#which I guess makes sense if at one point he even had his own eponymous company | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mariana-oconnor · 1 year

Text

The Engineer's Thumb pt 2

Our last entry was particularly gory and followed the lines of 'creepy person offers struggling worker job with pay they cannot afford to refuse and may secretly be a vampire cult leader'.

OK, so I added that last part, that's new, but the skeletal man offering our eponymous Engineer his job had a very undead aesthetic going on, so I'm keeping it.

I'm still not convinced that Mr Hatherley could have survived the trauma and blood loss he experienced long enough to get to Watson, but I was struck the other night, as I was going to bed, by the peculiar thought of what the other passengers on that train must have thought.

In Victorian times, they did still have compartments, so it's possible no one saw him. But in the modern day when you're all stacked in like sardines and he would have been on the commuter train... You're just sitting there, minding your own business, listening to a podcast and trying to ignore the very loud conversation from the two women behind you about how her cousin stole the family dog, entered it in a dog show and accidentally uncovered a drug smuggling ring, then ran off to Ibiza with her mistress -- but not trying too hard because honestly it's more interesting than the podcast, kind of. Anyway, you're minding your own business and you smell... blood.

And there's this guy sitting opposite you looking very pale and kind of sweaty and you've been avoiding making eye contact because he's sort of twitchy and you never make eye contact on British public transport, so instead you look at his hands and... is that a twig? And... a blood stained bandage and... is it just you or does his hand look a weird shape. You should stop staring. Maybe he's just tucking his thumb into his pal- no. No, he doesn't have a thumb. And that's blood and... and he's just sitting on the train with no thumb and fresh blood.

Would it be rude to ask?

It would probably be rude to ask. Like, he probably knows he's missing a thumb and you don't have any medical training and it's none of your business, is it? You should stop staring.

Yeah... honestly not the most disturbing thing I've come across on public transport, but it would be quite the morning.

On to today's email, though.

"Colonel Lysander Stark had said that it was only seven miles, but I should think, from the rate that we seemed to go, and from the time that we took, that it must have been nearer twelve."

Either one of you is about as good at estimating distances as I am, or he's taking the long way round so Mr Hatherley can't find his way back.

"I was aware, more than once when I glanced in his direction, that he was looking at me with great intensity."

This is giving very 'I want to steal your skin and wear you as a suit' energy, or is it just me.

"I tried to look out of the windows to see something of where we were, but they were made of frosted glass"

Was not aware that frosted glass windows were a thing at this point in time. I guess it makes sense as all you really need to do is scratch the surface of the glass a lot, but still. That's interesting.

It's also total overkill. You must come at night, we will take you down the windiest route possible to discombobulate you and we will have frosted windows so you cannot see out and no one can see you inside.

Frosted windows also don't provide any reflections on their frosted side. Not that Colonel Stark is a vampire, of course. I'm not even convinced he's a Colonel.

"We stepped, as it were, right out of the carriage and into the hall, so that I failed to catch the most fleeting glance of the front of the house."

If you look at it the right way, all these precautions are actually kind of reassuring. If you're planning to kill someone, you don't really care if they know where you're doing it. They probably intended to let Mr Hatherley go.

Always look on the bright side of shady nighttime business deals and potential kidnapping attempts.

"I could see that she was pretty, and from the gloss with which the light shone upon her dark dress I knew that it was a rich material. She spoke a few words in a foreign tongue in a tone as though asking a question, and when my companion answered in a gruff monosyllable she gave such a start that the lamp nearly fell from her hand."

And now we're getting some Greek Interpreter shit going on, which explains why I always get those two titles mixed up in my head.

"It was a wonderfully silent house. There was an old clock ticking loudly somewhere in the passage, but otherwise everything was deadly still."

Sounds like hell.

"She held up one shaking finger to warn me to be silent, and she shot a few whispered words of broken English at me, her eyes glancing back, like those of a frightened horse, into the gloom behind her. “‘I would go,’ said she, trying hard, as it seemed to me, to speak calmly; ‘I would go. I should not stay here. There is no good for you to do.’"

Well, I'd be out of there. Honestly, I'd probably be frozen in fright and too scared to try to leave, but I'd want to be out of there. This is about as obvious a red flag as you can get. And she tries 3 times to tell Mr Hatherley to go and he refuses. Trying very hard not to victim blame, but after a certain point of ignoring direct, clear warnings to your life, you have to take some responsibility.

“But I am somewhat headstrong by nature, and the more ready to engage in an affair when there is some obstacle in the way."

...Victor... Victor, Victor. Are you saying that you stayed in the creepy house with the creepy cult-leader not-at-all-undead Colonel because you were feeling contrary?

"I thought of my fifty-guinea fee, of my wearisome journey, and of the unpleasant night which seemed to be before me. Was it all to go for nothing?"

You were feeling contrary and the sunk cost fallacy, got it.

"This woman might, for all I knew, be a monomaniac."

"She listened for an instant, threw up her hands with a despairing gesture, and vanished as suddenly and as noiselessly as she had come."

Girl, same!

"a short thick man with a chinchilla beard growing out of the creases of his double chin"

omg, is there actually a type of beard called a chinchilla beard? Is it fluffy?

The only thing google is giving me is this exact quote and an urban dictionary link, which probably isn't relevant to a 19th century text unless ACD was a time traveller.

So basically he's got a chinchilla tail coming out of his chin? That's how I'm choosing to see it anyway.

“‘I had better put my hat on, I suppose.’ “‘Oh, no, it is in the house.’ “‘What, you dig fuller's-earth in the house?’ “‘No, no. This is only where we compress it. But never mind that."

"There were no carpets and no signs of any furniture above the ground floor, while the plaster was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in green, unhealthy blotches."

And this is where he lost his thumb? Yeah, no way he's not infected. He's have flu-like symptoms within the hour. Nothing worse than flu-like symptoms. I'm surprised that he didn't get sepsis just from walking through the place. Perhaps the lady is a 'monomaniac' from all the mould spores she's been inhaling. That shit can't be healthy.

“‘We are now,’ said he, ‘actually within the hydraulic press, and it would be a particularly unpleasant thing for us if anyone were to turn it on. The ceiling of this small chamber is really the end of the descending piston, and it comes down with the force of many tons upon this metal floor."'

Hello foreshadowing... postshadowing? Technically this is all a flashback and we know Victor loses his thumb, so I don't know what we call this? A not-so veiled threat?

I'm the opposite of claustrophobic, but there's no way I'm standing in that room.

Is someone going to turn this on intentionally, or is the real villain the OSHA violations we ignored along the way?

"It was obvious at a glance that the story of the fuller's-earth was the merest fabrication..."

“I felt angry at having been tricked by so elaborate a story as that which he had told me. ‘I was admiring your fuller's-earth,’ said I; ‘I think that I should be better able to advise you as to your machine if I knew what the exact purpose was for which it was used.’"

Victor here is standing in the death chamber in front of the murder man saying 'kill me now, please'. Guy has the survival instincts of a giant panda, I swear.

‘Hullo!’ I yelled. ‘Hullo! Colonel! Let me out!’

I'm interested in whether Victor actually thought this would work. His survival instincts have clearly finally kicked in, but they are still sleepy. I get there's not much else he could do, but the man just locked him in the death chamber and flipped the squishing switch, I don't think 'Hullo' is really going to make much of an impact. But if it makes you feel better about this totally avoidable circumstance, Mr Hatherley, then sure. 'Hullo' away.

"Then it flashed through my mind that the pain of my death would depend very much upon the position in which I met it. If I lay on my face the weight would come upon my spine, and I shuddered to think of that dreadful snap. Easier the other way, perhaps; and yet, had I the nerve to lie and look up at that deadly black shadow wavering down upon me?"

Well that's... a thought process. Totally horrifying. 10/10 for shudder inducing.

Mr Hatherley is clearly a very practical man, but at the same time lacks any common sense whatsoever.

"It was the same good friend whose warning I had so foolishly rejected."

This woman is the most patient person ever, and she doesn't even have a name at this point - unless I missed it.

"I clambered out upon the sill, but I hesitated to jump until I should have heard what passed between my saviour and the ruffian who pursued me. If she were ill-used, then at any risks I was determined to go back to her assistance."

Very heroic. Very dumb. Woman's got at least ten times the brains you have and she's survived this long. Admittedly her problem is entirely your fault, but she's risking her life to get you the fuck out. So...get the fuck out.

“‘Fritz! Fritz!’ she cried in English, ‘remember your promise after the last time. You said it should not be again. He will be silent! Oh, he will be silent!’"

The German guy is called Fritz? How unexpected.

And apparently he's a serial person squisher, so that's a thing.

“‘You are mad, Elise!’ he shouted, struggling to break away from her. ‘You will be the ruin of us.'"

Elise, nice to properly meet you. You are the MVP of this story, although you are probably also involved in the criminal undertakings. Sorry Victor was such an idiot. You tried.

"I endeavoured to tie my handkerchief round it, but there came a sudden buzzing in my ears, and next moment I fell in a dead faint among the rose-bushes."

Oh, and his open, bleeding wound fell into the dirt. He is so infected. Victor Hatherley is a dead man walking. No way he survives this.

I've found a paper that states in the 1850s the mortality rate for medical amputations was 45%, with the main cause of death being sepsis. This story is a little later on, not a major limb and, honestly, probably cleaner than a medical amputation at the time (from what I know, Victorian era surgeons weren't big fans of cleaning their equipment or themselves between patients) but even if he doesn't die, that wound is not clean and there's been no cauterisation of the wound and surgeons were at least quick.

"But to my astonishment, when I came to look round me, neither house nor garden were to be seen."

Ghost house! Spooky! I don't think I ever realised before how much ACD leant into the influence of Gothic literature in his works. But he's pulling out all the old favourites.

