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velvetdestroya · 3 years

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A Vigil, On Birds and Glass. I woke up this morning still dreaming, or not fully aware of myself just yet. The sun poked through the windows, touching my face, and then a deep sadness overcame me, immediately, bringing me to life and realization- My Chemical Romance had ended. I walked downstairs to do the only thing I could think of to regain composure- I made coffee. As the drip began, in that kind of silence that only happens in the morning, and being the only one awake, I stepped outside my home, leaving the door open behind me. I looked around and began to breathe. Things looked to be about the same- a beautiful day. As I turned to step back into the house I heard sound from within, a chirp and a rustle. And I noticed a small brown bird had flown into the library. Naturally, I panicked. I knew I had to see the bird to safety and I knew I had to retain the order of things in our home, and he very well couldn’t take up residency with us. I chased him (still assuming he was a he) into my office, where I have these very large windows. Just then, and luckily, I heard Lindsey’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and naturally being composed as she is, she grabbed a blanket and stepped into the office. He was impossible to catch, and I began to open the windows, via Lindsey’s direction, only to find out they were screened. The bird began to fly into the glass, over and over and in all different directions. Smack. Smack. Smack! I heard another set of footsteps, Bandit’s, running down the stairs in anticipation of the new day. Her entrance into the situation caused just the right amount of chaos (she was very excited to meet the bird) and we found ourselves chasing the bird into the living room. Knowing that this where it could potentially get sticky, being the high ceilings and the beams to perch on, I opened the front door as Lindsey did her best to encourage our new friend out the door. After some coaxing, flying, chirping, a wrong turn back into the library and a short goodbye to Bandit, he simply hopped out the front door- taking off on the fifth leap. We cheered. I was no longer sad. I didn’t realize it, but I stopped being sad the minute that bird had come into my life, because there was something that needed doing, a small vessel to aid and an order to keep. I closed the door. I decided to write the letter I always knew I would. It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all. I have always felt that the art I have made (alone or with friends) contains all of my intent when executed properly, and thus, no explanation required. It is simply not in my nature to excuse, explain, or justify any action I have taken as a result of thinking it through with a clear head, and in my truth. I had always felt this situation involving the end of this band would be different, in the eventuality it happened. I would be cryptic in its existence, and open upon its death. The clearest actions come from truth, not obligation. And the truth of the matter is that I love every one of you. So, if this finds you well, and sheds some light on anything, or my personal account and feelings on the matter, then it is out of this love, mutual and shared, not duty. Love. This was always my intent. My Chemical Romance: 2001-2013 We were spectacular. Every show I knew this, every show I felt it with or without external confirmation. There were some clunkers, sometimes our secondhand gear broke, sometimes I had no voice- we were still great. It is this belief that made us who we were, but also many other things, all of them vital- And all of the things that made us great were the very things that were going to end us- Fiction. Friction. Creation. Destruction. Opposition. Aggression. Ambition. Heart. Hate. Courage. Spite. Beauty. Desperation. LOVE. Fear. Glamour. Weakness. Hope. Fatalism. That last one is very important. My Chemical Romance had, built within its core, a fail-safe. A doomsday device, should certain events occur or cease occurring, would detonate. I shared knowledge of this “flaw” within weeks of its inception. Personally, I embraced it because, again, it made us perfect. A perfect machine, beautiful, yet self aware of it’s system. Under directive to terminate before it becomes compromised. To protect the idea- at all costs. This probably sounds like something ripped from the pages of a four-color comic book, and that’s the point. No compromise. No surrender. No fucking shit. To me that’s rock and roll. And I believe in rock and roll. I wasn’t shy about who I said this to, not the press, or a fan, or a relative. It’s in the lyrics, it’s in the banter. I often watched the journalists snicker at mention of it, assuming I was being sensational or melodramatic (in their defense I was most likely dressed as an apocalyptic marching-band leader with a tear-away hospital gown and a face covered in expressionist paint, so fair enough). I’m still not sure if the mechanism worked correctly, because it wasn’t a bang but a much slower process. But still the same result, and still for the same reason- When it’s time, we stop. It is important to understand that for us, the opinion on whether or not it is in fact time does not transmit from the audience. Again, this is to protect the idea for the benefit of the audience. Many a band have waited for external confirmation that it is time to hang it up, via ticket sales, chart positioning, boos and bottles of urine- input that holds no sway for us, and often too late when it comes anyway. You should know it in your being, if you listen to the truth inside you. And voice inside became louder than the music. Now- There are many reasons My Chemical Romance ended. The triggerman is unimportant, as was always the messengers- but the message, again as always, is the important thing. But to reiterate, this is my account, my reasons and my feelings. And I can assure you there was no divorce, argument, failure, accident, villain, or knife in the back that caused this, again this was no one’s fault, and it had been quietly in the works, whether we knew it or not, long before any sensationalism, scandal, or rumor. There wasn’t even a blaze of glory in a hail of bullets… I am backstage in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It is Saturday, May 19th, 2012 and I am pacing behind a massive black curtain that leads to the stage. I feel the breeze from the ocean find its way around me and I look down at my arms, which are covered in fresh gauze due to a losing battle with a heat rash, which had been a mysterious problem in recent months. I am normally not nervous before a show but I am certainly filled with angry butterflies most of the time. This is different- a strange anxiety jetting through me that I can only imagine is the sixth sense one feels before their last moments alive. My pupils have zeroed-out and I have ceased blinking. My body temperature is icy. We get the cue to hit the stage. The show is… good. Not great, not bad, just good. The first thing I notice take me by surprise is not the enormous amount of people in front of us but off to my left- the shore and the vastness of the ocean. Much more blue than I remembered as a boy. The sky is just as vibrant. I perform, semi-automatically, and something is wrong. I am acting. I never act on stage, even when it appears that I am, even when I’m hamming it up or delivering a soliloquy. Suddenly, I have become highly self-aware, almost as if waking from a dream. I began to move faster, more frantic, reckless- trying to shake it off- but all it began to create was silence. The amps, the cheers, all began to fade. All that what left was the voice inside, and I could hear it clearly. It didn’t have to yell- it whispered, and said to me briefly, plainly, and kindly- what it had to say. What it said is between me and the voice. I ignored it, and the following months were full of suffering for me- I hollowed out, stopped listening to music, never picked up a pencil, started slipping into old habits. All of the vibrancy I used to see became de-saturated. Lost. I used to see art or magic in everything, especially the mundane- the ability was buried under wreckage. Slowly, once I had done enough damage to myself, I began to climb out of the hole. Clean. When I made it out, the only thing left inside was the voice, and for the second time in my life, I no longer ignored it- because it was my own. There are many roles for all of us to play in this ending. We can be well-wishers, ill-wishers, sympathizers, vilifiers, comedians, rain clouds, victims- That last one, again, is important. I have never thought myself a victim, nor my comrades, nor the fans- especially not the fans. For us to adopt that role right now would legitimize everything the tabloids have tried to name us. More importantly, it completely misses the point of the band. And then what have we learned? With honor, integrity, closure, and on no one’s terms but our own- the door closes. And another opens- This morning I awoke early. I quickly brushed my teeth, threw on some baggy jeans, and hopped in my car. I gently sped down the 405 through the morning fog to a random parking lot in Palo Verde, where I was to meet a nice gentleman named Norm. He was older, and a self-proclaimed “hippie” but he also had the energy of Sixteen year old in a garage-rock band. The purpose of the meeting was the delivery of an amplifier into my possession. I had recently purchased the amp from him and we both agreed that shipping would jostle the tubes- so he was kind enough to meet me in the middle. A Fender Princeton Amp from 1965, non reverb. A beautiful little device. He showed me the finer points, the speaker, the non-grounded plug, the original label and the chalk mark of the man or woman who built it- “This amp talks.” he said. I smiled. We got coffee, talked about gold-foil pickups and life. We sat in the car and played each other music we had made. We parted ways, promising to stay in touch, I drove home. When I wanted to start My Chemical Romance, I began by sitting in my parent’s basement, picking up an instrument I had long abandoned for the brush- a guitar. It was a 90’s Fender Mexican Stratocaster, Lake Placid Blue, but in my youth I had decided it was too clean and pretty so I beat it up, exposing some of the red paint underneath the blue- the color it was meant to be. Adding a piece of duct tape on the pick guard, it felt acceptable. I plugged this into a baby Crate Amp with built in distortion and began the first chords of Skylines and Turnstiles. I still have that guitar, and it’s sitting next to The Princeton. He has a voice, and I would like to hear what it has to say. In closing, I want to thank every single fan. I have learned from you, maybe more than you think you’ve learned from me. My only regret is that I am awful with names and bad with goodbyes. But I never forget a face, or a feeling- and that is what I have left from all of you. I feel Love. I feel love for you, for our crew, our team, and for every single human being I have shared the band and stage with- Ray. Mikey. Frank. Matt. Bob. James. Todd. Cortez. Tucker. Pete. Michael. Jarrod. Since I am bad with goodbyes. I refuse to let this be one. But I will leave you with one last thing- My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die. It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you. I always knew that, and I think you did too. Because it is not a band- it is an idea. Love, Gerard

(Source Rock Sound March 25, 2013) [photo credit; ashley bird]

#mcr #my chemical romance #my chemical romance the end 2013 #geray way goodbye letter to fans 2013 #it is an idea #my chemical romance can never die #mcrmy #killjoys #gerard way

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marysfoxmask · 3 years

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the secret garden (1949) - why it’s my favorite adaptation

hello @renee-mariposa! thank you so much for the ask! while i believe i have answered a question like this before, i don’t think i’ve elaborated as much as i’d like to. so allow me to wax poetic on my favorite adaptation, the secret garden (1949)!

intro

this adaptation really stands out, i think, because of the the era it was made in; i don’t think you could get an adaptation aimed towards kids that is such a sentimental, gothic-lite melodrama with these days, at least without aggressively telegraphing its more emotional moments a la pixar/disney; it’s amusingly blunt and straightforward in that regard, much like the children at its center. there’s not much syrupiness at all. the child actors (margaret o’brien as mary and dean stockwell as colin) are fast-talking as any actor of that era, but in my opinion, the film’s clearly scripted dialogue just makes all the kids seem amusingly precocious.

actors

margaret o’brien as mary is great. i love her stridency, her snobbishness. unlike other adaptations, which downplay mary’s contrariness to the point where her character arc comes across as too subtle by half, the movie upgrades it. not only is 1949 mary contrary, her sullenness has been replaced by a shrillness, snobbery, and the tendency to run to emotional extremes (not to mention a healthy helping of classism). she alienates herself from the other children on the ship to england purposefully, finding them inferior to herself, then attempts to physically fight another passenger when the child calls archibald a hunchback. while this characterization isn’t book-accurate (book mary is a mix of fiery and sullen that none of the films capture accurately imo), i prefer this characterization of her to the closed-off sullenness of the 1993 version or the palatably traumatized 2020 version. 1949 mary isn’t given an obvious freudian excuse for her issues; her parents are just as neglectful, but the film puts the onus on mary for being contrary, which is weirdly refreshing and more attuned to the novel’s perspective. (that isn’t to say that mary’s traumatic early childhood didn’t inform her character in any meaningful way, or that the adults around mary aren’t responsible for how she turned out--but imo the films tend to take an un-nuanced view of the situation in order to make her a more palatable, sympathetic character, which is vastly less interesting than a complicated, flawed one no matter if the character is a child or not). when mary’s character develops and she becomes sweeter, it’s much more impactful as a result of this earlier narrative choice.

brian roper, who was 20 at the time (crazy, right?), plays dickon, and he plays him with a sweet affability that’s hard not to enjoy. he’s a little mischievous, laughing at mary when she accidentally speaks yorkshire (i’ll talk about that in a bit), and has, in a nice touch that i’ve strangely only seen in in the 1994 straight-to-dvd animated film, just as much of a passionate interest in the secret garden as mary does. dickon isn’t treated as mystically as other adaptations, save for the tendency to disappear strangely quickly just when mary happens to turn around (which is a nice nod to his quasi-magical aspects without being distracting, and also adds to mary’s sense of displacement/confusion on the mysterious misselthwaite grounds). he also gets a surprising amount to do in this adaptation, which i love, as someone who strongly believes his character has been under-served in all the film adaptations thus far. in this film, he gets to even enter misselthwaite manor by climbing up ivy into colin’s room in the middle of a storm (albeit offscreen), which is just the kind of adventurous, dramatic touch i enjoy. he also gets probably more dialogue than any of the other dickons (whoo!), as he makes a couple minor declarations--nothing super ham-fisted and melodramatic, as i said the screenplay is rather straightforward and devoid of a lot of corniness you might expect from a children’s film made in the ‘40s, especially with this kind of source material--that are heartfelt without being cloying (one of the benefits of having an older actor playing this kind of role).

colin, played by dean stockwell, is a weaker element to me. he does a good job alternating between screaming (and this movie contains a lot of screaming) and being sweet when the movie calls for it, but i don’t think he was the best choice for colin. while i think it’s awful to criticize a teen actor (stockwell was 13 at the time) for being baby-faced, the fact that he looks significantly younger than o’brien (who was 12) means that his tantrums come off as less a result of arrested development than they should. while he speaks as stiltedly as 2020 colin (who i personally think was one of the best elements of that film), it’s unclear whether that’s the result of the ‘40s fashion of expressing dialogue or a characteristic choice (i’m guessing the former). he can’t help but pale compared to o’brien’s mary, though he is perfectly adequate. he just didn’t stand out for me.

