Link List #97: Bandcamp, barriers, and record-breaking eggs - Friends of Friends / Freunde von Freunden (FvF)

Link List #97: Bandcamp, barriers, and record-breaking eggs

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In this week’s Link List, we’ve been asking ourselves the big questions: Why have the online retailer Bandcamp opened a physical record store in Oakland? What is the future of comedy in the #metoo era? And why on earth is a picture of an egg the most liked thing on Instagram? Enjoy.

Links

    • 1 Online music retailer Bandcamp have announced that they will open a physical record store in Oakland, California in February 2019. Record stores have been dying a slow death in recent years, but the Bandcamp store could become a test case for how to reverse this trend. The Wire notes that the store have already revealed a host of free, all-age live shows and announced partnerships with local organizations such as Oakland School for the Arts, Bay Area Girls Rock Camp, and the Transgender Law Center.
    • 2 At the beginning of January, @world_record_egg posted a picture of an ordinary brown egg and issued a challenge: “Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram.” The egg went on to get over 50 million likes in ten days, surpassing the previous record holder, Kylie Jenner, by over 30 million. Was it a shrewd marketing ploy or a brilliant piece of conceptual art? Art Net’s Ben Davis thinks it may be the latter – and he has found the art-historical precedent to prove it.
    • 3 “Of the 51 fortified boundaries built between countries since the end of World War II, around half were constructed between 2000 and 2014,” noted The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman at the height of the 2016 US presidential campaign. Two years later, Trump’s call for a US-Mexico border wall still dominates the news. To remind us that the underlying problems—“growing numbers of immigrants, terrorist activity, continued drug trafficking, and protracted wars”—are truly global, the publication gathered thirty stunning photographs of famous and lesser known barriers across the globe.
    • 4 Post-Kevin Hart, Louis CK, and Nanette, stand-up comedy is having an identity crisis. Should comics staunchly defend their ‘right’ to offend, or is complaining about political correctness just a way of avoiding updating tired—and no longer funny—material? Writing for The Guardian, Stuart Jeffries talks to a “new generation” of self-aware performers who are thriving in the era of the #metoo movement.
    • 5 Wincing: adjective. To recoil, shrink, draw back from the dangerous, fearsome, and unpleasant with an involuntary contraction of the facial features due to an overwhelming sense of revulsion. Mention the term Brexit lately and it has an immediate wincing effect on on just about everyone, especially now with the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. Since MP’s rejected Theresa May’s latest Brexit deal, the British Fashion Council have supported the call for a people’s vote. “A no-deal Brexit would have unthinkable repercussions for fashion entrepreneurs,” explains fashion critic Sarah Mower in British Vogue. In a follow-up piece by Alice Newbold, we hear from six London-based designers on what this could mean for their businesses.

Hopefully you enjoyed the reads from this week’s Link List, but if you’ve still got an internet itch to scratch, you can find more here.

Also, be sure to check out FvF Mixtapes for some tracks selected by our friends and favorite artists, and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date with FvF stories.

Text: FvF editorial team
Photography: Alexandros Ioannidis

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