twenty-four magazine issue two

Issue two • the limits issue

New Funding ModelsIndie Game: The Movie & the Kickstarter community

Spring, ephemera &

printing in 3D

Scott McCloud talks creative freedom & creative constraints

CURSETHE SUN

twenty-four magazine • page

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 Letter from the EditorOur editor, Sara Eileen Hames, talks about twenty-four: the project and the community.

6 InterviewIan Danskin asks Scott McCloud many questions.

10 Phantom LimitsSteven Padnick explores the limits of genre.

11 Train StorySteven Padnick and Pablo Defendini collaborate on a comic.

12 3D - Grab Your Glasses!Our contributors and the city, IN 3-D! (*requires red-cyan glasses, not provided.)

14 Contributor Interviews: LimitsRose Ginsberg asks each member of our staff about a limit of interest to their craft.

16 PoetryFlight and Light, by Tania Asnes.

18 Word LimitsElizabeth Boskey takes on the exacting art of exact word counts.

22 CocktailsFive cocktails by Meg Grady-Troia, composed exclusively from the contents of our onsite cabinet.

25 PoliticsRose Ginsberg on feminism and choices, and Kevin Clark on the GOP.

26 InterviewKevin Clark asks Cindy Au about managing Kickstarter’s community.


29 Interactive GamesCasey Middaugh on limits, art, and and collaborative storytelling.

30 InterviewIan Danskin, Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky talk about Indie Game: The Movie.

34 Artist Pro� leJohn Reid makes the world’s squeakiest dress. Casey Middaugh tells his story.

36 Artist Pro� leElizabeth Cherry’s fantastical hats.

40 Transmedia ChainIt starts with a musical score and ends with a cocktail. Your turn!

48 ScienceIan Danskin on the limits of human knowledge.

49 ChattingRose Ginsberg’s ongoing conversation with 24 Hour Play director Sarah Bisman.

50 Documentation HaikuCasey Middaugh’s 11 “haiku.”

51 Making the TempestProspero’s speech: a practical guide to rehearsing an acting marimba.

60 EphemeraJack Stratton on a life re� ected in objects and art.

62 ContributorsAt 6am we wrote our bios. We were tired.


LETTER FROM THE EDITORHere we are again, my friends.

Perhaps you know precisely what twenty-four is all about. Perhaps you have been following us for the past � ve months as we’ve built a little community, and raised a little money, and released a � rst pre-cocious issue. But in case you haven’t, if you happened to pick this magazine up from a co� ee table or a rack somewhere, please allow me a moment to explain.

� e object you hold in your hands is being made as I write this. Yesterday morning it was only a collection of ideas. In six hours it will be � nished. As we make it, the story of its creation is being told online.

Now that we’ve moved a little distance beyond our roller-coaster of a � rst issue, twenty-four’s future is beginning to take shape. We’ve committed to publishing an issue a quarter for at least the next year, and we are rapidly collecting an amazingly talented community of contributors. twenty-four is designed to be not only a magazine, but an experience between creators and consumers. It will hopefully continue to pull together eclectic groups of remarkable people with the goal of uncovering shared creative experiences, and do so in a format that allows each of us to dedicate ourselves to the experience entirely, if only for a short time.

It’s also become clear that each of our issues will be uniquely � avored by its particular group of contributors. I remain deeply, ferociously grateful to every person who has joined us today. So:

to Elizabeth, who can write six almost perfect pieces on a bad day and a � at tire;

to Kevin, who forces us outside of print with gleeful satisfaction,

to Rose, for making words appear with faultless generosity,

to Steven, who started over four times and kept on going,

to Victoria, for making media full of wonder,

to Ian, for doing things that make him nervous,

to Johanna, for populating our world with color,

to Rich, who forgave me graciously when I locked him out,

to Tania, moving so cleverly through our space and photographs,

to Casey, who loves through her words as well as her life,

to Pablo, quietly drawing comics with occasional breaks for dry humor,

to Jack, who makes us beautiful;

and to each of our readers, without whom this magazine would simply be a collection of people speaking into empty rooms:

thank you.

With love, respect, and 4am giddy joy,

twenty-four magazine • page 6

INTERVIEWScott McCloud, Interview with Ian Danskin I �rst read Scott McCloud when some of his webcomics were frontpaged on MetaFilter. He had written a two-part comics essay about micropayments as a means of self-publishing one’s work on the web, which caused a bit of a dust-up in the webcomic community. His webcomics were long and they never broke into separate pages—you simply scrolled down until they were done. Each panel con-nected to the following one with a thick line, which, I notice on re�ection, frequently led my eye to read right-to-le� as naturally as le�-to-right.

I �rst read his most famous work, Under-standing Comics, in the café at Borders without paying for it because they didn’t have it at the library (I got halfway through Making Comics before they sold the only copy). His work is lucid and endlessly fascinating, and what’s more, he’s the founder of the 24-Hour Comic, of which twenty-four is a semi-direct descendent. Here we talk about self-imposed constraints while I hold my cell phone over a �eld recorder.

IAN DANSKIN: So, you are the creator of, I believe, the very �rst 24-Hour Comic. Is that correct?

SCOTT MCCLOUD: Yes, in 1990, I think it was.

ID: And what was your motivation for cre-ating that?

SM: It was actually to help out a friend named Steve.

ID: �at’s Steve Bissette1, right?

SM: Yeah, Steve Bissette. He and I both had reputations as being very slow, but I had seen him do sketches and store signings, and the guy was wizard. He could go incredibly fast. So, I thought, well, why is it that this guy can’t turn out tons of comics every year instead of the, like, 14 pages a year or whatever he was

doing at the time? So, I challenged him. I said, you know, “I’ll bet you can draw a comic in a day.” And we came up with this pact that we would both—because I knew he wouldn’t do it unless I promised to do it, too.

So, we said, “Okay. By the 30th of the month, we’re going to do this.” And, on the very last day of the month, both of us had put it o�. [LAUGHTER] I started doing mine. And then, halfway through, I found out that he had chickened out and didn’t do his, because—well, actually, because stu� got in the way. He would do his six days later. But, as a result, I wound up going it alone for the �rst one.

ID: And did you like what you came up with?

SM: I kind of did. You know, one of the things that I’ve discovered, and I think others have over the years, is that, most of the time, when you’re making comics, your brain works so much faster than your hands. You know, you come up with one idea and, by the time you can draw the thing, you’ve come up with 10 more ideas. And it can be really frustrating. But, with 24-hour comics, you’re moving so fast that your hand is working faster than your brain half the time. So, you are running out of ideas and your hand’s still going. You have to keep going. And I think what a lot of people do is they have to reach down to the creative backup generator of the subconscious. And they wind up pulling all these crazy ideas out of their ass.

ID: [LAUGHTER] So, who was next? It sort of caught on slowly and then got bigger and bigger.

SM: Well, one of the key vectors was Dave Sim. His comic, Cerebus, printed a bunch of 24-hour comics in the back. And that spread the idea. And then, over time, more

and more people, more and more cartoonists, gave this a try. And then, in 2004—I think it might have been more than 1,000 people had done it—my friend Nat Gertler proposed that there be a day, 24-Hour Comics Day. �at’s been going since 2004. And we also get, like, you know, 20 or more countries participating in that.

And Tina Fallon began the 24-Hour Plays in New York a�er seeing—I think there was an exhibition or something of 24-hour comics. �at led to other mutations. �ere have been 24-hour �lm festivals, 24-hour games, 24-hour animations.

ID: Yeah, there’s also, like, two-day and weeklong things. I mean, there’s

the novel-writing month going on—I think it’s

going on pretty soon.2

SM: Yeah. And, you know, it’s gotten so elab-orate and so widespread that I o�en can’t keep

track of which ones [trace] their heritage back to the

24-hour comics and which ones don’t. I’m sure some of them just

came about spontaneously. �ere had been speed contests before. I remember Harlan Ellison famously sat in a store window and wrote a story for every letter in the alphabet over a long weekend, I think it was. So, there have de�nitely been speed exercises before. But I think, you know, generally speaking, it’s just a really useful thing to do every once in a while, to just see what you have in you.

ID: Do you think that’s the appeal of this? I mean, it seems like everybody does it for their own reasons. But is it that way that, like, creativity and coming up with ideas sort of syncs up that draws so many people from so many di�erent disciplines?

SM: I think that’s part of it. I think there are a number of things that might attract people to the challenge. One is the fact that it is a

Any creative work begins with

the choice of which limitations to embrace for aesthetic reasons.

That’s never going to change.


challenge. And, you know, many people are just attracted to the notion of competition and pushing themselves, pushing their limits. Another is solving those creative logjams, thinking outside the box. I think, you know, it’s very, very hard not to get into certain pat-terns, certain ruts, certain traditional ways of thinking. And something like this can really shake loose those preconceptions.

And also, there’s the community aspect of it, too, in many cases, like what you’re doing with the 24-hour magazine, or the 24-Hour Plays. People are getting together and they’re in a real pressure-cooker situation.

ID: �ere’s a few 24-hour comic meet-ups as well, right?

SM: Yeah, quite a few. In fact, once 24-Hour Comics Day started, one of Nat’s ideas was to have hosted events. And a lot of these were hosted in comic book shops or at universi-ties. And so you’d have 10 or 20 or even more people all at once. Some of them have reached as much as 60 people or more.

ID: To sort of shi� gears a little bit, it seems things like this get easier to do [because of] the way a lot of creative technology is getting cheaper and easier distributed, and the Web makes it easier to share these things with an audience, like, the day a�er you make it.

SM: Yeah.

ID: And you’ve talked a lot about new dis-tribution models and funding models. And I guess I’m sort of curious—do you see that tying in with the distribution of 24-hour comics as well?

SM: It does, and I think it ties in in two ways. I mean, in the one sense, it’s a facilitator. �is new environment facilitates and is a practi-cal aid to doing these sorts of things. But it also might be a case where we’ve become more acclimated to the idea of these sudden collaborative eruptions. You know, this is the sort of thing that seems much more natural

in this environment than it ever did before. We have it in physical spaces with groups like Improv Everywhere or �ash mobs.

And we have just this notion that it’s possible to get a worldwide network of people together on very short notice. So you have, you know, musical collaborations, the various video col-laborations that we’ve seen. �at takes place sometimes just on an everyday level. I mean, there are people for whom that’s becoming blasé, just ordinary, “Oh, yeah, another day, another 10,000 people getting together to make something.”

ID: Regarding these new distribution and funding models, you’ve talked a lot about webcomics. Just checking your pulse, with new things like Kickstarter or In-diegogo, how are webcomics doing these days? [PAUSE] I know it’s a broad topic. [LAUGHTER]

SM: Well, you talk to most cartoonists, and they’ll say, “Well, you know, almost nobody makes a living at it.” But that’s not really true, of course. It’s just that maybe, as always—I mean, this may have always been true—it’s still a minority that makes a signi�cant amount of money on it.

But, yeah, I think, when you have tens of thousands of people making stu�—and you do; you have that many people making webcomics—as a community, they’re bound to come up with some really good solutions. And many of them have. Even before crowd-funding came along, we did have a handful of pretty successful webcomics artists who just discovered that, when you have 100,000 people reading anything, there’s going to be a signi�cant subset of that group that’s willing to help support you on a signi�cant level, and then a larger group that’s willing to support you on a more trivial level of just, you know, tossing a few bucks your way. It’s just a numbers game. I mean, if you have a big enough audience, and if that money is �owing through a fairly fat pipe and is not

being diverted as it was, say, in the print world, the numbers are pretty overwhelming.

Now, you know, back in the day, I was hoping that we might see something in the way of a direct exchange of small amounts of curren-cy, the whole micropayments debate early in the century. But, with things like Kickstarter, we’re seeing a demonstration of a lot of the same dynamics. It’s just a simple fact that, you know, whatever the reader does with their dollar, whatever the audience does with that dollar in their pocket, if 90 cents is landing at the feet of the producer instead of 10 cents, that’s a di�erent dynamic. And it was 10 cents in my day.

ID: Yeah. Micropayment seems to have really caught on in music, surprisingly. [LAUGHTER]

SM: Well, of a sort. You know, there’s a huge di�erence between what guys like me were advocating for and what we see in, say, the iTunes model.

ID: I suppose, yeah. What are the di�er-ences?

SM: Most signi�cantly in the fact that you have a single vendor. You know, I was hoping for a single provider of currency and many vendors.

ID: Yeah.

SM: It’s worrisome when you have a single vendor. And that was really one of the great dangers that we see now, is that there’s this bottleneck. And we’ve already seen it in the example of works being rejected from the iTunes store because of content. �at wouldn’t be happening if there was just some-body minting the coins. You know, you have a much more resilient network if you have a single provider of currency, or rather a small number of providers of currency, and then 10,000 vendors.

So, you know, I’m not sure exactly how this is going to go. All I know is that there’s a very small number of hands that can choke o� the

�ow of work. Now, fortunately, that’s not true of crowdfunding right now.

ID: Yeah, so far.

SM: Yeah, so far. [LAUGHTER] I mean, we’ll see if Kickstarter takes progressively larger pieces of the pie. And, of course, everybody’s kind of counting down the days until we have Kickstarter fatigue. But, strangely, that hasn’t happened.

ID: Yeah, it actually seems to just be getting bigger.

SM: Yeah. And I’m not really sure what’s going on there. I mean, it could be that we were wrong. It could be that the fatigue would only kick in if you have an individual asker, you know, an individual provider continually asking for funding. You might get that kind of fatigue. But the model itself is not going to generate fatigue, because there’s always somebody new that you’re devoted to as an audience member.

ID: Do you consider using Kickstarter someday in the future?

SM: Maybe. It’s not necessary for me right now. And I think people might give me the hairy eyeball if they get the impression that I’m asking for money I don’t need yet. But, at a certain point, yeah, I could see it working for certain types of things.

ID: Well, Kickstarter seems to have an interesting tension to it, because so much of the time, the more established you are, like if people can click and see that you’ve already made things, then that almost helps you more. And crowdfunding comes with this problem of, well, you have to have already made something in order to make something.

SM: Well, unless you have an idea that’s going to go viral.

ID: Hmm.