"I had been lying in an angle of the hedge close by the highroad, and just a little lower down was a long building, which proved, upon my approaching it, to be the very station at which I had arrived upon the previous night."

And we have the answer of why the horse wasn't tired when he arrived at the station - because it had only come from next door - and why so much secrecy in preventing him from seeing where he was going - because he was only going next door.

"The same porter was on duty, I found, as had been there when I arrived. I inquired of him whether he had ever heard of Colonel Lysander Stark. The name was strange to him."

You literally know that's a fake name. His name is Fritz. Of course the porter hasn't heard of Colonel Fakename McPseudonym. He probably has a totally different identity he uses locally.

"There was one about three miles off." “It was too far for me to go, weak and ill as I was. I determined to wait until I got back to town before telling my story to the police."

3 miles is too far, but he can totally wait for a train and sit on it, then walk when he's in London. I mean, Victor, you have no thumb, that's pretty good evidence that you need assistance, I'm sure someone would fetch a police officer for you. I'm surprised they haven't already. How many city folk do they get turning up at stupid o'clock in the morning covered in blood and clearly very confused?

You know... I heard that as I was typing it and you're right. That probably is just an average Tuesday. Victorian equivalent of a stag do. Is it really a party if someone doesn't lose a thumb?

"I put the case into your hands and shall do exactly what you advise.”

I personally advise an immediate course of broad spectrum antibiotics, but given that they won't be discovered until the next century, I guess you're shit out of luck. Dip the whole hand in brandy and hope for the best.

Brandy! It cures everything! Unless you die!

I still don't know what Fritz and the chinchilla are up to. Seems like maybe it isn't a land-selling scam after all. But apparently he has been murdering random people, so that's concerning. The problem comes down to the fact I don't really know what hydraulic presses would be used for? Making coins? Is this a forgery business? That lines up with the 'crust of metallic deposit' Victor found in it.

So I'm going to go with that for now, coin forgery. Though why they are German, I don't know. Maybe just because it would add to the Gothic horror vibes if they had accents. Maybe they're working specifically to destabilise the British economy. Or maybe it's not related at all.

#Letters from Watson #Sherlock Holmes #The Engineer's Thumb #smh so hard at Victor 'don't tell me what to do' Hatherley #long post

37 notes · View notes

wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 4 years

Text

Michael After Midnight: Heavy Metal

Sometimes it’s fun to revisit old movies you watched when you were younger and find out, hey, this is better than you remembered! Sometimes your young mind just wasn’t ready to accept how awesome something was, and you needed time to fully understand what you look for and like about cinema to truly appreciate it. But then, sometimes, you watch something you liked when you were younger, and you realize… wow, this is absolute dog shit!

Such is the case with Heavy Metal. This is a movie I have frequently cited as a low-ranking entry on lists of the finest animated films of all time, and to be entirely fair to the film, it is important in a historical sense, being a cult classic that was passed around through bootlegs because music rights kept it from getting a home video release, and it came out around the dawn of the 80s and kind of destroyed what you would think an animated film was capable of. This film is full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and it entirely, unabashedly unashamed of this, for better or for worse.

Now, while I do think the overall film is a bit lacking, it is an anthology film divided into segments, and there are some pretty good ones I will make note of; this is not a film with absolutely no merit. But before that, let me point out the one thing everyone can agree is amazing about this film: the soundtrack. You’ve got Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Stevie Nicks, Devo, Cheap Trick… if nothing else, the kickass soundtrack is worth a listen, though Blue Oyster Cult’s song inclusion irritates me to a great degree. The movie went with “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” for the soundtrack, despite the fact Blue Oyster Cult had a song ready to go that is literally about the final entry in the anthology, called “Vengeance (The Pact).” Why the people compiling the soundtrack made this choice baffles me; it reminds me of how they didn’t use “Jennifer’s Body” in, well, Jennifer’s Body, instead opting for a different Hole song from the same album.

But I digress. Let’s go one by one and touch on the segments:

The framing device is about an entity known as the Loc-Nar, who claims to be the sum of all evil, detailing to a little girl how it has influenced chaos and carnage across time and space. The thing is, though, the Loc-Nar doesn’t come out on top in any of the segments, and its schemes are often thwarted. So the entire movie is basically this supreme evil being detailing to a little girl how much it sucks ass at its one job.

The first segment is Harry Canyon, a story about the eponymous futuristic New York taxi driver. In some regards it reminds me of The Fifth Element, what with a scruffy, slummy, futuristic taxi driver trying to help a smoking hot babe find out the truth and all, but unlike that film, this short is a lot bleaker and gritty. You kinda know what you’re in for when Harry vaporizes a dude who tries to mug him, and if that’s not enough, the female lead of this short literally throws herslef at him, and yes, he gets to take a dive into her Harry Canyon – and you get to see it.

This is a running theme throughout these shorts – almost every female character has huge titties and is sexually promiscuous, throwing themselves at the first penis they see as if it was their job. It’s so incredibly juvenile and tacky as to be laughable, but I guess this comes with the territory considering the magazine this film adapted.

Anyway, the segment is harmless and unremarkable. It’s exactly what you’d expect from this sort of story, without much in the way of twists or turns.

The second segment, Den, is arguably the best segment in the entire film. We have a nerdy kid named Dan who gets transported across space and becomes the musclebound warrior with a huge cock known as Den. Every woman throws herself at him, every villain in his way gets pummeled, and no task is too impossible for this man! And did I mention that he is voiced by John Candy? Really, Candy’s comedic touch is what makes this entire thing feel fun and palatable; it’s a cheesy swords and sorcery romp through and through. Honestly, I don’t have much bad to say about this one, it’s just very silly fun.

Unfortunately we are back to being not great with Captain Sternn. Sternn, played by Eugene Levy (of The Wacky World of Mini Golf fame), is basically an intergalactic war criminal on trial, and when his paid witness Hanover Fiste (played by Rodger “Squidward Tentacles” Bumpass) comes up to the stand, the Loc-Nar influences him to the most evil act possible… betraying this war criminal in front of the judge and jury! GASP! I’m not sure what the Loc-Nar is really trying to do here; you’d think it would maybe want Sternn free to continue spreading wicked influence across the galaxy, but nah, it just makes Squidward hulk out and tries to kill him, only for the tables to be turned and Squidward to be dropped out an airlock, further cementing how utterly useless the Loc-Nar is.

Thankfully, once that’s over, we have yet another very strong segment, another contender for best in show: B-17. This is a genuinely creepy zombie short film, and the zombies are utterly horrifying and grotesque. This is regarded as the most nightmarish part of the film, and for good reason; this shit is certainly worthy of being called “heavy metal.” Honestly, there isn’t much bad to say about this one either, except perhaps that it is over far too soon.

Then we get to what is probably the worst segment: So Beautiful, So Dangerous. The entire segment is sort of meant to be a lighthearted comedic breather between The last segment and the final one, but it just comes off as combining every problem the movie has into one segment: the uselessness of the Loc-Nar, copious and ridiculous sex, drugs, and so on. Really all that’s missing from this is gratuitous violence, but hey, guess you can’t have everything all the time, right? It just comes off as really dull and pointless, and there’s not really anything particularly funny about anything that happens in it, unless of course you’re a thirteen year old who thinks “big boob woman having sex with robot while aliens snort cocaine” is the funniest shit on Earth.

Thankfully, we end on a strong note with Taarna, which is about a proud warrior woman dressed in horrifically impractical armor (and this actually effects the plot, I’m not kidding, somehow there was some self-awareness here) and a cool alien pteradactly flying off to fulfill a vengeful pact after the slaughter of a peaceful race by barbarians mutated by the Loc-Nar, in what may be the Loc-Nar’s sole impressive feat. Taarna is the ultimate hero, giving us the trifecta of qualities a heroine in this movie should have – boobs, butt, and bush... Er, I mean, sword, cool mount, and ass-kicking prowess. This one is not quite as good as “Den” or “B-17,” but I still think it’s a solid finale that has enough action and awesome music to make up for its tackier elements.

The movie ends with Taarna’s defeat of the Loc-Nar echoing through time and killing it which… makes absolutely zero sense, but whatever, the Loc-Nar is an absolutely atrocious villain and perhaps one of the most useless in cinematic history, he gets a 1/10 on Psycho Analysis. Then the girl gets her own kickass space dragon thing and becoming the new Taarna or something and, honestly, it’s the exact sort of batshit ending you should expect from the film.

So, is this really an awful film? In some places, no. It’s a love letter to cheesy, trashy sci-fi fantasy from the 70s, with all that comes with it, and in that regard it does succeed. But still, a lot of the film feels like the utterly juvenile fantasies of same sad high schooler, or perhaps even middle schooler, who has never had and who likely never will have sex. It’s a tashy little time capsule to a bygone era where this sort of storytelling was okay so long as there was enough blood and titties on display, so if that appeals to you, by all means, check this film out. It’s certainly not the worst thing in the world to watch, but animation has come so far and adult animation in particular is capable of so much more than adolescent masturbatory fantasies that this film has little value beyond a few solid segments and a damn good soundtrack.

Hell, just go listen to the soundtrack. I think you’d have a better time doing that.

