love in the time of ctrl+alt+del

CROWS NESTCrows Nest Zine One

Love In The T ime Of c t r l + a l t + d e l e t e

Contents

three | Editors’ notefour | Love in the time of Ctrl+Alt+Deletefive | Follower, I married him seven | Sketchbookeight | The things you do to fall in loveten | Photographseleven | In June it would be bright by nowtwelve | One For Sorrowfourteen | Distance fifteen | Remember | When she told me she was happysixteen | In clutch | Photographsseventeen | When Spring is in the air | Resting place eighteen | Post-coital tristessetwenty | Sketchbooktwentyone | Hertwentytwo | Eternal sunshine of the spotless mindtwentyfour | Behind closed doorstwentysix | Mating habits | All my life I have longed

March 3

W hen we started talking about our first edition of Crows Nest, every walk down the aisle ended in coming face to face with glassy-eyed animals, clutching stuffed red hearts to their stuffed honeypot bellies. Every trip to buy

milk became a stickily sentimental, candyfloss Clinton cards mo-ment. Love was all around us. But with every shop surface decked in exhausted messages of romance, instead of feeling the warm Richard Curtis glow, we began to question what love really means in the modern world. When we only send cards on Valentines Day, but regularly swipe right, do the clichés of the past still stand? Love in the Time of Cholera saw love letters exchanged for half a century. Is it too cynical to think that Generation Y, in the time of control and delete, expect a reply in half a second? What do we talk about when we talk about love?

In this first issue we want to explore these questions. Love poems have transformed as many times as The Kiss; since photography began we’ve been pointing the lens at lovers. From modern mar-riage to toilet cubicles, this edition peels back the kitsch wrapping to peer at the state of love in the digital age. What is love? Crows Nest doesn’t know, but we offer you these fragments.

the editors

Follower, I married him.

union to the next, than ever before, the idea of marriage is still the over-whelming narrative for our under-standings of love and commitment. Even more so than thirty years ago, when many of the status-quo bashing students of the 80s declined to walk up the aisle, the blushing bride is holding sway over the collective psyche. ‘Wed-ding inspo’ rivals ‘fitness inspo’ for newsfeed clogging dominance; Gypsy Weddings rules the television sched-ules; Kimye’s four-day-photoshopped wedding shoot reigns over Instagram. Kate Middleton.

Why, in the days when divorce rates in the UK edge towards half of all mar-riages, are our pop culture queens slightly skewed Disney princesses? Why did Kim and Kanye’s kiss in front of ivory flowers garner 2.4 million likes? Why did Beyoncé call her most recent tour Mrs Carter? Why did ru-mours of trouble in the Carter world cause gossip columns tidal waves of concern? Perhaps most importantly, why do prominent women reliably get interrogated over when they will get hitched, as if the information was some kind of state secret?

Maybe its because, at whatever lev-el, most of us love what weddings are supposedly all about. We like parties and gossip and a bit of glitz, all of which weddings supply. The clothes,

L ittle girls are known to dress up in their mother’s shoes, smear make-up on their faces in comic, clownish imitations

of everyday feminine facial masks, and play make believe marriage. The cut-ie-pie image of an angel-faced child in mock up wedding veil is almost as fa-miliar as tiny toes inside stilettos. But am I being old fashioned? Sure, Kind-er eggs may now be divided into pink and blue (pony and racing car innards respectively) but haven’t we moved on from boys and stick-swords and five year old girls with full wedding day plans? Isn’t the whole idea of fairy-tale marriage a bit old hat?