SM: I mean, some of the successful Kick-starters, I think, have relatively unknown

producers of, say, gadgets or accessories that people heard about and they were like, “Yes, oh my God, this is something I wanted and I didn’t even know it until I saw that little video.” �ose things get passed around. It really doesn’t matter who the person is. It’s more of a meritocracy than it was. �at’s still true. �at’s been true now almost all the way back to Mosaic3, that what we have in the virtual space is more of a meritocracy. It’ll never completely be a meritocracy, but it’s getting closer than it was, because I remem-ber what it was like in the dark ages. And trust me, there were so many arbitrary gates and moats and walls that prevented people of tremendous talent from making any kind of an impression, from even being available. It’s still moving in the right direction.

ID: So, do you feel that artists, especially with these new models, are becoming freer with their work?

SM: Well, of course, you know, the greatest limitation for any artist is themselves. And I’m sure already, if you look closely, you’ll begin to see artists distorting their work in order to �t into accepted channels. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are already online courses for how to write or how to record a good Kickstarter video and how to—[LAUGHTER] you know, it’s coming like it’s just any other career path, in people’s minds. And that’s a kind of limitation, too. But, for the artist that’s unrestrained by their own im-agination, that’s able to think outside the box, I don’t see anything else getting in their way.

ID: So, is maybe this the most interesting time for Kickstarter, where it hasn’t quite become an institution yet and people are still using it very creatively?

SM: �e beginning is always the most inter-esting time for anything.

ID: Yeah.

SM: But what it becomes from here—you know, it may not be about Kickstarter. It

probably isn’t about Kickstarter speci�cally. You’re looking at the power of crowds. And that’s not going to subside as an issue for a very, very long time.

ID: Yeah, not unless the population drops.

SM: Well, yes. [LAUGHTER] It would have to drop a lot, though. [LAUGHTER]

ID: So, if limitations generally spur creativ-ity, and now a lot of longstanding industry or distribution-style limitations are start-ing to disappear, does that a�ect creativity? When people can do anything, does it make it harder to know what to do?

SM: No, that’s never been a threat to creativity. You know, if you look at forms in which there are limitations, say the haiku, or certain styles of drawing, those are limitations of choice. When you pick up a pen and a paper, you can put anything on that piece of paper. If you choose to write a form of poetry, it requires certain limitations. You’re imposing those limitations upon yourself. �ere’s nothing to stop you from picking it up like a �ve-year-old and just scribbling all over the paper.

So those limitations are not going to go away. �e option of limitations is not going to go away. Any creative work begins with the choice of which limitations to embrace for aesthetic reasons. �at’s never going to change.

My relationship to limitations is that what I see as a much greater danger is that people will see the limitations of one technology fall away as the new technology enters the stage. And, in my case, certainly the technology of print yielding to digital spaces. And what they will do is they will bring the limitations of the previous technology with them, and try to unconsciously import those limitations into the new form. �at is a problem every day, that we’re not even aware of the degree to which we’re still informed by, constricted by, shaped by limitations that no longer exist.

ID: It almost seems like innovation would


INTERVIEW

be—even if it’s slow, it seems almost inevi-table. Like, even certain webcomic artists who aren’t particularly Web-savvy will still periodically just be like, “Oh, well, this comic, I can make it 100 panels long, and it will just scroll down for a long time.”

SM: Yeah. Well, there, I mean, you have an in-teresting case there, because they are realizing that they can step outside those limitations. And hopefully they’ll have the good sense to give it some thought as to whether or not that’s a good idea aesthetically. Sometimes it is; sometimes it isn’t.

But yeah, you’re absolutely right that what’s going on there—you know, in the case of somebody who isn’t necessarily as conscious of those pos-sibilities, who just kind of stumbles in, starts doing their own thing, and then at some point wakes up and real-izes, “Oh, I have these possibilities,” you know, those people are everywhere. But really what they’re doing in many ways isn’t so much innovation as adaptation. But they both serve the same purpose. And they both lead to the same results.

ID: It’s interesting. [What’s interesting] is the fact that people—with something like the 24-Hour Comic or a 24-hour magazine or 24-hour plays—are o�en using these new models and collectively imposing really strict limitations on themselves, but of their own choosing.

SM: Yes, absolutely.

ID: And is that the biggest appeal?

SM: Well, like I said, I think there are a number of di�erent appeals. But that’s certainly one of the great creative appeals, is the notion that, within this stricture, you have so many possibilities. Some have taken a minimalist approach to the 24-hour comic. And I always

tried to point out to them that, while that is an option, to think, “How little can I put on a piece of paper in order to still represent something that looks like a comic?”—I’ve always thought it a more interesting challenge to say, “How much can you draw in an hour?” �at, to me, is the soul of the challenge.

ID: Or to have people commit to things that they’ve never done before, like Neil Gaiman drawing his own comic for the �rst time.

SM: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. To go outside your comfort zone is always useful, as a creative

person. And, you know, maybe it’s just that moment when you

realize that you’re no longer in school, but you still have to give yourself some assignments from time to time. [LAUGHTER] You know? If you’re ever

going to keep learning. 80 percent of everything I

know I’ve learned since leaving school. And I think, for a successful

creative professional, that’s vital.

ID: It’s still depressing when your teachers tell you that, though.

SM: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Yeah, it can be.

You can learn more about Scott McCloud, and read his experiments with the webcomic form, at scottmccloud.com

1 Comics artist Steve Bissette, best known for his work on Swamp �ing.

2 NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which begins in November.

3 Mosaic was the �rst web browser. I’ll admit that reference whizzed over my head.


Maybe it’s just that

moment when you realize that you’re

no longer in school, but you still have to give yourself some assignments from

time to time.


COMIC BOOKSTo me, the most interesting thing

about webcomics is how little they dif-fer from print comics.

As newspaper subscriptions shrink and comic book stores close, com-ics have found a natural home on the web, basically intact. The most popular webcomics, like Penny Arcade, publish daily to weekly, mirroring the newspa-per print schedule, and retain the hori-zontal orientation of newspaper strips. Even webcomics inspired by comic books rather than strips, and thus laid out vertically, like The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, work well on the screen.

There have been some minor innova-tions that are common to webcomics, such as rollover text to slip in an extra joke or editorial footnotes that are also hyperlinks to relevant strips, but for the most part webcomics are just print comics, formatted as a JPG and slapped on a page. And I think that’s � ne.

There have been experiments in in-novations with webcomics. Randall Munroe’s April Fools Day comic this year varied depending upon the viewer’s browser and window size. Scott McCloud promotes the idea of an in� nite canvas, where the full image is too big for any screen and the reader has to scroll in all directions to get the full story. And Patrick Farley has been experimenting with adding animation to webcomics for years. His piece “The First Word,” a single image that transforms as you scroll across it, is an inspiration for the comic in this magazine.

But in all of these cases, and with all due respect to the artists, the innova-tion outweighs the actual content. Yes, these are cool ways of saying some-thing, but are they saying anything that could not be said in a more traditional comics form? I already know how to read a comic. Without a good story, I have no reason to learn a new way of reading them.

Someday, I think, someone will cre-ate the webcomic that could only be a webcomic, but it would have to be because they have a story that needs—that demands—their new innovation. Until then, the webcomic will be � ne, if not anything that new. Really.

Genre is a useful tool for art. It is useful for the audience because it can help them � nd new art they will probably like. People know what they’ve liked before, whether in books, or movies, or music, or paintings, or clothing. If they liked this one novel or that one song, the odds are good that they will like other pieces in the same genre.

And genre can be useful for the artist too. Genre gives creators prede� ned tools, an agreed-upon language with which to speak to an informed and eager audience. � ey don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time they make art.

On the other hand, genres are limiting by de� nition. Sometimes these de� nitions cut to the core of the genre; i.e. something impossible has to happen for a story to be considered a fantasy. Sometimes, however, the de� nitions are more about style and features. � e audience for a daytime drama expects melodramatic relationships. � e audience for a Broadway show expects show-stopping belting. � e audience for an opera expects melodramatic relationships punctuated by show-stopping belting.

But these conceptual de� nitions are o� en just the echoes of physical limitations that existed in the original medium: opera is sung loudly to reach the audience in the back of the theater in the days before ampli� cation; � lm noir is black and white because color was too expensive for cheap gangster � lms in the 1940s; and auto-biographical comics are black and white line art because the un-derground comix of the late 1960s had to be photocopied for hand distribution. In each of these genres the � nancial or technologi-cal limitations have long since faded away, and yet the genres’ styles remain.

One could ignore these de� nitions—make the brightly colored crime story, the quiet and subtle opera—but at the risk of alienating and losing the audience. And it’s perfectly possible to create new and creative art while staying within the bounds of an established genre, or even to create new art that’s outside of any established genre and therefore not have to challenge assump-tions about how a beloved genre should be de� ned.

Personally, I think the reason to rede� ne a genre is also the only way you can rede-� ne a genre: because the art you are trying to make demands new forms. Create a sordid crime story in gritty color because it wouldn’t work in a world of sharp black and white contrasts, and you get Chinatown. Apply the song cycle format to a non-� ction subject with modern, pop vocal delivery, and you get Corey Dargel’s heartbreaking Last Words from Texas. Even this magazine is, in many ways, a ‘zine that eschews the traditional ‘zine aesthetic because we write and produce this on computers and would prefer to re� ect our actual process.

We need innovators in each � eld, if not necessarily to stretch the de� nitions of genres, then at least to give them the oc-casional shakedown cruise. We need to discover what parts of a genre are core to its existence, and what parts are just vestigial limits, the phantom limbs of old mediums, felt more in the absence than in the world.

- Ste en paDniCK

p

YOU FIRST

IT’S JUST

THAT— IT’S JUST

THAT—

OH I’M SORRY

NO, I’M SORRY

YOU FIRST

NO, YOU

NO, YOU

...YOU’VE BEEN

DISTANT. LIKE

WE’RE NOT REALLY

CONNECTING.

YEAH, I

UNDERSTAND.

OKAY, I’LL

START. LATELY

YOU’VE.. .

BUT YOU GOTTA

UNDERSTAND THAT I WANT

TO CONNECT. I DO.

YOU’RE JUST

AT WORK. ALL

THE TIME!

I KNOW. I KNOW IT’S

HARD BUT I DO IT FOR

YOU. FOR US. TO SUPPORT

OUR DREAMS.

I KNOW YOU’D BE DOING THE

SAME THING IF YOU COULD.

WHAT’S THAT

SUPPOSED TO

MEAN? WAIT, I DIDN’T

MEAN...

YES YOU DID. YOU

MEANT MY BAND.

THAT’S NOT

WHAT I MEANT,

BABY.

WELL, I’M SORRY, OKAY? I

KNOW MY DREAM JOB DOESN’T

MAKE A LOT OF MONEY. BUT I

CAN SUPPORT MYSELF

DON’T!

JUST...

DON’T.

I’M NOT

YOUR

BABY.

I DON’T

WANT TO BE

YOUR BABY

ANYMORE.

SCript By Ste en paDniCK • art By paB o DefenDini

3D - GRAB YOUR GLASSES!

NOTE: THIS IS NOT A PRINTING ERROR! PHOTOS BY VICTORIA NECE



MINI-INTERVIEWSQuestion: What is a limit in your creative work that either inspires you or that you chafe against (or both)? Don’t say ‘money’ or ‘time!’

Elizabeth BoskeyThe biggest limit to my creative work is that I am creative for a living. I no longer write and perform only for my own pleasure. In-stead, I have to shape my creations to the needs of others. The bene�t, of course, is that I have an audience. The things I care about are seen. The downside is that some-times what I want to share isn’t something I can sell. Before I built myself a platform for my words, it didn’t bother me to shout into the void. It’s more dif�cult to do so now that I’ve gotten used to being heard.

Kevin ClarkMy music has a lot of people who have to perform in two ways. And they’re usually acting musicians of some kind. If you play the cello, you’re going to have to recite a poem. If you play the saxophone, you’re go-ing to have to recite a poem. If you play the marimba, guess what? And that’s really hard to deal with. We encounter this with musi-cians, where the tools they have to shape a musical performance with emotion and character development are very rich, and they transfer really well to shaping a speech. What they don’t have is the vocal technique that a trained actor or singer would have. In my perfect world, everyone can play at least one instrument, sing really well in multiple styles, and act very well.

Ian DanskinWith work that I’m doing for its own sake—it’s not an assignment—it is very dif�cult for me to just get myself to work on it, even though most of the time, if I can push through the �rst half-hour where I want to be doing anything else, then I’m really happy to be doing it. And it’s the work that usually matters the most to me that is the hardest to do. I imagine that stems from the self-doubt, that you think you can’t get it done or that it’s not worth doing. I mean, the artistic process is a process of discov-ery. It’s not going to look like it does in your head. And that’s usually good. But it’s also

messy and tricky and imperfect. Trying to force yourself to grapple with that when you could just put on a movie…it’s not so much that the movie is better. It’s that the movie is so much easier.

Tania AsnesI’m working on undoing limits on my body and my ability to express and process and take in. I’m trying to unlearn the limits that I learned, certain ways of speaking that are appropriate or attractive, because I think my whole life I’ve been obsessed with being at-tractive and acceptable. None of that serves you in acting. And I am hitting those limits all the time. That’s why I’m studying move-ment; that’s why I’m studying improv. I have this instrument and I don’t know how to use it. Or I’ve been using it in one way so long that I don’t even remember what it was like to �ail around on the �oor, or in the air, or jump and be unconstrained.

Steven PadnickMy real limit is not part of the work. It’s part of me. I see my own weaknesses as a writer pretty glaringly. I can see what I’m good at and what I’m not, and my limits are all in style. I don’t write very pretty prose, or not as good as I want the prose to be on the �rst draft. I really want to be a Mark Twain-esque writer where I can write two drafts and I’m done, just step away and have a mint julep. And when I say I’m more like a Fitzgerald writer, I don’t mean that I will end up with The Great Gatsby, but that I might have to do 40 drafts to end up with “okay”. The only way I will ever become great at writing is by writing. But it means, as many writers have said, you write a lot of shit �rst, and that is daunting. It is daunting to think that I will write a hundred thousand words before I write a good one.

Pablo DefendiniI think limits in general are important. Hav-ing an assignment or creative endeavor that doesn’t have any constraints becomes dif-�cult to navigate. And it’s not interesting. Limits are what de�ne the outlines of a problem. And all or most creative endeavor is problem solving. So, a problem without constraints isn’t really a problem. I think

limits are built into creative endeavor. Self-imposed limits can be more interesting, although limits that are imposed externally can lead to more honest discovery, or more engaging discovery, simply because it’s a lot easier to go down paths that you weren’t really expecting to go down because you’re de�ning this problem based on somebody else’s terms.