#Michael After Midnight #Review #Movie review #Heavy Metal #animation #animated movie #sex drugs and rock and roll

18 notes · View notes

shireness-says · 4 years

Text

Wherever You’re Going (I’m Going Your Way) [1/6]

Summary: 1952. A lost boy without a home, Killian Jones rides America's back roads on his motorcycle, searching for a purpose that's just out of reach. This pit stop was only supposed to be a few days, a couple of weeks at most, but a pretty blonde waitress just might be his salvation. Is he brave enough to let her? Rated T for language. Also on AO3.

~~~~~

A/N: I’m pleased to present my contribution to the CS Rewrite-a-thon! Big thanks to the organizers at the @captainswanbigbang for organizing this. This is an expansion of a oneshot I wrote a couple of years back called A Sunlit Night, and I loved the chance to get back into the feel of that piece. The fic title is from “Moon River”, which didn’t exist in 1952, but some things are about the aesthetic and it fit too well to resist.

Special thanks to my beta, @thejollyroger-writer, and to @snidgetsafan and @profdanglaisstuff for the extra eyes and helping me work through some hurdles along the way.

Tagging the usuals. Let me know if you want to be added to or removed from the list!

@kmomof4, @aerica13, @thisonesatellite, @searchingwardrobes, @let-it-raines, @teamhook, @ohmightydevviepuu, @optomisticgirl, @winterbaby89, @spartanguard, @scientificapricot

Enjoy - and let me know what you think!

~~~~~

Storybrooke, Maine could be any town in America — just as picturesque as the name suggests in a way that doesn’t seem quite real. The houses have picket fences and boats bob in the harbor and there's an honest-to-god Main Street, lined with a diner and a general store and a pharmacy with advertisements for Ovaltine in the window. It's every picture of America that's ever made its way across the pond, every stereotype of small town life made real. It makes his presence all the more jarring; loners on motorcycles don’t belong in this picture-perfect magazine print town.

He never meant to stop here — in fact, it’s the kind of little hamlet Killian doubts anyone ever means to find themselves in. Though he may not have planned on stopping — not here, not anywhere, not for anything — he also hadn’t planned on the noise his bike’s engine had started making as he cruised down backroads under the emerald canopy that is rural Maine in June. Killian is used to making minor repairs to the machine — it’s inevitable with the miles he’s putting on the motorcycle, and besides, there’s things you pick up in a war, especially when he spend much of World War II criss-crossing Europe in his plane — but for all of his handy skills, he still can’t make parts materialize out of thin air.

And so, he finds himself in Storybrooke — the nearest town, according to the road map he’d picked up at a welcome center on his way into the state. He’ll find a garage, he’ll work for parts, he’ll be on his way. It should be simple; a few days, a week at most, and then he’s gone again.

(The sooner, the better, in his opinion; a woman wiping down tables outside of the diner shoots him a dirty look, and Killian can’t help but feel like he deserves it for disrupting this idyll they’re living in.)

Blessedly, there is a garage attached to the town’s service station — NOLAN'S REPAIR, a large painted sign advertises across the top of the panelled door — but there's no sign of life inside. A quick glance at his watch, one of the few relics of the war that Killian willingly carries with him, reveals that it's already past seven. That's fine; he doesn’t mind waiting until the morning.

It's easy enough to find space to park his motorcycle, conveniently alongside a park bench Killian suspects that he'll be spending the night on. As uncomfortable as it might sound to others, he barely thinks twice about the prospect anymore; he's spent plenty of nights on worse, both during the war and after it. His bedroll does more to counter the hard ground than anyone would expect.

(Sleep is hard to come by these days anyways, and when it does, it only brings nightmares — visions of falling and flames, reminders that there’s no real good reason why he was pulled out of the Atlantic when so many others weren’t.)

(It should have been Liam who was saved, not you, a terrible voice in his mind whispers. It’s easier to drown out during the daytime; at night he’s too tired to deny the truth of it.)

Satisfied that he's got a plan until tomorrow, Killian unbuckles the satchel containing his few important belongings from the body of his bike and sets out to locate the diner. He remembers the sign promising the establishment was open 24 hours a day, and he intends to take advantage of at least a few of them.

Sure enough, the lights of the diner still shine brightly as Killian approaches. Granny's, the neon letters out front read. By all appearances, it's typical of family-type joints across the nation (or at least the parts of the nation he's seen so far). A bell jingles merrily as he pulls open the door; inside, the diner is adorned with a busily patterned wallpaper that somehow avoids looking suffocatingly dark like he would have expected when paired with the red vinyl upholstery of the booths, chairs, and barstools. The jukebox plays faintly at the edge of his hearing, just low enough for him to ignore the sound. Not that he could place the song anyways. Even if there is something of a feeling that the establishment could have been located anywhere and he wouldn't have known the difference, there's a comfortable aura in the air as well.

"Seat yourself," an older woman calls from behind the counter without looking his way, apparently apprised of his entrance by the aforementioned bell. Considering the diner’s moniker, Killian can’t help but wonder if this is the eponymous Granny. It’s probably for the best that she hasn’t turned to face him; he can’t imagine the woman would be as welcoming had she seen his face. He’s a bad influence, they say wherever he goes in voices too loud to be a whisper, too loud to ignore. On a Tuesday night, the crowds here are minimal, a small blessing; after surveying his options, Killian chooses a booth in the back corner where he can watch everyone but hopefully not be disturbed. Already, his unfamiliar face is drawing attention from the few other diners. They’re not used to outsiders, he can tell, and he’s not surprised about it in a town this small. Already, he can feel an unnatural hush in the air as suspicious and in some cases curious faces follow him as he makes his way across the room.

Maybe, in another life, Killian might have stared back, daring his spectators with a look to do something about their staring. That life slipped away when he crossed the ocean in search of anonymity, however, and he makes a show of ignoring the stares, rustling in his satchel instead. From the cluttered depths, he extracts two books; one for his own reading, picked up from the last used bookshop he ran across, and one blank for his own use. Once upon a time, the sights he’s seen and the faces he’s met would have inspired verses, the words tripping over his fingers and across the page in a quest for life, but it’s been a long while since that’s been the case. There are many reasons Killian forges ahead on his endless, aimless ride — some of them tangible, some of them unknown even to him — but his pursuit of his words is part of it. The closest he comes these days is behind the controls of his bike, once more racing through the open sky; it’s only then that the guilt quiets somewhat and he feels like inspiration could be dancing along the breeze, like a bit of dandelion fluff.

This diner, however, is not the open air or the world rushing past him without a care, and his notebook will once again go to waste.

"Can I get you something?" a different voice asks — feminine, but a little deep and throaty. Killian glances up, expecting to order tea and a ham sandwich and turn back to his own distractions. He expects a passing, forgettable interaction.

He does not expect to look up and find himself faced with an angel.

It's far too fanciful to call her that, especially when she stands in front of him, flesh and blood and bone, but it's all he can come up with when faced with such perfection. Her hair is a shade of gold that painters and pirates must have coveted in times long past, shining and catching in the light with every movement. Though her tresses are pinned back, a few tendrils have still worked themselves loose to frame her face and model the slight curl to the lustrous strands. The way it's swept and pinned makes her eyes shine brighter than any he's ever seen, highlighting their green in a way she can't possibly be oblivious to. There's an aura about her that he can sense but not quite see that practically makes her glow, even in a blue uniform dress and stained apron that's less than flattering. She's somehow entirely separate from the drab surroundings of this small town diner, yet simultaneously he knows she must be an integral part — like the purest diamond embedded in the dingiest mine.

(Maybe there's a verse in there, somewhere. It's been too long for him to even tell anymore.)

He must be gaping like a fish, because she arches an elegant eyebrow at whatever expression graces his face, the barest hint of a smile pulling at her own mouth. It ruins the goddess effect a little bit, but makes her look more human instead — someone with a sense of humor, perhaps even a bit mischievous. "Sorry?" he finally manages to stutter out, though whether that's an apology or a request for clarification is anyone's guess.

"Would you like to order?" she repeats. "Or would you like some more time to look at the menu?"

"Just some tea, please." It's some kind of miracle that he doesn't trip over his own tongue, though not enough of one to remember that ordering tea in this country is a fool’s errand. "And a ham and cheese sandwich."

"Earl Grey alright?" she asks, surprising him, quickly scratching his order down on her notepad. From Killian's vantage point, he can just see her handwriting — a messy kind of script that fits his impression of her, casual and hurried and somehow still elegant.

"That's fine." Better than, really; he’d expected that terrible facsimile Americans insist on calling tea. He keeps drinking it anyways, for some indiscernible reason, like a last-ditch grab to hang onto a piece of who he used to be.

The waitress must see some of his surprise on his face, as she smiles knowingly. “Granny spent some time in England in her youth, and came back with very specific opinions about tea. None of the Lipton stuff here.” That would explain it — though it’s still unexpected in a tiny Maine hamlet. “Now, do you want that sandwich grilled or cold?"

"Grilled, please." The mere act of ordering a meal constitutes the most decisions he's had to make in a long time, and certainly the most he's spoken to anyone; his voice feels scratchy with disuse, which can't make the good impression his ego desperately needs. He was considered quite the catch once, if anyone could believe it; Killian wouldn't blame those who called him a liar, to see him now.

As he grimaces at his own ineptitude, the waitress finishes scribbling out his preferences and tucks her order pad back away in the pocket of that awful apron again. "We'll get that going for you then," she smiles. "Let me know if you need anything else."

(A name would be nice, for one, but it feels like overstepping to demand that particular snippet of information. He'd caught an E at the corner of her breast pocket, but that could be so many things. Eleanor? Elizabeth? Etta?)

"Wait, lass," he cuts in as she turns to disappear back behind the counter. Her head tilts in a sign of her attention — an adorable one at that. If he were a braver man, he might ask her a bit about herself. Unfortunately, he is not a braver man. "Is there a telephone somewhere I could use?"

"All the way down the hall," she nods. "Can't miss it."

"Thank you, lass," he murmurs as Ella-Ernestine-Elsie walks away again. There's no telling if she heard him or not, but Killian is almost afraid to bring any more attention to himself.

Sure enough, the payphone is just down the hallway. It's far enough away to offer Killian a modicum of privacy, which is more than he's come to expect in many places. It's dimly lit, and right next to the bathrooms, but he's not here for the ambiance anyways.