i summed up my feelings of elsa lanchester as martha in my previous, brief review of the movie back in june: “the one major flaw, i think, is actually martha, played by elsa lanchester; her portrayal is odd, feels definitely tone-deaf. her constant shrieking laughter feels very forced and unconvincing. in her few scenes, she jars everything to a halt in terms of believability.” she was significantly older than brian roper, being in her ‘40s playing a character heavily implied to be in her mid-teens to early twenties, and as a result feels out of her depth. her establishing scene is probably the worst, although i’ve warmed to her other scenes as time’s gone by.

tone/atmosphere

in general, i think the ‘49 film does a wonderful job expressing the gothic implications of the original book, even emphasizing them by casting misselthwaite manor largely in shadow and having mary and mrs. medlock first arrive in a carriage pulled by black horses on a dark, stormy night. it makes the bright outdoor scenery seem that much more inviting in comparison. burnett’s robin is also replaced by a raven, who also takes on aspects of dickon’s crow soot, as he is friends with dickon and hops on his shoulder occasionally. while it divulges from burnett’s book, i think a raven makes a little more sense in this adaptation, which amps up the eeriness of the original story; it gives mary’s journey a little more of a fairytale aspect, i think, and is overall an understandable and palatable change.

plot

the big plot development that divulges from the novel is the presence of a subplot where, due to a misunderstanding of an axe and a tree in the titular garden, mary and dickon fall under the impression that archibald killed lilias. now, this is a pretty bizarre plot, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t take up much of the film; it’s charming in its strangeness, and fits well with the idea of innocent children struggling to understand the complicated adult world—which is itself a theme original to the story that i’m kind of a sucker for, in general. it also serves as a bonding point for dickon and mary, whose friendship largely feels passed over in film adaptations.

and, of course, there’s the big plot-breaking point near the end, where archibald goes to tell colin that he’s selling misselthwaite and going to move to europe with him. an obvious plot point that conflicts with this scene is that colin, in the book, has no relationship with his father. again, it’s an odd adaptational choice meant to amp up the stakes, but it doesn’t impede my enjoyment of the film as a whole. the presence of two doctors—one, a hapless neville craven figure named dr. griddlestone, and the other is obviously inspired from the book’s “doctor from london,” who insisted all colin needed was fresh air, food, and exercise—gives the film some psychological weight. despite the disappointing element of all of colin’s neuroses being blatantly the result of his father’s emotional ailments, which i think is a lazy way of reading the original novel’s portrayal of colin’s illness, i think the way this development was executed in the film was tolerable—and i’m a sucker for children’s films that don’t think anything of including long conversations between adults about psychological issues. like, you can’t help but respect a film like that!

the garden

something i also love about this adaptation is that the garden isn’t a huge part of it; it represents more of a place where mary and dickon and colin can foster ideas and grow rather than a place of orgasmic beauty. there’s not a surplus of lavish panning shots, really, like in the ‘93 film, and it lacks the magical realism of the 2020 film. the garden itself is more transparently a plot device, which i actually like—it gives more room for the children to center themselves.

individual scenes

and the pacing of the film is actually really nice, i think—probably the best out of all the films. i love the ‘93 film with all my heart, and it’s definitely gorgeous in its own right, but i think it gets a little sluggish; this film is paced beautifully. there’s no fat, really.

there’s a scene i really love that shows the passage of time from winter to spring in a super succinct, stupidly obvious way that nonetheless works because of the innocent sweetness of o’brien’s delivery. like, it’s very old-fashioned and sentimental, but gah, it gets me every time.

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it’s time to talk about the scream scene!

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this film stole my heart the minute mary screamed wholeheartedly at colin that she hopes he dies. there’s a dark comedy to this whole scene; these two maladjusted, spoiled children trying to out-scream one another while tearing down curtains and knocking down tables full of food higgledy-piggledy?? you just can’t get better than that!

if you’re adapting the secret garden, i strongly feel you can’t soften the children’s meanness, their sharpness and ugliness. their tantrums must be harsh and grating and horrible! they have to really let loose! the rawness of the children’s emotional dysfunction contrasted against the buttoned-up stiffness of edwardian england is one of the fascinating aspects of the novel i love to think about, and you just can’t get that contrast if you don’t have the children be genuine terrors! i think this scene puts that nicely, more nicely than any of the other films, which pussyfoot around colin’s intense tantrum too much to be nearly as effective. i get giddy whenever this scene comes on; it’s brilliant.

there are so many little details from the book that i love: that the children speak yorkshire to one another, mary singing her ayah’s song to colin,

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dickon’s “i will cum bak” note (here written as “i will kum back”), the mention of dickon’s mother sending them bread to eat to make them strong. it’s all so nicely implemented, and reminds me of the joy of reading the book for the first time.

but the scene i love most is one entirely made up for the film. in it, mary tells colin about the garden, but wraps it up in fiction wherein it’s a sort of child’s eden, only accessible for children like themselves. that gets to the heart of why i love the book moreso than any other adaptation i can think of. it’s a children’s paradise where the innocent, inherent goodness of children reigns. it makes me tear up almost every time, despite the scene’s brevity.

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miscellaneous

there are some little details that i love about this film: the fact that mrs. sowerby is spotted in one scene where we see dickon at his home, feeding a lamb (and the implication that mary was so darn excited about finding the key to the garden that she ran all the way to the sowerbys’ cottage, five miles away from misselthwaite, to show dickon), mary’s clearly false story to colin about being surrounded by tigers and elephants in india, mary threatening to tear people’s gizzards out, mary telling dickon she hates him because he (gasp) dared to know about colin so she couldn’t reveal his existence to him...there’s a lot to enjoy about this film. it definitely isn’t the most accurate to the book, but it’s one of those films that i could watch over and over again.

aside from some superfluous subplots, it’s a lean adaptation that still captures all the essential elements of the book to at least to a degree. i can easily imagine some very indignant little girls in 1949 insisting that no, the raven was a robin in the book, and there was no implications of murder, either, but i love it in all its simplicity. i think you need a little old-fashioned sentiment to make a film adaptation of the secret garden successful.

#the secret garden #frances hodgson burnett #the secret garden 1949 #mary lennox #dickon sowerby #colin craven #margaret o'brien #dean stockwell #brian roper #elsa lanchester

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bubbleteagrunge · 5 years

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A Vigil, On Birds and Glass

I woke up this morning still dreaming, or not fully aware of myself just yet. The sun poked through the windows, touching my face, and then a deep sadness overcame me, immediately, bringing me to life and realization- My Chemical Romance had ended.

I walked downstairs to do the only thing I could think of to regain composure-

I made coffee

As the drip began, in that kind of silence that only happens in the morning, and being the only one awake, I stepped outside my home, leaving the door open behind me. I looked around and began to breathe. Things looked to be about the same- a beautiful day

As I turned to step back into the house I heard sound from within, a chirp and a rustle. And I noticed a small brown bird had flown into the library. Naturally, I panicked. I knew I had to see the bird to safety and I knew I had to retain the order of things in our home, and he very well couldn’t take up residency with us. I chased him (still assuming he was a he) into my office, where I have these very large windows

Just then, and luckily, I heard Lindsey’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and naturally being composed as she is, she grabbed a blanket and stepped into the office. He was impossible to catch, and I began to open the windows, via Lindsey’s direction, only to find out they were screened. The bird began to fly into the glass, over and over and in all different directions

Smack

Smack!

I heard another set of footsteps, Bandit’s, running down the stairs in anticipation of the new day. Her entrance into the situation caused just the right amount of chaos (she was very excited to meet the bird) and we found ourselves chasing the bird into the living room. Knowing that this where it could potentially get sticky, being the high ceilings and the beams to perch on, I opened the front door as Lindsey did her best to encourage our new friend out the door. After some coaxing, flying, chirping, a wrong turn back into the library and a short goodbye to Bandit, he simply hopped out the front door- taking off on the fifth leap

We cheered

I was no longer sad

I didn’t realize it, but I stopped being sad the minute that bird had come into my life, because there was something that needed doing, a small vessel to aid and an order to keep. I closed the door. I decided to write the letter I always knew I would

I had always felt this situation involving the end of this band would be different, in the eventuality it happened. I would be cryptic in its existence, and open upon its death

The clearest actions come from truth, not obligation. And the truth of the matter is that I love every one of you

So, if this finds you well, and sheds some light on anything, or my personal account and feelings on the matter, then it is out of this love, mutual and shared, not duty

Love

This was always my intent

My Chemical Romance: 2001-2013

We were spectacular

Every show I knew this, every show I felt it with or without external confirmation

There were some clunkers, sometimes our secondhand gear broke, sometimes I had no voice- we were still great. It is this belief that made us who we were, but also many other things, all of them vital-

And all of the things that made us great were the very things that were going to end us-

Fiction. Friction. Creation. Destruction. Opposition. Aggression. Ambition. Heart. Hate. Courage. Spite. Beauty. Desperation. LOVE. Fear. Glamour. Weakness. Hope

Fatalism

Personally, I embraced it because, again, it made us perfect. A perfect machine, beautiful, yet self aware of it’s system. Under directive to terminate before it becomes compromised. To protect the idea- at all costs. This probably sounds like something ripped from the pages of a four-color comic book, and that’s the point

No compromise. No surrender. No fucking shit

To me that’s rock and roll. And I believe in rock and roll

I wasn’t shy about who I said this to, not the press, or a fan, or a relative. It’s in the lyrics, it’s in the banter. I often watched the journalists snicker at mention of it, assuming I was being sensational or melodramatic (in their defense I was most likely dressed as an apocalyptic marching-band leader with a tear-away hospital gown and a face covered in expressionist paint, so fair enough)

I’m still not sure if the mechanism worked correctly, because it wasn’t a bang but a much slower process. But still the same result, and still for the same reason-

When it’s time, we stop

It is important to understand that for us, the opinion on whether or not it is in fact time does not transmit from the audience. Again, this is to protect the idea for the benefit of the audience. Many a band have waited for external confirmation that it is time to hang it up, via ticket sales, chart positioning, boos and bottles of urine- input that holds no sway for us, and often too late when it comes anyway.

You should know it in your being, if you listen to the truth inside you. And voice inside became louder than the music

Now-

There are many reasons My Chemical Romance ended. The triggerman is unimportant, as was always the messengers- but the message, again as always, is the important thing. But to reiterate, this is my account, my reasons and my feelings. And I can assure you there was no divorce, argument, failure, accident, villain, or knife in the back that caused this, again this was no one’s fault, and it had been quietly in the works, whether we knew it or not, long before any sensationalism, scandal, or rumor

There wasn’t even a blaze of glory in a hail of bullets…

I am backstage in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It is Saturday, May 19th, 2012 and I am pacing behind a massive black curtain that leads to the stage. I feel the breeze from the ocean find its way around me and I look down at my arms, which are covered in fresh gauze due to a losing battle with a heat rash, which had been a mysterious problem in recent months. I am normally not nervous before a show but I am certainly filled with angry butterflies most of the time. This is different- a strange anxiety jetting through me that I can only imagine is the sixth sense one feels before their last moments alive. My pupils have zeroed-out and I have ceased blinking. My body temperature is icy

We get the cue to hit the stage

I am acting. I never act on stage, even when it appears that I am, even when I’m hamming it up or delivering a soliloquy. Suddenly, I have become highly self-aware, almost as if waking from a dream. I began to move faster, more frantic, reckless- trying to shake it off- but all it began to create was silence. The amps, the cheers, all began to fade

All that what left was the voice inside, and I could hear it clearly. It didn’t have to yell- it whispered, and said to me briefly, plainly, and kindly- what it had to say

What it said is between me and the voice

I ignored it, and the following months were full of suffering for me- I hollowed out, stopped listening to music, never picked up a pencil, started slipping into old habits. All of the vibrancy I used to see became de-saturated. Lost. I used to see art or magic in everything, especially the mundane- the ability was buried under wreckage

Slowly, once I had done enough damage to myself, I began to climb out of the hole. Clean. When I made it out, the only thing left inside was the voice, and for the second time in my life, I no longer ignored it- because it was my own

There are many roles for all of us to play in this ending. We can be well-wishers, ill-wishers, sympathizers, vilifiers, comedians, rain clouds, victims-

That last one, again, is important. I have never thought myself a victim, nor my comrades, nor the fans- especially not the fans. For us to adopt that role right now would legitimize everything the tabloids have tried to name us. More importantly, it completely misses the point of the band. And then what have we learned?

