support or discussion points through social media so our future does not turn into a dystopian sci-fi novel. p
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HOME SWEET iHOME
art by: dan nott
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KAIT BRINK DOESN’T
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ocal artist Kait Brink loves coffee, tequila, and Dr. Pepper. During daylight hours, you can find her painting in her studio at Cottage Street in Easthampton.
Or you can find her knitting with her homemade, 6 ft knitting needles anytime -- just google her name. by Diana Waldon
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LIKE SQUARES DESCRIBE SOME OF THE MEDIUMS YOU WORK WITH AS A VISUAL ARTIST: Watercolor on paper, yarn and fabric, paper, video. HOW HAS USING SOCIAL MEDIA CONNECTED YOU, AS AN ARTIST, TO OTHER PEOPLE WHO MIGHT OTHERWISE NOT HAVE ACCESS TO YOU WORK? A few people from Spain, Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Turkey, and New Caledonia (France,) have liked and follow my page on Facebook. I suspect the people from the UK found me through purchasing items from my Etsy shop, Ugly Cookies. In each package [I send,] I put in a business card with a link to all the places where I have an online presence. I know that without an online presence it would take me much longer to reach people in other countries. It’s all about exposure on as many platforms as possible. KNITTING! AND FIBER ART VIDEOS! TELL US ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE USING YOUTUBE TO FEATURE YOUR WORK: YouTube has been great for getting my work seen through video. [My video,] The Blanket of Blankets blew up--it has over 16,000 views now. It took a few months, but the number rose steadily, then kept jumping higher and higher. Googling around,
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Art by Kait Brink www.KaitBrink.com
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I found the video on blogs and websites about art. Very cool. I think in order to catch someone’s attention online with this sort of stuff it has to be grand and “wow” and hold the attention of a viewer over anything else they could skip to online. To me, it’s impressive, because we’re using three needles and doing a cable stitch, but that may have gotten lost on the audience.
TWITTER: YAY OR NAY? Nay, I don’t use Twitter. I went to the website to sign up once and it was confusing so I just didn’t create an account. I like the hashtags that people use, especially when they are clever-- like a punch line to a joke or dry sarcasm. I don’t hear too much about Twitter so I figure keeping up with my website and Facebook page and sharing on Instagram is enough. ANY CURRENT WORK BEING DISPLAYED IN THE AREA? I have current fiber work being shown at 29 Pleasant Street in Northampton. It’s a window installation for the Northampton Wools yarn shop. I have been gathering scraps of yarn for over a year, and I knotted and wound them together to make various sized, colored and textured “planets.” It’s called, “Scrappy Universe.” I prompted viewers to pick a planet they’d like to be. One woman chose a fuzzy blue one and said that everyone had to wear blue fuzzy slippers there. A young girl chose one with bright green encasing a lighter green and she decided green beans would live there and everybody would eat green beans. It’s light-hearted work--great to see in person. FAVORITE COLORS? A favorite anything is hard to decide. A color that I always like to use is white for the space it creates. p
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#OPINION
AMATEUR HOUR
Rachael Roth
I
’m in a bar called Sunset on a street that might be Sunset Boulevard-everything in LA seems to be a Sunset drive, street, bar or boulevard. Anyway we’re in the back of the bar drinking pints. My beer rests on the concrete in intervals, each time the base of the glass squeaking on impact. A chill exists that only happens in February in LA and early summer in New England-- the kind of chill that only affects your armpits or the tip of your nose, and buzzes like nicotine in your temples. Some kid comes up to us, a friend of a friend, holding out his iPhone. It’s wobbly due to the weight of the attached camera- an extraneous limb that fits over the already built-in pinhole lense. The fuck is that. He goes on to show us psychadellic photos he’s mastered with the camera, some photo app and his amateur hands: pictures of lightning bolts going through his cat’s eyes, disco lights and a purple sky behind someone’s grandmother, a beer can as if through a fish-eye lens and otherwise inane still lifes. Determination is the only thing that drives someone to buy an external camera for an iPhone, whose built-in camera is already multifunctional-not to mention it turns something completely innocuous into bulky plastic. But it’s not determined in the way that pursuing photography as a profession or even as a hobby would be--rather, we’re playing a more extended game of ‘Look What My iPhone Can Do,’ and we continue to exist in the realm of amateur. But what, specifically, is amateur about amateur photography?
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I respect photography. I’m pretty sure I know good photography when I see it, but I’m not convinced that I know what makes it good. Is it the effort? The content? The framing? The lighting? The cost of the equipment? The aforementioned kid with the iPhone isn’t in any way a threat to the sanctity of “photography.” In fact, he never once claimed to be good at taking photos. He actually prefaced his “portfolio” with, ‘It’s just an iPhone, but...’ And that’s just it: it’s not just an iPhone, anymore. Sure, the thing you use to check the temperature before you step outside or to see what your friends have been up to that morning before you get out of bed is not also going to make you the next Annie Leibovitz, but it is enabling more of us to try. Most cameras are “user-friendly” and accessible-- now you don’t need expensive (or hardly any) equipment--and you can still take photos that look pretty damn good. I saw an art exhibit awhile back of blown-up iPhone photos taken throughout the course of the artist’s day, or week. A lot of them were blurry, out of focus, of his kids, his dogs-- I have no idea if it was supposed to be ironic or not. Still, the photos admitted to be from an iPhone. Usually, we try to hide the fact that some of our best photos were taken with our phones- we don’t want the compliment, it doesn’t count. Making a tool more universal is not a bad thing-- when we take a photo we aren’t dipping into a depleting art well and sucking it dry. We have to decide though: should we raise the bar for what makes a good photograph, or revel in an ever-replenishing body of content? p
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Rachael Roth (@rrpizzaburger) #editor #opinion
Diana Waldon (@dianayoungblood) #interview
Kyrie Chamberlin (@kkkkkyrie) #artconsultant
Josh Crane (@fmr_on) #graphics
Chris Villon (@fromcharms) #lyrics
Jamie Roth (@jamiebmr) #playlist
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William Van (@SailN64) #opinion
Nicole Nihan (@MissNihan_Says) #opinion
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