In most of the Western world, ar-ranged marriages, or relationships forged for familial economic or social advantage, have been rejected. The secular, democratic age is the also the age of romantic love, of unions based on pure passion and feeling. Yet, despite strict marriage rules being abandoned, and having more freedom to co-habit, divorce, or flit from one

March 5

the décor, the embarrassing speeches and dancing, the idea of a happy ending. It is not that surprising that photos of Kate Moss, or Angelina Jolie, or Amal Alamuddin, which routinely sell for thousands, are worth ten-fold to magazine editors when they are decked out in designer wedding garb. And yet. The dominance of wedding and marriage narratives in our culture does not seem to be just a frothy smile at pretty people in pretty clothes. For it is not just the big day that preoccupies us, but also the run-up and the aftermath. It is not just the blushing bride, but also the fiancé and the spouse that fill column inches. Benedict Cumberbatch’s announced nup-tials, Brangelina working together, Johnny Depp and George Clooney finally heading to the altar,

Gwyneth and Chris consciously uncou-pling, Jennifer Aniston as either spurned and jealous ex-lover or des-perate wannabe bride. While it is overwhelm-ingly focused on the female camp, this ob-session is not entirely gender specified, and ‘obsession’ is accurate.

From childhood, certainly through adolescence, we are fed with the idea of love. Adulthood and con-tented happiness have become synonymous with coupledom. The ‘singleton’ may be portrayed as the wild and free one of the friendship group, the one unhampered by couples bickering, cheating and commitment fears, the one able to go out all hours and regale others with one-night stand stories. Yet, there lurks under these notions the prevailing idea of ‘searching’. There is the assumption that, unless you’ve ‘levelled up’ and coupled up, you are firmly in the dating game. All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely Players, or something.

The modern age of casual flings and no-strings attachments, of Tinder and Grindr and mass online dating, hasn’t made marriage or monog-amy things of the fairytale or fifties-housewife past, because we are still gorging ourselves on these narratives. We want it all - the fun and the freedom, and the promise of a soulmate Prince Charming or Cinderella at the eventual stroke of midnight. We want infinite choice from an eter-nity of options, only a mouse-click away, while also being assured that we are one-of-a-kind. One-of-a-kind that is conveniently also some-one’s ‘other half’. Why can’t we be ‘complete’ until paired up?

Loneliness is scary. The prospect of ‘being left on the shelf’ is not a nice one. But that is partly because we have constructed singledom, or se-rial dating, or polygamy, as social oddities. We have made our own bogeyman fears, by casting such an all-encompassing angelic glow on mari-tal ‘bliss’. It is a conservative and restrictive sto-ry we are telling ourselves, imagining it’s escap-ism. We have more options than ever before; the world is getting smaller by the day. Rather than attempting to fit ourselves into wedding-gift boxes, maybe we should be questioning why the gift-wrap still holds so much allure. Maybe it’s time to blow the bloody doors off.

“There is the assumption that, unless you’ve ‘levelled up’ and coupled up, you are firmly in the dating game”

WORDS: Eloise HendyILLUSTRATIONS: Figgy GuyverARTWORK: Rowan Stevens

6 Crows Nest

March 7

8 Crows Nest

M usical phrases, particular patterns of notes, are sometimes like sentences. Think of Jimi Hendrix, particularly that solo in ‘Voodoo Child’ - it’s become

a bit of a platitude to say that Hendrix’s guitar ‘speaks’. There’s a bit in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being that sticks in my mind for mentioning this idea. Tomas and Tereza are brought together by a musical phrase taken from the last movement of Beethoven’s last quartet (bear with me). The dominant motifs in the work are based around the two phrases ‘Muss es sein?’ (Must it be?) and ‘Es muss sein!’ (It must be!). The phrases are ‘spoken’ first by the violins, and then recur and are echoed by other instruments throughout the piece. When I first came across this idea in Kundera’s novel, and then listened to the quartet, I remember wonder-ing, even as a violinist myself, how the pattern of notes could signify those particular words. If

you listen to it, knowing the verbal phrase that stands behind the musical phrase, it all makes much more sense.

This is something that happens all the time in contemporary music, albeit in quite a differ-ent way. Instrumentals are sampled, extracted from their original source and transplanted into new and unfamiliar surroundings. At some point, vocals are added, and inevitably lyrics. The instrumental sample abruptly becomes as-sociated with a set of words, a linguistic phrase.