With honor, integrity, closure, and on no one’s terms but our own- the door closes

And another opens-

This morning I awoke early. I quickly brushed my teeth, threw on some baggy jeans, and hopped in my car. I gently sped down the 405 through the morning fog to a random parking lot in Palo Verde, where I was to meet a nice gentleman named Norm. He was older, and a self-proclaimed “hippie” but he also had the energy of Sixteen year old in a garage-rock band. The purpose of the meeting was the delivery of an amplifier into my possession. I had recently purchased the amp from him and we both agreed that shipping would jostle the tubes- so he was kind enough to meet me in the middle

A Fender Princeton Amp from 1965, non reverb. A beautiful little device

He showed me the finer points, the speaker, the non-grounded plug, the original label and the chalk mark of the man or woman who built it-

“This amp talks.” he said

I smiled

We got coffee, talked about gold-foil pickups and life. We sat in the car and played each other music we had made. We parted ways, promising to stay in touch, I drove home

When I wanted to start My Chemical Romance, I began by sitting in my parent’s basement, picking up an instrument I had long abandoned for the brush- a guitar. It was a 90’s Fender Mexican Stratocaster, Lake Placid Blue, but in my youth I had decided it was too clean and pretty so I beat it up, exposing some of the red paint underneath the blue- the color it was meant to be. Adding a piece of duct tape on the pick guard, it felt acceptable. I plugged this into a baby Crate Amp with built in distortion and began the first chords of Skylines and Turnstiles

I still have that guitar, and it’s sitting next to The Princeton

He has a voice, and I would like to hear what it has to say

In closing, I want to thank every single fan. I have learned from you, maybe more than you think you’ve learned from me. My only regret is that I am awful with names and bad with goodbyes. But I never forget a face, or a feeling- and that is what I have left from all of you

I feel Love

I feel love for you, for our crew, our team, and for every single human being I have shared the band and stage with-

Ray. Mikey. Frank. Matt. Bob. James. Todd. Cortez. Tucker. Pete. Michael. Jarrod

Since I am bad with goodbyes. I refuse to let this be one. But I will leave you with one last thing-

My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die

It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you

I always knew that, and I think you did too

Because it is not a band-

It is an idea

Love

Gerard

#my chemical romance #mcr #march 22 #gerard way

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intothespideyverses · 6 years

Text

so I had a season 2b/3 predictions post in my drafts that’s been sitting there since the bar mitzvah episode but now that so many Things have happened I feel like I kinda need to redo it. funnily enough I predicted juffy (but it was one-sided), ham having a midlife crisis (although the midlife crisis was linked to ham having a health scare that caused him to try to ‘live every day like its his last’ and not ham being so Done with his family that he just leaves them for india) and the post also mentions tyrus and g*briel coming back (neither have been been confirmed yet but they’re very likely) so! here’s my New and Improved list of Season 3 Predictions/Ideas:

[Disclaimer: I doubt a lot of this will happen bc my mind automatically goes for the most melodramatic scenario. This is still disney channel and they’re too cowardly to go thru with like half of this tbh. also tw for minor abuse mention!]

The G*briel Plot

-g*be comes back and reminds bex of “””why she can never marry anyone””” just as bowie is about to bring up maybe getting back together again. the reason why they shot a wedding scene and the whole green screen thing is bc bex has a nightmare about marrying bowie but then everyone’s heads turn into gabe’s. the following is literally copy and pasted from the first post and tbh I don’t think things will happen this way anymore (I originally thought miranda wasn’t going to be a snake and that her and bowie would get married, leading bex to run back to g*briel so andi could have a father figure in her life again) but it’s still a p interesting plot I think so: g*be’s an abusive asshole. it’s still disney so I doubt they’d show that much but like…he’s very manipulative and he kisses bex really hard all the time in front of everyone and he’s super possessive, etc. he gives bex the silent treatment every time she hangs out with bowie and thus the whole “ask if they’re mad 3 times” thing and on the third time he always yells at her in front of andi. andi notices all of this and tells bowie but bowie thinks she’s just saying that to break bex/gabe up so she can get back with bowie. that is until he witnesses the tomfoolery himself when the couples are on a double date so bowie takes her aside and starts questioning her but bex lies and this whole ugly thing continues on for several episodes until bex and satan have one last fight that goes too far (he says something about andi probably) thats about to get physical and andi strolls in w/ a phone in her hand like 91 fucking 1 bitch. pack your bags ur going home rat! and he’s finally gone and andi tells bex that she doesn’t need another dad if it means bex puts herself thru that kinda torture. and they have another closure ceremony <3

The Divorce Plot

-ham decides to permanently travel the world. he probably comes back for an episode to get cece to sign them divorce papers. this starts a huge plotline that will probably get ignored after 2 episodes lbr here but we finally see cece SNAP bc the way she’s been behaving lately has definitely been leading up to that

-bex is going off the rails at this. she starts slacking at work and the business that caused the rift in her parents’ marriage in the first place is starting to fall apart. the light bill is going unpaid and bex is crumbling. she doesn’t want anyone to know so she makes andi stay at cece’s while she’s living in darkness. bowie visits one day and is like “tf happened to the lights” and bex has a breakdown. she tells him everything and bowie comforts her and offers to help (how? who the hell knows!). bex is so touched that she admits to having feelings for bowie still. bowie turns her down tho bc she’s in a rly emotional state and doesn’t want to take advantage of her.

-andi eventually finds out what’s been going on and tells cece. cece is the last person bex wanted to know about cloud ten struggling, as cloud ten was the only thing keeping cece sane. they eventually have a heart-to-heart and bex/andi encourage cece to get some closure from ham

The Wandi Plot/Death of Jandi

-wandi rises. they resolve to just be friends at the end of season 2 but after a lot of things that I’ll mention later, andi realizes walker was the one for her :’). they paint a mural alongside cloud ten and cece makes some offhand comment about them becoming a painting duo, which they LOVE. they go around the town offering to paint on the walls of local businesses and it’s rly cute. god can you imagine the montages?? andi is in puppy love however we have like 5 episodes of her despairing over if walker even LIKES her anymore after months of just being friends. the roles are reversed and she’s the one doing all these things to get his attention. bc he’s not an oblivious Fool like jonah, walker picks up on this relatively fast and wandi is official!!

-that leads us to what will come of jandi? they perish of course. andi starts getting jealous of jonah hanging out with all these high school girls and naturally there’s more and more miscommunication and jonah whines about her friendship with walker etc etc etc just break up already god. andi eventually realizes that she’s just not feeling it and she puts her foot down to bex that he’s just not right for her!! bc tbh at this point the only reason she still fw jonah is bc of bex’s constant encouragement

The Tyrus Plot

-tyrus happens obviously. if we ever actually get a real apology from tj (which I’m doubting at this point lol) this can happen smoothly. I kinda imagine tj trying to teach cyrus how to swim (swimming is definitely on cyrus’ list of things he can’t do) and the first time it happens tj is SO sure cyrus will be able to do it that he lets him go out on the deep end on his own and uh lmao ya boi almost drowns. buffy’s there and she saves him and she tells tj to stay away from cy bc hello he could’ve McDied and tj, crushed over the fact that cyrus could’ve met a watery grave, actually does what she says. cyrus tells buffy that it was his dumbass decision to go on the deep end tho, and tj didn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do, so buffy relents. cyrus practices by himself and makes it his goal to learn how to swim in order to impress tj. he invites tj to the neighborhood pool one day as a surprise and he just like...cannonballs into the deep end (but he’s STILL not ready) and again almost fucking dies. tj saves him and he starts yelling at him a la titanic (”you’re SO stupid rose why’d ya do that huh???”) and then tj lets it slip that he would’ve mcfreaking lost it if something ever happened to cyrus bc “you mean a lot to me underdog” or w/e and during this whole rant cyrus realizes that he’s floating!! and he’s like yes bitch i did it im swimming! and tj’s so happy for him that he kisses him and cyrus almost drowns again from shock but it’s all good lol. maybe tj avoids him for a bit after the kiss bc cyrus’ reaction seemed like a rejection, but it wasn’t cyrus was honestly just shook to the core.

-cyrus lets tj know that he likes him too and they start dating. they definitely keep it a secret from the ghc for a while, probably until the midseason finale. maybe jonah finds out first and that’s how cyrus comes out to him and tells him that he used to have a crush on him too. jonah is flattered and cool w/ it. anyway at first tj doesn’t like going on rly public dates with cyrus, not bc he’s ashamed of him or anything, but bc he doesn’t want anyone to make fun of cyrus (he can take ugly remarks but he’d hulk out if anyone touched a hair on cyrus’ head). cyrus doesn’t care tho and the one time they go on a date, some kids from tj’s school (he’d be in high school by season 3 right?) start messing with them. tj does in fact hulk out but only when one of the demons says something about cyrus. cyrus hauls tj off the creep and they talk in private about not wanting to live in fear but also not wanting to get harassed everywhere they go. when cy tells andi, she tells them that maybe they’d be safer if they went on double dates with her and walker, and so that’s a thing and its cute

The Juffy Plot

-anyway by the season 3b, both wandi and tyrus are thriving. they all hang out a lot leaving buffy to feel like a fifth wheel. she hides it tho bc does she ever express her feelings? she soon finds out that jonah is feeling the same way, and he thinks andi and cyrus don’t rly want to hang out with him anymore. buffy starts inviting jonah to all their outings and anytime the two couples are on a double date or something, buffy and jonah decide to do something else together on their own. cyrus takes note of this and tries to push buffy to ask jonah out since they’re practically dating already but she refuses bc he’s still andi’s ex and that violates girl code or w/e.

-she goes to bex for advice! but she uses a hypothetical situation instead and changes names. bex, unaware that she’s telling buffy to go after her daughter’s ex, tells her to follow her heart but keep it a secret. meanwhile, jonah is slowly but surely realizing his feelings for buffy, and goes to bowie for advice. bc jonah’s a fool, he doesn’t know buffy has any feelings for him whatsoever, and he asks bowie how he can make her see him That Way. bowie, recycling ideas, tells him to perform a song for her but to do it as if he was just practicing and wanted to see if she thought it was a good song. jonah also doesn’t tell bowie that this is all for buffy lol.

-so jonah invites buffy to the record store to hang out while wandi and tyrus are doing wandi and tyrus things. he plays some song for her (chemistry perhaps?? i still haven’t heard it yet but if its as good as y’all say...) and buffy is all heart eyes!! until she assumes that he wrote that song for another girl. there’s more unnecessary tiptoeing and drama for an episode until jonah notices that there’s something Up with buffy (she started avoiding him) and demands to know what’s going on. she doesn’t feel like talking about fEeLiNgS so instead he challenges her to arm wrestle. if she wins, she has to fess up. buffy’s like “um?? so all I have to do is let you win” but jonah’s like “like you would ever do that lmao”. she almost lets him win but bc he starts taunting she slams his mf arm into the table!! she fesses up and jonah’s like :D bc duh bitch that song was for you this whole time. they keep it a secret bc of bex’s foolish advice but eventually cyrus finds out and tells them to tell andi. andi’s upset at first but she gets over it. the three couples live in harmony

The High School Plot

-we see more of the high school now that jonah (and tj?? unless he has to repeat a grade which is seeming likely actually) are there. jonah, who’s used to being the big man on campus, gets bullied for liking frisbee so much and is shamed into doing a “real sport” instead. he hates it and is miserable. he puts on a good face for the ghc bc he doesn’t want them to know he’s struggling. it eventually all comes crashing down when he has another panic attack (the first one in a while after starting therapy WHICH HE BETTER). also we get a look at his home life, I hc that he’s adopted and has a lot of foster siblings that have a lot of their own issues, so he constantly downplays his own bc he doesn’t want to be a “burden” and be abandoned again

-amber becomes a part of the crew and hopefully maybe just maybe is a lesbian. she starts hanging out with a bunch of sapphic baddies. she and jonah become friends and they help each other with their respective mental illnesses

-through jonah, buffy makes friends with the high school track lesbians <3 they adopt her. one of them tho is Evil and is jealous that some middle schooler is getting all of this attention from the captain so she tries to break buffy’s fucking leg akjhskjdhds I told y’all this was melodramatic

das it. disney you can send my paycheck to [redacted] within 10-12 business days.

#andi mack #disney PLS let me write ONE episode I keep asking and yet I receive nothing in return #tyrus #all i do is work and churn out plots for a tv show i never will be able to work on #long post

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professorpalmarosa · 6 years

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Commander Charon (Frugal Ferryman)

Charon’s one of those characters you either really love or really loathe. I personally love him and was way too excited when I found his journal in the Silph Co. building in HGSS! Honestly, he may be my favorite in the entire franchise...

He’s also the only Team Galactic Commander who (for the most part) is relatively consistent with his personality. His anime version had that delightful laugh and mildly sarcastic attitude I enjoyed in the game. His Special/Adventures and DPA counterparts just cranked that snark up to 11 and went over the top with it. He was a melodramatic ham, yes, but a recognizable melodramatic ham.

He makes me smile. He makes me laugh. He makes me feel a little less weird about my steadily increasing Rotom collection. And, naturally, I have to have him play a major role in my Platinum prequel fan-fiction Pokemon Dawn & Dusk!

Going into this, I knew there were two things I wanted to do when creating Charon’s blend (Frugal Ferryman):

It needed to smell like old people (but in a good way)

It needed to use at least one of the most ridiculously expensive oils in my collection (because Charon thinks he’s worth it).

And yet somehow, the main oil in this synergy ended up being neither of those things. It ended up being my December Oil of the Month from Plant Therapy: something so obscure and rare that I can only order it from them over the phone!

It’s Cubeb Essential Oil: a mildly peppery scent that promotes pain relief, respiratory health, and digestive health. By itself, it kind of smells like soy sauce. I was stumped on how I could use it, but then I did some research to see what it paired with…

…bingo!

To get that “old person” smell, I added CO2 Supercritical Bulgarian Lavender (which made the blend smell just like these half-fossilized bath cubes my grandmother’s hoarded in her bathroom since the late 1980s) and Ylang Ylang III.

To give you some idea, Ylang Ylang is known as “king of the flowers” and has the obnoxiously high price tag to match. It’s great for hair care, is lauded as a powerful aphrodisiac, but typically only succeeds in making me sleepy due to its strong sedative properties.

Earlier, I made note that one of these bath bombs knocked me out in the tub and I woke up a couple of hours later. It was this one. This bomb means business and isn’t for the faint (or weak) of heart.

Together, the blend starts out with an “old lady’s powder room” type of floral…but then the peppery notes of the Cubeb come back to give it a more masculine bite. I really like the way this one smells…but the way it looks is even more dramatic. There’s so much purple in this one that you can’t even see your body in the water!

Now it’s time to talk about the pros and cons of these oils from a safety perspective…

Aromatherapy isn’t just about pretty smells and scented bath water. Essential oils are in such a high concentration that even absorbing them through your skin can leave you with the therapeutic (and potentially toxic) benefits.