Casey MiddaughI think my favorite limits to work to are briefs for what a game needs to be made for. So, it’s whatever requirements the peo-ple who want the game impose, because then it’s like a puzzle and �guring out what it is that I need to do to make it all work and �t within what they’re looking for. I �nd that inspiring, to know that they want me to do this very speci�c thing, but, within that very speci�c thing, I can do whatever I want.

So, I did a game for the Hayward Gallery, an art gallery in London. They had this two-story-tall thatched fox. And they were part-nering with a fox charity, a fox preservation charity. They had already named the game, “The Fox Hunt,” so we had to do that. It had to be within the space around the gallery. It had to be for an unspeci�ed number of children and their families. And it needed to be as positive about foxes as possible, in spite of the fact that they’d already ac-cidentally named it, “Fox Hunt.” So, I did a bunch of research, and I talked to a lot of fox authorities. And so there were certain things about fox behavior that I wanted to put into the game. So, it ended up being like a scavenger hunt, and you had to �nd the fox, who had disguised himself as a per-son. You wouldn’t be able to see that he was a fox. You had to �nd him through his be-havior and through clues that had been left behind. And so that’s what I think is really fun about game design, is that you’ve given me these things that I need to ful�ll. But, because it’s something new, and because it needs to be fun, I can do whatever the heck I want with that.


Victoria NeceMy main line of work is documentary ani-mation, so there’s this strange limit where I don’t have complete artistic freedom, be-cause I have to be accurate. That’s always a priority, to be factually correct. In a lot of ways, it’s great, because it gives you a focus. It gives you a structure to start with. There’s certain information that people need for something to make sense. But part of why you have to be so accurate is that documentary audiences will complain about the tiniest things. We did a � lm for a muse-um that included a sequence with a bunch of pictures in antique picture frames. And the museum people told us, “These frames aren’t period accurate. We have to throw this graphic out completely unless you can get period-accurate frames, because we’ll get complaints.” It’s that level of fact-checking.

Sara HamesI chafe pretty hard against the limits of my own education when it comes to both technology and design, because a lot of the projects that I’m trying to do these days are very internet and digitally oriented, and they are also projects that are heavily reli-ant upon excellent design, whether that be graphic design or interation design. And I probably stop and curse my lack of a graph-ic design degree and/or computer science degree ten times a week. One of the ways that I get around that limitation is by try-ing to create more and more collaborative projects. And that simultaneously makes me very happy, because I have all of these amazing people surrounding me who are so good at what they do, and I know that I can’t be good at everything, but also—I should be good at everything! And it drives me crazy that I’m not.

Johanna BobrowI would say the limit that I chafe against most is probably light; not enough photons. How do I get enough photons from the right direction, re� ecting off of the right things, back into my camera, to get something that is in focus and has enough depth of � eld, to portray the image I want, given that I’m usu-ally taking pictures of small things, indoors, not in natural light? I have a lens with a very wide aperture, which helps with that,

because it takes in as many photons as pos-sible per second, but that means the depth of � eld is very narrow. But it’s still better than � ash, which I generally use as little as possible, because it is not something I’ve learned. There are in� nite things to be learned about arti� cial lighting, and I have only the smallest amount of knowledge of it.

Jack StrattonFor good or bad, right now, I am writing to sell. And I’m okay with that, because there’s a long, great tradition of pulp novels and genre novels. And I � nd the constraints of writing towards trends that people are buy-ing actually makes for a really creative at-mosphere. So, that’s a big limitation, in that a lot of what I want to write, a lot of the things that I naturally tend to write about, aren’t as popular. And so, when faced with writing about things that are other people’s sort of desires or inspirations, it makes my work much more challenging and interest-ing in a lot of ways.

Rose GinsbergOne of my favorite limits to work with in theater is the limit of physical space. The constraints of the venue for any production I direct, whether it’s in a blackbox theater, the back room of a bar, or someone’s living room, literally shape the performance. And because theater is all about the immediacy of the experience, the performance will feel more alive for the audience if the actors and the production design embrace the dif� cul-ties of the space rather than � ghting against them. Is it uncomfortably tiny? Get in the audience’s faces. Are there strange nooks and crannies? Hide in them, light them spe-cially, incorporate them into the action. No matter how bad a space seems, you can use it to help you tell your story.

Your mist

Deer Rose Fox,

the very faire

Copy editor

extraordinaire,

While were here

We know your their.

And while at

The � oor we stair,

We did hour best.

We muddled threw

with coffee

and tea

and cocktails

and more cocktails

and some bad puns

and some terrible poetry

and we made art two.

We hope your having fun.

Wherever you our.

Just no your mist

By one and all.*

*We know.


POETRY

Blue Morpho didiusSideways hourglass, marking:we shall live out our lives in 6 x 7” acrylic,or a riker mount,an addition to the house,a framing narrative;

insects only,another entry for Denis’ Encyclopedie,re�ections of relics,mementos of the �rst oneswho gathered stones to build their wings,so� and vulnerable, caterpillarsall but for the bones,browbeaten and cowed,they sank instantly.

Surfacing,you are the face of (fate)(fear)(fantasy)phosphorescingskeleton,your glimmer intrinsic,scales re�ecting;

do I measure my life in your wingspans, you and you, locked in an airy dance, thin, silken eaglesspiraling,emblems of a fallen age—reptiles roaming, we but a glimmerin the eye of ouranonymous, omniscient creator,you iridescing, soaring within glass.

What do you think happens when we die? She askeda �eet of silken blue wings released, an explosion of energy

- TANIA ASNES


For EugeniaThey tell us we are thin-skinned, soft-shelled

But our exquisite sensitivityOur propensity to care

And then to bruise

We care, and this is howWe know we are here.Our bruises are true.

When a pin of lightPricks the tunnel darkness

Will you not want sensitive eyesFor guides

Yes. We are here. We will stay. We will wait.We are the gentle attendants,

Midwives of your journey.

I will wait on you

I am here.

- Tania asnes

10

0WORD LIMITS


Words: 100Writers have always had to

deal with word limits, but today such limits are becoming an almost instinctive component of modern communication. Tweets and text messages are limited to 140 characters, and we are learning to ration not just our words but also our letters.

Limits change both the way we talk and the way we think. The need to � t an idea into a de� ned space shapes our per-ceptions and conclusions. There is only so much complexity that can � t into 100 words. In this issue of twenty-four magazine, I am exploring the freedom found in those boundaries.

- ELIZABETH BOSKEY

WORD LIMITS


250

250

250

250

250

250

250

250

250

Space: 250Public spaces are often de� ned by

limits of use. Some of these are—at least theoretically—for the public’s safety. Others are designed to protect the integrity of the area, either physi-cally or socially. However, whether or not people bene� t from these limits is sometimes a subject for debate.

Questions of how public spaces can and should be used were front and center during the early days of the Occupy move-ment. When occupying public spaces, protesters often pushed up against the limits of their use. Although government of� cials did sometimes have legitimate concerns about public safety when evicting protestors, other limits were clearly being enforced for political rather than practical reasons. This highlighted the fact that some boundaries set “for the public good” may only bene� t a select few.

The limits we place on public spaces are not inherently good or bad. They simply re� ect what we do and do not value as a society. By

forbidding rock climbing in a public park, the government shows it prior-itizes limiting liability over allowing people to make their own decisions about risk. By keeping hikers out of wildlife areas and wetlands, we place the importance of preserving the physical environment over an indi-vidual’s freedom to roam.

Our society is anything but mono-lithic. The boundaries that some people applaud are to others an invitation to transgress. Some people prioritize defending the environment. Others would do anything to keep tight grasp on the status quo. Who sets the limits? Who decides what to respect?

- ELIZABETH BOSKEY250

the integrity of the area, either physi-cally or socially. However, whether or not people bene� t from these limits is sometimes a subject for debate.

Questions of how public spaces can and should be used were front and center during the early days of the Occupy move-ment. When occupying public spaces, protesters often pushed up against the limits of their use. Although government of� cials did sometimes have legitimate concerns about public safety when evicting protestors, other limits were clearly being enforced for political rather than practical reasons. This highlighted the fact

250that some boundaries set “for the

250

250public good” may only bene� t a

250

250select few.

250

250The limits we place on public

250

250spaces are not inherently good or

250bad. They simply re� ect what we

250bad. They simply re� ect what we

250do and do not value as a society. By

250do and do not value as a society. By

250forbidding rock climbing in a public

250forbidding rock climbing in a public

250

50

0


WORD LIMITSChoice: 500Decision Fatigue: Are There Bene� ts to Limiting Choice?

What could be better than limitless choice? The freedom to do what you want, when you want, is exhilarating. Isn’t it? Maybe not. Over the past decade, a num-ber of scientists have investigated wheth-er people are happier when they have only a limited number of alternatives.

Many people are familiar with an expe-rience colloquially known as option pa-ralysis. While it might be easy to choose between Italian and Thai food for dinner, faced with a larger menu of choices, it becomes impossible to pick the best one. The notion that too many choices can make people anxious was popular-ized in 2004, by the psychologist Barry Schwartz. He believed that people only think having unlimited freedom to choose will make them happier. It seemed to him that having too many choices just made them cranky.

The notion that too much choice could

be a bad thing stunned psychologists. Historically, it was believed that giving people more options was always to their bene� t. However, the studied sets of choices had always been relatively small. Only in the modern consumer market had people truly been given the chance to experience what some scientists were starting to call choice overload.

Is choice overload a real concern? The simplicity movement says yes. Sci-ence says maybe. In certain situations, it seems clear that having too many options can make it dif� cult to make a choice. However, at other times people bene� t from having a larger number of options. What makes the difference may be whether there are real advantages to one choice over another – and whether there is enough information to make the decision.

Having to make decisions can be ex-hausting, in and of itself. In 2011, a group of Israeli scientists published a study looking at whether factors other than guilt might affect a judge’s willingness to allow a prisoner out on parole. They found that the answer might just be yes.

The default choice for a parole board is to keep a prisoner in jail, and the data suggested that it got harder and harder to make any other decision throughout the day. Judges were most likely to release the prisoners they saw � rst thing in the morning and right after lunch. The less energy a judge had, the more tired they became, the harder it was to choose. Their decision fatigue came not from the number of options for each case but the number of times they had to choose.

Americans value individual preferences and expression so highly that it’s hard to imagine that having more options could be a bad thing. To an extent that’s prob-ably true. With a wider variety of products available, there’s a better chance that people will be able to � nd exactly what they want. However, what happens when that perfect choice doesn’t exist? When you can’t � nd the ideal option, but still need to make a choice, it may be easier to pick from a menu of ten alternatives than to weed through a list of thousands.

- ELIZABETH BOSKEY

1,0

00


Life: 1000Accepting Limits at the End of Life

To many people, one of the things that makes the American healthcare system wonderful is the fact that they can buy all the care they can afford. As long as the money holds out, it is rare for doctors to tell patients to stop trying for a cure, a treatment, or another few days. Instead, our medical philosophy seems to be “do the next thing.” Doctors will try anything they can to prolong a life, even at the expense of its quality – at least for their patients.

They seem to know better for themselves. A few months ago, a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Why Doctors Die Differently,” brought this issue to the attention of the public. Doctors make different decisions for themselves than the average patient does. They are less likely to seek out interven-tions that will prolong their lifespan at the expense of quality of life. They are more likely to have their thoughts about extreme measures written out in advance.

So why don’t more patients make the decision to forgo care when it is likely to extend, but not improve, their lives? There are a number of reasons. They may be under pressure from desperate family members who would do anything to keep them for another day. They may not have been accu-rately informed about how a treatment will affect their health. They may be so afraid of death that even extreme discomfort seems to be the better choice.

As a society, Americans are not comfort-able with the notion of death. We are reluc-tant to embrace the idea that, at least for now, life has limits. This makes it dif� cult for some people to even discuss the notion of stopping care. It’s easier to simply let doctors make the decisions, and do what they want. That’s not just true for end-of-life decisions. In a national survey of American adults, almost everyone wanted to hear their medical options, but more than half preferred to leave � nal decisions in a doc-tor’s hands.

One of the few studies to look at end-of-life directives in healthy adults, the Framingham Heart Study, found that many of the elderly had con� icting thoughts about end-of-life care. In general, most adults said they would prefer comfort care to life-

extending care, and a solid majority wanted to die at home. However, when asked about speci� c life-extending interventions, they said they preferred them to death. Fewer than half said they would rather die than live out their lives in a great deal of pain or in a state of constant confusion.

This seeming disconnect can probably be explained by the fact that even well educat-ed adults may not understand the difference between comfort and life-extending care. They may also lack an accurate perception of what it is like to live with dementia or extreme pain. Counseling and education about these issues can be enlightening. In one study, before viewing a video of what it is like to live with advanced dementia, al-most a quarter of the participants said they would want life-extending treatment. After viewing, none of them did.

Unfortunately, the highly in� ammatory political rhetoric around President Obama’s health care bill has made such counseling harder to get. The original bill, as pro-posed, would have allowed doctors to be reimbursed for providing regular, voluntary counseling to their elderly patients about end-of-life issues. However, after Sarah Palin and other conservative pundits started characterizing such counseling as govern-ment mandated “death panels,” the idea was quickly derailed.

The irony is that where Palin implied the government wanted to decide who was worthy to live and die, the legislation was actually designed to help Medicare patients make more informed decisions about their own life and death. It wouldn’t have harmed anyone. It would have increased patient awareness of advanced directives and the bene� ts of living wills by motivating doctors to provide the counseling they needed.

One of the tragedies of the American healthcare system is that patients can buy all the care they can afford. Unfortunately, unlimited care does not necessarily provide unlimited bene� ts. The problem is, without better information, how are people sup-posed to � gure out when, and if, they’re ready to stop?

- ELIZABETH BOSKEY

I am a cancer survivor. In my early thirties, I was diagnosed

with papillary thyroid cancer. Although people stare at me when I say this, it wasn’t that big a deal. The cancer was small and contained. It was caught early. I was treated with surgery, and that was it.

It almost wasn’t. My endocrinologist wanted me to have radioactive iodine therapy after my cancer surgery was complete. I didn’t think it was neces-sary.

That was an educated decision. Not only had I done extensive research on my own, I’d also talked to one of the top experts in the � eld, who agreed that radiation therapy was unnecessary. Although the risk of side effects was relatively low, it was also unlikely to be of real bene� t. Therefore, I refused the treatment.

