International Paneling/August 2022
Image by Horster
HOT! HOT! HOT!
by Wolf Vest
Berlin
This past week has been one of the hotter ones of the year and a reminder of how intense and dangerous too much heat can be. It was the hottest day in London history some days back. Last summer, traveling to Italy or Greece was a no go due to the danger of random fires. It’s a strange time with almost every move you make having a negative effect on overall situation, as well. Travel somewhere? Carbon footprint. Air conditioner? Using too much gas, coal or electricity during a time of limited supply and high prices. I guess you can stay in your house and hope not to sweat to death.
In Germany, where I am now, air conditioning is an unusual thing. Most existing places do not have it, and I have been in government offices in the summer days, talking to immigration or tax officials who are wearing tee-shirts and flip-flops. The top edge of the windows open, but not the bottom, which means US window unit-types are also a no go. Beyond that, if you wanted to add a wall-mounted unit, you would need the approval of all your neighbors. A lengthy and very yucky process, even if your neighbors are cool.
So, as I marinated juicily for hours in my seat, it turns out that several older folks died that very day.
I was on a train from Berlin to Frankfurt one hot summer day, when the trains AC broke down. Since we are in hyper efficient Germany, the windows would not open. So, as I marinated juicily for hours in my seat, it turns out that several older folks died that very day. It was gross and sad, and the world over here simply is not prepared for an ongoing escalation of temperatures.
So, one wonders about the future here. People don’t even buy fans (ceiling, table, none). It’s very bizarre. But in one way, this lack of mechanical devices to forcibly change the environment is kind of good. I was telling someone the other day that Manhattan is noticeably hotter than Brooklyn due to the density and sizes of the AC units which are meant to keep skyscrapers cool. Meanwhile, kids and weirdos go to the ice cream truck for a cool treat while being blasted by the heat and noise from its cooling system. It’s sort of a heat purgatory in deep summer Manhattan and I am happy to be away from it.
One positive of summer days in urban centers is that all your neighbors leave! Peaceful times with music, ice cubes and some Rosé are nice. So is having the laundry room all to yourself. Ice coffees enjoyed while in an uncrowded city park? Why not? Benches are free and the people who are around are sunbathing like beached beluga whales in skimpy outfits. It’s its own time.
Dazed summer days in front of a hot grill blur the brain and allow us to forget for a moment the ongoing war, the ongoing virus and the hearings about the last president’s awful doings of January 2021 (and many other months, for that matter). But rest assured, the neighbors will return, the virus will come back, all manner of protestors, gun violence and new threats from oligarch wannabes will rise as the days get shorter and the weather gets colder.
So, my best thoughts of the moment are to enjoy whatever good you can get on these hot summer days. Try to have some kind of fun, if you are lucky enough to be in position to do so. Stay hydrated, stay safe, take a break, because you may need everything you have got soon enough.
Shorty of the Month! Scii-fi Freakout, “Ming,” by Rani Messias with sound by Anna Leevia!
intro by Leo Kuelbs
Berlin
This tasty treasure was created as part of the Digital Fairy Tales: Chinese Stories program, which originally appeared in 2018. Rani Messias is a fan of the Wachowskis and their influence is on display here. Yet, Rani and her talented team of actors, editors, DOPs, etc. manages something unique, mysterious and wonderful. Rani is based between Brazil and Berlin with lots of stops in NYC, LA and other international hot spots. She has contributed several short films to the Digital Fairy Tales series, as well as other projects and platforms. Check it out! It’s a International Paneling fave!
Image by Juliane Pieper
Here we are! It’s Poetry Place!
by Sanj Nair
Lake Tahoe
How to Live
For Anjali
I cannot tell you how to live but to be
a mother is as redundant as it is impossible.
I know and can tell you: breathing isn’t enough to do it.
You must get dirt under your nails regularly,
love your hands enough to scrape even the nailbeds clean.
You must run hard, until it feels like your heart’s pounding
a stampede of horses in your chest:
a reminder to ride a horse through at least one field and one forest
before the machinations of your body cease.