If you are allergic to a plant, you are 100% without question going to be super allergic to the essential oil.

There’s also such a thing as contraindications: where some oils may affect you in weird ways if you have a certain medical condition or take certain medications.

The information below is for your safety if you want to attempt to make this blend at home (as a bath bomb, a body spray, or even scented bath salts). And do be sure to wear gloves. Some of these oils have recommended dilution rates as small as 0.4%. You don’t want that to slide on bare skin!

Cubeb

The Javanese Cubeb plant (Piper cubeba) is known by many names, but is cultivated mostly for its fruit and essential oil. The smell is very aromatic (kind of peppery, really pungent, slightly bitter, and it lingers). The aromatherapists say it smells like a cross between Allspice and Black Pepper (both of which you can get as essential oils), but I’m calling bullshit.

It smells like soy sauce. It pairs well with clove, rosemary, and most wood oils.

I’d never heard of this oil until I got it as Plant Therapy’s December Oil of the Month, nor did I have any idea how to use it. A quick Google search told me this is one of the oldest essential oils used by mankind, dating as far back as the 4th Century BC!

Cubeb was used by ancient Greek pharmakons, along with medieval alchemists. Even some modern witchcraft rituals use this fantastic plant--and I’d never freaking heard of it.

Pros

It’s an aphrodisiac! There’s nothing quite like a superconcentrated dried pepper to put you in the mood, I guess. People used to use this thing to treat infertility, impotence, ED, gonorrhea, and other STDs. And apparently, the two things I mixed with the Cubeb for Charon’s blend also have this aphrodisiac property. Ladies~

Feeling bloated? Cubeb’s here to help! Sometimes you really have to fart and it won’t come out. So you bloat, feeling all that painful air trap inside you with no way out. Cubeb Essential Oil has a carminative (gas-relieving) property to help you break wind discretely and safely. However, if chronic flatulence becomes a regular thing for you, contact your healthcare provider.

Feeling a little blocked up? Can’t breathe well? Cubeb’s fantastic for breaking up phlegm, calming down asthma, relieving congestion, and helping you ward off that nasty cough once and for all! For even faster results, pair it with Cajeput Essential Oil, Eucalyptus Globulus Essential Oil, or Camphor Essential Oil.

Flush out toxins! Cubeb has diuretic properties. It stimulates your kidneys to excrete more liquid, which in turn flushes out any toxins in your body. This can include stuff like uric acid, salt, cholesterol, and fat.

Tired joints? Maybe Cubeb can be of assistance! Some Ayurvedic medicine practitioners use Cubeb Essential Oil to alleviate aches and pains from joint and bone problems.

Cons

By itself, it smells like freaking soy sauce. I cannot reiterate that enough. If you diffuse this at work (true story), people are going to assume you have something delicious at your cubicle and won’t stop hounding you for it. That’s really frustrating when you’re trying to run a QA test!

Due to its high sequiterpene content, this is not a cat-safe oil.

Cubeb Essential Oil (when overused) runs the risk of increasing the sensitivity of your stomach and intestines. Don’t use this oil if you’re taking antacids, have acid reflux disease, or take medications to decrease stomach acid.

Some people have reported irritated skin after prolonged use of Cubeb.

Avoid using this oil if you are pregnant, plan to become pregnant, or are nursing.

This is not a child-safe oil. Avoid this essential oil (and bath bomb) for any children under the age of 12.

Never apply this oil neat (undiluted) on your skin or ingest.

Due to Cubeb’s strong diuretic properties, avoid usage if you are suffering from kidney disease.

Lavender

Pros: Lavender is one of your best friends when it comes to restlessness, insomnia, anxiety, and depression. It’s also great for loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, gas, and a fussy stomach. It’s also remarkable for pain relief in cases where you’re troubled by migraines, toothaches, sprains, nerve pain, and joint pain.

Some folks even apply Lavender Essential Oil to the skin for hair loss and pain. It’s also safe to apply this one neat (on your skin) for most people.

Cons:

Lavender has also been shown to slow down the central nervous system when used on the regular. If you plan to go under for surgery or anything else with anesthesia, please avoid using Lavender Essential Oil two weeks ahead of the scheduled procedure.

Lavender should not be used by prepubescent and pubescent boys, as it can warp certain hormonal reactions and greatly increase risk for gynecomastia (male breast growth).

If you are taking a sedative, adding Lavender Essential Oil to the mix may create too much drowsiness. Exercise caution!

Ylang Ylang III

Pros:

Fight insomnia! Ylang Ylang is a natural sleep aid and very effective. However, its sedative properties are so strong that you might want to avoid using Ylang Ylang in the morning or if you intend to drive or operate heavy machinery. Pull this oil out right before bed or at least once you’re in for the night. It’s worked for me!

Repel head lice! Ylang Ylang can be used in a combination spray to repel and even kill head lice. Developing evidence suggests that a homeopathic blend of coconut oil, anise oil, and ylang ylang oil had a 92% effectiveness rate on killing those unwanted creepy crawlies in children’s hair.

Lower high blood pressure!

Increase your sex drive! Ylang Ylang is a natural aphrodisiac and has been used for millennia for that exact purpose. There’s a reason this flower is also known as the King of the Flowers.

Cons:

Ylang Ylang Essential Oil is considered to be universally safe for general use. However, it is not safe to diffuse around a cat.

When I said this thing is a sedative, I freaking meant it. I am a relatively healthy 28-year-old woman and this bath bomb knocked me out in 20 minutes. I stayed asleep for a solid 2 hours. If you plan to use Charon’s bath bomb, make sure you have absolutely no other plans for the rest of the day and leave the bathroom door unlocked. There’s a good chance you’ll pass out in the tub.

#Commander Charon #Charon #Commander Pluto #Pluto #Team Galactic #Galactic Bombs #Skye makes bath bombs #Professor Palmarosa #professorpalmarosa

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callmeblake · 7 years

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@gerardway

25th Mar 2013 from TwitLonger

A Vigil, On Birds and Glass. I woke up this morning still dreaming, or not fully aware of myself just yet. The sun poked through the windows, touching my face, and then a deep sadness overcame me, immediately, bringing me to life and realization- My Chemical Romance had ended. I walked downstairs to do the only thing I could think of to regain composure- I made coffee. As the drip began, in that kind of silence that only happens in the morning, and being the only one awake, I stepped outside my home, leaving the door open behind me. I looked around and began to breathe. Things looked to be about the same- a beautiful day. As I turned to step back into the house I heard sound from within, a chirp and a rustle. And I noticed a small brown bird had flown into the library. Naturally, I panicked. I knew I had to see the bird to safety and I knew I had to retain the order of things in our home, and he very well couldn’t take up residency with us. I chased him (still assuming he was a he) into my office, where I have these very large windows. Just then, and luckily, I heard Lindsey’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and naturally being composed as she is, she grabbed a blanket and stepped into the office. He was impossible to catch, and I began to open the windows, via Lindsey’s direction, only to find out they were screened. The bird began to fly into the glass, over and over and in all different directions. Smack. Smack. Smack! I heard another set of footsteps, Bandit’s, running down the stairs in anticipation of the new day. Her entrance into the situation caused just the right amount of chaos (she was very excited to meet the bird) and we found ourselves chasing the bird into the living room. Knowing that this where it could potentially get sticky, being the high ceilings and the beams to perch on, I opened the front door as Lindsey did her best to encourage our new friend out the door. After some coaxing, flying, chirping, a wrong turn back into the library and a short goodbye to Bandit, he simply hopped out the front door- taking off on the fifth leap. We cheered. I was no longer sad. I didn’t realize it, but I stopped being sad the minute that bird had come into my life, because there was something that needed doing, a small vessel to aid and an order to keep. I closed the door. I decided to write the letter I always knew I would. It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all. I have always felt that the art I have made (alone or with friends) contains all of my intent when executed properly, and thus, no explanation required. It is simply not in my nature to excuse, explain, or justify any action I have taken as a result of thinking it through with a clear head, and in my truth. I had always felt this situation involving the end of this band would be different, in the eventuality it happened. I would be cryptic in its existence, and open upon its death. The clearest actions come from truth, not obligation. And the truth of the matter is that I love every one of you. So, if this finds you well, and sheds some light on anything, or my personal account and feelings on the matter, then it is out of this love, mutual and shared, not duty. Love. This was always my intent. My Chemical Romance: 2001-2013 We were spectacular. Every show I knew this, every show I felt it with or without external confirmation. There were some clunkers, sometimes our secondhand gear broke, sometimes I had no voice- we were still great. It is this belief that made us who we were, but also many other things, all of them vital- And all of the things that made us great were the very things that were going to end us- Fiction. Friction. Creation. Destruction. Opposition. Aggression. Ambition. Heart. Hate. Courage. Spite. Beauty. Desperation. LOVE. Fear. Glamour. Weakness. Hope. Fatalism. That last one is very important. My Chemical Romance had, built within its core, a fail-safe. A doomsday device, should certain events occur or cease occurring, would detonate. I shared knowledge of this “flaw” within weeks of its inception. Personally, I embraced it because, again, it made us perfect. A perfect machine, beautiful, yet self aware of it’s system. Under directive to terminate before it becomes compromised. To protect the idea- at all costs. This probably sounds like something ripped from the pages of a four-color comic book, and that’s the point. No compromise. No surrender. No fucking shit. To me that’s rock and roll. And I believe in rock and roll. I wasn’t shy about who I said this to, not the press, or a fan, or a relative. It’s in the lyrics, it’s in the banter. I often watched the journalists snicker at mention of it, assuming I was being sensational or melodramatic (in their defense I was most likely dressed as an apocalyptic marching-band leader with a tear-away hospital gown and a face covered in expressionist paint, so fair enough). I’m still not sure if the mechanism worked correctly, because it wasn’t a bang but a much slower process. But still the same result, and still for the same reason- When it’s time, we stop. It is important to understand that for us, the opinion on whether or not it is in fact time does not transmit from the audience. Again, this is to protect the idea for the benefit of the audience. Many a band have waited for external confirmation that it is time to hang it up, via ticket sales, chart positioning, boos and bottles of urine- input that holds no sway for us, and often too late when it comes anyway. You should know it in your being, if you listen to the truth inside you. And voice inside became louder than the music. <At this point, I take a break to receive a visit from old friends, all of which were instrumental in some way to the beginnings of the band. We talk about the old days, and we talk about music, we talk about new things. We laugh and drink diet soda. We say goodbyes, I go to bed, to resume my letter in the morning, which is-> Now- There are many reasons My Chemical Romance ended. The triggerman is unimportant, as was always the messengers- but the message, again as always, is the important thing. But to reiterate, this is my account, my reasons and my feelings. And I can assure you there was no divorce, argument, failure, accident, villain, or knife in the back that caused this, again this was no one’s fault, and it had been quietly in the works, whether we knew it or not, long before any sensationalism, scandal, or rumor. There wasn’t even a blaze of glory in a hail of bullets… I am backstage in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It is Saturday, May 19th, 2012 and I am pacing behind a massive black curtain that leads to the stage. I feel the breeze from the ocean find its way around me and I look down at my arms, which are covered in fresh gauze due to a losing battle with a heat rash, which had been a mysterious problem in recent months. I am normally not nervous before a show but I am certainly filled with angry butterflies most of the time. This is different- a strange anxiety jetting through me that I can only imagine is the sixth sense one feels before their last moments alive. My pupils have zeroed-out and I have ceased blinking. My body temperature is icy. We get the cue to hit the stage. The show is… good. Not great, not bad, just good. The first thing I notice take me by surprise is not the enormous amount of people in front of us but off to my left- the shore and the vastness of the ocean. Much more blue than I remembered as a boy. The sky is just as vibrant. I perform, semi-automatically, and something is wrong. I am acting. I never act on stage, even when it appears that I am, even when I’m hamming it up or delivering a soliloquy. Suddenly, I have become highly self-aware, almost as if waking from a dream. I began to move faster, more frantic, reckless- trying to shake it off- but all it began to create was silence. The amps, the cheers, all began to fade. All that what left was the voice inside, and I could hear it clearly. It didn’t have to yell- it whispered, and said to me briefly, plainly, and kindly- what it had to say. What it said is between me and the voice. I ignored it, and the following months were full of suffering for me- I hollowed out, stopped listening to music, never picked up a pencil, started slipping into old habits. All of the vibrancy I used to see became de-saturated. Lost. I used to see art or magic in everything, especially the mundane- the ability was buried under wreckage. Slowly, once I had done enough damage to myself, I began to climb out of the hole. Clean. When I made it out, the only thing left inside was the voice, and for the second time in my life, I no longer ignored it- because it was my own. There are many roles for all of us to play in this ending. We can be well-wishers, ill-wishers, sympathizers, vilifiers, comedians, rain clouds, victims- That last one, again, is important. I have never thought myself a victim, nor my comrades, nor the fans- especially not the fans. For us to adopt that role right now would legitimize everything the tabloids have tried to name us. More importantly, it completely misses the point of the band. And then what have we learned? With honor, integrity, closure, and on no one’s terms but our own- the door closes. And another opens- This morning I awoke early. I quickly brushed my teeth, threw on some baggy jeans, and hopped in my car. I gently sped down the 405 through the morning fog to a random parking lot in Palo Verde, where I was to meet a nice gentleman named Norm. He was older, and a self-proclaimed “hippie” but he also had the energy of Sixteen year old in a garage-rock band. The purpose of the meeting was the delivery of an amplifier into my possession. I had recently purchased the amp from him and we both agreed that shipping would jostle the tubes- so he was kind enough to meet me in the middle. A Fender Princeton Amp from 1965, non reverb. A beautiful little device. He showed me the finer points, the speaker, the non-grounded plug, the original label and the chalk mark of the man or woman who built it- “This amp talks.” he said. I smiled. We got coffee, talked about gold-foil pickups and life. We sat in the car and played each other music we had made. We parted ways, promising to stay in touch, I drove home. When I wanted to start My Chemical Romance, I began by sitting in my parent’s basement, picking up an instrument I had long abandoned for the brush- a guitar. It was a 90’s Fender Mexican Stratocaster, Lake Placid Blue, but in my youth I had decided it was too clean and pretty so I beat it up, exposing some of the red paint underneath the blue- the color it was meant to be. Adding a piece of duct tape on the pick guard, it felt acceptable. I plugged this into a baby Crate Amp with built in distortion and began the first chords of Skylines and Turnstiles. I still have that guitar, and it’s sitting next to The Princeton. He has a voice, and I would like to hear what it has to say. In closing, I want to thank every single fan. I have learned from you, maybe more than you think you’ve learned from me. My only regret is that I am awful with names and bad with goodbyes. But I never forget a face, or a feeling- and that is what I have left from all of you. I feel Love. I feel love for you, for our crew, our team, and for every single human being I have shared the band and stage with- Ray. Mikey. Frank. Matt. Bob. James. Todd. Cortez. Tucker. Pete. Michael. Jarrod. Since I am bad with goodbyes. I refuse to let this be one. But I will leave you with one last thing- My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die. It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you. I always knew that, and I think you did too. Because it is not a band- it is an idea. Love, Gerard