According to U.S. law, patients have the right to refuse medical care. My endocrinologist disagreed. She argued with me and insulted me and eventu-ally � red me as her patient. If I was unwilling to go along with the standard treatment, she was unwilling to be my doctor.

Eventually, I found another endo-crinologist who, while also unhappy with my decision, was at least willing to abide by my wishes. Five years, and many clear screening exams later, I am still convinced that not taking the radioactive iodine was the right choice for me.

I just wish I hadn’t had to � ght so hard to make it.

What is hospice?Hospice is a type of care designed to

ease the suffering of terminally ill pa-tients. It may include pain relief as well as various forms of physical, emotional, and social support for the patient and their family. Unlike many other forms of medical care, the aim is not to prolong life. Instead, hospice tries to make the end of life as comfortable as possible, so that patients can die with dignity.


COCKTAILSCocktails: designed by Meg Grady-Troia, beverage director at Journeyman restaurant in Somerville, MA.

Her limits? The contents of the liquor cabinets onsite at twenty-four magazine.

“Let’s now play with the limitation of what you have in front of you. I’ve assumed a re-ally limited pantry of non-spirit ingredients, but � gured a citrus fruit or two and some condiments might exist. My additional limit to myself is that none of these drinks will repeat an ingredient from your liquor cabi-net.”

Cocktail One2 oz Absolut Boston vodka

1 oz lime juice

3/4 oz St. Germain

1/4 oz Chambord

To build the drink, � ll an Old Fashioned glass with crushed ice.

Shake together the vodka, lemon, and St. Germain for 10 seconds and pour into the Old Fashioned over the ice. It still looks virginal, as if you were just having a bit of soda water on ice, but to make sure people know how hard you worked, drizzle the Chambord down the center of the glass from a jigger, so they see the blood and love that went into the drink.

Serve with a straw for stirring in the Chambord (otherwise it will eventually settle to the bottom of the glass).

This plays with the original Gin Bramble, keeping the construction and propor-tions, but changing ingredients.


Cocktail Two1 oz brandy

2 oz Cold River gin

1/2 oz lemon juice

2 dashes Scrappy’s chocolate bitters

Zest an entire orange into the brandy & let it sit for about 15-20 minutes.

To build the drink, run some orange juice over the rim of your cocktail glass and sugar the rim.

Strain the brandy into a mixing tin and add all the ingredients but the bitters. Shake for 10 seconds, then strain into the sugared glass and top with the bitters.

This is based on the Pegu Club, but takes some liberties with how you get the right �avors into the drink.

Cocktail Three2 oz Hudson Bay bourbon

1/2 oz Frangelico

3/4 oz someone else’s coffee

Rinse of Cabo Wabo Reposado tequila (only a few drops needed)

To build the drink, rinse a cocktail glass with the tequila (pull a Julia Child here, and drink the dregs of the tequila while you mix your drink).

In a mixing glass, combine the bourbon, Frangelico, and coffee. Fill the glass with ice and stir for 30 seconds. Strain into the cocktail glass and garnish with a shred of someone else’s torn-up manuscript.

This one should taste sort of like any morn-ing after: a bit smoky, a bit sweet, and more than a little bitter.


COCKTAILSCocktail Four2 oz Square One vodka

3/4 oz Domaine de Canton

1 1/4 oz orange juice

Dash soy sauce

Toss about 1 tsp of peppercorns (or 1/2 tsp ground pepper) into the vodka and leave to steep for about 30 minutes.

To build the drink, pull a chilled Old Fash-ioned and add 2 ice cubes.

Strain the peppered vodka into a mixing tin with the rest of the ingredients, shake for 10 seconds over ice, and strain into the glass. Garnish with candied ginger or an or-ange twist.

This is your kick-in-the-pants: like a really mean Emergen-C, it’ll take care of your sore throat, your headache, your cold (and hud-dled masses), and keep any other nasties at bay. Or at least, if they arrive you won’t notice.

Cocktail Five2 oz Angostura bitters

1/2 oz Patron Anejo tequila

1 oz grapefruit juice and 2 swaths grapefruit peel

1/2 oz honey

To build the drink, muddle the honey with 1 piece of grapefruit peel until it is highly fragrant in the bottom of a mixing tin. Pour in the other ingredients, and shake over ice for 15 seconds. Strain into a cocktail glass, and garnish with grapefruit oil.

I can’t help my love for bitter drinks, so this wildly inverted Salty Chihuahua, Grapefruit Margarita, or whatever else you want to call a tequila and grapefruit drink, might be my favorite.

Cocktails implemented and documented by Kevin Clark and Johanna Bobrow

twenty-four magazine • page twenty-four magazine • page

Back in April of this year, a�er Republican politicians tried to reignite the supposed con�ict between working women and stay-at-home mothers, Dahlia Lithwick and Jan Rodak wrote a piece for Slate entitled “�e Faux Mommy Wars.”1 As a graduate of an all-women’s college and a staunch believer in the power of sisterhood, I was predisposed to agree with all of the authors’ arguments. But one sentence hit me unexpectedly hard: “For starters, ask yourself why we talk about Amer-ican men using the language of ‘freedom’ and women in the language of ‘choice?’”

It had never occurred to me that the dis-tinction was so sharp. I realized, though, that women are taught to frame all aspects of our lives in terms of choices. Will you be sexu-ally active and a slut, or celibate and a good girl? Will you be happily self-sacri�cing, or a bitch? Will you choose career, or family? Marriage, or a life of loneliness? Mother-hood, or freedom? It is generally assumed that men will design their lives however they wish, whereas women are perpetually caught between a rock and a hard place.

No matter how many women we know who have children and successful careers, or who enjoy being single, or who proudly take ownership of their sexuality, these dichoto-mies remain with us. And every decision we make can take on added weight, because we feel it will de�ne the rest of our lives. If I take a break from my job now, I may not

ever be able to come back. If I sleep with one more person, I may be permanently branded a “slut.” If I don’t marry whomever is avail-able right now, I may never have children. It’s an insidious way of thinking, and I hadn’t realized just how much it had penetrated my proudly feminist brain.

When my current relationship started to become serious, it was the �rst time in my adult life that I felt pulled away from the re-hearsal room just as strongly as I felt pulled towards it. I was shocked. Did that mean I didn’t want my career in theater as much as I’d always thought I did? Was I giving up on my work? I didn’t know what I would do with my life, if that were the case. And more im-portantly, I didn’t know who I would be. For years, my �rst two self-identi�ers had been “feminist” and “director.” I couldn’t fathom either of those changing.

In fact, neither of them has changed. I’m still working on balancing a personal and professional life, but that’s not a hard-ship—far from it! It’s just a new thing for me. What surprises me, looking back, is how quickly I assumed I was facing a choice. My �rst impulse was that I would have to decide between these wonderful parts of my life, rather than being able to integrate them and allow them to inform one another.

- ROSE GINSBERG

1 twentyfourmagazine.com/issue-two

POLITICS

ChoicesYesterday in Ohio, a Romney campaign

bus drove around honking outside of an event where Obama was delivering a major speech. And today, a reporter for the Daily Caller (a Tory paper) interrupted Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden – twice. Obama was talking about enacting, by executive order, a scaled-down version of the DREAM Act that mirrors almost exactly what the GOP says it wants to do to appeal (read: suck up) to Latino voters.

�ese childish antics are great examples of Josh Marshall’s “Bitch Slap Politics” (his term, not ours). It’s becoming increasingly clear that thuggish behavior in the media is going to be a hallmark of the GOP side throughout the election. Just how much can they disre-spect the President in public?

It’s not about policy, and it’s not about strength and weakness; it’s about perceived strength and weakness. Obama doesn’t do righteous anger that well, so they might be hoping he actually goes Hulk on someone, but they’re probably hoping he just stands there and takes it and looks weak and that that strategy is enough to win an election.

�ey certainly can’t win on policy.

How do we set up Obama to win this image �ght without pushing our democracy into pure thuggery escalation?

Hard. Fucking. Job.

- KEVIN CLARK

GOP Strategy: Let’s Be Rude


INTERVIEWCindy Au, Community Manager for Kickstarter, interview with Kevin Clark

Kevin Clark: �anks for making the time for doing this.

Cindy Au: No problem.

KC: First I wanted to ask you if you could tell us a little bit about how you came to Kickstarter and what your role there grew into.

CA: Sure. So, I started at Kickstarter a little over two years ago. And I was one of their early community team members. Back then, there were just three or four of us, I think, when I �rst started. We were kind of just handling everything that connected to com-munity. �at was answering support tickets and talking to people over email, looking at all the projects coming in, and trying to basi-cally help people as much as we could.

And then, of course, in those two years, our site has grown a little bit. [LAUGHTER] So, we’ve expanded quite a bit, and I’m now the director of community and helping manage the team that handles all our support and all the other many things that we do.

KC: �at’s sort of a job that doesn’t exist outside of the tech world. My day job is at an arts nonpro�t, and it’s becoming more and more important to us to understand what it is to manage a community. Can you talk a little bit about what that actually means?

CA: Yeah, like you said, it’s kind of a strange new world. Our community exists on so many levels. We have users of Kickstarter, but within that we have the people who are actually creating the projects; we have all the people who are backing projects; and then we have people who are just observing and fascinated by what’s been happening on Kick-starter. And I think of everyone, in that sense, as a part of our community.

So, to keep on top of all of that, much of it

is talking to people as much as possible, whether it’s in person at events or whether it’s online or over email. I try to make myself as available as possible, and I think that’s really important any time you have an online community. Especially with Kick-starter, because so much of what we do ends up a�ecting people in real life in really meaning-ful ways. So, making sure that people know who we are and that they can always come to us with a question about what they’re working on, and knowing that we’re always going to be incredibly sup-portive of that, is really important.

KC: Do you wind up mixing technological, quantitative tools with the qualitative tools, for instance talking to people, to get a feel for what they’re doing?

CA: I don’t do much of that. [LAUGHS] We actually just started doing a little more research with data. And that’s been part of a bigger initiative that we’re thinking about in this next year, to really look at some of the numbers. We’ve done a couple of big data posts, kind of connecting people with some of what we’ve seen about how people are using Kickstarter.

I think everyone’s interested in seeing how di�erent communities are using Kickstarter and how much traction is being built within each of those communities.

KC: I dearly love your data posts. �at’s the mode gi�. �at’s the mean gi�. �is is how these structures work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve drawn this curve: you get a peak at the beginning, and then a trough, and then a peak at the end.

CA: Yeah, yeah. And I think those things are really important for people to see, because one of the common things that I o�en have to help people with during a project campaign is they send me an email saying, “Oh my God, no one pledged today. What do I do?” [LAUGHS] And it’s completely understand-

able. When you’re running a Kickstarter campaign, every single day is so important. And those new backer emails are just a ray of light every single day. So, if one day goes

by where there isn’t one, it’s completely natural to freak out about it. But,

when you look at that U-shaped funding curve, you know that things naturally slow down in the middle, and then they pick up again.

KC: Yeah. It’s really fascinat-ing, seeing how using Kickstarter

teaches people who don’t have much of a business background everything you need to know about running a small busi-ness in a completely hands-on way in a month.

CA: Yeah. �at’s an interesting comment, because we’re a site for creative projects and for arts. And this idea of, “Oh, you’re running a business” has always been kind of strange to us, because we’re like, “Oh, that isn’t what we really expected.”

But I can see the analogy and I can see how those skills, like being able to talk about what you’re making or what you’re creating, and being able to manage all of the things that go around that, those are kind of important life skills, in addition to being important skills to run a Kickstarter project.

KC: I also wanted to ask you how the com-munity has changed and grown from the early days, when there were enough people that you could just call them all up on the phone, to today when there are enough people that you actually have to analyze it with aggregate data.

CA: �ere are just so many more people than there were before. And the really exciting thing that I’ve seen is people within each of their own creative communities have really done a lot of amazing things on their own to build up a knowledge base about Kickstarter.

So, if you’re someone in music, and you want to run a Kickstarter project, you can just go

And then, of course, in

those two years, our site has

grown a little bit.


to Twitter and say, “Hey, guys, what do you think? Should I try this? What’s the best way to go about this?” And you’ll see that tons of people reply. A lot of people have had expo-sure to projects now, either because they’re run one or they’ve backed one. And they have really great feedback for people. And I see this happening more and more. And it’s fan-tastic, because people are smart. �ey know what works. �ey know what doesn’t. Backers especially are very, very observant. And they give really great advice.

So, more and more, we’re actually seeing the community participate in the actual creation of a Kickstarter project, even before it’s ever been launched. We’ve seen this with games, especially, because the game community has this very intense forum culture. So game developers say, “I’m going to ask everyone before I even put this thing together. What rewards should I o�er? How much should I price them at? What do you guys want?” And I think that development is really fantastic.

KC: It’s been really interesting to watch the change of content coming from Kickstarter. Early on it was a mix that was mostly how-to posts, training people about this new thing. And now it mostly highlights the awesome stu� that’s on the site.

CA: Yeah. I’m glad you pointed that out. For that �rst year a�er I started, any time I men-tioned Kickstarter, people said, “What is that? [LAUGHS] And how do you do it?” And now, I feel like we’re past the point of having to explain to everyone what Kickstarter is. We get to just spend most of our time highlight-ing amazing projects.

KC: How does the �lter work, going from your knowledge of the community and your contact with the community, back into the technical side? How does your work impact the user interaction design and develop-ment of features?

CA: Right now, Kickstarter is, I think, just under 40 people. We’re still at a nice size where almost any conversation relating to a

product or a feature can very easily be com-municated to a developer who would possibly end up building it. And that �ow of informa-tion is important.

I’m not a developer, but I de�nitely hear what people are thinking about. I see how they react to things on Kickstarter. And we spend a lot of time listening and making sure that, when we see something bubble up repeatedly, that gets prioritized and moved to the top of the list for what we want to do.

KC: Next, I want to talk about broader issues, because we’re getting used to think-ing about the new creative economy wiping away the old creative economy. Now we can do whatever we want. And I’m wondering what you think are the limits of that. Where do you see the barriers on the road in front of us?

CA: Right. �at’s a really big question. I think every creative avenue has its own speci�c types of barriers. Depending on the type of industry that you’re in, you’re going to run into di�erent kinds. And I like the sentiment out there that eve-rything is changing and we can do whatever we want. But I also think that in reality there are still in-stitutions and rules and barriers and things that get in the way.