Gap Magione’s ‘Diana in the Autumn Wind’ might sound familiar to anyone who has ‘who-sampled.com’ in their internet history, but probably won’t to anyone else. But 37 seconds

the things you do to fall in love

March 9

in to the track, you find the famous ‘fall in love’ sample, a little musical phrase that has been used first by Slum Village, then Madlib, Chance the Rapper, Flying Lotus, BadBadNotGood, just to name a few. The musical phrase first acquired the words that have now become synonymous with the musical pro-gression back in 2000 thanks to Slum Village. Once you’ve heard their version, it becomes almost impossible to dissociate the musical phrase with the linguistic one; ‘the things you do to fall in love’ becomes part of the progression of notes. If you go back to Gap Magione’s instru-mental original after listening to all the sampled versions, it is irreversibly changed.

Love moves in mysterious ways. Slum Village, and all the artists who have since sampled ‘fall in love’, have recreated the listening experience

of Gap Magione’s original. Like rewriting a little moment in music history from the present day, there’s a sort of retrospective rearrangement of the past going on here. Sampling puts various musical genres into dialogue. Cut, spliced and reassembled, you might find a pastiche of jazz, funk, disco even ‘elevator music’, all in one track that is classified by Spotify as ‘hip hop’. No one genre is left untouched in the process.

In 1991 the bass line of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ found an unexpected home. Bor-rowing one of the most famous riffs of all time, the hip hop group from Queens, A Tribe Called Quest, sampled the bass line in their single ‘Can I Kick It?’, which fast become one of the most famous tracks in hip hop history. Hearing Lou Reed’s song now is quite a different experience. As the bass plays its opening riff, you wait, ex-pecting a particular drum beat that never arrives.

the things you do to fall in love

“There’s a sort of retrospective rearrangement

of the past going on here”

WORDS: Figgy GuvyerPHOTOS: Nolwenn Davies

“Writers are liars” – Erasmus Fry, in conversation, 6 May 1986.

I would suffer the lacerations of these sunsets,Endure the magma pupil’s ethereal torch,Corrosion of the whirlwind sea-wind’s lash;The well-wrought fences’ tangled knot of rootsRipped from the jealous, grasping soilTo leave me suture-less and splitFor this view – this hand – this kiss:For an ounce of pain as beautiful as this.

But enough of that.It’s dark. You’re asleep.The air is warm with whispers,The night is sweet,And here I lie:Unable to find a single honest word.

In June It Would Be Bright By Now

WORDS: Colm GleesonPHOTOS: Nolwenn Davies

March 11

One for s o r r o w

12 Crows Nest

ARTWORK: Eleanor Ann WardMarch 13

Sleepless until waking to heaven faced morningsLimbs entangled in ideal knotsLong dreamed of nights breaking onto daytime dreamsNectar nothings sugar coat famished daysSweet heart fluttersKaleidoscope hues erase ashen afternoonsElectrocutions banish faded greysSupine spine tingles Usher in the comic reliefTo mundane prosaic book endsThe pavement cracked in-betweensThe go-between between usThe mediating skiesOver irregular decline and riseTouchdown lows and take off highsIncessant to and froI capture you in photographsFlat frames to act as cagesDim reflections of vivid traces Memento tokens waiting To be made shadows by your face

Breath caught in chests buried overseasReaching out to empty pointsArms breadth stretched to breaking pointOnly pointing to pointed placesSmooth out these stabbing vacanciesFill the indented hollowThe ghost memory of your shapeI press my nose against black mirror panesChilled eskimo kissCheek to almost cheekSkin away from skinFingertips graze past placesSaved like scrapbook bruisesI try to remember how your hand feels in mineHands unfoldedUnfulfilled until intertwinedPulled to pieces by heart stringsWrapped around fingers farawaySleepless until seen again

WORDS: Eloise Hendy

Distance

14 Crows Nest

When she told me she was happy, I stopped -Raised a hand to cover my face with a feigned cough -Thought: ‘Does she not know that happiness is where we are not?

that we have tottered, razor-walking, and fallen into a lukewarm bath?

that love means variously:Birthday head, half-price (Saint) Valentine’s chocolate, a gilded dream on movie screens, always thinking of themwhen you masturbate, joined-at-the-waist financial parnership, and sterile cups of tea?