#gerard way #march 22nd #I didn't realise this was three days later until just now #but I was dealing with some other things of my own at this time

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joshlerisvvreal-blog · 7 years

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I’m sorry for bringing this back into your life

A note from Gerard Way about My Chemical Romance's breakup:

It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all. I have always felt that the art I have made (alone or with friends) contains all of my intent when executed properly, and thus, no explanation required. It is simply not in my nature to excuse, explain, or justify any action I have taken as a result of thinking it through with a clear head, and in my truth. I had always felt this situation involving the end of this band would be different, in the eventuality it happened. I would be cryptic in its existence, and open upon its death.

The clearest actions come from truth, not obligation. And the truth of the matter is that I love every one of you. So, if this finds you well, and sheds some light on anything, or my personal account and feelings on the matter, then it is out of this love, mutual and shared, not duty. Love. This was always my intent.

My Chemical Romance: 2001-2013

We were spectacular. Every show I knew this, every show I felt it with or without external confirmation. There were some clunkers, sometimes our secondhand gear broke, sometimes I had no voice- we were still great. It is this belief that made us who we were, but also many other things, all of them vital- And all of the things that made us great were the very things that were going to end us-

Fiction. Friction. Creation. Destruction. Opposition. Aggression. Ambition. Heart. Hate. Courage. Spite. Beauty. Desperation. LOVE. Fear. Glamour. Weakness. Hope.

Fatalism.

That last one is very important. My Chemical Romance had, built within its core, a fail-safe. A doomsday device, should certain events occur or cease occurring, would detonate. I shared knowledge of this “flaw” within weeks of its inception. Personally, I embraced it because, again, it made us perfect. A perfect machine, beautiful, yet self aware of it’s system. Under directive to terminate before it becomes compromised. To protect the idea- at all costs. This probably sounds like something ripped from the pages of a four-color comic book, and that’s the point. No compromise. No surrender. No fucking shit.

To me that’s rock and roll. And I believe in rock and roll.

When it’s time, we stop.

You should know it in your being, if you listen to the truth inside you. And voice inside became louder than the music.

Now- There are many reasons My Chemical Romance ended. The triggerman is unimportant, as was always the messengers- but the message, again as always, is the important thing. But to reiterate, this is my account, my reasons and my feelings. And I can assure you there was no divorce, argument, failure, accident, villain, or knife in the back that caused this, again this was no one’s fault, and it had been quietly in the works, whether we knew it or not, long before any sensationalism, scandal, or rumor.

There wasn’t even a blaze of glory in a hail of bullets…

The show is… good. Not great, not bad, just good. The first thing I notice take me by surprise is not the enormous amount of people in front of us but off to my left- the shore and the vastness of the ocean. Much more blue than I remembered as a boy. The sky is just as vibrant. I perform, semi-automatically, and something is wrong. I am acting. I never act on stage, even when it appears that I am, even when I’m hamming it up or delivering a soliloquy. Suddenly, I have become highly self-aware, almost as if waking from a dream. I began to move faster, more frantic, reckless- trying to shake it off- but all it began to create was silence. The amps, the cheers, all began to fade.

All that what left was the voice inside, and I could hear it clearly. It didn’t have to yell- it whispered, and said to me briefly, plainly, and kindly- what it had to say.

What it said is between me and the voice.

There are many roles for all of us to play in this ending. We can be well-wishers, ill-wishers, sympathizers, vilifiers, comedians, rain clouds, victims-

With honor, integrity, closure, and on no one’s terms but our own- the door closes.

And another opens-

He showed me the finer points, the speaker, the non-grounded plug, the original label and the chalk mark of the man or woman who built it-

“This amp talks.” he said. I smiled. We got coffee, talked about gold-foil pickups and life. We sat in the car and played each other music we had made. We parted ways, promising to stay in touch, I drove home.

I still have that guitar, and it’s sitting next to The Princeton. He has a voice, and I would like to hear what it has to say.

I feel love for you, for our crew, our team, and for every single human being I have shared the band and stage with-

Ray. Mikey. Frank. Matt. Bob. James. Todd. Cortez. Tucker. Pete. Michael. Jarrod.

Since I am bad with goodbyes. I refuse to let this be one. But I will leave you with one last thing-

My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die. It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you. I always knew that, and I think you did too.

Because it is not a band- it is an idea.

Love, Gerard

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hotnews69 · 6 years

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She was the self-anointed tragedy queen of the Indian marquee, what with her roles mirroring her life and vice-versa. Meena was born as Mahjabeen Bano in 1932 to a family of poor theatre artistes. She was made to act as a child artiste and was the sole earner for her family from the age of six. Her first film was Vijay Bhatt’s Leatherface (1939). It was Bhatt again who gave her Baiju Bawra (1952), the film which catapulted her into the limelight. She became the first recipient of the Filmfare Award for Best Actress for her performance. She’s popularly known as the ‘tragedy queen’ after playing a suffering woman in films like Parineeta (1953), Daera (1953), Ek Hi Raasta (1956), Sharda (1957), Dil Apna Aur Preet Parayi (1960), Dil Ek Mandir (1963) and Kaajal (1965). She created history during this period by being the only nominee for the Filmfare Award in 1962, for her roles in Aarti, Main Chup Rahungi and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. She won the award for Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. Despite the tragedy queen tag, she was also noted for light-hearted comedic roles in films like Azaad (1955), Miss Mary (1957), Shararat (1959) and Kohinoor (1960). Her personal life was fraught with heartburn. She married director Kamaal Amrohi, her senior by 15 years in 1952 when she was just 20. The initial awe she felt towards the intellectual Amrohi soon faded and the couple started having problems. It’s said that Amrohi couldn’t stand his wife’s rising popularity and started mistreating her. The differences led to separation in 1960 and finally to divorce in 1964. The couple did reconcile to finish Pakeezah (1972) (which was started way back in 1956) but the relationship had lost its charm and they separated again. The actress died amidst penury due to complications arising from liver cirrhosis in 1972. Filmfare awards 1954 Filmfare Best Actress Award - Baiju Bawra 1955 Filmfare Best Actress Award - Parineeta 1963 Filmfare Best Actress Award - Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam 1966 Filmfare Best Actress Award - Kaajal

With Raj Kapoor in Sharda Sharda (1957) This is one of those films where the filmmakers were really ahead of their time. Meena Kumari excelled as Raj Kapoor’s lover forced by circumstances to marry his father (no kidding!). How she reforms the heartbroken and alcoholic stepson might seem a bit melodramatic but is saved from being a farce by forceful acting by both Meena and Raj. Baiju Bawra (1952) Meena Kumari started the martyred woman journey with this musical bonanza of a movie. She was so much in love with Baiju that she even separated from him so that the pain could elevate his music. That’s taking the ‘pain, no gain’ maxim to its limits. A young Meena Kumari played the perfect foil to the debonair Bharat Bhushan and won plaudits for her performance. Parineeta (1953) Move over, Vidya Balan. Meena Kumari was the original Parineeta in the Bimal Roy classic and won her second Filmfare Award for her power packed performance. Her body language, her hurt and anguish when judged wrongly by her fiancée (Ashok Kumar) and the confrontational scenes between the two lead actors formed the crux of the film.

Ek Hi Raasta (1956) Made by the progressive director BR Chopra, the film dealt with the sensitive issue of widow-remarriage, quite a bold theme at the time. The complications that arise when Meena goes into a new relationship with Ashok Kumar are thoughtfully portrayed. The actress’ interactive scenes with her young son (played by Daisy Irani) are a delight.

Miss Mary (1957) People who perceive that Meena Kumari is just a tragedienne will do a rethink when they see Miss Mary. She was paired opposite Rekha’s father Gemini Ganesan and Kishore Kumar also played an important role in the film. It centered around the lost-child-found-again formula and it’s good to see Meena doing a happy-go-lucky role. Her comic timing is impeccable.

Dil Apna Aur Preet Parayi (1960) Doctor-nurse romance anybody? This film was straight out of some Mills and Boon novelette. Meena Kumari played a nurse who suffers unrequited love. Raaj Kumar plays a hard working doctor who marries Nadira for the love of money. And Nadira plays a scorned wife who makes everyone’s life a merry hell. It’s what we call a 12 hanky film. Ajeeb daasatan hai yeh from the film still rules the air waves. Main Chup Rahungi (1962) It’s another of those unwed mother dramas. Sunil Dutt plays her paramour who later suspects her of being a woman of loose character. How the misconception is cleared and the lovers reunite and the child gets a fresh pair of parents forms the crux of this overemotional film.

Kohinoor (1960) It’s a regular Errol Flynn swashbuckler set in India. Dilip Kumar was advised to play light-hearted roles by Harley Street shrinks and Kohinoor was the answer. Both Meena and Dilip had a glad time letting their hair down and it shows. The film confirmed that the tragedy queen and king can act better than anybody else against the type too.

Aarti (1962) If Dil Apna Aur Preet Parayi was about a scorned wife raising hell, then Aarti is about a jilted lover creating misery for his ex. Ashok Kumar brought his villainous side to the fore and Pradeep Kumar played the suffering husband. Meena Kumari played the emotional punching bag which both men abused with much gusto. It’s a weepy to end all weepies.

Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962) This film came close to mimic Meena Kumari’s real-life trauma. The attraction to younger men, the apathy of the husband, rampant alcoholism – you couldn’t decide where Choti Bahu ended and Meena Kumari began. It gives one goosebumps every time one watches a rerun on TV. It’s considered her best performance till date. She won a well-deserved Filmfare Award for it.

Phool Aur Patthar (1966) He removed his shirt and a nation sighed. Dharmendra’s licence as a sex-symbol got stamped anew in the scene where we think we might get to see some hanky-panky between Meena and him. There were rumours that there was real-life romance going on between the actors during the making of the film. Dil Ek Mandir (1963) Meena Kumari seems to revel in doctor dramas. Here, Rajendra Kumar plays a conscience-stricken doctor who is in a dilemma of whether or not to save the life of his ex-flame’s husband. Watch the scene where Raaj Kumar wants to reenact the suhagraat on his hospital bed. Meena Kumari’s face is a canvass of emotions. The film also has an interesting ham heart attack scene by Rajendra Kumar, but that’s another story. Kaajal (1965) After Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, Meena Kumari again falls prey to a debauched husband. This is mostly a reprise of the earlier film and this time the platonic relationship with a younger man more pronounced in the sense that Dharmendra plays her raakhi brother. Choo lene do naazuk hothon ko, where Raaj Kumar extols the virtues of alcohol to his horror-struck wife remains glued to the memory. She won a Filmfare Best Actress Award for her performance. Mere Apne (1971) Meena Kumari plays an old woman who is shunned by her family. She becomes a foster-mother of sorts to two factions of warring local youths. Her death makes them realise that violence doesn’t pay. Meena wasn’t yet 40 when she did the film but yet shone as s septuagenarian. She came up with a strong portrayal of an old woman caught between two street gangs of frustrated, unemployed youth, whose killing finally makes them realise the futility of violence in Gulzar's directorial debut.

Pakeezah (1972) Pakeezah started out way back in 1956. Then differences emerged between Kamal Amrohi and wife Meena. Even then, after all those years, the magic of the story didn’t fade. Everyone loves a golden-hearted courtesan, so you can only nod in sympathy when Raaj Kumar fell for her. And claps again when the besotted lover wants to marry her. The great music by Ghulam Mohammed is still remembered today. And so is the line, ‘Aapke paon dekhe. Bahut haseen hain. Inhe zameen par nahin utariyega. Maile ho jaayenge.’ Sigh! They don’t make such films any more. from filmfares https://ift.tt/2vyf8L1

#Blogger

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kidsviral-blog · 6 years

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The Strange, Isolated Life Of A Tuberculosis Patient In The 21st Century

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-strange-isolated-life-of-a-tuberculosis-patient-in-the-21st-century/

The Strange, Isolated Life Of A Tuberculosis Patient In The 21st Century

While volunteering for the Peace Corps in Ukraine in 2010, I contracted a severe version of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Two years of painful, isolating treatment taught me the vital role social media may play in finally eradicating this disease.