There’s a calming ritual to making the phone calls to New York, even if they’re only sporadic. He’s accustomed by now to speaking with the operator, inserting the change when directed, waiting for the shrill ring as the call connects across hundreds of miles. He doesn't make these calls very often, but it's been several weeks — somewhere in upstate New York was his last call, he thinks — and this unexpected pit stop is as good an excuse as any.

It doesn't take long for the other end to pick up. "Scarlet residence," declares the softly accented voice on the other end of the line, familiar and comforting even across such a distance.

"Hello, Belle, it's me." Killian leans into the corner formed by the wall and phone as he settles in for the conversation, propping his forearm on the top of the telephone's boxy structure. Belle just might be the last family he has left — certainly the last family he’s aware of — some sort of distant cousin on his late mother’s side. The details of it don’t particularly matter; what does matter is that she’d opened her heart and home when Killian had left, nay, fled England without any plan to speak of. London had still been in shambles, even after hostilities had long since ceased; Killian had found it impossible to live every day surrounded by ghosts and memories, all decaying and obliterated. Belle had offered to let him stay, too, help him get back on his feet again, but the itch to keep moving had been too strong under his skin.

(One thing they don’t tell you when you enlist in the Air Force is this: the solid ground will lose its appeal in a way you can’t imagine, and the world will start to move too slow everywhere else when you’ve spent enough time in a cockpit.)

Besides, Belle has a family of her own, a husband who loves her and two small boys; as kind as she is to offer, and as hard as she has tried to include him, Killian would inevitably always be an outsider in that tableau. It was for the best that he left, to try and settle his demons and rediscover who he can be on his own.

"Killian!" It's easy to hear the warmth and excitement in his cousin's voice. "How are you? I was just thinking about you today." Just worrying about you is what she means, but Belle's always been too much of a lady to say it out loud. Besides, she understands why he's doing what he's doing; as settled as she is, he hadn't expected her to understand the itch to move that's settled beneath his skin, impossible to ever truly alleviate, but she'd just smiled and asked what she could do when he'd told her his plans. It's how she wound up the custodian not only of Killian's scant belongings, but also his savings account in his absence.

"I'm fine," he assures her as best he can. "I'm in Maine. I'll be here a few days, I think."

"A few days?" The worry isn't back in her voice yet, but he knows it's coming, just as soon as he shares his reason for stopping.

"Aye. There’s a nail in my tire. I’ll get it checked out at the shop tomorrow, but I assume they’ll need to order in the new tire. I doubt they’ve got the right ones for the bike on hand."

"But you're alright?" Ah, there's the worry. "You don't need anything? I can wire you money, if you like —"

"I'm fine, Belle, truly," he hastens to assure her. "I'm hoping to trade my labor for parts, help out around the shop if the owner will let me. I'll need something to do around here anyways, it's a pretty small town. I'll let you know if you need to wire me money, don't worry."

"If you're sure..." Belle tries to start, but Killian cuts her off.

"I'm sure."

"I suppose I'll have to be fine with that. But now, Killian, how are you? Not your motorcycle or the roads — how are you?"

"I'm okay," he says truthfully. It's the best he can give most days; he hasn't quite found what he's looking for, can't even put his finger on what that might be, but he knows it's still out there, still out of reach. Still, it feels better than being cooped up in some office job, forcing himself into the boxes polite society wants him to inhabit that are slowly smothering him. It lets him try to figure out who he is now without Liam and without a clear purpose.

"But are you happy?" It's not the same thing, she doesn't say, but Killian hears it anyways.

"Enough." It's the best he can give her. "Listen, I just wanted to call and let you know where I am. If it seems like I'll be here more than a few days, I'll give you a number you can reach me at. Tell Will and the boys hello for me."

"I will," Belle promises. "If you need anything at all, if there’s anything I can do, promise you'll call me, Killian. Promise."

"I promise. Love you."

"We love you too, Killian. You can always come here, even if it's not home."

She says that every time, and every time, Killian hangs up to avoid responding. The truth is, he still doesn't have a good answer, and as much as he loves his cousin and her family, their apartment just isn't home. That's something he's not yet sure he'll find again.

He's barely returned to his seat before a steaming pot of tea is placed before him, the cup following in its wake. "Your sandwich will be ready shortly," the blonde angel assures him. "Let me know if you need anything else."

"Thank you, lass," he tries to smile. At least his voice is audible this time after his conversation with Belle.

As Killian lifts the pot to pour himself a cup, he’s thrilled to see the genuine article trickle out. Even with the waitress’ explanation, his expectations of the promised tea had been low. This, though, is steaming and hot and just the right strength. It tastes like a little cup of the home he’d left behind, and infuses him with a warmth and comfort that he hasn’t felt in… years. Not since before the war, just he and Liam sitting at the kitchen table with a cuppa and the radio.

(It’s a feeling he’s long since lost, and one he didn’t expect to find again in the middle of nowhere, Maine. Everyday miracles can still sprout anywhere, he’s learning, as long as you’re looking for them.)

His dinner arrives as quickly as promised, and time begins to blur together in between warm bites and crisp pages and his thoughts. At some point, the empty plate is whisked away and another cup of tea is brought for him to enjoy. Killian is so used to entertaining himself that he doesn't truly notice any movement around him — that is, until a new plate is placed on his table and nudged into his hand. Glancing at the clock, Killian is surprised to find that the time is now just before ten; he'd been at the diner over two hours, far longer than he’d intended. Blame it on a good book and intriguing, if passing, company, he supposes.

Another quick glance reveals the small plate that the waitress had deposited to display a slice of pie — blueberry, if he's not mistaken. The thing is, he’s certain that he’d never ordered it.

"Excuse me, miss," he calls before she can walk away, "I believe you delivered this to the wrong table."

"No, I didn't," she smiles back, before glancing towards the door. It must be time for her to go home; Killian will regret her absence once she departs, though he knows he doesn't have any true right to do so.

Still, he must insist. Good form and all that. "I didn't order this, I'm afraid." I'm not sure I can afford it, he doesn't say, though that's what he means.

"I know," she replies. "You like pie?"

"I do," he assures her, still confused.

"Then it's on the house. Granny's got a soft spot for the lonely ones." As she tears his ticket off from her order pad, Killian wonders if the woman in front of him might have a soft spot, too. Maybe she was a lonely one herself, once; something in her eyes speaks to the kind of understanding you just can't fake. "If you'd like some more tea, Ruby will be happy to help you," she nods towards a smiling brunette behind the counter. "Have a good night."

"You as well, lass."

The pie is delicious; he should have expected such just from the look of that flaky crust, but the confirmation is its own revelation. He can't say any of this was what he expected when he set out for dinner — not the blonde angel, and certainly not her unexpected kindness towards him. The more he thinks about it around bites of pie, the more he thinks the diner's proprietress had nothing to do with the sweet treat in front of him — especially since he hasn't even seen her on the premises since his server made that claim. No, he thinks that the pie must have come from the waitress herself, though he can't fathom for what reason.

He finally pays his bill and leaves, letting the diner's bell ring behind him as he exits, but it's not until he's nearly halfway back to the garage and the bench out front that he realizes:

He never actually learned her name.

#csrt #cs ff #captain swan #my writing #Wherever You're Going (I'm Going Your Way)#A Sunlit Night #1950s au

83 notes · View notes

straykidsupdate · 5 years

Text

Stray Kids are shaking up K-pop’s status quo

The South Korean pop band Stray Kids are clustered around a laptop for a Skype interview, pale in the screen’s glow as heavy rain turns New York City to grey. It’s a fitting backdrop for the group: from their 2017 pre-debut release “Hellevator” to the latest single, the snarling, trumpeting EDM of “MIROH”, the K-pop group have made similarly dystopian environs their visual backdrop, where neon and CCTV screens flicker and the group are hemmed in by skyscrapers, tarmac, and tunnels as they attempt to escape or defy their surroundings.

This concept – of attaining freedom – is central to the group, and it’s an idea that’s rooted in reality. The group’s leader, Bang Chan, handpicked each member for the group from their parent label JYP Entertainment’s roster of trainees, a process unheard of in K-pop, where that power lies with executives and creative directors. Stray Kids write and produce all their material, too, and are one of the few idol groups to do so. Their music focuses unflinchingly on their youth – the anger and frustration, the ecstatic highs and ragged lows – while questioning their own shifting sense of identity.

With bleached bangs falling into one eye, Bang Chan recalls not the gravitas of the opportunity to form his own group, but the pressure of picking wisely. “There was a lot on my mind,” says the 21-year-old, speaking during the band’s run of sold-out North American concerts. “Choosing the right people was a must, because I’m going to be with them for a long time. Because I’d been a trainee for so long,” – seven years – “I think I had the ability to figure out what potential they had.” He turns to his bandmates and namechecks them: Woojin, the eldest at 22; Lee Know; Changbin; Hyunjin; Han; Felix; Seungmin; and the youngest, I.N, who turned 18 in February. “With everyone around me right now, I’m really glad we’ve become this team.”

Bang Chan and 18-year-old Felix, whose cavernously deep voice is at odds with his Bambi-innocent looks, were both raised in Australia, and the broad twang of their accent conveys a cheerful, anything-is-possible resonance. It’s the former who helms the conversation. He’s an engaging speaker and a careful listener, stopping to translate questions for the non-English speakers. At times he falters, and at others he deflects to well-worn answers (a reflection of their newness), but he’s unmistakably a leader, a role he wears effortlessly.

As a whole, Stray Kids are known for their friendly, indefatigable rambunctiousness, but with nearly a dozen rookie awards and five EPs in just over 12 months, it’d be foolish to underestimate their tenacity. Their start was a baptism of fire. On Stray Kids, the eponymously-named survival TV show that they were formed through, they were required to write tracks and perfect performances to short deadlines, then ruthlessly critiqued by the CEO of their label, JYP Entertainment. Two of the group members, Felix and Lee Know, were initially eliminated, although eventually reinstated in the final episode via a public vote. Felix, axed due to his less-than-fluent Korean, hasn’t forgotten the sting. “I still think about my Korean and how I use the language,” he sighs. “I try to learn, and fix it.”