the Second Comingan old, exhausted favourite joke,

the Apocalypse a daydreamed headline:BOY SLAYS ZOMBIE ROYAL FAMILY WITH 12-GAUGE SHOTGUN!TRAPPED IN A NUCLEAR BUNKER WITH BARBRA STREISAND!

that death is coming and you might just thank it?i tried to smile and hid under the blanket.

rememberhow your grandfather liftedyou, child,and how his young eyesbeckoned to miraclesfor it was a promisefulworld, hup-chaup and aroundhow flyingly he wouldpilot you, safelyswooping arms’ orbitsoh when I am kingdilly dilly a royalcarriage you sparklingdew shall be green life ahead

WORDS: Fred SpoliarILLUSTRATION: Figgy Guyver

March 15

Your eyelids restagainst each other,skin barelyfilming the curve.Your lips part –a glacial shiftof slackening jawand tilting chin.Your breathis delicate and intricateas cobwebs, gentlepiston of your soulthat pulses, pulls,drawing the air closerlike a blanketover our shoulders.I listen to youas we moveand youriselikesteam.

WORDS: Colm GleesonPHOTOS: Nolwenn Davies

In Clutch

16 Crows Nest

Resting Place

March 17WORDS & ARTWORK: Eloise Hendy

can i curl up under your collar bonein that hollow placejust beneath the ink of your tattoocan i crawl into your nooks and be cradledheld tight in the crook of your heartit is cold out herethe air scrapes, sliceswhistles through skincan i just rest my head for a whilein between your angel wingsthey could be bladesif you turned me the sharp sidebut keep them briefly bluntedlet me sleeplet me lay my body down

on your armi am weary of travellingthe road is not smooth, i am sorecan i wrap myself round the nape of your neckput my crown up close to yourscan i cling on to you until daybreakthe darkness reaches out to my corecan i hold on to your littlest fingermake your hairline my ceiling and footprintmy floorcan i hang on your lipscan i unlock your handslet me need youlet me stay here til dawn

18 Crows Nest

Post-Coital Tristesse

PHOTOS: Nikoletta Majewska

March 19

Nikkoletta??

20 Crows NestARTWORK: Rowan Stevens

who can’t, adding ‘personal’ touches for people he will never meet. This pastel ver-sion of LA is clearly a deeply sentimental so-ciety, which eagerly outsources love.

Twombly is a thoroughly postmodern ur-ban man. Post-divorce, living alone in one of the city’s many sleek, minimal apartments, in one of many high rise buildings, he checks his emails on his commute from work and plays video games late at night. The person-al touches he adds for others do not seem to have been extended to himself: his flat is as sterile as an Ikea showroom.

Jonze and Pheonix have created a perfect portrayal of contemporary loneliness. In an overpopulated city, Twombly is isolated. All our fears about conversations becom-ing mere connections, our lives increasingly becoming a breathing hybrid of Facebook and LinkedIn, with our experiences filtered through blue-light screens, are condensed in Twombly’s solitary existence. Perhaps

the most surpris-ing thing about the central rela-tionship between Twombly and his husky-voiced personal com-puter system, Sa-mantha, is that it never strikes as too far-fetched. This is Siri a few

upgrades down the line, a Turing tested dis-embodied entity that reads emails, reminds of appointments and also has the capacity to think independently. For Theodore, Saman-tha is an ideal blend of secretary, friend, lover and therapist; she fills all the gaps his self-contained life has left gaping. They speak through an almost hidden earpiece – on the beach, at a fair, lying down in bed at night. Theodore opens up his wounds from his broken marriage and they begin to heal. Is this love?

W hat does love look like? What should it look like? Who gets to decide?

Her is described as a love sto-ry, and it opens with a declaration of eter-nal love, spoken from the lips of a Joaquin Pheonix apparently drained of all his usu-al rugged, brooding quality. The world is coloured dreamy pastel shades. Yet this fluffy, candyfloss feel, conjuring every Val-entines Day greeting card, chocolate box message and romantic movie closing-scene, is a sugar coating on a film that is far from cliché. The initial comforting embrace of the familiar is illusory – despite the hazy, Ins-tagram filter cinematography, Spike Jonze’s love story is, at most, bittersweet. It is as much a science-fiction contemplation of technology as it is a romance; it is as much about loneliness as love. But then, maybe this is ultimately true of all romantic narra-tives, which promise to welcome lost souls into the land of happy-ever-after. Perhaps we just choose to remain with the sugary layer over our eyes.