One of the loneliest nights of my life was when I masturbated for an Australian stranger on the only webcam chat site that would load on the shitty hospital Wi-Fi. He didn’t want to show his face on camera, and I didn’t care whether it was because he was famous, married, or ugly. The internet was so slow that the sound stalled, so the dirty talk had to be typed.

It was a terse, space-economizing raunch, pounded out letter by letter with his left index finger, since his dominant hand was busy. I WANT TO VERB YOUR NOUN. But the artlessness was a relief. The more work it took to type, the less likely he’d waste time asking about my hospital bed and IV rack. If I didn’t mind him being headless and talking like a filthy grown-up “see spot run,” couldn’t he handle a naked stranger in a tuberculosis sanatorium?

Nor did he mention the armband, which hid the nozzle nurses screwed to dripping sacks of drugs during infusions. Three times a week, amikacin seeped down the skinny 2-foot-long tube inside and up my arm, leading behind my collarbone to splash into a big fat artery over my heart.

Just please don’t fucking ask, I thought. It was exhausting to explain. Screw this guy. Wouldn’t it be weirder if he had inferred a medical emergency, but resolved not to let it ruin his hard-on? Do virtual strangers without heads even have cognition? What the hell was wrong with this guy’s face, anyway?

Who cares? I had been in that room in Denver for almost a month. I was days away from lung surgery to remove my upper right lobe, where the bulk of the disease was headquartered. This was the last goddamned time I’d ever get to show my tits to a stranger without any scars. And it was the skinniest I’d ever been.

I had contracted extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB (a severe version of multidrug-resistant, or MDR tuberculosis), while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. The National Jewish Health Center is no longer a sanatorium, but it is still one of the country’s top TB research facilities, staffed by worldwide mycobacteria experts and equipped with properly ventilated rooms for the infrequent consumptives who turn up there.

When I was admitted to the hospital, the state of Colorado dispatched a guy to my hospital room to read me my legal quarantine order. I’d be in isolation for however long I was contagious.

During my stay, I started a two-year course of harsh antibiotics, including an IV drip. I had two surgeries, which flanked a blood transfusion and peskily recollapsing lung. I lost 12 pounds and half my blood, which have been replaced, and the upper lobe of my right lung, which hasn’t. I wish I could be more inspiring. But I didn’t use that time to write a novel, learn yoga, or even plow through a beach read. Falling into a trance and getting off strangers was all I felt capable of.

Objectifying? Sure. So is being sick.

Such isolation — both physical and emotional — takes a serious toll on TB patients. From the 18th century glory days up to the modern rise of MDR, tuberculosis went from being a relatively universal human experience to being a profoundly lonely one. Isolation and stigma make long treatments even harder to endure and inhibit public consciousness that could lead to more meaningful progress. But we may be approaching a new historical moment: Social media makes it easier than ever for patients to find and support one another. These connections can improve patient morale and treatment outcomes and ultimately raise the profile of MDR-TB in global health policy.

Because I was never as alone as I thought: Five thousand miles away in Siberia, a woman my age named Ksenia Shchenina was also suffering. So are patients in dozens of other countries, and more and more of them are beginning to use the internet to combat the solitude that has long not only defined the disease and its treatment, but kept it from being eradicated for good.

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Most people don’t spend much time thinking about tuberculosis. If pressed, they might make a few basic generalizations. It was a very serious disease in the olden days. It killed your great-great-grandfather, all of the Brontës, and Nicole Kidman’s character in Moulin Rouge. But then it was cured. It doesn’t exist anymore. So we’ll all just have to get Ewan McGregor’s attention some other way and die of something else.

Tuberculosis has been on the scene since ancient times, but it only reached menace status in filthy, urbanizing mid-17th century Europe. It went on to dominate the continent’s “cause of death” list for over two centuries. This makes sense, if you know how germs work. Poverty and bad sanitation — e.g., the Industrial Revolution’s toxic work conditions and shantytowns — made toppling immune systems a cinch. Before germ theory caught on, some people even saw TB as a sort of moral retribution for the sins of modernity.

Even the disease’s classic name — consumption — implied a physical and spiritual connection. It consumed you; it devoured you from within. Before the scientific consensus on how an infectious disease was transmitted, many people assumed a person could be predisposed to consumption. (They caught on to genetics before they unraveled epidemiology.) An entire family of consumptives probably meant they were ill because they had all inherited the proper preconditions for the illness — not because they lived together and coughed fatal microbes into one another’s food. Similarly, researchers couldn’t help but notice that consumption disproportionately seized writers and artists, whose lifestyle was practically synonymous with urban poverty. But when it was still assumed that the disease grew from within, many scientists searched for a link between consumption and genius. This is the kind of factoid that makes you feel smug when modern doctors are really, really surprised that you got this.

The jig was up in 1882. A German bacteriologist named Robert Koch zeroed in on the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterial cause of consumption. It spread from person to person by air.

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Robert Koch Ann Ronan Pictures / Getty Images

Koch’s early attempts to develop a vaccine failed, but his efforts did yield a valuable diagnostic tool: the tuberculin skin test. It’s a shot that scans for TB antibodies. If you’ve been exposed to the disease, the injection site on your forearm will flare up into a BRIGHT RED SKIN MOUNTAIN. The test is still part of routine checkups today among grade-schoolers, teachers, cops, and — as I would learn — Peace Corps volunteers.

There is a photo of me on Facebook from early 2010, lodged between a handful of party shots with fellow volunteers. We had traveled to Kiev from across Ukraine to make a weekend out of our mid-service medical checkups. I’m 23, hamming it up in melodramatic distress, and twisting my left elbow up over my head to show off the swollen red splotch on my forearm.

A positive skin test usually doesn’t mean you have TB — less than than 10% of people with positive skin tests ever develop an active case, because healthy immune systems can usually defeat the bacterial intruder. Several volunteers each year end up with the telltale red blotch; it was really nothing to worry about. We’d need a follow-up X-ray, but an active case was highly unlikely. So I cracked a few jokes and went back to pounding flat Chernigivske beers with my friends.

I had been in Ukraine since September 2008, after studying Russian in college. I volunteered at a school in an eastern mining town called Antratsyt. The town borrows its name from anthracite coal. The region is flat, but you can see hills in the distance — they’re “slag heaps,” or piles of debris extracted from mines. The town only runs water for a few hours a day to protect the mines from mudslides or collapse. But life wasn’t as bleak as it sounds. I had students who were so excited to practice their English that they would chat with me after school, perched in a row on the edge of a Soviet-era fountain long-since bone-dry. I struck up friendships with their parents and my fellow teachers. I toasted my colleagues over champagne and chocolate on Ukrainian holidays. One time, I even gave a thickly accented speech on international education at a school assembly that ended up on the TV news. I was happy.

My follow-up X-ray was two weeks later, in Kiev. Taking yet another 17-hour train trip felt like an epic hassle. Is there a word that means the opposite of hypochondriac? There should be, because that’s what I am. In hindsight, of course I had symptoms – I just wrote them off to other things. I had a bad cough, because I was a smoker at the time. I’d lost weight, because there was no American junk food to lose my will power around. I was run-down and sluggish, because it was the Ukrainian winter!

I got a ride with Dr. Sasha, one of the Peace Corps’ Ukrainian staffers, to my screening at a tuberculosis dispensary — tubdispensar — on the edge of the city. He spoke the sort of English that made me self-conscious about my Russian. He carried my Peace Corps medical history file on his lap. The most dramatic thing in it was an allergy to mangoes. (Not exactly a significant handicap in Ukraine.)

I was X-rayed in a machine that looked like an iron colossus. In the waiting room, I tried to distract myself with a biography of John Adams. (His son, John Quincy, spent years in the Russian Empire as Ambassador and managed to stay consumption-free.) Soviet-era medical facilities are much more dimly lit than their Walmart-bright American counterparts. To see the page, I had to squint.

The head TB doctor finally called me into the office. He explained the X-ray results and prognosis to Dr. Sasha, who relayed them in English to me. But when Dr. Sasha asked a follow-up question, they flipped back to Russian and cut me out of the triangle. My Russian was good – but not “unfamiliar medical jargon” good. But this wasn’t a conversation I could stand to be excluded from. I was on the brink of a tantrum.

“Goddamn it!” I wanted to shriek at the TB doc. “Don’t say it in his Russian. Say it in mine.”

My face must have looked like a cartoon teakettle. So he slowed down and turned toward the image pinned to the light board.

“Classic pulmonary TB,” he said to me. (Words like pulmonary and tuberculosis are cognates.) “It’s strange that it advanced so quickly. Especially for a healthy young girl.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I heard you guys muttering about bronchitis or pneumonia before. Could it be one of those?”

“No. We assumed it could have been at first, but this is a clear case. See, on an X-ray, healthy lungs should look solid black. See the contrast down by the lower ribs? But now look up on the right. See the [blahblahblah]? The [blahblahblah] is the tuberculosis.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t get that word. What part is the tuberculosis?”

He sighed. It would have been easier to let Dr. Sasha translate. Now he had to dumb down his lexicon for a rattled American.

“Up there. Upper right. Well, left on here. That white spot? The part that looks like a ghost.”

That night, I started treatment in a studio apartment the Peace Corps rented for me in Kiev. My prognosis was good. For two weeks, I took pills, got X-rayed, and hocked up sputum — a polite word for loogies — into sterile plastic cups for lab work. One set stayed in Ukraine; the other was shipped according to special biohazard protocol to an American facility to better coordinate my care at home.

Eight weeks later, just as life was settling down back in Chicago, I was surprised to find an ominous number of missed calls on my phone: from the diagnostic lab, my mom, my American pulmonologist, my mom, the Cook County Department of Public Health, my mom, my mom, the Cook County Department of Public Health Epidemiology Unit, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom.

Those loogies had yielded bad news. I had XDR-TB. The bad kind.

Effective immediately, I was placed under an isolation order. I was told to stay home whenever possible — I could go outside sparingly, but any other indoor space was off-limits until I was noninfectious. A few months, at least. The police could get involved if I didn’t comply.

A month into my quarantine, my Chicago doctors were stumped. They’d rarely seen anything like this.

So I set off on a journey not unlike those taken by consumptives a century before. I left my bustling, industrial Midwestern city and headed west, to the National Jewish Health Center in Denver.

It was the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives back then. In 1899, the brand-new philanthropic institution was brimming with needy patients. In 2010, I was the only one.

I told almost no one where I was going. I had already been avoiding friends who tried to contact me. It is exhausting to have your life flipped around by something people know nothing about. You get so damn sick of telling the story. Weird caveats demand exposition. Here is what I have. Here is why it’s bad. Here is why I had to evacuate Ukraine and leave the Peace Corps early. Here is why I can’t be in public or see anyone for the foreseeable future. Here is why I am going to some hospital in Denver for a long time. Here is why they chopped off a big chunk of my lung. Here is why I have this IV armband thing for nine months. Here is why I puke a lot. Here is why food tastes all wrong. Here is why my hearing got warped. Here is why I can’t feel my toes. Here is why I am not supposed to drink any alcohol. Here is why I’m still going to anyway.

Since I was on the no-fly list, we drove the 15 hours by car. I wore a mask the whole time so I wouldn’t infect my parents.

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National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives c. 1920

Basic infection control, like isolating the sick and using protective gear to lower transmission risk, may seem primitive compared with modern medicine. But the truth is, public health measures like quarantine and mouth covering did more to eradicate tuberculosis than drugs did. We never did figure out a great way to cure TB; we just got better at preventing it. That is, until it caught up with us.

After Dr. Koch’s splashy 1882 debut of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the medical community was certain a surefire solution was close behind. But they were disappointed. No cure came.

Forty years later, a new vaccine — Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, or BCG — entered human testing. But BCG was never that good. Most researchers believe that adults are just as likely to wind up with TB whether they get BCG or not. It also suffered a major PR setback as the center of one of the worst vaccination disasters in history. In 1930, 73 babies died of tuberculosis meningitis after being injected with BCG in Lubeck, Germany. The vaccines had been contaminated after getting mixed up with a virulent live TB strain back at the lab. (Life hack: Always be sure your doctor has a label maker.)

It wasn’t until 1943 that a team at Rutgers University pinpointed streptomycin, the world’s first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. TB’s staggering cultural legacy made the discovery a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize, but streptomycin was nonetheless terribly flawed. It was toxic, and patients quickly developed antibodies that resisted the drug. The only solution was to scrape around for more options and blitzkrieg every case of TB with several so-so drugs at once. The first-line regimen has hardly been tweaked in nearly 50 years. It was never a secret that such a long and tedious course of antibiotics would, like a Shakespearean hero, engineer its own demise.

But that hardly seemed to matter. By the time streptomycin ‘n’ friends showed up, barely anyone even needed them. Throughout the 20th century, people gradually stopped getting TB in the first place. We got healthier, cleaner, and smarter. We could contain disease and catch it early. It nearly disappeared.

Then, in the early 1990s, it bounced back. Two global crises — the rise of HIV/AIDS and the fall of the Soviet Union — helped resurrect the scourge of the 19th century. The World Health Organization declared a worldwide TB emergency in 1993. (It just goes to show: Don’t count your eradicated diseases before they hatch.)

AIDS was even harder on human bodies than the Industrial Revolution had been, and millions of centuries-won immune systems were suddenly wide open to infection anew. TB remains the leading cause of death among AIDS patients.

The collapse of the USSR spread TB in even more complicated ways. The year 1991 saw the traumatic birth of 15 brand-new post-Soviet republics. Each of these new countries was in economic and social turmoil. They were broke. They had no central government or public health system. Before their independence, everything had more or less filtered through Moscow. In some places, there were few to no supplies or institutional infrastructure, let alone money for health care workers. Alcoholism and malnourishment soared. People lost their savings. Rampant crime stuffed the prisons — notorious hotbeds of TB — to well over capacity. Released inmates carted these germs back to their communities. By the time the 15 new countries had smoothed things out, they already had a new old epidemic to battle.