You can see his determination when Stray Kids appear on Korean variety shows to showcase their work and their personalities. Felix’s shyness in speaking had resulted in less camera time but, in recent months, his studying has appeared to pay off and he’s a far more confident presence, able to convey the charm that's endeared him to their fans. It’s the result of constant help from his bandmates, he says, radiating positivity (which is, delightfully, Felix’s default setting). Lee Know, however, who’d had only a short idol training period and was cut early in the series, favours a more stoic approach. “I think I’m here thanks to that feedback. I worked really hard then, and I’m still trying to work hard now too,” he says, and although his small smile seemingly hints at something more pronounced, he settles on a double thumbs up and sits back.

“Choosing the right people was a must... With everyone around me right now, I’m really glad we’ve become this team” – Bang Chan, Stray Kids

Their rough-meets-polished sound was set up by the darkly anthemic “Hellevator”, but the thundering EDM and guitar riffs of their official debut, “District 9”, cemented them as a fresh force in K-pop. In its music video, they flee a clinical-looking prison and use a school bus to smash through to the safety of the titular District 9, although even there they’re left searching. “I don’t know who I am, it’s frustrating, it always worries me / Answer me, then give me an answer that will clear it all,” Hyunjin raps with a volatile urgency.

This ceaseless quest weaves through last year’s EP trilogy (I Am NOT, I Am WHO, I Am YOU) and into their latest EP, Clé 1: MIROH, the clear narrative allowing for sonic experiments (from the minimalist electronica of “3rd Eye” to the bright pop drawl of “Get Cool”) without losing momentum. In their song “NOT!”, they celebrate breaking out the “system” – the status quo – and the strength of being different. For Stray Kids, this is more about ambiguous storytelling than holding a deliberate ’us versus them’ mentality. “We usually don’t compare (ourselves) to others,” says vocalist Seungmin, in English. “Like in the song ‘My Pace’, we’re saying we don’t care about others’ (achievements), we’re just talking about Stray Kids’ own way.”

While Stray Kids have definitely created a richly empathetic musical tapestry, their chosen path raises a pertinent observation: in breaking out of one “system”, they’ve joined another. The idol system that they’re now a part of often appears more restrictive than the one they leave behind, and as they move towards the bubble of fame and money, there’s also the potential to lose a sense of oneself. Both feel paradoxical to their story. Bang Chan pauses. “Well, honestly, we wouldn’t call it a system, let’s say a ‘world’, and we’d call it a decision that we made. In order for us to get out of the main system, we chose being idols, and through K-pop we can show the message we want to express.”

Han, the 18-year-old rapper, singer, and songwriter/producer, drapes himself, cat-like, over Felix’s head and neck to get close to the camera. “I think fame and success can be dangerous to a person, depending on how they feel about it, but we’re going to try to always be positive and good natured about it,” he opines, gesticulating rapidly. “We’re still lacking so much, but we’re going to try really hard to understand other people’s feelings and be a good influence.”

Given Stray Kids’ formation, creative freedom, and growing success makes them something of an anomaly, might their presence provoke change in the idol world? Bang Chan furrows his brow. “I suppose so,” he says with the questioning tone of someone presented with an unfamiliar concept. “I guess it’s up to how people take it in.”

Stray Kids, evidently, have been more preoccupied with looking inward, and, when examining their new EP, it’s apparent their gaze has been in flux. Clé 1: MIROH, which Bang Chan describes as “us being really confident because all nine of us are together”, presents a new fearlessness on tracks like “Boxer”, “MIROH” and “Victory Song”, where Han triumphantly raps:“A laidback victor, a smile spreads on my face / Who else is like me, there’s no one.”

“When I was becoming a singer, some people didn’t support my dreams, so I was sad. I remember that and put those feelings into this song” – Changbin, Stray Kids

They pose fewer existential questions than on previous EPs, but, says Bang Chan, “if you look at tracks like ‘Chronosaurus’ and ‘Maze Of Memories’, it shows nervousness or anxiety, and a feeling of being lost as well.” The latter, its doomy hip hop propelled by tense piano and bursts of foreboding strings, was an emotional outlet for their silver-tongued rapper, Changbin. “When I was becoming a singer,” he says, in English, “some people didn’t support my dreams, so I was sad. I remember that and put those feelings into this song.”

Yet despite sieving emotions and thoughts through the music, their biggest questions, says Changbin, remain unanswered. “But we’re trying,” he smiles. He points to the close presence of their fans, known as STAY. “Maybe we can find the answer soon, through STAY.” How does he intend to discover deeply personal epiphanies through others? “I’m young and lack a lot of experience,” replies Changbin, reverting to Korean. “There are still a lot of childish elements about me as well. By watching those around me, I can find out what I like through them. I feel like I can find myself through (others’ journeys).”

For now, Stray Kids simply continue doing what they’ve done so well thus far – capturing the human condition, including tackling difficult subjects like depression (“Hellevator”), anxiety (“Rock”), and negative thoughts (“Voices”), all of which, Bang Chan says, they’ve experienced first-hand. The group’s core writing team (Han, Changbin, and Bang Chan, together known as 3RACHA) have not only refined their style over the past year but, according to I.N, “improved on their speed of making songs. They’ve gotten really fast,” he says with a sunny grin.

3RACHA’s Soundcloud days are far behind them, although, to their credit, they haven’t deleted the handful of songs that were posted pre-debut. Some will remain just enthusiastic learning curves, but others were raw and powerful, such as “Broken Compass”, which was refashioned into “Mixtape #4” for Clé 1: MIROH.

The “Mixtape” songs, which are only found on the physical versions of their EPs, are where, Hyunjin says, “we all contribute, and fill our individual verses with our personal stories”. In January, 3RACHA revisited a few songs during a Vlive broadcast, and cringed to the point of sweating profusely. As Changbin and Han crease up, Bang Chan covers his face, mock-groaning. “We can’t listen to them now!” But there’s a glint in his eye. “We do have to do episode two of that,” he adds, grinning.

It’s not just the songwriters who are evolving; from being wide-eyed, ambitious and nervous trainees who didn’t always get along, as Hyunjin recently revealed, Stray Kids have become compelling performers with close bonds. They’d clung tightly to Bang Chan during their survival show, but do Stray Kids today feel less lost – or at least more secure in their responsibilities? “I’ll just leave the room so the guys can talk more freely,” jokes Bang Chan, even as Changbin, owner of a bone-dry sense of humour, simply yells, “No!” Vocalist Woojin leans in. “He was very good to us while we were filming the show. At that time we always followed him very well, and relied on him a lot.”

“I don’t have a lot of confidence but when he’s next to me, I know I can do this,” adds Felix, as they ready to depart for the next schedule in a packed day. “But,” Woojin says, “now we’re all developing our own selves, too.”

Source

#stray kids #190606 #era: clé 1 miroh #t: article #dazed

254 notes · View notes

ducktracy · 4 years

Text

14. smile, darn ya, smile! (1931)

release date: september 5th, 1931

series: merrie melodies

director: rudolf ising

starring: rudolf ising (foxy)

perhaps the most well known cartoon to feature foxy (granted there WERE only 3 of them made). the song “smile, darn ya, smile!” was even used in the ending scene of who framed roger rabbit! to further twist the tangled web of harman and ising’s disney influence in looney tunes, this short appears to be heavily influenced (if not a remake) of disney’s trolley troubles starring oswald the rabbit, which hugh harman has some influence in creating him (like mickey mouse.)

we’re greeted by the smiling face of foxy, who starts the cartoon off by singing “smile, darn ya, smile!” while driving a trolley (and using a cat’s tail as a rope to pull, sounding a bell). god, what an earworm! it’s so catchy! and foxy doesn’t sound half bad, either. imdb and the looney tunes wiki (which both of those aren’t the most reputable of sites, but they’ll do for now) cite foxy’s voice as rudolf ising himself, though roxy’s is yet to be identified (i’d guess rochelle hudson personally).

foxy makes a stop to allow any passengers to board. an oversized hippo attempts to climb aboard, but has trouble fitting. there’s a part where foxy is pushing her and she starts talking backwards inexplicably (much like porky’s backwards dialogue in porky’s railroad that perplexed me so much). thank god for imdb trivia: evidently she says “susie heard one of those atlantic bells! whaddaya think?” i guess it isn’t all that inexplicable, probably intended to imitate some angry muttering, but it was a little jarring at first to hear.

to solve the dilemma, foxy plucks a feather from her hat and pokes a hole in her stomach, which causes her to deflate like a balloon. embarrassed to be seen in her underwear, the woman marches off as foxy laughs and hops back into his trolley.

now we find roxy waiting patiently by the tracks. foxy happily picks her up, and together they sing “good morning to you” and “smile, darn ya, smile!”. this is actually the first time we figure out foxy’s name (“good morning, dear foxy!”)—his name wasn’t mentioned in the previous cartoon.

while the lovebirds sing “smile, darn ya, smile!” we have a few gags with the advertisements on the inside of the trolley, like a long necked dog advertising “narrow collars” singing a bass line, the “sniff brothers” advertising cough drops, their coughs so powerful it causes a chicken to loose all its feathers and hit the brothers over the head, and an advertisement for “risk tires”, the advertisement next to it a picture of a tombstone captioned “ask the guy who owns one!” like everything else in these cartoons thus far it’s just a simple “objects anthropomorphized” gag, but the jokes land. the pacing of this sequence (and quite honestly the cartoon as a whole) is smooth and quick. the voice acting is decent, no awkward pauses that drag the short on forever. and that damn song is criminally catchy!