Phoenix’s profession of undying love is not his own, nor is it unique. His character Theodore Twombly composes hundreds similar every day, at his office desk, for his heavily ironic office job at ‘BeautifulHand-madLetters.com’. He finds words for those

“Jonze and Pheonix have created a perfect portrayal of contemporary loneliness”

Her

March 21

EternalSunshine

The clever collaging of flashback and current moment paints a poignant contrast between Theo-dore’s relationships. His marriage, before it soured, is all morning cuddles and crisp white sheets, while his rose-tinted days with Samantha are necessar-ily missing any physicality. Yet even this does not make the love story unbelievable, rather it gives it a deeper poignant resonance. In the days of long distance loves and Skype relationships, the lack of physical touch is emotionally touching. Under can-dyfloss coloured skies we are called to question how we relate to people, and what ‘people’ really are. Is this love? Is this just the idea of love?

Technology is increasingly obliterating bound-aries. We are accessible in ways unimagined even a single decade ago. Cybersex, sexting, even ‘tel-edildonics’ are terms entering our everyday lan-guage. Is this good or bad? Is there any way we can know, and should we even try to work it out? Who decides? Are we numbing ourselves to and shunning ‘real’ connections in favour of virtual worlds? Perhaps. Yet it seems that, despite tech-nology developing at a frantic pace, whatever the changes or upgrades, we are still searching for ways to share our lives, to be less alone.

WORDS: Eloise Hendy

22 Crows Nest

T here’s a certain tyrannical power, a reckless abandonment, in emptying your computer trash. ‘Are you sure you want to permanently erase the items in

the Trash?’ Your computer asks. Remember, ‘you can’t undo this action’. Whenever I coolly hit ‘OK’, I imagine myself as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Except the contents of her trash are not screen-shots-that-crowd-your-desk-top, or drafts of emails you never sent, her trash is Joel, an ex-boyfriend, but also her kind-of-soul-mate who she drags and drops into the trash, and permanently erases from her memory.

The setting is New York, the year 2004, and the culprit is Lacuna inc., a ‘mind erasure’ com-pany that comes into your home, wires up your brain and removes the unwanted memory while you sleep. They then send out a perfunctory message to friends and relatives on what looks like a chillingly subverted wedding invitation: ‘Clementine Kruczynski has had Joel Barish erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to her again. Thank you.’

March 23

A friend of mine recently starred in a play that included the line ‘you know how sometimes dreams have really good cinematography?’. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind feels just like that. It’s a dream you had a couple of weeks ago where perspectives were twisted, gravity slightly defied and, in that moment just before you woke up, things spiraled into a wild caden-za of flashing memories and synesthetic images. The lighting in the film recalls the spotlights, LED strips and bare tungsten bulbs that might illuminate nocturnal dreams. Things are never quite right; you feel anesthetized, or as if you’re hallucinating.

Eternal Sunshine, and Lacuna Inc. isn’t all sci-fi far-fetched fantasy. Neuroscientists are already using a memory-altering drug called propranolol on PTSD suffers to lessen the emo-tional distress associated with certain events. Patients are given the drug before they are asked to recall the particular distressing memo-ry by writing a narrative of the events. Over the course of a few weeks of treatment, the memory loses its emotional impact. Patients report feel-

ing like the memory isn’t theirs, facts can be recalled but emotions dwindle, the memory becomes like an observation. It’s not be-ing used outside of PTSD yet, but you can see how the drug could be used to let you fall out of unrequited love, or a destructive relationship. There’s a shop in Edinburgh called Crew Mind Altering, which I’ve never actually been inside but has posters tacked to the windows asking questions like ‘have you ever wanted to modify your mind?’. I always think of the building as the real La-cuna Inc.; this, worryingly, might not be a daydream fiction.