Even as the immediate post-Soviet crisis improved, other factors played into treatment interruption and new infections. These have been beautifully documented by experts like Dr. Lee Reichman in his 2001 book Timebomb and are easily rattled off by every post-Soviet MDR expert I’ve come across. Treatment in prisons has been badly underfunded, so for years people didn’t get the meds they needed. There is often subpar follow-up for ill prisoners after they’re released. Infected migratory workers are tough to treat and track. The Soviet-era mentality of medical specialization has made the region slow to coordinate HIV and TB care. Both illnesses are also correlated with substance abuse, and addicts often turn out to be less-than-diligent patients. In sum, the long, hard treatment places economic, social, and physical strain on patients.

Antibiotic treatment is an all-or-nothing game. Patients need to take every dose by the book, or germs acquire resistance. Getting it done right depends on stupendous public health programs, not to mention stupendous patients. Once a strain does acquire resistance, it can’t be undone — and the stronger, harder-to-treat germ is passed on to others, like me. If the best drugs don’t work, doctors are forced to use drugs that are even harder on the body. All of these factors collude to paint a grim reality. In former Soviet countries, only around 60% of patients who begin tuberculosis treatment ever successfully finish it. The rest of them flee, slip through the cracks, fail to respond to treatment, or die before they are cured.

So it is no surprise that the region has the highest rates of MDR-TB in the world — as many as 30% of all newly detected cases are impervious to first-line drugs. (The global average is reportedly less than 5%, but statistics are widely believed to be low, especially in resource-poor countries. In the U.S., there were fewer than 100 cases of MDR in 2013.) Even in optimal conditions, the difference between a case of run-of-the-mill TB and MDR can be the difference between a moderate inconvenience and a life-threatening catastrophe. A standard case can be cured for less than $100 with a daily dose of four different drugs for six to nine months. My treatment cost taxpayers seven figures and lasted well over two years.

On paper, many of these problems have already been fixed. A decade ago, Tracy Kidder’s best-seller Mountains Beyond Mountains lauded the achievements of Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health and other global health organizations in revolutionizing worldwide MDR-TB care. The region’s TB programs are now relatively well-organized and padded with funding from global health mammoths like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There are detailed and standardized treatment guidelines. TB drugs are fully subsidized. So why are so many patients still failing their treatments?

Without an effective vaccine or better drugs, efforts to curb MDR-TB face a serious paradox. As a strain becomes more resistant, it becomes simultaneously more painful and more urgent to treat it. Many countries have responded by adopting stringent patient monitoring policies, which improve cure rates but are nonetheless no small imposition in patients’ lives. Public safety overrides patient agency, which is a tough pill for victims to swallow (and they’ve already got plenty of those to worry about).

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A patient receives the TB vaccine in 1949 Cornell Capa / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

During my treatment, I felt sick for two years. Nausea became my baseline. Sometimes the drugs make you puke, or give you the kind of diarrhea that makes you need a nap. One screws with your nervous system, and I permanently lost most of the feeling in my feet. I’ve tracked blood across kitchen floors because I can’t tell if I’ve stepped on shattered glass.

And I had it lucky. I had no comorbidities like HIV or diabetes, which make everything even worse. Being on amikacin cost me some low-frequency hearing, but it has caused deafness in others. And I got to take it by IV drip, instead of the painful upper-thigh injections that leave some patients too sore to sit up. And while cycloserine — a drug nicknamed “psychoserine” for its notorious mental and behavioral effects — makes some patients hallucinate and scream, I got away with confusion. I had trouble with reading, organization, and paperwork. It’s an especially tough break if you’re dealing with a workers’ comp claim for a medical disaster. I couldn’t keep it all straight, and walloped my credit.

Even worse, most patients in former Soviet countries and across the world get practically no social support during the crisis. They get little help with side effects, and suffer serious social and economic strain. Many of them have no way to make up for lost wages over the course of their treatments. Some even face lasting discrimination. In 2011, an undercover Ukrainian journalist wrote an exposé about being iced out by hiring managers after casually mentioning a past bout of TB.

The reason why boils down to one key factor: Tuberculosis remains highly stigmatized throughout the world. In the former Soviet Union, people associate it with painful memories of the lawless, chaotic ‘90s. Having it means you’re a crook, a junkie, a drunk, a bum, or a sewer rat.

Stigma makes epidemics worse — it gives people a reason not to be seen walking into a clearly labeled TB clinic to see a doctor when they should. Loneliness and despair can convince someone that health doesn’t matter, so why take these pills? And stigma shuts people up, so they’ll never organize, influence funding, or change minds about TB. Stigma means more stigma.

When patients are silenced and isolated from one another and their communities, it stymies progress against the disease. The WHO estimates more than a $1.3 billion worldwide funding gap in TB research and development, and the number threatens to grow. Even though investment in new drug research is one obvious way to improve treatment, AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Pfizer recently pulled a combined $50 million out of the fight. According to an email from the Treatment Action Group, a TB and HIV advocacy nonprofit, this steep loss amounts to a full third of private-sector TB investment since 2011.

Erasing stigma, combating TB’s chronic underfunding, and promoting new research and drug development are incredibly lofty goals. But similar barriers have been conquered before in diseases like breast cancer and HIV/AIDS, where passionate activism made incredible inroads in raising awareness and influencing policy. If former and current TB patients joined together, could they build the first real advocacy movement centered on patients?

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

Tuberculosis patients haven’t always felt so alone.

After leaving Denver, I read The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s sprawling 1924 classic novel about a Swiss sanatorium. I forced myself to finish it, but it’s the most boring book I’ve ever read. It’s the story of a total wiener named Hans Castorp who goes on a trip to hang out in the Alps and visit his TB-stricken cousin. Then Hans ends up sticking around and living there for seven years even though he doesn’t really have tuberculosis, just so he can do stupid crap like spend 70 pages talking about the nature of consciousness.

Ugh, I’m still so mad at him. But maybe it’s because I’m a tiny bit jealous. So what if he’s a fake person with fake tuberculosis? It would have been so nice to have someone to be sick with.

Sanatoriums, like National Jewish and the one atop The Magic Mountain, bridged the gap between the mid-19th century and the 1940s discovery of streptomycin. With no cure in sight, the ill had long made do with an iffy array of treatment options. Some doctors stuffed people’s windpipes with vacuum contraptions to simulate lazy lung capillaries. Cottage industries of miracle cures gorged on ad space in periodicals, sandwiched among serial installments of now beloved classics. (If you liked Great Expectations, you’ll love Daffy & Son’s Natural Miracle Multi-Purpose Health Elixir! Available wherever fancy wool top hats and snuff boxes are sold!!!) But the White Plague seemed to beat them all.

Tuberculosis did have one semi-formidable opponent, though — one hope that physicians agreed on. It wasn’t a cure; it wasn’t a given. The idea came from an 1840 pamphlet written by Dr. George Bodington, a British family doctor who covered a large area by making his house calls on horseback. His essay was based on a simple observation: that consumptives in wide-open spaces fared better than those packed tightly in cities.

But Dr. Bodington drew a further conclusion: It must have been the country air that healed them. Their bodies need pure, unsoiled air, shared with as few people as possible. Depending on the severity of their case, they might need months or years of it. In the disease’s final stages, Mycobacterium tuberculosis finally chews through the lung tissue, resulting in the bloody cough that famously beckoned death (but, curiously, couldn’t stop the heroines of Les Misérables, La Bohème, and La Traviata from singing). If combated early with the right dose of air, the process could drag to a halt.

And where could patients find such magic air? The best stuff was nippy, clean, and thin. Way up high, where no one can spoil it with industrial factory smog. And so, for the next 100 years, sick city-dwellers left their crowded hubs by the thousands and set off for specialized tuberculosis hospitals in the mountains. These sanatoriums treated patients with Dr. Bodington’s “rest cure” — medical observation, a generous binge diet, and hours a day in rows of canopied outdoor beds. In The Magic Mountain, characters traveled to Switzerland from places like England, Italy, and Poland. For months or years at a time, consumptives at sanatoriums lived and breathed together far away from real life, in their own little communities up in the sky.

Denver — the Mile High City, full of its own magic mountains — thus became America’s magnet for the dying who wanted to live. In the late 19th century, nearly a third of Colorado’s population suffered from tuberculosis, after journeying west for the air that might save them. At the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives, they slept two by two, tucked into each of its dozens of bunk beds.

By the time I showed up, the bunk beds were long gone. There were no pretty canopies or breezy napping patios. And all that oh-so-edifying “virgin air” stuff? Turned out to be bunk. The bump in survival rates among patients who spent all that time outdoors wasn’t because of the air; it was the sun. Vitamin D is good for the immune system. They could have gotten the same effect on the roof of a tenement house. Or by taking sunshine stuffed into Vitamin D pills, like I did, supplemented by the UV light in my hospital room. (In a 21st century American city, you don’t just let a case of active tuberculosis run around outside.) Other times, patients’ health improved simply because sanatoriums gave them a badly needed break from lives of poverty and labor.

Still, the sanatorium era continues to be considered a public health success. Not because sanatoriums ever did much to help “lungers.” But because they kept them away from healthy people. By shooing contagious patients off to remote treatment complexes, Dr. Bodington had inadvertently pioneered the concept of infection control. Keeping sick people away from vulnerable populations seems so obvious now. But back then, would the idea of germs — invisible, flying disease pods — have sounded any less silly than magic air?

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Tuberculosis treatment in 1942 D. Hess / Fox Photos / Getty Images

I tried seeing a therapist after my quarantine order was finally lifted. My mom made the appointment. I didn’t really want to go; I’ve never liked therapy.

But I hated doing this to my mom. This wasn’t just my crisis; it was my family’s too. And it was harder on my mom than anyone. She’d just spent 10 days next to me on a cot in the Denver ICU after my first lung surgery went wrong. She’d held my hand when the stiff chest tube draining blood from my lungs made breathing hurt so badly I got tunnel vision. She’d lost so much weight and was thinner than I’d ever seen her. So when she kept insisting that I talk to someone, I figured I could force myself to muster an hour of sincerity. And if I didn’t like it, I could lie, quit, and just find my own answers in some book.

I got to the office and we made our introductions. Then I broke the ice.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Laura Linney?” I asked.

She paused. For too long.“No. I’ve actually never gotten that.”

“No. I’ve actually never gotten that.”

BULLSHIT. She looks exactly like Laura Linney.

“I spoke to your mother on the phone. She said you contracted tuberculosis while you were in the Peace Corps in Russia?”

“No, I was in Ukraine. But yes. I mean, it was the Far East. The Russian-speaking part.”

“And so you’re going through chemo now? How long is that?”

“Well, I was hospitalized in Denver and got the part of my lung removed with the TB on it last month. So now I’m on chemo. It’s the IV drip. None of the radiation stuff. And I never lost my hair. So I don’t know if it even counts. I have nine months of that, and a total of two years or so on everything else.”

OK, it’s not like I’m uniquely hyperaware of Laura Linney or something. There’s no way I could be the first person to notice.

“And then…it goes away?” she asked.

Wait, is she pissed? Why? It’s a compliment, right? Hold on. Does she just, like, hate Laura Linney?

“Knock on wood. It can come back, hypothetically,” I recited. “That’s why they treat it so aggressively. They just want to make sure that it’s really, really dead. But they can’t, like, promise you anything.”

I went back once or twice for additional sessions. I tried to explain that I wasn’t scared about dying or anything. By then, doctors seemed confident that I wouldn’t. But I had this anxiety I couldn’t shake. I wanted closure in Ukraine, and the people in my town. I wanted to be moving toward something. I tried to convert the emotional fallout into a momentum that more closely resembled psychosis. I took 36 practice LSATs but was hospitalized the day of the test. But panic was a problem I couldn’t obsess my way out of. I’d pick up a book but just hold it in my lap and forget what the hell it was for. I had no job and no idea what to do with myself. I lived with my parents, who at that moment seemed to be trying to keep me alive by never letting me out of their sight. I felt timid and stuck. I felt cheated out of that rosy immortality my friends had. All those toxic meds made me feel like someone else. I was very, very tired. And I felt like I was failing. I wanted my sense of control back. I was so damn sad.

My mom picked that therapist because she specializes in treating patients with life-interrupting illnesses, like MS or cancer.

“It can be hard for people to lose their control,” the therapist told me. “Here’s something I suggest that people can do to feel like they have some power over everything. Next time you go for an infusion, try to close your eyes and think of the chemicals in the drugs coursing through you, attacking all of the bad cells. And concentrate on them, and really see them. Then, envision the chemo forcing them out of your body. Picture them floating away.”

I skipped my next appointment and never rescheduled. It wasn’t a therapist that I wanted. I wanted to connect with other patients like me.

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

I’m not the only person to conclude that TB patients may be uniquely equipped to help each other. In 1907, a Boston-area internist named Dr. Joseph Pratt had the same idea while searching for innovative treatment alternatives for TB patients who couldn’t afford faraway sanatoriums. He had the hippy-dippy idea that bringing patients together could replicate the revitalizing effects of places like the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives, and help patients heal. Couldn’t they guide each other through the experience better than any doctor could?

Pratt tested his hunch with a trial of a dozen patients. Modern medicine’s first recorded support group was deemed a success. Moral support really did help combat tuberculosis. His destitute patients had made do without the magic air that wasn’t really magic and replaced it with something that was.