in similar fashion to sinkin’ in the bathtub (and, going back to disney, trolley troubles), a cow blocks the path of foxy and roxy. foxy attempts to scare the cow away, repeatedly yelling “hey!” but to no avail.

cut to a gang of hobos who find merriment in foxy’s dilemma, transitioning into a BEAUTIFUL barbershop chorus of the eponymous tune. i love the music in all the looney tunes shorts, especially carl stalling’s scores during his 1936-1958 career, but i have a fondness for the music in the 30s shorts. there’s an abundance of lush harmonies, barbershop quartets and pseudo-andrews sisters types. they make for a very atmospheric cartoon. even if a cartoon doesn’t have much going for it, a good music score can cushion the blow of a bad short (not that this one is bad, i really enjoy it!)

in pure cartoony goodness, foxy manages to slide the entire trolley beneath the cow, who sticks up her tail and her nose and carries her business elsewhere.

the influence of sinkin’ in the bathtub and box car blues comes into play by reusing the same concepts and animation. after crossing a bridge like a tightrope, the trolley enters a cave and foxy is catapulted out of the trolley, leaving roxy to her devices. the trolley heads down a steep decline, and foxy, conveniently spotting a rope nearby, fashions a lasso and attempts to wrangle the trolley back, but only ends up catapulting himself onto the out of control trolley with roxy.

we get this beautifully dizzying scene of foxy attempting to maneuver the trolley the best he can down the decline. i really appreciate the camera angles used in these cartoons. they come off as up close and personal, and therefore tend to be slightly uncomfortable, but good on them for mixing it up! staging the scene this way from foxy’s point of view adds a sense of immersion as you yourself feel you’re about to plummet into the unknown with them.

foxy enters a black tunnel, and the fate of our favorite foxes is floundering and unfathomable...

until we see foxy screaming and tumbling out of his bed. twas merely a dream, all is well! that is until the radio sings “smile, darn ya, smile!” foxy appreciates the singing SO MUCH that he tears a leg off of his bed and bashes the radio in.

i enjoyed this cartoon! it had more plot than lady, play your mandolin! and, for once, the voice acting was tolerable. “smile, darn ya, smile!” should be criminal! it’s SUCH an earworm, i can’t get it out of my head! some animation was reused (as was the entire concept from trolley troubles), but this cartoon manages to feel fresh, chipper, and energetic, paced well for its time. overall, i’d definitely give it a watch! AND it’s in high quality. what’s not to love? watch it, darn ya, watch it!

youtube

#lt #smile darn ya smile #reviews #long post

14 notes · View notes

loquaciousquark · 5 years

Note

hey! love your writing and hearing about your process. you have mentioned that you need to write out a full fic first, rather than writing and posting chapter by chapter. what is your process for editing those longfics? i finished the first draft of my first longfic and the idea of editing it seems incredibly overwhelming. do you have any recommendations?

thank you kindly, anon! this is a difficult question to answer because I have no actual writing...training, I guess, is the word? I was a biomedical sciences major and I have never taken a creative writing class in my life, so I haven’t the foggiest idea if what I do breaks every Prime Tenet of Proper Writing ever, so take everything here with a grain of salt.

Because the thing is: I hate editing. HATE it, loathe it with every atom and sinew of my body. It is by far my least favorite part of the writing process, and because of that I go to great lengths to avoid it as much as humanly possible.

I’ve talked before about how I outline, I think, but basically, I outline all my long pieces heavily to get as much right on the first pass as I can so that I can not have to do major edits. Drafts, likewise, don’t really exist for me; 95% of what I write on the first pass gets published in that form with only minor changes. I strongly suspect this is an artifact of me being an architect rather than a gardener in my writing; I can’t remember the last time I scrapped a whole scene (or even a major part of a scene) because of how heavily I outline first and how strict I am with myself in sticking to that outline. Probably the vampire AU, honestly, because of Jade--but more on that later.

Here’s an example of what some of my outlining looks like:

Like, sometimes I’ll do proper numerals and such, but more often than not it’s just paragraph descriptions of the major things that should happen in each chapter, and if there’s some phrase or idea that I really want to use, I’ll just jot down a few specific phrases right there in the document.

This does a few things for me, but the biggest is that it gives me a solid bird’s-eye view of the thing I’m trying to write. If I don’t know them already, what are the themes I want to emphasize? What are the plot threads that run throughout? If I have “introduce Gilchrist the evil baker” in chapter one, this helps give me the reminders to make sure Gilchrist has appropriate follow-through in each subsequent chapter and isn’t completely forgotten by the side-plot I accidentally brought up in chapter three and loved way more than Gilchrist’s unleavened muffins.

And this is not to say that I build the entire lattice out of iron from the start so that there’s no room to grow. Even in this fic I’ve just finished, I was telling @eponymous-rose as I was working on the epilogue (which I hadn’t intended to have) that I wasn’t sure what it was going to be about, but that I could feel it was needed; and it wasn’t until I was writing the epilogue’s last few lines that I realized both why it was important regarding the overall themes of the fic as well as regarding the characters’ individual narratives, even though I hadn’t planned for it in the outline.

This process is also why I tend to write the whole fic before ever posting a single word. If I realize in chapter nine that I completely forgot Gilchrist the baker existed until I made an inadvertent reference to a crooked croissant, there’s not a darned thing I can do about it if chapters one through eight are already posted. And because I also have major personal hangups about making public mistakes, I would much prefer to write in private, fix my boo-boos before anyone else sees them, and THEN post, rather than getting a half-dozen comments wondering if this was all a secret patisserie plot all along.

The other thing I’ll add here is how important my betas are to me and how I write. I am by nature an incredibly impatient person--I’m the one shopping at 8:30pm at Hobby Lobby and then working on a spraypaint project in the backyard at midnight by phone flashlight because I refuse to wait until the next day--so this has always been a little hard for me. However, being able to give the whole fic at once to a beta and say here, this is it, and letting them read the whole thing at once--this is so invaluable to me in picking out things I’ve forgotten, scenes that didn’t translate well from my head to my page, or plot points that might be weaker than I first thought and need shoring in multiple places throughout the plot.

@jadesabre301 has been my beta for...years. Middle school? Twenty years, maybe? And by now we know enough of each other’s writing to know where the pitfalls are, how each person needs to be checked. I tend to forget side characters exist when I have a huge cast; Jade is always there to remind me they exist and to bring them back in (see Sebastian’s chapter in Ever Rise for a perfect example; that chapter didn’t exist before she told me to let him be alive again). I tend to overuse certain phrases and metaphors, and I’ll sometimes have characters repeat the same action several times in a scene without realizing (see Invicta, where I had three separate people cross their arms in less than 500 words before she called me on it).

Jade also has a marvelous ability to look at a work’s overall structure and point out which sections are strong and which sections are weak and need a little tweaking before they’re published. (Again, because I hate editing, the bones are usually sound enough that I can make these changes with only a few paragraphs or sentences here and there; and when Jade tells me to cut some line altogether I rarely save it, because if it didn’t make her cut here I know it’s not worth the saving anywhere.)

Example!

And because she also knows me very well, she is also very kind to point out the things she likes throughout her edits, which is just as invaluable a skill in an editor and I hope she realizes how important it has been to me over the years.

And because this is quickly getting much longer than I’d ever intended, I will close with the last thing that has helped me with my own editing when I’m (alas) forced to do it: I know what my problems are, if that makes sense. Not just the structural issues above, but repeating phrases and words to the point of distraction, hammering metaphors into the ground when a lighter touch would do them better service, and significantly overusing emdashes & semicolons. (Based on @eponymous-rose‘s beta/grammar check of this most recent fic, 43 of 350 or so emdashes died, and more will again when I get a chance to look over it once more.)

So when I’ve gone through it enough that I’m happy with the characterization and the plot threads and themes, as set out by the original outline I spent too much time on, then I go through and do one or two passes on word choice. To be quite honest, I do a Find search through the document for words I know I overused, then look at each usage and make sure they’re not too close to each other. Example--I did a search for “hard” on this last fic, and found I’d used it four times in the same paragraph. All in different ways--his eyes were hard, his grip hardened, he had a hard set to his shoulders, etc--but too much! So knowing the words (and issues in general) I tend towards and looking through to excise some of them specifically helps a lot in the editing I am willing to do.

SO!

To summarize: how do I edit my longfic? As little as possible!

heavy outlining prior to writing to make sure I have themes and plot threads properly established and mapped out throughout the piece

sticking closely to my outline throughout the writing process

sending only completed fics to beta so that they can read the whole thing at once and more easily pick out flaws in structure, theme, or character progression

ctrl-f words/phrases I know I most frequently overuse to cut the unnecessary ones (I’ll sometimes run the fic through something like this site to check phrase frequency for anything that might have slipped through)

and when all else fails, I set the whole thing aside for a week (again, I am impatient--longer would probably be better) and then come back and try to read it with fresh eyes

I hope this has at least been moderately helpful? Again, I’d like to emphasize that I have no idea what I’m doing, and this is hardly foolproof, but it’s worked for me so far, and hopefully at least a small part of it will be helpful to you. Thank you for asking!

#writing: other #quark replies #long post for ts #anonymous #someone tell me if i should cut this!#nm i'm just gonna cut it #how did this get so long

36 notes · View notes

angelofberlin2000 · 5 years

Link

Keanu Reeves May Be Pure, But He's Not Oblivious

America’s most memeable actor is back in John Wick: Chapter 3, a movie that's in on the joke of our obsession with Keanu. He might be too.