It isn’t okay to refuse to dance;
Only those who get up and move ever go anywhere.
Your hips will hold you in place,
Be sure to place them near those you adore who adore you, too.
When you are ill, remember how much you took breath
For granted. Grant yourself lazy days of books and baking.
Master the love of your rosy tastebuds and the gifts of scent
And learn to make at least three dishes:
one from your mother or father’s raising of you,
and one from your own sweet palate of desire
and one from curiosity and ambition.
Bake cookies or eat cake, monthly.
When the time comes, drink an ice vodka martini
with a sliver of Meyer lemon from a glass
well-seasoned with sweet vermouth and ice.
Visit a vineyard. Anywhere.
Climb a mountain that you think will be take all day.
Stare down the tunnels of canyons that remind you
how small you are. Remember your mind makes you large.
Don’t shy away from being wrong:
certain hypocrisies mean you are growing better.
Sit on rocks next to water. Be very still and
listen to the language the water, wind, rocks and sky
speak to living things in and around them:
They speak and sing to you. Do this as much as you can.
Remember the small bodies of birds struggle to survive winters
and feed them when you can. Notice their fear of you.
Feed them until they are no longer afraid.
Know fear will guide you away from danger,
but its insatiable fires can devour dreams:
Do not feed it regularly.
Learn to swim. Jump off a boat into the deep, unfathomable waters
though these are the home of sharks.
Know you will be fine.
Learn another language beyond the reading of faces and bodies.
Travel to the places of the words’ origins and then, use them.
Feel the way your mouth moves around what is foreign
and learn to embrace it.
Pee in the woods. Sleep under an open sky. Cook a meal over fire.
Tell people you love that you love them. Use your voice.
It’s a melody stitched from your blood and bones.
Remember its power.
Show people you love. Show them.
You do not need the medicine of school to do this.
When you leave your beloveds,
be sure your love echoes in them. The stories.
Echo that love for yourself.
Feel those echoes in my love for you.
Remember that in the fine pores of your skin,
deeper than any scar you will ever carry,
is the stitching of human stories
and the sound of my heart beating in yours,
the same sound of all the hearts that have been or ever will be.
3 Questions with…Summer reRuns…NYC-based Actor Anthony Crane!
Let’s go back to early 2022, and check out Anthony Crane’s awesome “3 Questions with…” segment. You may have seen Anthony on TV, in films or on stage. It’s amazing to hear about how he weathered the earlier part of COVID, plus his other interests/talents. Great stuff! He to see more of this amazing dude’s work in the near future. For now, let’s go back a little ways in time…
Technology Update and Opinion: Hive Network Democracy
Image by Tom D. Rotenberg
by Mark Bailey
Minneapolis
When the US government started seizing bitcoin in criminal investigations, I began to see cryptocurrency as more than a passing fad. I bought my first bitcoin in 2014, but it wasn't until a couple of years later that I really dived into the world of crypto. In the summer of 2016, a friend introduced me to a new social media platform called Steemit. This platform changed everything for me.
Steemit had its own native crypto token, called Steem, as well as a stablecoin called Steem Backed Dollars, or SBD. It used a delegated proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, which meant that it consumed almost no energy, setting it apart from bitcoin and other proof-of-work tokens. The Steem Blockchain was run by 'witnesses' that were elected by network participants and paid for validating transactions. And the blockchain itself paid content creators for blogging on Steemit.com, with payment amounts determined by a voting scheme.
So the network was run by elected officials and the the blogging platform paid content creators according to the content's perceived value to the community. As someone who had blogged on standard corporate websites extensively, oftentimes paying for the privilege, this was a game changer for me.
I started posting art and writing to Steemit, earning cryptocurrency with every post. The sums involved weren't large. My most successful post made about $350, though $2 was more typical.
I started posting art and writing to Steemit, earning cryptocurrency with every post. The sums involved weren't large. My most successful post made about $350, though $2 was more typical. But for me the money was less important than the fact that I was actually able to capture the value I was producing. There were no advertisers or unpaid likes. The tech itself was impossible to censor. I could say whatever I wanted and if people liked it I'd get paid.