What I think is important about something like Kick-starter is that this is a way of starting to investigate an alternative. It doesn’t mean that we have to think of Kickstarter as a re-placement for anything. It’s more about o�er-ing everyone more choice and letting people decide, “Do I want to try it this the traditional way, because that’s how I’ve always done it and it’s always worked for me? Or do I want to try it this other way, because I’m interested in seeing what the community thinks and working with people from the very begin-ning?”

And I think you can �ip back and forth between those, or you can combine them. I think having more of those options out there is good and healthy for the creative economy.

People always say, “Oh, what if someone super famous uses Kickstarter?” And, from our perspective, that’s not really that impor-tant. It doesn’t really matter how—you know, if a million people know who you are but don’t really care about what you do, it really doesn’t matter. And ultimately, it is about: how much does the audience care about the thing that you’re actually making? And that’s proven true for every Kickstarter project.

KC: We’re talking to the “Indie Game: �e Movie” people in about 20 minutes.

CA: �at’s awesome. I love Lisanne [Pajot] and James [Swirsky]. �ey’re fantastic people. I actually met them very early on in my life at Kickstarter. And I remember thinking, you know, when you encounter someone through a project for the �rst time—or at least for me, I get a little starstruck. [LAUGHTER] I think

to myself, “Wow, these are literally the coolest people in the world.” And

I’ll meet them in real life and always be just so amazed when they’re nice and humble and just very real people.

Creators like Lisanne and James are a perfect reminder

of why Kickstarter exists. �ese are two people who had a movie

that they wanted to make their own way, and there’s no way that they could have done it without the help and support of the �lm community and the game community. And seeing them kind of go through this very long process that was not, by any means the easiest, and then �nd so much success, has been hugely rewarding for everyone involved and all the backers. I feel ridiculously proud of them.

KC: I’m actually ashamed to say I haven’t seen the movie yet. My own gaming is mostly held back by the fact that I have

For that �rst year after

I started, any time I mentioned

Kickstarter, people said, “What is that?

And how do you do it?”


INTERVIEWtendinitis in my wrists. Holding a control-ler is possibly the worst thing I can do, apart from playing the piano.

CA: Yeah. Yeah. So, you’re a pianist?

KC: I’m a composer, actually.

CA: � at’s cool. A long time ago, I wanted to be a music composition person. [LAUGHS] � is is, like, right when I graduated from high school, and I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, because I’m 16.” And I really wanted to compose music. But it turns out I wasn’t very good at it, so. [LAUGHS] But, actually, our support manager is a com-poser. Our community team is a hodgepodge of musicians and � lmmakers and writers. It’s fun.

KC: Yeah. � ere is one other question I wanted to talk about. One of the things that I think a lot of people wonder about Kick-starter is that it can be seen as privileging the privileged. If you have those connec-tions already, it makes it a lot easier to � nd what looks like success, even if your parents would have given you the money anyway. How does that come into your daily life?

CA: I’ve seen people say things like that, where they look at a successful project and they’ll say, “Hey, that’s not fair. � at person already has this many Twitter followers or this many Facebook fans,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the reality of it is nobody thinks about their friends and family and people that they know in the world as social capital.

A project is really just about rallying the people who care about you and care about what you’re doing into one place. � e suc-cessful projects that we see happen every day are because of the fact that people running these projects do have these networks, and they don’t have to be huge. It’s not about gi-gantic Twitter followings.

It’s about being someone who has friends and family and people that care.

When you go and put the e� ort into making a project that resonates with other people,

that ends up being the most important thing. A lot of people actually end up developing larger followings because of the project. It really is not about fame, and it’s not even that the most gregarious person out there gets the most backers and pledges. � at’s de� nitely not true. We’ve got lots of people who are camera-shy and maybe not the best at being out in public, but the very act of just putting it out there is really great at inspiring people to take action and do something about it.

KC: Kickstarter is a place where you can raise money by talking to people. But also, it’s a great place to talk to people by asking for money.

CA: Right. And not even just asking for money, but just asking for support and en-couragement, right?

I’m a huge fan of the $1 pledge. [LAUGHS] I don’t know if everyone else is. Part of this is very practical, because I back hundreds of projects. And, if I backed them all for $10-15, I’d quickly burn through my paychecks.

But to me, the $1 pledge is like reaching out and high-� ving someone, just saying, “I don’t know who you are, but you are doing some-thing cool, and you seem like a cool person.” And o� entimes that’s where I start. And, by the end of the project, I’m so in love that I have to bump up, you know?

It’s this relationship that you form over this project. And yeah, you’re right; it becomes this vehicle for conversation and for meeting people. And it’s much more than fundraising.

KC: Okay. So, I guess we should probably let you get back to your life.

CA: All right. Okay. � anks a lot.

KC: � ank you very, very, very much.

Meta

The great limit on any writing is the fact that you’re asked to write what you know. But if you’re a writer, even if in a previous life you were a fi sherman, a riverboat captain, or an emperor, what you know the most is writing. So you end up writing about writing. And the only people who want to read about writing are writers. So writers write about writing for writers who ask other writers how to become a writer and who, for some reason, are unsatisfi ed with the answer, “you write.”

You write, and you write, and you write, because every writer has one hundred thousand bad words in them, and, apparently, for me, thirty percent of my bad words are “write,” “writer,” and “writing.” Writing, in the end, is about the writer, no matter how hard he or she tries to make it about anything else. Sure, great writing is about people, but it’s always people as seen through the eyes of the writer, who only has two eyes. At most. I can’t think of any one-eyed writers off the top of my head, and polling the room for a cyclopean author only got me penis jokes.

So writers can create all of the com-pelling characters, driving plots, and complicated worlds that they want, but still it will be a world seen only through their eyes, and in the end, no matter what they’re writing about, they’re really writing about the art of telling the story they are telling, a snake eating its own tail, forever.

Fortunately, it’s a fucking awesome snake.

- Ste en paDniCK


INTERACTIVE GAMESFor FigmentNYC (an annual interactive

arts festival that takes place on Governors Island) I designed Tapestry, a commu-nity story sharing game. I’ve been designing games for nearly three years now as Casework Productions. What I like to explore with my games are liminal spaces; environments that allow players to experience things that would be di�cult to access outside of the environment of the game. My games focus on community, interaction, and personal experi-ences.

�e way that I start making a game is by looking at what I want the player experience to be. In the case of Tapestry, what I was looking at was the ideas of gratitude and con-nection. �e game is still in the research and development stage, and I expect it to continue to morph and change as I run it in di�erent contexts with di�erent people, but what I see as the core mechanics have remained un-changed since I �rst started designing it.

You ask a person for a story. You listen to and then thank them for their story. You condense their story into some creative and

restrictive format- a comic strip, a haiku, a graph, a picture. �en you post the story art somewhere communal.

As simple as that premise sounds, it creates a space for people to quickly and easily share important stories and build connections that typically you would not be able to form with strangers in a park.

�e things I am most proud of about Tapes-try are two-fold- the fact that players have to listen carefully and attentively to one another and then that they have to actively digest and process that information in order to create a small, precise piece of art.

I chose these proscribed forms on purpose. It was important to me to have Tapestry be as accessible and welcoming as possible. If something is technically tricky, but still ac-complishable, there seems to be a li�ing of judgment. �e limited structure of Haiku means that �tting a long story into 17 syl-lables is a feat in of itself, so who cares how much sense it makes? �ere is clarity and a �owering of creativity in brevity and the need to be concise.

�e number of rules and the small space in which you can use them means that you have to consider carefully and �gure out what the important part is. What was the underlying story?

And here’s the really cool part: that means that you are connecting. You, the player col-lecting the story and you, the player sharing the story. You’re actually connecting. And then, THEN, there is evidence of your con-nection.

My games are lo-� and pervasive. �ey happen in tangible spaces with tangible things- 4 kilometers of plastic wrap, 13,000 stickers, or 25lbs of paper. I make games like this because I like playing them. Because as a group of players you end up making art. When the games are site speci�c it means that you then always encounter that space in a di�erent way—that tree isn’t just a tree, it was where you and 500 other people created a new piece of art.

- CaSey miDDaugH


INTERVIEW p J

S B i

Danskin Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky of Blink-Works have become well-known in the inde-pendent gaming scene, which is interesting because they’re �lmmakers. A�er doing a for-hire short on indie developer Alec Holowka for New Media Manitoba, they ran a Kick-starter pitching a feature documentary about independent game developers. Two years and an atypical development cycle later, Indie Game: �e Movie has been released, and to fairly broad acclaim; Roger Ebert, who stirred up the community by claiming games could never be art, called the movie “fascinating” (on Facebook).

I �rst met James and Lisanne at PAX East in Boston in 2011, where they were �lming one of the �lm’s subjects—I’ve been told I may be in the background in one of the shots, but a�er 3 viewings I still cannot verify this. When the �lm toured the country in 2012, I met them again at a bar in Cambridge follow-ing the show, and was �abbergasted that they remembered who I was. For this interview, we talked about the unique production of the �lm, which was not made the way �lms are usually made. We don’t discuss the �lm’s contents much, so I don’t mind telling you: I’m a fan. �e �lm was released digitally on June 12th, 3 days before this interview.

IAN DANSKIN: Your �lm, Indie Game: �e Movie, just released, but not in the traditional sense of released. Most movies release in the theaters, but your release was a�er the theater.

JAMES SWIRSKY: Yeah, yeah. We did a screening tour that lasted about—what was it?—four or �ve weeks, something like that. And then we actually opened in New York and L.A., San Francisco, and a few other cities, and did a run for about three or four

weeks.

LISANNE PAJOT: And then we jumped right into digital.

JS: Yes.

LP: Usually �lms would probably run in theaters a bit longer, and they may not do digital until later. But we just really felt like we needed to get the �lm out there. �ere’re just so many people that supported Indie Game: �e Movie. We felt it was important to share it with everybody as fast as we could. We were able to get the �lm out from pre-miering at Sundance in less than six months, which is, I think, pretty cool, because not a lot of �lms are able to do that. So, we’ve been running on the treadmill, and now it’s �nally out. [LAUGHTER]

ID: [LAUGHTER] It just launched this week, right?

JS: Yeah, yeah. Tuesday.

ID: How is it selling so far?

JS: You know, pretty good. People seem to be reacting to it in ways that, you know, we dream about. We’re super happy with it.

LP: We tried to think about the way that we like to consume media online. And as soon as I hear about a �lm or a book or a game, I want to be able to �nd it and buy it really quickly. I don’t want to wait. And so, we launched the �lm on iTunes, which is really, really cool, to be on iTunes. It’s like being in theaters, because it’s, you know, the big platform for �lms. We launched on Steam, and Steam is one of the biggest gaming platforms in the world—we’re the �rst feature �lm to be on there, which I think is pretty interesting. And then we also made the �lm available on our website, and in multiple di�erent languages. And you can download it, you can stream it, and it’s all DRM-free. So, if you want to put it on a thumb drive and play it on your televi-sion, you can.

We just tried to make it as easy as possible. It was kind of hard to get this all set up for the same day, getting all these moving parts together. And it seems that people appreci-ate it, and that’s so good to hear, because it wasn’t easy, and not a lot of people have done this sort of release before. And it’s just good to hear that people like the movie, which is awesome, but they also are excited by the dif-ferent ways that we make it available.

ID: Well, not a lot of people funded their movie the way you did, either. Is that correct?

JS: Yeah, we were kind of born on Kickstarter, like back in the day, actually, before Kick-starter was really Kickstarter.

LP: Old-school Kickstarter.

JS: Yeah, pre-Tim Schafer.*

ID: Before it was cool.

JS: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. We used Kickstarter [in the original sense] of the word, where we did our �rst campaign with the goal of $15,000, which is not a lot of money to make a movie. It’s a lot of money, to be sure, but it’s not a lot of money to make a movie over the next two years. And so we used it as seed money to help get the ball rolling.

And then we ended up having a second Kickstarter a little later on that also did very, very well. We asked for $35,000 for post-production costs. And we kind of structured it as a preorder system. And I think, because of that, and because [we now had] the trailer, we got our goal in, like, 25 hours, and then it kind of kept on going. It was $51,000 by the time we were done.

[We also relied on] a lot of our own personal funds. We had a declining bank account that got to anemic levels.

ID: And you also did presales, right?

JS: Yeah.

LP: Yeah. Yeah. Because some people missed


the Kickstarter or they didn’t want to go through Amazon payments. So we ended up putting preorders on the site. Seriously, that kind of support throughout—cash �ow is a bit of a problem when you are making a �lm, especially [since the money] we raised from Kickstarter is only about 40 percent of what we spent.

So, having the sort of trickle of people that are interested and purchased it propelled us forward. And we learned [about preorders] through independent games like Cortex Command and Overgrowth**. We tried to put out as much content as we could as we were shooting. We’d go back to the hotel and think, “Okay, this will be in the �lm, but this won’t be in the �lm. Let’s cut something really quickly and put it up online, so that we can share something.” And that ended up being about 80 minutes’ worth of content through-out the �lm.

ID: So was there any worry that using this presale method meant that, once the movie was released, most of the people who wanted to see it would have already paid for it? �at there just wouldn’t be that much le� that you were going to generate?

LP: Yeah! [LAUGHTER] Yeah, we weren’t sure if the people that preordered were, you know, all the people that would ever be inter-ested in the �lm or not. But, at the same time, it’s kind of empowering to know that you have all these people that are willing to pay for your �lm and support you, even though it’s not out. �at gave us some con�dence. We wouldn’t have made the project had we not had that support. We probably would made up excuses to ourselves, like, “Oh, it’s prob-ably not a good idea,” or, “Oh, you know, we can’t take time away from our regular work to do it.” But [that support] propelled us forward.

JS: Yeah, even more so than the money. �e fact that people were giving us dollars for

something that didn’t even exist yet, based on the promise of something, gave us this wonderful con�dence that, yes, there’s a movie here; yes, there’s a product here. But you do have a little worry that, oh my gosh, do we already have our core base and it won’t expand beyond that on launch day?

But then the opposite thinking of that is you have this core base. And, if you make the movie that they really like, they’ve already proven they’re passionate about it. �en they’ll share it. Or they’re just a subset of a larger audi-ence—hopefully, anyway, because not many people preorder things. Like, that is common and is getting more common, but not many people plunk down money to see a movie two years in advance. [LAUGHTER] You know, that’s a special type of person. And you’ve got to think, if those special types of people exist in those numbers, then there are people like them that just don’t hit that preorder thresh-old. So, we were kind of hoping on that. And, yeah, it’s working out.