Alison Willmore

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on May 17, 2019, at 10:40 a.m. ET

For a guy without any official web presence or expressed interest in things online, Keanu Reeves goes viral a lot. He's spawned memes when he's looked sad and other memes when he's looked happy. There's a Twitter account, 198,000 followers strong, devoted to "Keanu doing things" like wearing a fedora or hanging out on set with Sandra Bullock. Creepshot footage of the actor giving up his seat on the subway or rattling around the Bakersfield airport after an emergency landing has racked up thousands of delighted views. Reeves may have risen to fame as a Gen X movie star ("the most soulful while being the most stoner-bro," as the New York Times recently put it), but it was millennials who carved out a permanent place for Keanu in the internet boyfriend hall of fame, as an embodiment of inexpressible melancholy and a figure too pure for this world.

The fact that the actual Reeves — like any living, breathing human — is likely a lot more complicated than that has never gotten in the way of how he's been enshrined in the popular imagination, in part because Reeves has never seen fit to fight it. Reeves works hard onscreen, while barely seeming to notice the eyes (and cellphone cameras) that remain trained on him when he's off it. Where other stars attempt to actively sculpt and control their public image, Reeves submits to the sometimes intrusive attention with bemused acceptance, aware of but apparently unbothered by the fact that there's an outsize version of himself living in people's heads. When questioned about it, he tends to be kind: "Yeah, I guess that’s like an invasion of privacy. They didn’t ask me," he told Uproxx of the bus video, the existence of which seemed to be news to him. Then he added, "They were nice people. We were in it together. We had a nice car ride."

When Reeves went viral again last week, it was for something he definitely knew was being recorded. He was on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, doing promo for John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, the preposterously enjoyable third film of the action franchise that's come to define this period in his career. Reeves, sporting some “I'm-between-roles” facial hair, talked up the stunts and how he was set to reprise his role as world-saving slacker Theodore "Ted" Logan in a third Bill & Ted movie, nearly three decades after the last one.

All of which led Colbert to coyly ask Reeves what he thought happened when we die — a ludicrously weighty question for the average talk-show exchange, but a perfect one for the bodhisattva of showbiz. And Reeves did not disappoint, answering simply that "I know that the ones who love us will miss us." It was both a perfectly shareable aphorism and a poignant reminder of his own experiences with losing loved ones, which are real and terrible and which were also outlined in a Facebook video that blew up to the point that the fact-checking site Snopes felt compelled to put together an entry on it, judging it to be "Mostly True."

Reeves is now 54 years old. The inhuman splendor of his youthful beauty (seriously, have you seen My Own Private Idaho lately?) has gradually softened into a more manageable gorgeousness that shows the touch of time while remaining a little unreal. The fact that Reeves isn't a kid anymore is, in fact, the whole point of the John Wick trilogy, which puts the actor in the eponymous role as a retired killer yanked back into violence after an arrogant Russian mob scion kills the puppy gifted to him by his late wife.

The John Wick franchise is the creation of Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, stunt coordinators turned filmmakers whose elegant action sequences make clear how often it's really Reeves there doing the work, having a swordfight on a motorcycle or slowly sinking a blade into a struggling foe's eyeball. His physicality is front and center, and it's both impossible (John should be dead a thousand times over) and extremely human (John bleeds, staggers, reels with grief). Like Reeves himself, John is at once larger than life and extremely to scale.

Reeves is famous for action. His biggest films are the Wachowskis' Matrix trilogy, those landmarks of bullet-time choreography and heady stoner philosophy for which his flat affect was perfectly suited, as well as Speed and Point Break. But he's always harbored a romantic streak too, even if it hasn't always been showcased well by leading roles (like his in 2006's The Lake House) that leave him looking lost. He's better as the losing corner of the love triangle in Nancy Meyers’ 2003 rom-com Something's Gotta Give, despite the grievous injustice of Diane Keaton throwing him over for Jack Nicholson. The John Wick films work so well not just because of their fight sequences and increasingly arcane assassin mythology, but because of the degree to which they're romance-adjacent. They're heartfelt films about grief, with John as a man lamenting the death of his love and losing pieces of the life they built together in each subsequent installment.

The further the John Wick series has gone on, the more it's curled around Reeves' own persona. The first was a comeback vehicle for Reeves that also happened to be about a hitman's comeback from normal living, and the second was a riff on contractual work obligations. By the third, John is as beset by admirers as Reeves was at that Bakersfield bus stop, only in the film they're affectionately trying to murder him. When he faces down two henchmen (played by Cecep Arif Rahman and Yayan Ruhian of the Raid series), they thank him for the honor of fighting him, and maintain a running commentary on his performance in Indonesian during the sequence. "He's getting slow," muses one as John peels himself off the floor, while the other points out that he is recently out of retirement.

The main antagonist in the new movie, at least physically, is a striver and self-declared fan named Zero (Mark Dacascos), who’s a devotee bumped up to the assassin big leagues. "I've been looking forward to meeting you for a long time!" he declares. "And so far you haven't disappointed!" Zero is a surprisingly funny creation who owes something to Sonny Chiba in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, in how he's introduced, and something to Anne Baxter in All About Eve, in how he's ready to destroy his idol and take his place.

But Zero and his team also feel like a meditation on modern fandom at its most intense, where people need the person they admire to live up to the image they've formed of them, with an implied threat as to what might happen if the object of their obsession doesn't manage this feat. Most of the characters in the John Wick movies are bewildered by John's efforts to get out of the game and live like a normie, but they treat him as a fellow professional. The baddies in John Wick 3, on the other hand, are fans who feel a sense of ownership over John because they've tracked his career so closely.

Reeves may have the most even-keeled relationship with celebrity of any A-lister working today, but in the beleaguered looks he shoots at his foes in this new movie, there's a hint of wry self-awareness. It doesn't feel accurate to describe Reeves as a reluctant movie star, not when he devotes so much of himself to what he does, and when he gamely participates in every aspect of the process. But in playing this reluctant killer, the actor does offer a glimpse of himself as someone who's aware that there’s a finer line between being loved by the public and being devoured by it than anyone would like to think about.

There’s a thrill watching Reeves in this role that’s related to how delightful it feels to see him turn up as what looks like himself in the trailer for Netflix's upcoming Always Be My Maybe — the rom-com loser and internet boyfriend all in one, mashing his face into Ali Wong's while muttering, "I miss your taste." We may like to treat Reeves as a kind of holy innocent, but just because he avoids artifice doesn't mean he doesn't know what's going on. ●

#keanu reeves #buzzfeed news

16 notes · View notes

theuniversitychallengereview · 5 years

Text

UC 48.35 - Durham vs Edinburgh

Scotland have never had an institution in the Grand Final of University Challenge since the Paxman Era began in 1995, with St Andrews being the last team from north of the border to make it to the showpiece, back in 1984. Their loss that year to the Open University marked the end of a mini Golden Age for Scottish Collegiate Quizzing, with victories for themselves and Dundee in ‘82 and ‘83 being preceded by Edinburgh’s only final appearance in 1981. Two winners and two runners up in four years, with nothing either side.

Its Edinburgh who have come closest to breaking that duck post-95, this being their fifth (and third consecutive) run to the semis. Last year they were blitzed by eventual winners St John’s, Cambridge and in 2017 they fell to Champions-elect Balliol, Oxford. Aberdeen and St Andrews have also made it to the last four (in 1995 and 2004), but none have thus far been able to take that extra step.

Hoping to block that path and take their own place in the Final for the first time since they won the trophy in 2000, Durham came into this match with a great deal of confidence, unbeaten so far and with a comfortable win over their Scottish opponents already under their belt. These are the two sides with the most Challenge appearances between them since the show returned to the BBC, and they’ve played each other a number of times in that period, but never with as much at stake as this.

Durham certainly came into this match as the clear favourites, and not only because they had dismantled their opponents earlier on in the tournament. While fellow semi-finalists Darwin and Teddy Hall have demonstrated an over-reliance on their captains (both in games versus Bristol, which Darwin narrowly lost and Teddy narrowly won), Durham have proved a more rounded team, with all four players getting stuck in on the buzzer. Edinburgh rank somewhere in between these two extremes, with captain Fitz-James their strongest buzzer, but backed up by decent rates from Booth and Campbell Hewson.

Fitz-James likes to play a high-risk high-reward brand of buzzer quizzing, with a bunch of starters to his name, but also the highest number of negs in the tournament so far. This is a dangerous but necessary tactic at some points in the game - for instance when they were trailing Durham in their previous encounter - but it hasn’t always paid off for him. Knowing that they’ll need to beat Durham on the buzzer I didn’t expect him to play more conservatively this time round, but he’ll need to improve his interruption conversion lest this method have a negative effect.

Anyway, let’s not bother with the rules, here’s your first starter for ten.

Question one of the evening, and the the first neg. Fitz-James (of course), wearing an unbuttoned crisp white shirt and big blue blazer with racing stripes (the semi finals being the stage at which some of the contestants are wont to start dressing up) zooms in too early to send Edinburgh into the minuses before we’ve even properly settled down. His opposite number Toynbee calmly waits for the end of the question before cleaning up his mess, and Durham take two of the resulting bonuses on the Kalinga Prize. Normal service resumed.

Or not... The maverick nature of Fitz-James’ style turns positive on the next starter, and Booth follows it up with one of his own. Booth then manages to understand a particularly mangled set of bonuses on geometry for ten more points, mixing up the icosohedron and dodecahedron for the final five, which is fair enough. Edinburgh now lead.

The first picture round, a surprisingly simple question that was effectively ‘name the period between 1929 and 1939 in the United States’ (which is pretty gettable on its own), but with the further clue of a massive economic crash at the beginning of it, goes to Durham’s Yule, and they go five clear with two bonuses. Booth, complying with his captains instructions to buzz at all costs, jumps the gun to the tune of negative five with primitivism, but Toynbee doesn’t manage the steal this time. He gets the next one though, on military history, and the next, on the prefix psycho. 35 points in it now.