At the center of the Steem ecosystem was a company called Steemit inc. During the winter of 2019-2020, Steemit inc.'s leadership agreed to sell the company to Justin Sun, the head of the Tron Foundation. Sun's plan was to fold Steem into his Tron empire by manipulating the elections that determined who was actually running the public Steem blockchain. This plan backfired when the Steemit community abandoned Steemit entirely and created their own network, called Hive.
Hive forked Steem on March 20, 2020. The move cut Steemit inc. and Tron's Justin Sun out of the new chain. This gave Steemit users the opportunity to switch to Hive, where Steem tokens were honored 1:1. Along with thousands of others, I made the switch from Steemit to Hive.
Hive was a copy of Steem, built on the same open source code, but it was fully democratized and without a corporate center. Soon, teams of developers began building out decentralized applications on the new blockchain. Today, the Hive ecosystem boasts a handful of blogging platforms, as well as games, high yield savings accounts, and NFTs. Its stablecoin, the Hive Backed Dollar, wasn't harmed at all by the recent market downturn.
I blog on the Hive.blog platform daily, posting art or fiction or societal commentary articles for my small crowd of followers. But Hive isn't perfect. Hive's NFT Showroom is more costly and less user friendly than Tezos. And the process for creating a new Hive account is strangely unclear and complicated, which is probably a network growth bottleneck.
These issues aren't minor, but neither are they likely to be permanent fixtures of a network run by volunteers and elected officials. Hive has already proven that an online community can successfully abandon corporate leadership when that leadership conflicts with community interests. And, where conventional social media platforms present manipulated feeds and increasingly targeted advertising, Hive presents only uncensored content.
Damien Hirst NFT experiment shows physical art still holds sway
by Adrian Pocobelli
Kalimvari
In the summer of 2021, Damien Hirst launched an experimental NFT collection called “The Currency,” which consists of photographs of some of his dot paintings that were minted on the Heni blockchain (which I've never really heard of). As part of the experiment, collectors who bought an NFT could decide a year later (during the month of July 2022) whether they would keep the NFT or burn it in exchange for a physical version of the work. At first, the concept seemed a little gimmicky, but as photographs of the unboxed physical works emerged on Twitter in the last few weeks, it seems something of significance was revealed.
My first impression when I saw photos of the physical works that had been mailed to collectors who had burned the NFT was, “Wow, that’s a real Damien Hirst.” I immediately thought to myself, “How much is this? Maybe I can get an actual Damien Hirst painting for a few thousand dollars.” If anything, it seemed like good value for an original Hirst painting—and with pretty easy access, as well—no dealer to contend with and pure transparency on the blockchain, so I could see what everybody else had paid for similar items.
Conversely, if an artwork is created as a digital work, then its power, or value, is best expressed in digital form.
But the photos hit me right away—there is a preciousness and even talismanic power that physical art possesses. Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. The real issue was this: if an artwork is created as a physical work, as Hirst’s dot paintings in “The Currency” had been, the power (hence value) of the artwork is in its physical embodiment. Conversely, if an artwork is created as a digital work, then its power, or value, is best expressed in digital form, i.e. and NFT. In the case of Hirst’s Currency, the NFTs are photos of physical artworks, which, from my point of view, seem basically worthless compared to the physical, original version of the work. Were I to buy one, I would quickly burn it to receive my physical copy in the mail. That being said, had Hirst made digital works and offered them to be exchanged for a print work in a physical format—then, in my view, the digital NFT would take precedence.
So, all in all, Hirst’s Currency helps clarify what makes an NFT valuable, as several artists have tried to make use of NFTs to sell photos of physical works, and it never really hits right. I’ve noticed this myself when collecting NFTs on the Tezos blockchain. I can be interested in an artist's works, but whenever I see an NFT that is simply a scan or reproduction of a physical work, I lose interest immediately. I want their digital works when I collect NFTs.
But you decide for yourself, dear reader. You have until the end of the month to pick up your original Damien Hirst digital or physical, whatever you prefer.
