Lucy Boynton as Andrea Howe in Apostle (Dir. Gareth Evans)

There’ve been a few responses to/reblogs with tags on my post about DIY clothing embellishments that basically boil down to ‘I’d love to do this but I’m scared it’ll turn out bad/I’m not a good enough artist’. And I get it, I really do! I also want my art things to turn out nicely. But also...making it badly is sort of the point of punk DIY. 

Listen. We live in a world that would dearly love to charge you a subscription fee for breathing. The bastards are doing everything they possibly can to figure out how to turn art - stories, visual art, music, textile/fibre art, sculpture, crafts and creations of every kind - into a neat, discrete, packageable commodity, a product they can chop up into little pieces and stick behind a paywall so they can charge you for every drop of it you want to have in your life. 

The whole sneering idea that ‘everybody wants to be some kind of creator now’ and anything less than absolute mastery right out the gate is somehow shameful and embarrassing is a tool those bastards are using. It’s a way to reinforce the idea that only a set group of people can create and control art, and everybody else has to buy it. 

But art isn’t a product. Art is a fundamental human impulse. Nobody is entitled to a specific piece of art (which is where this message gets skewed into pitting people who love art against the artists who make it, while the bastards screw us all and run away with the money). But making art belongs to everybody. We make up songs and dances and stories, and paint things, and make clothes, and embellish them, and carve flowers into our furniture and our lintels and our doorframes, and make windows out of tiny pieces of coloured glass, and decorate our homes and our bodies and our lives with things we make and make up, simply for the love of beauty and of the act of creation. Grave goods from tens of thousands of years ago show that ancient hominids gave their dead wreaths of ceramic flowers, tattooed their bodies, beaded their shoes. Making things for the sake of beauty and enjoyment is one of the most ancient and human things we can do. 

The idea that we can’t, that we have to buy shit instead, because art is a product and you have to have the bestest prettiest most perfect product, is the enemy of joy. It’s the death of culture. And it means that, instead of whatever it is that you cherish and enjoy and value, you get whatever inoffensive (and to whom is it inoffensive?) bland meaningless samey-samey crap that the bastards want you to be allowed to have. What are you missing and what are you missing out on, if you don’t make or modify or decorate anything for yourself, if you don’t think you can because the product at the end won’t be polished or perfect or marketable enough? What do you lose? What do we lose? 

It is a desperately vital and necessary thing for you to make shit. For you to know that you can make shit, that you don’t have to just lie back and take whatever pablum the bastards want to force-feed you (and charge you through the nose for). That the bastards need you more than you need them. 

Become ungovernable. Be your own weirdly-endearing punk little freak. Paint on a t-shirt. Sing off-key in the shower or at karaoke night or at open mic night. Make up a story where you get to meet your favourite fictional character and you guys hug or fuck or punch each other in the face. Make art. Do it badly. Do it frequently. Do it enthusiastically. Do it for love and joy and creativity and fun and the spiteful joy of thumbing your nose at some smug motherfucker with a Swiss bank account who wants to track your heartbeat and location for the rest of your life in order to automatically pump AI-generated beats matched to your mood into your earbuds for a small monthly subscription fee of $24.99/month. It is literally the only way we are ever going to have even a chance to save art and our own lives from the bastards. 

So. Paint that t-shirt. 

(Also support artists where you can, and buy your music from Bandcamp.)

Charles's football warm-up is like watching ballet:

German Grand Prix Qualifying Day | 21 July 2018

📸 Manuel Goria

Bonus:

📸 Jerry Andre

Taylor trying to figure out how to combine ttpd foreshadowing vibes with “I’m in killalove” vibes for Sydney night 1 surprise song o’clock

pentiment + the evolution of andreas’s mind palace

Mirandy still going strong after 18 years <3

on earth we’re briefly gorgeous, ocean vyoung / we are okay, nina lacour / @fairycosmos / how this ends, andrea gibson / the zahir, paulo coelho / alex hirsch

Rip most frenemies from F1 you would have loved the Andrea-Emily relationship from The Devil wears Prada

I need to watch s2 of twd again just for Daryl's sudden character development. Dude started being nice and everybody simultaneously went

Peak tv

love as a religion

terrifying and joyous

richard siken ("litany in which certain things are crossed out") / aurora ("exist for love") /andrea zanatelli ("and binding with briars, my joys and desires") / before sunrise (1995) / sufjan stevens ("the greatest gift") / @tallahasseemp3

PENTIMENT (2022) Andreas Maler petting animals in Tassing and Kiersau Abbey

A ruling order that destroys the foundations of life deserves no loyalty from its subjects.

Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

a few fav excerpts of andrea talking about oscar and how mclaren is supporting him from this this speedcafe interview 🧡

We were optimistic, we certainly wanted, very strongly, that Oscar could race for McLaren in his first season in Formula One. But what he was able to deliver on-track—and to some extent, off-track!—was beyond expectation.

He supports the capability to utilize the talent that he has available by just being a very cool guy. You know, like, very calm, very controlled. He keeps himself in the most productive status.

We need to make sure that we keep this quality [Oscar's ability to reject unnecessary noise in his brain] on his side, supporting his development.

+ mark's commentary, per adam cooper (see also: "it's important to be wanted" / "it was extremely nice to be wanted, and a massive factor in why i decided to go to mclaren"):

Taylor yelling “WHAT THE FUCK” on that would’ve been touchdown should’ve been a pass interference call is so me

@joseartcenteno asked: Hey Buttercup, big fan of your TGAMM artwork, and i have a question… Have you been thinking of doing Molly and Andrea together as besties?

yesss I love these two, I'm so glad to see them being friends now!