But why shouldn’t we have control over this sort of thing? We’re living through a decade in which we’re finally coming to terms with the medical side of mental health. Regulating emo-tion with drugs

can be beneficial. So isn’t the next step picking and choosing what you have stored in your brain, which memories you decide to retain? Well no, because most funda-mentally, memories aren’t just your own, they’re shared. If we learn anything from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it’s that erasing a memory comes with a host of complications. Relationships are tangled up in an enormous web of interconnecting memories and associations which technol-ogy can’t yet be trusted with.

“The light-ing recalls the spotlights, LED strips and bare tungsten bulbs that might illu-minate noctur-nal dreams”

WORDS: Figgy Guyver

24 Crows Nest

March 25

Behind closed doors...

manity, rather than the bladder and bowels. So, when better to scrawl your name, to defend your humanity, than when you’re breaking the body taboo, and letting your bowels momen-tarily take charge?

Public toilets are interesting spaces. The most private acts, in the public sphere; neces-sary yet not readily discussed. Places of pause, where the public face briefly slips. Take a piss, wash hands, re-apply make up. Re-enter the outside world. They are our united unmen-tionable-in-polite-society zones. Which makes the graffiti in them an interesting breed. It is a special kind of self-affirming graffiti, with its own distinct label; ‘latrinalia’ has been subject to scrutiny, and not just from drunk ladies making bathroom friends (the toilet socialis-ing taboo only falters when inhibitions are al-ready noticeably lowered). What is striking is that, in this pause-place, this non-place of daily dirty deeds, the most common graffiti reaches to the heart or the head. What are you almost guaranteed to see in bathroom stalls saturat-ed in scrawls? Lofty quotes and bawdy jokes. ‘Kate loves James’ and a half-remembered Oscar Wilde quote. Mash-ups of high and low, thoughts and feelings, to prove we are more than beasts.

We mark our territory through carved letters and ink. I was here. I am. At our most vulnera-ble moments, when we are most exposed, most grotesquely comic, most beastly, we call out from our inaccessible worlds. I was here. Is it surprising that countless doors bear Wilde’s words? “We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

T he ability to communicate is of-ten seen as what divides hu-manity from the animal king-dom. Language is a more tightly

held possession than the ability to make fire – without it we are lost and isolated. Our thoughts and feelings might make us hu-man, but without means of expression our emotions and rationality are useless. With-out words we are powerless, trapped in a sol-ipsistic, inaccessible world. Without words we become babies, or beasts. Language is what elevates our base, bodily natures to something higher. Entry to language is entry to human society. Even without getting theo-retically technical, in a post-Saussure age we all know language is inescapable.

So maybe it is not surprising that when we are forced to remember our affinity to the animals we so resolutely define ourselves against, we often strain against the bit with words. When we are forced to surrender our mind’s control of our bodies, and let our in-nards rule, we get more than a little uncom-fortable. Shave the legs, hide the nipples, tame the lust, blame farts on the dog. Don’t make eye contact at the urinals and lock the door when you shit. It is the head and the heart that get priority in our schemes of hu-

WORDS: Eloise Hendy

26 Crows Nest

during my attempt on this hotmilk pretense of coffeesomeone has placed beside me his pockmarked girlfriend and between ushis sallow interceptive self. they are eating beansand I am reading about thenot less repulsivered sputum of Beckett’s darlingmother? cousin and yes it is yes the sky is a shroud.

library café 20/1/15 12:30-1:30 pm

Mating Habits

ARTWORK: Eleanor Ann WardWORDS: Fred Spoliar

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Thank you to Carrie Alderton, Mary Burgess, Rebecca Dick-son, Henrietta Gill, Patrick Guyver, Rebecca Guyver, Holly Hart-ley, David Hendy, Morgan Hendy, James Ireland, Katy Kehoe, Hugo Lau, Emma Lawson, Sam Prance, Frances Roe, Mike Roy, Heather Scouler, Susanne Shoemaker, Fred Spoliar, Colm Sum-mers, Rowan Stevens, and Eleanor Ward. This edition would not be possible without your help and support. Thank you.

love in the time of ctrl+alt+del

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