That’s one thing the sanatorium era got right that today’s TB control programs get wrong: the need for community. Today, the sanatorium era is thought of as a relic of medical quackery rendered moot by modern science. But to mock it in favor of enlightened antibiotic cures is to dismiss the lived experience of patients. For all their problems, sanatoriums were designed to heal patients. Today, treatment is primarily concerned with limiting threats posed to others. Patients’ lives are collateral damage.

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I showed up at the radiology department of George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., for my final chest X-ray in late spring of 2012. I stood in the yellow foot outlines and assumed the TSA body scan position without even waiting for the technician’s spiel.

“Oh, you’re an old pro, then!” he said from the processing room. “OK, deep breath and hold it… Good… Now let’s just make sure that… Whoa, you’re missing a big part of your lung! Sorry, wasn’t expecting that!” That makes two of us.

But the Mycobacterium tuberculosis had indeed been destroyed. What was left of my lungs showed up as solid black — just as a healthy X-ray is supposed to be.

But somehow, it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped. Once again, I wanted to share the moment with someone who understood what it meant. Moral support is nice for the good stuff too.

I began to find out how many patients felt the same way in June 2013, when I finally went back to Ukraine. I made a ring around the country to gather data for my master’s thesis: I traveled to Kiev, Lviv, Crimea, Mariupol, Kharkhiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, and my beloved Antratsyt. I visited hospitals, clinics, and met doctors, health care and nonprofit workers, and, of course, patients. No matter who they were, tuberculosis had a profound impact on their lives. Many had lost friends or even family members over their illness, or felt forced to keep the experience secret. Loneliness and shame were practically the default.

For as long as I’d spent surviving and learning about tuberculosis, one big question stuck in the back of my mind. I posed it to Oksana Viktorovna, a training coordinator for the Stop TB in Ukraine initiative in Donetsk. Why, I asked her, is there so little communication and coordination within the TB patient community, and so much of it — working successfully, by the way — in other diseases?

“You’re right,” she told me. “People are ashamed to be associated with the fringe. And even though TB is curable, the stigma makes them think it would be better to have cancer.” And perhaps, she continued, people who survive TB are ready to forget it and move on.

But, this might be changing, Oksana said. Lately, she’d noticed a few groups pop up online, on Russian networking sites like LiveJournal and VKontakte. Some people even created entirely new accounts to be able to discuss their lives with tuberculosis anonymously. “They write about their experience, their worries, their questions,” Oksana told me. “It seems to increase their optimism. I think it helps them get better.”

The clandestine online TB clubs were easy to find. As soon as I started poking through them, I found someone my age from Khabarovsk, Russia, whom I felt like I already knew.

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The Kyiv Tubdispensar or Tuberculosis Dispensary Photograph by Natalie Shure

I finally met Ksenia Shchenina face-to-face in Moscow this past spring. Even in the tourist-thick crowd by the famous Tretyakov Gallery, she wasn’t hard to spot. By now we’d already spent hours of our lives talking on Skype.

Ksenia maintains a patient-centered website about TB, as well as pages in English and Russian across several social media platforms. Her project’s slogan, “Being ill isn’t shameful,” challenges the negative cultural narratives about TB and the people who have it. Visitors can read the blog she kept during her treatment and her interviews with doctors and survivors. She regularly interacts with new patients from all over the world.

Social media has the potential to finally address the long-standing need for support among TB patients. Last month, Doctors Without Borders published a study that identified serious benefits for users of these online platforms, including TB & Me, the organization’s own blogging portal. Social media, they conclude, helps MDR patients adhere to treatment, gain back a sense of control, fight feelings of despair and solitude, and educate health care providers and the public. After treatment, survivors like Ksenia can continue to serve as mentors and advocates for the global patient community.

I strolled with Ksenia across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, along the edge of Red Square, and up the fabled Arbat Street. We drifted between languages and talked about being sick. I told her how badly I wished I knew people like her back when I was diagnosed.

“I can’t find the words in English to explain how much I agree with you,” she said.

I’m not sure I could have, either. But then, it hit me: “I’ve spent years researching tuberculosis. I’ve toured hospitals, read books and articles, conducted dozens of interviews. But this is the first time I’ve ever told my story to another patient.”

How magical to find her in a world with 5,000 miles, two screens, and three healthy lungs between us.

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

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#consumption #MDR-TB #National Jewish Health Center #National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives #peace corps #Robert Koch #russia #sanatorium #social media #soviet union #ukraine #XDR-TB

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its-just-like-the-movies · 7 years

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The Judge (2014): D-

Why am I writing this review? Am I just flummoxed that, against all odds, The Judge is as bad as I heard it was, in some ways even worse? Is it just easier to trash this than parse what I did and didn’t like about The Final Girls and Logan? In some ways, absolutely. Films that fail with such utter confidence in their storytelling, as anachronistic in its relationship with creating and executing a narrative as it is, are completely captivating in a way that middle-of-the-road movies with more successful if uneven execution can’t be. The ways they fail can even be more stand-out than flat-out, across-the-board achievements. All the disparate elements of The Judge, working so poorly without any self-awareness of its awfulness, is a lot easier in some to dig and rip into than films that unify as an internally syncopated artistic achievement. Personally, I often get tongue tied differentiating between elements of perfect films except that they're perfect, whereas all the ways a bad movie fails often clash within itself and are painfully noticeable. For sure, no sound or image or line or performance in The Judge works so wonderfully or grabs my imagination the way that The Immigrant, or Selma, or American Sniper, or Edge of Tomorrow do. Even typing their names reminded me of all the remarkable, almost miraculous achievements each of those films pull off, not just in how they use filmmaking techniques but how their achievements represent peak realization or reinvention of biopic conventions, of infusing melodramatic devices throughout generations of storytelling styles, of combining such a hodgepodge of filmic influences with video game conceits that manages to stay light on its feet and remarkably complex. The individual ways a film can be good or bad are, of course, various, and The Judge is no exception. The nicest thing about it I can say is that it seems like a gangbusters stage-to-screen adaptation from seventy years ago, with Lionel Barrymore in the Robert Duvall role and Cary Grant in the Robert Downey Jr. role. It’s existence seems more excusable that way, but how this ever got made today is, in some ways, as fascinating as the actual, glorious achievements of the other 2014 films I mentioned earlier. Maybe if I write about The Judge I’ll be free of the space it takes up in my head. Maybe the only way to clear it out is to watch an even worse movie. But for now, let’s get to business.

Perhaps the real value of analyzing a shitty film is just educational, to know what not to do. Not every film should have The Immigrant’s yellow hues, revolving between majestic and sickly shades, or the blunt gunshots of American Sniper, but they serve their films and their ideas remarkably well. Meanwhile, all of The Judge’s mistakes are patently obvious and so avoidable I laughed repeatedly at some of the film’s biggest lapses in judgement, or simple logic. In that case, let’s start with its most grievous sin: Thomas Newman’s belabored, mediocre, and almost hilariously manipulative score. Never does it appear to conjure up any emotion or idea that the film didn’t already want us to feel, hammering home whatever plodding plot development we’ve just realized. Duvall reveals that he will not be using his cancer diagnosis in his defense before walking off to nowhere, and as the camera pans across Downey’s permanently blank yet aggrieved and annoyed expression, Newman runs up to us screaming that this is Important, and that we should definitely be feeling Sad right now, as if we could be feeling anything about The Judge except sadness. Does Newman even trust the audience to understand such a straightforward, one-emotion-per-scene film? It’s completely overbearing, and ends up making the moments where his score isn’t present stronger simply for that fact. If there are any tender mercies in Newman’s seeming relentlessness, Robert Duvall’s speeches are at least allowed to flow on whatever dubious power that may ultimately be instead of getting musical backup. But no montage, no major scene transition, no tragic revelation can go unscored, and they are all the worse for being so cobbled down by Newman.

From here, I suppose all of the film’s other sins are about equally awful, but they all deserve a special shout-out and breakdown of their terribleness. Having just seen Bridge of Spies, it makes sense that the culprit behind The Judge’s ugly look and terrible lighting is Janusz Kaminiski. Not that Spies looks bad at all - I agree with but would not vote for the film’s Production Design nomination (and I liked Thomas Newman’s score, but would swap its nomination for Original Score in a heartbeat for the achievements of Creed or It Follows), but Kaminski’s lensing is often detrimental to the look of both of films. Every bit of light coming through a window or out of a lamp makes each one look like a miniature sun, and the actors are lit so oddly that real human people seem only degrees away from entering the Uncanny Valley. Sometimes it works, tamping itself down to the sickly blues of the ward a cancer-ridden Duvall is resting in, but this can’t compare to the frequent moments of overlighting. The darks aren’t as overwhelming, but the neutral color palette is a hard range to fuck up, and the general dimness only makes the contrasting Brights even Brighter. Maybe there’s a majesty to having every wrinkle on Duvall’s forehead illuminated, just as there surely must have been when he did it for Mark Rylance, but I can’t see past the glare.

As mentioned, the film’s screenplay is almost forgivable if you pretend this was written seventy years ago. But Christ, as a piece of contemporary writing, I have only scorn for Nick Schenk and perhaps even moreso for Bill Dubuque. I have not seen any of their previous works, but from the looks and descriptions of Schenk’s Gran Torino (which I may see, for Eastwood completion) and Dubuque’s The Accountant (Ben Affleck’s autistic superhitman thing) and The Family Man (a Gerard Butler vehicle about a workaholic whose son gets cancer soon after Butler is promoted to run the company he works at) seem impressively bad and cliched, though here I mostly look at Dubuque, since this nonsense fits far more with his scripts, and Schenk’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even list his writing credit for The Judge. It’s incredibly ham-handed, overstuffed with subplots that never come to any kind of fruition. The sad pasts of side character like the brothers, of Downey’s hometown girlfriend left behind, giving him an ex-wife to scream at and whose response to muffle completely while the cheery daughter is six feet away, both parents convinced their child doesn’t know about their upcoming divorce. Suggesting at any moment where Downey unknowingly hooked up with his biological daughter is a truly disgusting feature in the script, the actual reveal only slightly less awful than what had been repeatedly implied to us. Do I even have to say out loud that this is a misogynistic script? It’s a misogynistic script, and also a truly shitty one that neglects every one of its character inside a spectacularly bad plotline. Individual moments like when Downey meets with any other lawyer, Downey talking down and at several bar patrons who were imprisoned by his father before seduced his not-daughter, Duvall’s hiring of Dax Shepard’s incredibly incompetent attorney, everything after the verdict on Duvall’s murder case is passed, are some of the worst things I’ve ever had to seen an actor try and put over as anything a real person would do.

Should I even bother with direction, since David Dobkin’s direction is so extraordinarily limp that I can’t even think of a contribution of his that isn’t ever overwhelmed by what any other participant does. It’s just not remarkable at all, and unlike everyone else in the film I can’t even imagine what he brought to the table, besides maybe unifying the film under an umbrella of shittiness. And aside from Downey and Duvall, the actors all feel more like hostages trapped in this dretch. I cried out in horror once Vera Farmiga appeared on screen, and for Denis O’Hare, gifted with only having to appear in a single scene. It was sad to be reacquainted with Bernard the Elf by seeing Downey piss on his shoes, and I was left truly baffled by what Billy Bob Thornton was doing here. I felt pity for the actor who played Duvall’s bailiff, for the performers who had to feature in the mentally challenged brother’s home movie as the childhood version of these characters, for the woman who plays the dead mother, and thankful that the actor as that brother was at least electing to have a non-presence instead of garishly overplaying his mental illness. Maybe Vincent D’Onofrio grew his sadness beard in response to getting this part. But I felt no pity for Downey’s angsty simmering, and was vaguely appreciative for Duvall trying his best with that shitty dialogue. At no point is Downey ever a sympathetic presence, anyone to root for or care about, and the scripted nastiness is clearly accentuated by the most common tics of the performer, as though Iron Man was completely shorn of his charm and remained the smug, self-satisfied bastard Tony Stark would have been had he never been bombed and kidnapped. It’s an entirely intolerable performance, and one exacerbated by Downey’s own worst tendencies. I should say that I don’t think Duvall gives or has the material to give in any way a good performance, let alone one worthy of a goddamn Academy Award nomination, but the film is so reverential of his character that it occasionally makes Newman put down the strings and lets the outright majesty and potency of Duvall’s warbling speak for itself. It’s not good, per se, but he gets the closest to finding an actual character and suggesting what a better version of this film could be, as low as that bar is.

Before closing I’d like to just take a moment to single out the two single worst moments in the film, so awful that they made me laugh out loud. The first comes early, when part of Downey’s initial “driving back home” montage features a completely VFX shot of his car driving alongside a corn field, digital stocks rustling in the winds as he passes by. And the second, unexpected gem in this shitstain, is when Billy Bob Thornton’s out-of-town lawyer unfurls his shiny metal cup with the exact same, sharp, poisonous SHNK sound bite that ALWAYS used when someone whips out a knife super fast. But these were small, accidental joys in a film I’m still somewhat shocked I’m not giving an F, especially since it more than earns that grade repeatedly. Maybe I just can’t give a Vera Farmiga film the worst grade a movie can get. Either way, and I’m sure you already knew this, but don’t see The Judge. If you’re an Oscar completist like me, don’t save it for last. Rip it off quick like a bandaid, and save the actual artistic achievements like Boyhood and Birdman and Two Days, One Night and the films I mentioned at the top for later, as a soothing balm to remind yourself what magic and power a movie can achieve. Maybe how this pile of shit ever got in front of a camera, much less an Academy Award nominee, is a bigger mystery than anything in Gone Girl, but the answers may be even more horrific and unsettling, and best left to shit itself in the bathroom rather than engage with.

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