ID: It sounds like the wager paid o�, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Between the cheapening of the technology and both the new distribu-tion and funding models, could you have made this movie this way even, like, �ve years ago?

LP: [PAUSE] No.

JS: I don’t think so.

ID: Short answer: no.

LP: [LAUGHTER] No, again, we’re just really fortunate that our skill set got good enough at this time. We’d been making �lms and videos and working in television for 10 years, but we’d worked [our skills] to a point that we could do it. And the fact that the technol-ogy—HD-DSLRs and the sort of image that

they can create—were available.

JS: It’s a weird perfect storm of empowering technology. Like, at every stage of preproduc-tion, production, postproduction, we seemed to be making this movie at a time where real important things were happening. You got crowdsourcing; you have this really empow-ering, a�ordable technology; and then the distribution channels are opening up in ways that they weren’t available �ve years ago.

It’s just really an exciting time to be a creator. Whether it be �lmmaking

or game-making or, you know, music. We’re watching the rules be rewritten right now. And then they’re being written on top of that. It’s changing so

fast. It’s going to be scary to see where we are in another two,

three years. Like, Kickstarter is just a strange, weird juggernaut that just keeps

on evolving and getting bigger, and it’s going to change, and other things are going to come and compete with it, or augment it, or what-ever.

And yeah, I’m really excited to see what we can do with project number two, because we’ve learned a lot on this, using a lot of inter-esting tools and techniques. And I would love to take what we learned and apply it to new stu� or perfect it—well, you can never perfect it, but to, yeah, just kind of build on it.

ID: It’s curious. Not too many people—or, probably, for �lm, almost no one—had done exactly what you did. And I’m wondering how much the novelty aided you, or if the fact that it’s been done once is just going to draw more attention to the next one.

LP: �e �rst Kickstarter that we did, there was a lot of novelty to it. You know, we got in the local paper. Now, if someone did a Kickstarter, no one would be like, “Oh, great.” But, two years ago, people were like, “Whoa,

“I don’t think there’s an artist

or creator out there that creates without

constraints.”

—Lisanne Pajot

this is crazy. We’re going to put you in the local paper.” I think our parents clipped that. [LAUGHTER] �ey did. And that’s a big achievement. And we laugh about it, but it was at the time. It was a big achievement.

So, I think things will change a bit. But I think the idea of being an artist and creating what you want, but also keeping in mind your au-dience and welcoming them into the process, I think, is something that will grow, whether the technology changes or not.

ID: So, funding it this way, and shooting it the way you did, you’ve been in control of the �lm pretty much for its entire lifecycle.

JS: Mm-hmm.

LP: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

JS: It’s great. It’s a blessing and a curse.

LP: It’s like a baby.

JS: Yeah.

LP: It’s like it’s always there.

ID: It is exactly like a baby.

LP: You can’t go to sleep. You have to keep at it. You know, when it’s rendering, you’ve got to make sure it doesn’t screw up. You’ve got to read all the support emails and make sure—like, it doesn’t end. You’re raising this thing up, and now it’s all out there. And it’s gone to school. And it’s like, “Ah, I don’t want anyone to insult it,” or—

JS: Or be mean to it.

LP: Or kick it in the playground. You just want it to be safe. You want it to be this beau-tiful thing that you made.

ID: Were there any things that you couldn’t do because of the way you were doing it? I know you mentioned you didn’t get to go to Europe…

JS: Yeah. I think our budget probably dictated our focus a little bit. But I’m not too sure that’s

a bad thing. Actually, it probably honed our focus, having that constraint there. We kind of always knew that we wanted to make a movie in a more modest way, just because that’s the way we operate, really. We’re com-fortable working as a two-person team. We’re a small crew.

And [bringing on extra crewmembers] kind of scares me thinking about it. If we did have another two, three people on set when doing interviews, what that would have felt like? Because we get very honest reactions and very intimate moments with these guys. And, had

the crew been bigger, I think it could have de�nitely been di�erent.

But, yeah, in terms of things that we had to say no to, we did toy with going to Europe. And it was one of those things

where we looked at the budget and—

LP: And we also looked at our time.

JS: And our time, yeah, timeline.

LP: And we were worried [about incorporat-ing] all this stu� into a �lm that we felt was already starting to grow. It was de�nitely an economic choice, but it was also a storytelling choice. And yeah, I don’t think that there’s any artist or creator out there that creates without constraints. I think there’s always something, whether it’s arti�cial or whether it’s real. In our case, it was a real constraint. [LAUGH-TER] And I think it helps you create.

JS: Yeah. I think one of the strange things about being crowdfunded, versus having a more traditional model, is that it creates this expectation, like this built-in expectation, of an audience. It actually keeps you on the ball and makes you want to get this thing out there as quickly as possible, because you have X number of people who have already given you money, and they’re real people, and you have a dialogue with them, and you’re talking

with them. And, if you don’t do it, they’ll be disappointed. And we value that. �at’s some-thing that’s really important to us.

Had we had a more traditional funding thing, where deadlines and schedules weren’t as audience-crucial, this movie may have been coming out a little bit later. We may have waited until the end of 2012 or 2013. But we’ve had that dialogue with them for now two years—and two years on the internet is a long time, so it’s weird. No one pays attention to anything on the internet for two years. But that’s crazy, actually.

LP: Yeah.

JS: Can you name one thing that you’ve been watching over the internet for two years? Even my sites change over two years. So there’s this kind of pressure, but it’s also an incentive. And sometimes it can be bad; sometimes it can be good. But it de�nitely helped get the movie done quicker. And I think, for this movie, in this case, it was a good thing.

ID: I assume you’re probably going to use a similar model for your next project, what-ever it ends up being.

JS: Yeah. I like the independence a lot. I like being in control of the project and having a direct line to the audience, because that makes you engage with the �lm so much more. Like, this �lm is important to us in such a way, because it takes over your life. And, when you’re funding and making a �lm this way, it has to take over your life. Like, there’s no way around it. And, if we went through a more traditional route, I don’t know if we’d be as invested. Well, I’m sure we’d be invested and put all our heart and soul into it, but it would be a little bit di�erent. Yeah, it would be—I don’t know.

Yeah, so, you got me. Long story short, de�-nitely, I think it’s a smart move all around to kind of engage the audience early and o�en, and try and have as much control throughout


INTERVIEW

“It’s just really an exciting time to be a creator.”

—James Swirsky

the entire process as possible, because we went into the whole distribution thing think-ing that we know how to sell this movie, or we know what this movie is and where the audience is for it. And we think we know how to do it best or how to give it the best chance that we possibly can.

LP: I think the one thing that we learned is we did take on a lot. We’re two people, and not only did we shoot, edit, direct, produce, but we also are distributing and [doing eve-rything] from scanning people at the door on a tour that we set up ourselves to replying to support emails to the website.

JS: Shipping t-shirts. [LAUGHTER]

LP: Shipping t-shirts. I just think we bit o� a little bit more than we could chew. And I think, [LAUGHTER] yeah, in the next project, we’ll have more people involved and we’ll know where we need people earlier on, as opposed to, last-minute, being like, “Dammit, how am I supposed to ship all these t-shirts, answer these emails, and do an interview at the same time?” You know?

ID: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.

LP: I think that is the lesson. We want the control, but I think we just need a few more people to help us.

JS: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Yeah.

You can learn more about James’ and Lisanne’s �lm at indiegamethemovie.com

*Game developer Tim Schafer broke all Kick-starter records when his $400,000 Kickstarter made $3.3 million. Several multi-million dollar game projects have been Kickstarted since.

**Indie games that sell alphaware, or early, playable builds of un�nished games that are regularly updated for customers.



ARTIST PROFILE: I keep trying to ask John Reid about his

work. His process, how he got into balloon art, what he likes about it. And he does

answer those questions, but what really gets him talking is his family: his Granny and his eight year-old goddaughter.

John is currently building a dress in the back room of the apartment we are all busily working away in. �e squeak and squack of the balloons twisting together forming this dress is loud enough that when he answers my questions, he has to pause working so that I can hear him. �e dress is blue and cur-rently the bust is �ying up into the air like an enthusiastic fountain.

I’ve been thinking and writing today about how I think that art should be made with the medium that best expresses what the artist is trying to express, and that we should stay away from novelty for the sake of novelty. But balloons are found a carnivals and children’s birthday parties. �ey are novelty. �ey are balloons.

I ask John about that. He �gures they’re art because balloon sculptures sure aren’t a science, and eventually he lets it slip that he won the 2010 balloon twisting champion-ship, “Twist-n-Shout,” held in Chicago for balloon twisters from around the US and the world every year. But his goddaughter keeps peppering his conversation and so does his Granny. Choice Granny quotes include, “Whatever you do, just be the best at it.” He �gures she didn’t quite mean, “Be a balloon artist and a magician,” but I think she might have.

She lives in Jersey and he sees her every couple of months. She told him, growing up, “�e beauty is in the details,” and that’s what he focuses on in his sculptures. �e details are the fun part; “they’re what changes a blob into a face.” He shows me pictures of a 14’ tall sculpture of Voltron, Defender of the Universe. Loved by Good, feared by Evil. He shows me pictures of his life-sized Delorean sculpture. He tells me about how he started making balloon dresses (most recently worn by Amanda Palmer at her Kickstarter celebra-tion party in June.)

When John’s goddaughter was small, maybe 5 years old, she tripped and scraped her face up. She was bawling, talking about how she would never be pretty. John needed to �nd some way to make her feel special and good again. He built her a dress in her favorite colors and le� it standing on her bed. �e family was at a magic convention in the Rocky Mountains and when she put on the dress she was transformed, prancing around the hotel and stopping tra�c as people asked to take pictures with her. She’d totally forgot-ten about her face.

�at’s the thing about John’s work: he’s not creating a dress or a sculpture that will last. �e medium of balloons necessarily means that what he builds will be ephemeral. �e air will leave and the structure will de�ate. What John makes is a moment that you won’t be able to create again.

Seems like art to me.- CASEY MIDDAUGH


john reid


Artist Profile:elizAbeth cherry

Elizabeth Cherry’s hats are charming. Her designs for Lizzie Anne Millinery straddle historical patterns, bridal wear, and burlesque. (She says she realized one day that pasties are just little hats, and now makes matching sets to go with her cocktail hats.)

She’s lovely, by the way. We met her last week at the Figment NYC interac-tive arts festival on Governor’s Island where I was premiering my story shar-ing game, Tapestry. She had a garden of crocheted flowers made out of yarn she’d spun from discarded plastic shopping bags. They were bewitching and actually gorgeous: this little plot of quiet, ecological peace in the midst of a counter cultural festival of neon body paint and human-sized gerbil wheels.

She looked up when I walked by and said hello. We were both happy to meet other friendly artists on the island, and when it turned out that the ferry back to Manhattan would take another hour, she stayed with the crew for Tapestry and found herself invited both to lunch and to twenty-four magazine for a photo shoot.

Elizabeth arrives at twenty-four magazine at mid-morning. We decide to shoot at Greenwood Cemetery and it is swelteringly hot. We are playing with the contrast between Johanna’s blue hair adorned with a lurching skeleton hat and Tania’s wild curls topped by a bridal fascinator. Elizabeth is wearing a light cloche hat that perfectly fits her. I mean that in the sense that she looks right wearing this delight of a hat, com-plete with lace trim and small yellow roses. She’s sunny in the best possible way.

I ask her whether she considers herself an artist or a craftsman. She kindly puts me in my place and says that she prefers the term ‘artisan.’ It makes sense: these hats take skill and (in the case of handling steaming hot felt) courage. She likes her hats to grow organically from the materials she is using to trim them. I learn that you need to be careful not to over-handle the decoration, lest it end up looking studied and over designed. That’s not what she’s going for with her hats.

We talk about the “breathless mo-ment at the beginning of terror” that exists at the beginning of a new project, the certainty that you can in fact do this, though you’re not 100% certain quite how yet.

She recently made a reproduction for the understudy of a traveling show. The lead’s hat had been made in Canada and Elizabeth was not certain she’d be able to appropriately match the original trimmings used. So she made them herself. This extensive hand work was laborious, but she enjoyed the puzzle of figuring out how to reproduce some-thing already in existence. The lack of creative wiggle room reminds her of logic puzzles from her childhood.

In the end the hat she make for the understudy looks better than the original.

- casey middaugh- johanna bobrow

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The staff of twenty-four magazine has an almost absurdly diverse creative background. We are sci-entists, poets, illustrators, composers, musicians, edi-tors, game designers, actors, sex educators, balloon art-ists, video editors, and more. It just keeps going. Given this plethora of creative endeavors it seemed like an excellent opportunity to ex-ploit each other’s talents and make something together.

Hence, The Transmedia Chain. The concept is sim-ple—starting with a short phrase from Kevin ‘s Tem-pest piece, each contributor made a piece of art based on the piece before, changing art forms each time.

Kevin’s sheet music led to Johanna’s picture of her violin. That photograph then inspired Jack’s short story. The story was passed on to Steven, who wrote a poem. Pablo took that poem and made a drawing. The draw-ing was displayed on my computer while John made a balloon sculpture. Tania examined the sculpture and wrote a multiple choice question. Kevin came back and wrote a violin piece that then was torn to pieces and used in Meg’s cocktail.

There. The Transmedia Chain. Wending its way through our art forms.

Your turn.


TRANSMEDIA CHAIN

He rolled his eyes.A blue violin?Really?His own instrument was, of course,

a Guarneri. Well, not his, actually, but a loan from an institution. Still, he’d been selected to play the instrument and it was an honor as prestigious as it was distin-guished. Dragging his bow across the �ne strings he reached out through the ages and took his place among artists of a more re�ned time.

As each of them prepared backstage he tried not to look at her at all. A nose ring? Purple hair? Her style of dress was less foreign than it was alien, and he tried hide his disdain.

And what would she play? A selection of Enya-inspired pablum? Perhaps vari-ations on her favorite video game theme song? He chuckled at the thought.

As if reading his mind she turned with a look in her eye that made him almost drop the bow he was rubbing down with rosin.

“You’re attempting the Ysaÿe? Bold,” she said in so� but con�dent voice.

“Oh, yes, it can be challenging, I suppose,” he said, hardly looking at her.