A Bittersweet Summer Flight Story
image and text by Stu Spence
Sydney
Flight
"Need a hand ?" the guy next to me asked. I musta looked desperate, probably the head in the hands and jumpy leg gave it away.
"Nuh."
I tried to give him a reassuring sideways smile, but the hair fell over my face, and I lost him in the greasy seaweed.
When the bell dinged and the seatbelt light went off, I slowly leaned back, hands only lowering from my face when my head touched the seat.
"Buy ya a drink?" He was smiling now, but with a healthy dash of pity thrown in. His eyebrows were scrunching his forehead like a pushed down bed sheet. He was huge.
"Yeah," I said, noticing his face was kinda patchy, like red and yellow continents stretching around the globe. He had black eyes, and full lips. The plane leveled off, thank Christ.
"Beer'd be fine."
He laughed. "Thought y'all might need a quart o' vodka after that." It was a short laugh, but its shake knocked my arm off the armrest.
"After what?"
"That takeoff! Thought we might lose you there, for a second?"
I suddenly felt ill. My face was hot and cold at once. I was ill that this man had been so close to something so painful of mine. So personal. That shit had always been precious, to me. No one saw it. Ever.
"Ahh well, we all got somethin', huh?" I said, trying to laugh it off, but those kinda inane things strangers say to one another never came out right for me. My daddy called it, "New York talk," which really just meant a complete waste of time. He was a rancher, and anyone from the city was full of horse shit as far as he was concerned, no two ways about it.
But the fat guy just looked at me. He wasn't buying the chit chat.
He leant in across to me. He smelt like baby oil.
"It's a girl, innit?" I didn't have the strength to argue. The trip to Atlanta to get her back had failed so spectacularly, man, I was just empty, hollowed out by white ants and deceit.
"It's a girl, innit?" I didn't have the strength to argue. The trip to Atlanta to get her back had failed so spectacularly, man, I was just empty, hollowed out by white ants and deceit.
"Yup."
He nodded.
The stewardess handed me an opened beer and I'd downed it before she'd gotten the big boy his screwdriver. They both looked at me like I was a terrorist or somethin'.
"Hardest thing."
"What is?" I asked, despite having no real desire to know the answer.
He didn't say anything else for the whole flight, and when I woke he was waddling out with the rest of the passengers, his back wet with sweat. As I gathered my things I noticed handwriting on the boarding pass, small, almost childish lettering. It just said, 'let go.'
Running at Night
Image by Juliane Pieper
by Leo Kuelbs
circa 2005
It’s been a long, lonely trip back to the borderlands. It’s been about 500 degrees for ten days and the best thing to say about the heat and the water carried in the air is that you will not forget it soon. It’s a valid distraction from everything else. A reason to stay inside, eat, sleep, be lazy, get fat. But you cannot do that. You have to be ready for whatever comes your way next and we all know that lots of things are coming our way. Bad things, heavy things—wars, death, tragedy, terrorism, bombs, divorce, heartbreak and finally growing pains and the circle starts again until we’re cut down, everyone in his time, when we can no longer take it.
Back on the border this time around, after the brutality of last winter, I finally recognized my strength, power, I see my awkward people. The sky opened up and I was dropped back into life. The black clouds lifted and it turns out that I did a nice job caretaking while my soul was hiding away healing itself. Born out of a womb contaminated with sick commitments. The claustrophobic terror of living with the dead is over. The room that I kept insulating from the inside with depression and alcohol has been vacated and the accidental jailer has left town.
And I am back here—overgrown in my old life. Completely certain in my uncertainty. Relishing not knowing, restarting and enjoying the slightly bitter and sad world I woke up into. I’ve grown a taste for it. I am amazed to find everyone still alive, even the recently deceased. I see her sometimes running like a ghost across streets that are impossible for me to cross. A two-dimensional version. A place keeper, an empty cliff dwelling inhabited by occasional lost spirits and souls. Its intended occupant under arrest in some dark corner of a psyche. Or asleep. Or dead. But the body runs on. Smokes strong marijuana and seeks shallow pleasures only a few feet away in a world that shouldn’t exist, but does. It’s right over there. Put your arm out and you can feel it whipping by.