“Yes, people have said the same thing about my solo. �ough not everyone is familiar with Zoe Keating” she replied nonchalantly.

He allowed an eyebrow to raise, but only for a moment. He looked down at her violin again and sighed.

“It has integrated pickups that are sent to my laptop. I can amplify the sound, modulate it, add a thousand di�erent e�ects,” she said, a bit giddy as she pol-ished the electric blue.

“I’m sure it’s all very exciting,” he said in a bored monotone.

She sighed this time and put her instru-ment back in her case.

“�e number and variety of the things for which we are di�erent ends of the spectrum are, I’m sure, staggering, but shall we attempt to to be civil on stage?” she said with the con�dence of those sure of their skill.

He smiled in an exaggeratedly false apology.

During her performance, which was directly before his, he nearly tripped as he moved to a better place to stand behind the curtain. �e sounds, strange, per-plexing, complex, made the remarkably complicated piece even more interesting. In a few minutes he was faced with not just a piece of music, but a philosophi-cally sound argument about some of the pillars of his life. He was angry, moved, teary-eyed, and by the end even slightly aroused.

She passed him as she exited the stage to waves of applause and gave him a tight smile.

He then looked down and realized he would have to follow a performance he couldn’t even fully comprehend.

Later, as champagne glasses clinked and tuxedoed patrons mingled, he searched for her. Purple hair was oc-casionally visible in the crowd. When he �nally found her at the bar, he listened to her playfully instruct the bartender on the proper way to make a Perfect Manhattan.

She saw him out of the corner of her eye and she seemed to try and hide the fact that her eyes were rolling.

He gave her tight smile and said, “Truly, a thought provoking interpretation.”

She bowed her head and raised her glass to him.

He walked away, watching the setting sun dip into a violin-blue sea and breath-ing in the cool air, deeply, mourning lost chances and the stability of his own con-victions.

Blue waves crash fold envelope me grab me take me

Take me away far away deep deep into the sea

Where mermaids sing and play and laugh and laugh

At me. At me as I drown in beauty I cannot cannot under-stand I can barely see

For a moment, a glorious moment, I am li�ed I am free I am in the air and I am breathing

But ICannot feel. I can breath and see clearly on this rock shelf but I feel nothing, nothing but cold

Nothing but the chill of the wind and the icy �oor and below me the waves crash

�ey look warm and the women with their full lips and dark eyes wave to me

And when they laugh they sound like gulls screaming for �sh

And so I Hang, here, between drowning in beauty and living in numb solitude

It is death, inevitably, but at least I can choose

I choose...

die blaue Geige


TRANSMEDIA CHAIN

An angel is a

a. stone dome inhabitant, dwelling in numbers

b. delicate and �axen-haired, �uttering girl

c. power source, radiating in on you from all sides1

d. giver, a charitable savior

e. pudgy and harp-bearing child

f. All of the above.

1 Be not afraid.


TRANSMEDIA CHAIN

2 oz Hudson Bay bourbon

1/2 oz Frangelico

3/4 oz someone else’s coffee

Rinse of Cabo Wabo Reposado tequila (only a few drops needed)

To build the drink, rinse a cocktail glass with the tequila (pull a Julia Child here, and drink the dregs of the tequila while you mix your drink).

In a mixing glass, combine the bour-bon, Frangelico, and coffee. Fill the glass with ice and stir for 30 seconds. Strain into the cocktail glass and gar-nish with a shred of someone else’s torn-up manuscript.

This one should taste sort of like any morning after: a bit smoky, a bit sweet, and more than a little bitter.


SCIENCEThe Final Limit is You

It is strange, sobering, maddening, amaz-ing, and ultimately inconsequential to think that I will never be a string theorist. I have no particular drive to be a string theorist, and no guilt about being a non-string-the-orist. But during most of a person’s youth they are aware that life is long and there is still time. Want to be a clown? You can still be a clown. Wake up one morning needing to be a novelist? You can start today. But at the age of not-quite-thirty, the very �rst possibilities are closing off. The number of years it takes to be a string theorist probably exceeds the number of good, math-y years I have left.

Beyond the 6-odd years of college and grad school I haven’t taken, there are all of the remedial classes I’d have to take for the math I’ve forgotten. I haven’t done trig since freshman year of high school. Call it 8 years, then, and that’s just to get to quan-tum. (This is all presupposing, by the way, that my brain can even get back into the swing of things after so long away from any formal scienti�c training.) And then once I hit quantum, there’s however many years to get to string theory itself. It’s safe to say I’d be well into my forties, perhaps my �fties, before I could claim to be a string theorist.

I think we know that’s not going to hap-pen. And it’s curious to know that the very �rst doors are closing.

What’s also curious is to realize just how elite the premier science-geniuses are. Edward Witten, the theoretician behind the prevailing version of superstring theory, is, if Time is to be believed, “generally consid-ered the greatest theoretical physicist in the world.”1

Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about string theory. I can’t talk about string theory; I don’t understand a word of it. After seeing the Nova special on string theory in my college math class (this was “math for artists”), I talked to a friend about it, one who used to be an engineering student. He said, “Yeah, I tried to read a book on string theory. I couldn’t understand any of it.”

If you saw the same Nova special, you may remember how all the underlying phys-ics were explained with cute analogies, i.e.

“imagine a parent and child playing catch, but every time they throw the ball, they move closer together; that’s how a graviton works.” Did you notice the way that once they started talking about string theory it-self—and Witten’s M-theory in particular—they stopped explaining their analogies?

We’re talking about math so many orders up that it may be impossible to put into lay-man’s terms.

M-theory, allegedly, proposed a way that the 5 competing string theories could, in fact, all be correct at the same time. I am taking Witten’s word on this. But that’s the question: how many people have to take him at his word? It takes 20 or more years of concentrated study to even begin tangle with his theories. I can’t imagine how few people can even claim to fully understand M-theory.

If he’s the world’s greatest theoretical physicist, who’s quali�ed to peer-review him?

And that’s the thing; that’s looking at the potential limit of what a human can come to know in a single lifetime. That’s the idea that’s fascinating, and perplexing, and yet has negligible effect on one’s life, which makes it doubly-fascinating and doubly-perplexing. Journalists like to talk about Witten like he’s one of those once-in-a-century geniuses, like Newton and Einstein. Maybe that’s hyperbole, but geniuses of that type do pop up, and they’re usually dead by the time the next one comes along. During their lifetime, perhaps that’s it; that’s as far as people go in that direction. Until the next one comes along, you have to wonder if there’s any further we can go.

So as not to �aunt some glaring igno-rance, I’ll stress that I am quite sure many people understand M-theory, at least as well as theories of this kind can be understood. And perhaps someday, if they work out all the iffy bits and string theory still holds up, it will be ungodly simple. Teachable, even. It took a genius like Newton (or Leibniz if you prefer) to invent calculus, but now that the legwork is done it can be understood by teenagers. (Or, certain teenagers, anyway. I got a C in Calc.)

But somehow I doubt that M-theory is going in that direction. twenty-four team-mate Johanna, a Real And Actual Scientist, explained science education to me like this: Your �rst year in college physics, they

tell you all the science you learned in high school was lies and here’s the real truth. Then your second year, they explain that everything in your �rst year was lies, over-simpli�cations, and here’s the real truth. And then your third year comes around and... et cetera.

It’s always more complicated. Each pro-gressive level is both more accurate and more abstract. In many �elds, you never hit The Truth, and a good science education won’t pretend that anyone knows The Truth. We have only better and better guesses. If your interest in gravity is only in the way objects of certain mass move in relation to each other, you are interested in knowable, teachable facts. If you want to get into the movements of gravitons, the why of gravity, forget about it. No one knows. But they can show you the prevailing theories. Dedicate 30 years of study to it and maybe you’ll push the theories forward a tiny bit, and if you’re lucky you’ll die before you’re disproven.

But the really crazy idea is that sooner or later we’re going to hit the edge, and it’s not going to be answers; it’s going to be the hard limit, either of the brain’s processing power or the length of human life. The idea that we’ll �nd things our brains are simply unable to decode, or that require more years of study than a human lives.

I wouldn’t say that this is certainly true, and you’d never know if you’d hit that point or if you’re just waiting for the next revolu-tion. A limit’s only a limit until someone breaks it, like calculus, or the 4-minute mile. And it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever run out of things to ponder. If M-theory were the end of physics (hint: it’s not), there’s still biology. It’s not so much the idea that the hard limit of what humans can know is al-most here, or that we’ll see it in our lifetime. Simply consider the idea that it may exist at all, and at any given time, and you don’t know how far away it is.

- IAN DANSKIN

1 twentyfourmagazine.com/issue-two


INTERVIEWFor issue one of twenty-four magazine, Rose Ginsberg interviewed Sarah Bisman, a producer of the 24 Hour Plays. The creation of Issue 2 overlapped with a production of the 24 Hour Plays in L.A., so Rose and Sarah decided to stay in contact throughout the process and compare notes.~11:00 AM MsEnScene PM to TheSarahBiz

Hi! Checking in: I just wrote about working on a magazine while not being a writer. Hope production things are good!

~12:00 pm TheSarahBiz PM to MsEnScene

We’re in the middle of our walk through at Santa Monica’s Broad Stage. This is opp for theater, producers, bene�ciary, sponsors, PR [...] to all touch base about the �ow of events and any last minute concerns.

12:02 PM TheSarahBiz

Good morning-noon to my friends at #24mag, who are a couple of hours into their own day of 24-related-activity.

12:04 PM TheSarahBiz

Follow #24mag at @24magazine. You can’t take me anywhere. I forget all the important user handles. Moar coffee.

12:08 PM MsEnScene

Thanks for the #24mag shout-out, @TheSarahBiz! We’re also keeping an eye on @24HourPlays and #24HRLA over here. Break all the legs!

~1:00 PM TheSarahBiz PM to MsEnScene

OOh. I like this! We �nished our walkthru, re-located the nearest Staples, and are about to have lunch and make a supply run.


Our talent is starting to get excited too. Our show Twitter account is starting to get a bit of activity.

~3:00 PM MsEnScene PM to TheSarahBiz

Nice! I’ve been across Brooklyn, rehearsing a monologue from The Tempest set for acting marimbist. Heading back to write about it now.


Of�cially, now we’re off for lunch, supplies, and Other Mysterious Production Activities.

5:18 PM MsEnScene PM to TheSarahBiz

Yay, mysterious production activities! It is now 5:18pm and I have transcribed my �rst interview of the issue. There will be more.


Woo. I’m enjoying my 2.5 hours of personal

time. Hanging out w our lighting designer Zach. He took me to most amazing music shop.


I bought a wee les Paul epiphone uke. Grabbing lunch soon. Then a nap!!!

5:27 PM MsEnScene

@TheSarahBiz That is AWESOME. If you were here, there could be duets! (We have a ukelele onsite, of course.)

5:28 PM TheSarahBiz

@MsEnScene next issue!

7:58 PM MsEnScene PM to TheSarahBiz

7:58pm - Have written the rough draft of an article and am out for a walk before dinner and more transcribing. Hope you’re napping well!


Aside from our little music break I ran a couple of errands and gave some team members a ride to Kinkos. NOW I’m going to rest. 1 hr.


Then up for 12-13 more. Red Bull & Coffee will see me through.

~9:00 PM MsEnScene PM to TheSarahBiz

Ah yes, caffeine. How we love you. I’ve had two ice coffees today and may switch to soda of some kind for overnight. Gotta switch it up.


As soon as this production meeting is over we are setting up the writers room. Talent and creative start rolling in at 9-9:30.


What’s the editing process like for you now that you’re starting that?

~1:00 AM MsEnScene PM to TheSarahBiz

Sorry I disappeared there! I’m working on recording mini-interviews with all of the collaborators.


Editing: we give Sara a piece. She edits, gives back with notes. We add notes, she or someone else edits a 2nd time, gives back again.


Then, if no more changes to make, it goes to Jack for layout!

1:35 AM TheSarahBiz

A t-Rex mask, a 4-wheeled dolly, a dead

friends jacket and a plea to kiss a best friend. #24HRLA #meetandgreet

2:00 AM TheSarahBiz

Scrubs, a femur, a singing pickle and lots of sports equipment. The possibilities are endless. #meetandgreet #24HRLA

2:29 AM MsEnScene PM to TheSarahBiz

2:29am - Finished everything but my mini-interviews. I have conducted them all & am transcribing now. Loved your meet-and-greet tweets!

~4:00 AM TheSarahBiz PM to MsEnScene

Aw, thanks!!! It’s just me and one assistant with the writers. I’ll feel better when they’re fed. :D

4:19 AM TheSarahBiz PM to MsEnScene

I’m on my 2nd can of red bull. It’s 1:20 in the morning, so guess what time my body thinks it is. >:-O Yup. Ordered food. Writers writing.


It’s 5:00 AM, and I am putting our Twitter conversations together into a feature for the magazine. I may include this message. META!


SO META, ZOMG. I am overtweeting to the universe right now. I just shared my ex’s friend’s amazing spotify playlist with Teh Internets.


In 25 minutes I make writers give me a �rst draft of stuff.


Roughly 12 hours after our rough drafts were due. Makes sense, given our overall schedules. Hey coordination!

6:19 AM TheSarahBiz

It’s both inspiring & lovely that our friends at #24mag are hard at work on their project at same time we are w/ #24HRLA. Kindred spirits.

6:22 AM 24Magazine

@TheSarahBiz We’re so glad to be sharing this day with you.


Limited Hearing

I don’t hear out of my right ear. It is alternately not a big deal at all, and something that governs all of my inter-actions with the world. I lost my hearing as a child due to cholesteatoma—truly disgustingly described on Wikipedia as, “a destructive and expanding growth consisting of keratinizing squamous epithelium in the middle ear and/or mastoid process.” I don’t fully under-stand what that means in medical terms, but what it means in my life is that the bones in my right ear are ceramic and I have a skin gra� for an ear drum. � is all happened when I was quite young, early in elementary school. When I became a musician a few years later, it wasn’t as though I knew what I was missing.

In music school I discovered a secret society of hard-of-hearing musicians. We found each other subtly, not wanting to announce to the world that we were missing part of what would seem to be an essential sense for musicians to have. � ere were at least a handful of us lacking directional hearing and never being quite sure if the narrow portion of the orchestra we heard was what every-one else heard or not. Was my di� culty with ear training due to a fundamental inability to di� erentiate pitches? Or would it have been a tricky subject for me even with full hearing?

At this point in my life my hearing a� ects me in three ways: I train all of my friends to walk on my le� so as not to miss out on the conversation; I stay away from loud venues and bars because I end up feeling too isolated; and I sleep on my le� because I then have built in ear plugs blocking out the hum of electronics or snoring.

- CASEY MIDDAUGH

Sleep is elusive.I’ve promised to documentour new magazine.

Lord of the art direction, we are putting green dots along the walls.

Sneakily, they blend in, obscuring where lines should be, these stealth haiku.

Twitter is full of vagaries. I just want to write meta haiku.

I tweet these from a bed that is full of pillows. It is very nice.

The time edging near. I really have no idea what is going on.

Continuing mistakes suggest that sleep is still an issue for me.

Three of us are curled like seashells in the bedroom. Someone is snoring.

Steven says my poems vary in quality. That means some are good, right?

7am and the editors are talking about our cover.

I’m astounded by the productivity ‘round me. Write more poems.

- CASEY MIDDAUGH

DOCUMENTATION HAIKU


PROSPERO Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,

And ye that on the sands with printless foot

Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do �y him

When he comes back; you demi-puppets that

By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,

Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime

Is to make midnight mushrumps, that rejoice

To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,

Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’d

�e noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,

And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault

Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder

Have I given �re and ri�ed Jove’s stout oak

With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory

Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up

�e pine and cedar: graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth

By my so potent art. But this rough magic

I here abjure, and, when I have required

Some heavenly music, which even now I do,

To work mine end upon their senses that

�is airy charm is for, I’ll break my sta�,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.

Solemn music


Making thE tEMPEStI always come out of a great rehearsal walk-

ing on air. Everything is wonderful. I take hours to come down, and the only thing I want to do is make more art and show it to the world. Today was like that.

This afternoon, I left the twenty-four mag-azine production house with Rose Ginsberg, theater director, twenty-four magazine con-tributor, and very old friend. We went to my friend Ian Rosenbaum’s apartment. Ian is an old friend from Peabody, a wonderful percus-sionist, and a not-frequent-enough collabora-tor. The three of us spent almost two hours out of our twenty-four rehearsing This Rough Magic, a setting I wrote of a key Prospero speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest for acting marimba.

We wanted to explore the limits and bound-aries between text and music in performance, and see what happens when you try to break them down. I wrote the first version of the piece during one of the 24hr concerts I used to run at Peabody, so it seemed appropriate to bring the piece into this twenty-four-hour hack-a-thon of creativity-that-goes-on-paper.

We came back with photographs, record-ings and video. So far we’ve put Ian’s best take up on Youtube with wonderful video effects added by Victoria Nece, and started a “trans-media chain” based on a few bars from the piece that ended in tearing up some other music I hastily scribbled to garnish a cocktail. It’s been a weird day.

An Actor & A DrummerIan isn’t an actor. He’s a percussionist. In

this piece he has to be both. But the tools that shape attitude and emotion in music translate very well to shaping attitude and emotion in acting. In each, you think about intention, and use different emotions for different sec-tions to help shape your performance. Even though Ian doesn’t have an acting back-ground, that musical skill transferred very quickly to his acting delivery, and his inter-pretation developed very, very quickly.

As a composer, one of the most amazing things to see was how Ian’s improved per-formance as an actor reinforced his musical decisions. He started understanding the text

through the music, and that understanding flowed back into the music and made his per-formance even better.

Ian’s voice itself was a challenge. His voice isn’t trained in the way that an actor’s or a singer’s would be. The marimba in this piece is loud and without the vocal power of a trained voice it’s practically impossible to compete. If you watch the video on YouTube you’ll hear how Ian’s words are very hard to hear even though his character is very well defined.

Most actors learn their vocal delivery at the same time as their interpretative ability, so hearing Ian interpret so well with an un-trained voice was very unusual. If Rose and I ever follow through on our plan to create a fully staged version of The Tempest out of this monologue, we’ll have to hire a vocal coach. Then again, maybe we’ll just ask Elspeth Da-vis, a wonderful mezzo-soprano who hap-pens to be Ian’s girlfriend. That could work.

RhythmI always say that there is a spectrum of

rhythm. Percussionists and dancers are the most precise; change even a little and they’ll know. I probably won’t, but they will. Then there are other instrumentalists. They have a little room to flex the beat and stretch out or press forward for dramatic effect. Then are singers, who have rhythms given to them for every note. But ask anyone who has ever played in an opera orchestra if singers can count, and you’ll see what I mean. With words and blocking and character there’s an extra dimension that can distort the written rhythm. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean accompanying a singer is a matter of listening more than it is of playing what’s in front of you.

Most flexible of all is the rhythm of spo-ken text. Actors don’t have tempo markings. Actors don’t have meter. They don’t follow conductors and they certainly don’t count themselves in with beats per minute. Spoken text needs to stretch a lot, and the actor and director need to create an interpretation that determines the rhythm of the speech.

For This Rough Magic, one of Ian’s biggest

challenges was combining his precise per-cussionist rhythm with a more free acting rhythm.

Ian has to create his own internal, invis-ible score that allows him to think about the words at the same level of rhythmic precision as he does the notes. It’s almost as if he’s ‘up-converting’ the rhythm of the words to the same high resolution as the rhythm of the percussion.

Actors need much more room to interpret than instrumentalists do. In This Rough Mag-ic, I had to give Ian a lot of detail about the notes, and very little about the words.

With His Own Bolt The real fun of rehearsing this piece is the

moments where the interpretation of the mu-sic and the words come together, like at the end of the line “And rifted Jove’s stout oak with his own bolt.”

On that word, “bolt”, Ian has to give a thundering glissando right down the instru-ment. Before he even played it the first time, he’d made an improvement. I put in a note about doing one hand on the “black notes” which are the notes that are black on a piano, and one on the “white notes”. In this case, it was just a stupid thing to try to do. It would have meant one hand dropping off in between the “black notes” and making a lot of unpleas-ant clicking sounds for no good reason. I was stupid to write it, and Ian just ignored it and played something that sounded better.

Very good musicians will do that. But even so, the first time we did it, it didn’t quite work. Ian was playi ng the glissando after the word “bolt”, which is a natural thing to do. Jazz sing-ers do it all the time – they’ll move a chord or a

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2 This Rough Magic


Making thE tEMPESt


word a little bit o� the beat to make it easier to understand what they’re saying.

�e second time, Ian added a stronger at-tack on the front of the glissando, to make it match the accent in the voice on “bolt.” But that didn’t quite work – we had too many beats: “bolt”, then accented attack, then gliss down. �e whole line was building up to this really powerful release! But there were two releases instead of one.

�e right solution was to keep the attack on the front of the glissando, but line it up exactly with the word “bolt.” So you heard one strong “bolt/accented attack” followed by the glissando down, representing the thun-derbolt itself.

Figuring this sort of thing out is why you need actors, directors and rehearsals. It’s why you throw things up on their feet. �ere are a dozen moments that got this sort of attention throughout the piece. Rose, Ian and I do love performances, and we love applause. But you can’t really make art like this unless you love working out detailed moments like this that connect words and music into one shape.

�e Physical MarimbaMarimbas are huge. Which notes you’re

playing dictate almost entirely where you’re standing, how you’re holding your arms, and what shape you’re making with your body. When composers are learning how to write for marimba we’re told to think as much about the movement of the player as we do about the notes they’re meant to be playing. �is is very good advice. O�en when I’m writing for marimba you can see me jump-ing around near my desk and waving my �sts around with two pencils sticking out of each hand. �is is a totally normal thing to do.

�is means that in a piece of just-marimba music, the musicians look like they’re danc-ing. In a Shakespeare-based theatrical piece, however, that means that almost all of Ian’s blocking was determined before the director, Rose, ever set eyes on her actor.

Rose was very concerned about this. What if the blocking she was stuck with didn’t �t the story at all? For all that we musicians

love to focus on the sound of music alone, how we’re standing and moving and showing emotion on our faces tells the audience how to feel much more than the notes do. �ere was a real danger that this piece was going to incomprehensible if Prospero had to be big when he should have been small.

When I was writing the piece, I tried to tell the story of the speech with the music. I tried to make it match. When you’re setting text to music you need to put strong syllables on strong beats, or it will sound really weird. I tried to do the same thing with the music and the motion.

As it turned out, the way that Ian had to move did �t in Rose’s mind with Prospero, and what he’s doing in this monologue. He’s saying goodbye to his magic, to his sta� and his book, and to his power. He’s choosing to give it all up and go home.

�ere are two lines that Prospero speaks a capella, “But this rough magic I here abjure” and “I’ll break my sta� ”. One of the only blocking decisions Rose was actually able to make was that on those lines, when Ian isn’t playing anything at all, he should step away from the instrument. Prospero is trying to give it up, but he has one more spell to cast, and the magic, the power, and the music are so seductive that he barely can. He’s made his decision and is saying farewell, but it’s not an easy thing to do.

Words and MusicI love the boundary between words and

music. How far can you push words before they become music? How can music take the shape and sound of words? And together, what can they accomplish? I love the pitches and rhythms of language and poetry.

�ere is rhythm and pitch in the English language. It’s not as speci�c as what you �nd in music, but iambic pentameter certainly has a rhythm. We don’t use pitch to convey meaning in English, but pitch is important. Just think of the rising in�ection at the end of a question? Without it, wouldn’t something be missing.

You could look at what I do with spoken

text and music as less than composing. Some people have seen it as merely adding sound e�ects (meant as a pejorative—don’t try say-ing that to a sound designer or a foley artist).

But that’s not what it is to me. To me it’s matching an actor’s pitches and rhythms with those of music as closely as I can, using what I know about the text from my own reading. To me, it’s taking two meaningful strands of pitch and rhythm and creating something new. It’s counterpoint.

- KEVIN CLARK


Making thE tEMPESt

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©2006


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4 This Rough Magic


EPHEMERAI’ve known the occupants of this space for a while.

One for a year or two, the other twice as long. � ey are, in their own ways, makers. Person-

ally, I’ve never been a maker. I’m a writer and I’m a designer, but these are intangible cra� s.

� ey are builders of things, shapers of matter. Making things both intrigues and confuses me. � eir hands know how move in ways mine don’t seem to.

As well, they are collectors. Masses of stu� , tiny and large, � ll their space. Jewelry and tools, carv-ings and antiques, cra� s and projects. I’ve con-spired to reduce the things in my life to my phone, my computer, my clothes, and my relatively small number of essential toys.

� ey have boxes of paraphernalia, memorabilia, tables covered in of all manner of tchotchkes, and shelves upon shelves of books which, like many of their collections, bring me pangs of guilt. I’ve gone to great lengths to remove ephemera from my life. I’ve digitized things; � rst my music, then my movies, and � nally my books, but I still love the feel of spines and edges, and all of those tactile reminders of a past full of material items.

Is it strange to walk through their home and steal images of their relics and curios, ignorant of the little stories such things carry, and sigh as if passing by lost loves? I’ve chosen speci� c limits for my life. It helps me let go of the past, which can so o� en anchor itself to objects. I’ve decided to travel light and focus on creating stories. At some point I chose words over books and although it’s hard not to look back, it’s lovely that I have friends who let me trace their spines and � nger their pages when I need to.- worDS & pHotoS By JaCK Stratton


CONTRIBUTORSIan Danskin @InnuendoStudiosAnimate. Make games. Edit sounds. Edit video. Draw. Write. Shoot video. Sleep. Someday, somehow: sleep.

Sara Eileen Hames @SaraEileenSara Eileen Hames tells stories, or-ganizes people, and creates strange publishing ventures.

Jack Stratton @writingdirtyJack Stratton is a writer, graphic designer, fop, rake, rapscallion, dandy, and all around fancy pants lucubrator.

Kevin Clark @kevinefclarkI write music, I write about writing music, and I talk about Kickstarter a lot.

Pablo Defendini @pablodProducer; designer; printmaker; ebookmaker; science-� ction and tech geek; ronin; robot in disguise; sometimes nsfw.

Steven Padnick @padnickSteven Padnick is a freelance writer and editor. By day. You can � nd his work and funny pictures at http://padnick.tumblr.com.

Casey Middaugh @casitareinaCasey is a game and experience designer. Her work focuses on com-munity, interaction, and personal experiences.

Victoria Nece @fakegreendress Victoria makes animation, motion graphics, and astounds the whole staff with 3d photography.

Johanna Bobrow @silverandindigoJohanna is a scientist, musician and photographer. She has spent the past 24 hours obsessed with color and light.

Rose Ginsberg @MsEnSceneRose loves to tell stories. Usually she uses scripts and actors, but in a pinch she’ll sing you a song or write you an article.

Tania Asnes @taniaasnesExplored the resonance of her newly opened acting instrument in creat-ing collaborative print media, and defeated evildoers.

Elizabeth Boskey @melebethElizabeth is the foreign correspond-ent for #24mag #2 because the al-ternative was hiding in the closet...

The Morning After

It’s a beautiful sunny morning. A cool breeze blows in and birds call to each other in bright notes. I have been awake for twenty-four hours now, and I have been working on this magazine for almost twenty-one. Most of the maga-zine has been written and designed, and most of us are still at work, but not all. About a third of the contributors are passed out around the apartment, and there’s a peaceful calm coming in with the new day.

It’s quite a contrast to twelve hours ago, when none of the magazine was written, and half of the magazine was left unplanned. That was probably the worst moment, when it all looked undo-able, when the word counts were low. But those that had done this before seemed unconcerned, so I went along.

Now, frankly, it seems so easy. I am in that weird liminal state where my body just assumes that if it’s dawn and I’m awake, I must have slept the night before. It won’t last—it never does—but in this moment it seems like really anything is possible. We’ve made something beautiful. We did it by working together, by learning from and inspiring and challenging one another.

This is what happens when you push yourself to your limits, when you ex-haust all of your resources in a quest to do something great, but also to exhaust yourself. It’s easier to remove all of the junk from your mind, from your soul, and from your self-perception until all that remains is the true self, the es-sential you. I feel something quietly transcendent.

But there are still nagging doubts. By de� nition, I’m still writing this piece, and our designers are still putting the magazine together, if at a subdued rate. I am con� dent. I am hopeful.

I am fucking tired.

- Ste en paDniCK

Thank You

twenty-four magazine issue two

Documents

Transcript of twenty-four magazine issue two