And it’s close, but I can’t see it all right now. Its traces abound, jump out of corners and off walls, so I decide to run at night. The sun has long since descended and I have left the uncomfortable regularity of my family and returned to the borderlands that seem like the refuge of myself alone. There are others. The renter sleeps through a drunken haze on a couch in the cool, wet basement. Random beasts roam the thick night. The few neighbors’ houses are all creeping and dark and I am running through the almost liquid air. The white line of the road is my guide and I make silent wishes that I don’t run into or onto dead things in the road. Blood on my running shoes, the smell of the dead deer, the dead mole I saw rotting in two days ago’s sun. The dead squirrel. The dead that are living.
It’s my best opportunity to test myself. No sun, my dog has gone back to his foster home. Is he dreaming of squirrels? He belongs to the borderlands. I can come and go and it’s better that way, but not the hairy little man. He stays. If he leaves, he dies. And I do wish he were with me, to guide me with his dog eyes. Without him in tow, though, I can run faster, further, no breaks, fall into the trance and run all the way to the ski hill which sits in embarrassed abandonment in hot summer times. All houses are black. No dog, keep running.
The moon is down. The sky is covered with stars paled by summer-wet haze. Follow the line. The trance is on and I’m no longer worried about the dead things on the road.
The moon is down. The sky is covered with stars paled by summer-wet haze. Follow the line. The trance is on and I’m no longer worried about the dead things on the road. I am in the safe zone, regular rhythmic breathing on the four. “When you hear the whistle blow, you eight to the bar.”
Check back in to wonder where I am exactly. It’s good not to be sitting, watching the television. As good as I feel these past days, there’s still a submerged continent of confusion and shame that could resurface at any moment. Running is the hand that keeps it underwater where it will eventually dissolve into little tiny pieces that will look like stars as they float into being other random bits of life or death waiting to get into coalition with like minded particles and start some great new thing. But I won’t be around for that. Not like this, anyway.
And I look down at my light-colored shorts and I pull off my soaked tie-dyed tee-shirt that seems to pulse in the light-blue, barely light and tuck it into the shorts which are swimming trunks which might come in handy if I decide to jump in the river to cool off after all this running. And I am flying through the night, by myself, quiet and sleek, my white skin easy to see if any cars come by. I’m not close to tired and I wonder how far I can go. No pain, just keep going. No worry now, just rolling in time over the little bridge past another mailbox, even the big house 150 yards ahead is dark. The driveways that lead up the hill to mysterious houses are darker black and I’m looking at myself and the white line and going out of my body asleep and moving.
Then a big crack, a lot of noise. No light. Leaves move, big grass is crunched around. A deer? Heavy breathing. A big dog. In the city, I always think, “If faced with danger, run!” So I turn and then know to not run from a bear. Do I walk? I am so white. I am like a beacon. “This is a good reason to turn around. I’m not doing it because I am tired. No one would doubt my intentions, right? How could they? I wonder WWJD?”
I am listening for more big-dog breathing and wondering what to do if I hear it. I imagine the fat muscles of a bear jostling around as it gains speed.
News stories of the boy who was mauled by a bear during the night!
“What an idiot!” watchers of the news would say to each other. “Who runs at night? And out in the woods!” Would I hear nails clicking on the asphalt, or would they sink into the black road? I am moving quickly now. My dog’s collar makes a tinkling sound when we run together. I miss that and listen as I run. Hearing nothing, I put the hammer down and practically fly back past the rotten deer spot, past the dead mole spot and into the lights of an oncoming car and I wonder what they’ll think when they see my naked whiteness running at them on the wrong side of the road. Just want to stay on the road. Stay away from the dead things on this hot, dark night. My skin is swimming wet. I think of bears near the river as my feet hit the line. I can see the light from my poor, little house and I am getting closer and I will walk through the door, onto the screen porch in less than thirty seconds and I am burning with sadness and filled with life.