Campbell Hewson springs into action for a question about Scottish mathematicians, which makes sense, given that he is also a Scottish mathematician. Bonuses on swans follow. Paxman describes one species as having a ‘loud hissing sound when provoked’, and Fitz-James muses that this sounds like a goose. His teammate Booth rightly points out that geese aren’t swans, and they muddle around to the correct answer of Mute.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture plays for only a few seconds before Fitz-James buzzes in. The good thing about the music starter is that you can’t neg it, but on this occasion his fast fingers were on the pulse and two bonuses were enough to give them back the lead. This spooks Durham into a neg of their own, with Yule not looking very sure of himself as he says Walt Whitman. FJ doesn’t manage to punish him though, but Campbell Hewson, with an energetic thinking phase, romps in with Via Della Rosa to take the next question.

Murray, scourge of Edinburgh the last time the sides met, buzzes in with trademark composure for his first starter of the night, and Durham followed it up with a quick hat-trick on eponymous laws in electrostatics. After the second picture round, which also went to the Wearside Quartet, there were only fifteen points separating the two teams, and only a few minutes to go.

For once, Fitz-James holds off on the next starter, as does everyone else, with the question hanging there for a few seconds of dead time until FJ comes in with a guess of Moses, based on the final clue, relating to Charlton Heston. Sometimes you just need to guess. Ten points to Edinburgh, who crucially go more than a full set clear.

Yule keeps the game alive with Mahler on the next starter, and Durham opt for a rapid triple pass on molecular biology bonuses - a wise move (sometimes you just need to pass. You’d need somewhere beyond thin air from which to pull guesses of thermococcus litoralis, pyrococcus furiosus and thermus aquaticus) . But Fitz-James and Campbell Hewson each take their fourth starters of the night, leaving Durham shellshocked, and seventy points behind at the gong.

Final Score: Durham 110 - 180 Edinburgh

A fantastic performance from Edinburgh, who upset the odds to reach the final at the third time of asking. Durham couldn’t quite keep up the standards they’d set in the previous rounds, as Edinburgh’s quick-buzzing tactics well and truly paid off. Nevertheless, a great game from all involved, and we have a superb semi to look forward to next week as Freddy takes on Jason in University Challenge’s answer to Hollywood.

#university challenge #durham #edinburgh #bbc2 #jeremy paxman

6 notes · View notes

redrosella · 6 years

Text

Avarice - Chapter 2

Summary: Roman hasn’t been feeling well lately. He’s been waking up at random times in the middle of the night, is perpetually exhausted, and he can’t seem to get rid of this damn headache. …If only that was all it was.

Warnings: Mind Control, Brainwashing, Dark Sides, Corruption

Word Count: 1618

Tagged: @sanderstalker @rosie-the-bi

Chapter 1

The sides hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Roman since the last video. It was almost like he was a ghost. All of them knew by now to give him time to decompress after a video, but three days was really pushing it. The most he’d had to leave for before had been two days, and that was only after one of Thomas’ more strenuous musicals was finally over after months of practice and performing.

Almost nothing could keep Roman down for long, which is why it was so concerning to the others that the prince hadn’t appeared even once since his and Logan’s video. It wasn’t like it was a more stressful or engaging video than usual. Sure it was a bit more creative with all the handwritten graphs and lists and the cut out artwork, but it shouldn’t have warranted a three day vacation.

Virgil worried his bottom lip between his teeth, unable to sit still in his seat. “We really should go check in on him…”

“You know Roman doesn’t like to be interrupted when in his room. I don’t believe we should be worried right now, anyway. Perhaps he was simply decompressing, and then went right into another one of his little artistic binges that keep him all cooped up. It is statistically probable given how often he has them that one might coincide with the ending of a previous video.” Logan adjusted his glasses, looking back down at his book.

“I don’t know, Logan. I mean surely he should have at least come down to eat by now? I cooked him dinner and everything!” Patton spoke up, poking his head from the kitchen in to comment. “He must be hungry…”

“Roman can conjure anything, Patton. He can take care of himself.” Logan said, not looking up.

“Why are you being so blasé about this?” Virgil asked.

“I just don’t see the point in worrying about it right now. Roman can take care of himself. He certainly had it all figured out in the last video,” Logan mumbled bitterly. “Is that still bothering you, Logan?” Patton placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure Roman meant nothing personal by the video. He was just a bit over enthusiastic like usual.”

“I am not bothered by it. That would be illogical. I just wish he hadn’t been so dismissive of my points.”

Patton resisted the urge to point out that that qualified being bothered, instead trying to go for a more neutral route. “Well, maybe Roman believed you were dismissive of his ideas as well. He could be hiding away because he feels bothered as well. Maybe you should have a chat when he comes out of his room and sort all of this out. I’m sure something just got miscommunicated, and if you just talk it out and explain to Roman how you feel, you’ll feel better.” Logan was about to reply when he suddenly stopped, hearing the telltale sound of footsteps coming down the steps. Roman walked down looking perfectly normal. Maybe a bit worse for wear in some departments, but certainly not the disheveled appearance he usually had after his creative binges.

“Roman!” Patton called. “It’s good to see you kiddo! We missed you.”

Roman didn’t respond. He just continued walking into the kitchen, grabbing one of the notebooks that he left lying around the house for whenever he got an idea out of nowhere, opening it up and scanning the pages. The moral side’s smile fell.

Virgil furrowed his brow. “Roman?” Nothing. “Roman,” he said more forcefully.

“What,” Roman grit out, not looking up from his notebook.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Then why were you ignoring Patton?”

Roman snapped his book closed, glaring at Virgil. “I don’t need to respond to everything you say. I just came to get my book, and now I’m going to go.” He stalked off.

There was a silence. Then-

“Geez, what crawled up his ass and died?”

“Virgil!” Patton swatted at the side’s shoulder. “Language.”

“I’m just saying what we’re all thinking.”

“I was not quite as crass, but I was thinking the general point. That was not very… Roman-y.” Logan waved his hand to the last word, adding extra emphasis to the eponym. “However, that did confirm that Patton’s hypothesis was correct. This attitude change seems to be in direct reaction to the video we just completed.”

“Well then maybe you should go up to his room and talk to him,” Patton suggested.

“He’s probably been hiding away because he doesn’t want to talk to Logan, Patton,” Virgil spoke up. “He’s not going to want to talk to him.” “I don’t see why. I didn’t say anything horrible during the video that would cause such a strong reaction.”

“Logan, I haven’t seen the video yet, but… well... I don’t know how to put this, but you are very blunt, and Roman is very sensitive. You may have said something that just rubbed him the wrong way accidentally, just like he said some things that rubbed you the wrong way. I’m sure neither of you meant it, but you two both have very different ways of speaking and communicating. Just go up and clear it all up. I’m sure Roman will listen.” Patton patted Logan on the shoulder.

Logan sighed. “Alright.” He put down his book, standing up from him chair. “Thank you, Patton.”

The logical side walked over to the staircase, taking the steps slowly to give himself time sort out his thoughts before going to confront the creative side.

He wasn’t mad at Roman for the video, really. He knew bringing Roman into it that they would have differing opinions, but he also knew that by the end of it they’d come to a satisfying conclusion about it. Or at least he had thought. This time there was no satisfying conclusion. Only Thomas cutting them off in the middle of insulting each other. Usually if they said something scathing during a video they’d apologize by the end of it, or at least see eye to eye in some respects, but that had never happened this time.

All the insults were just left hanging in the air between them with no resolution. It made sense that if Logan was upset by them then Roman would be too, given that they both traded insults several times.

Not that it bothered Logan. That would be illogical.

Logan came to Roman’s door, knocking on it twice and then stepping back, waiting for the side to appear. It took about thirty seconds but finally the fanciful side opened the door a crack, peering at Logan through the small gap.

Logan frowned, expecting the side to have slammed open the door like he usually would, but decided not to question it right now. There were more important things to worry about.

“Roman, I believe we need to talk,” Logan said, adjusting his glasses.

“About what?” Roman asked curtly.

“About the last video. I do not believe we parted on the best of terms, despite how it may have seemed. You have been locked away in your room for three days, and I have been out here, so clearly we haven’t communicated since the video ended. I believe you- we- said some things we may not have meant, so it would be best to clear the air before we continue on.”

Roman deadpanned. “There is nothing to say. Didn’t you hear Thomas? We make a great team.”

“That was quite obviously Thomas trying to end the video on a more positive note. We were no closer to a resolution than before he cut us off and suggested a middle road. We did not reconcile ourselves.”

“There was nothing to be reconciled. You said what you wanted, I said what I wanted, and then you ignored me despite wanting my help.”

Logan frowned. “I apologize if that is how it felt, Roman. I assumed you understood that the point of the videos is to meet in the middle.”

“I don’t think you understand, Logic. I do not want to meet in the middle on this.” Roman opened the door more, stepping out and closing it quickly behind him. Being able to look closer at the side, Logan could see that he was more bedraggled he seemed at first glance. There were bags under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept for the three days he had been gone, and his glare was almost deadly in it’s intensity. “There was nothing to debate on. We don’t need to focus on trivial little things like you want. Not everything has to be about what you want.”

“Roman that is highly illogical. I thought we went over this during the video. Thomas decided that-” Logan tried to reiterate before being cut off.

“Well Thomas was wrong. He doesn’t have to be right all the time. You’re just influencing him by pushing your own agenda. Well guess what? Thomas doesn’t need you, Logic. You’re just holding him back.” Logan took a step back, almost physically moved by the force of Roman’s words. “I was right when I said you were alone, Logic. No one wants to be around you when you never listen to them and instead try to use them for your own gain.”

“Falsehood,” Logan protested shakily. “I don’t- Roman, what has gotten into you?” “What has gotten into me?” Roman laughed. “Nothing. I’ve just become more aware. I don’t have to listen to you.” He turned on his heel, opening the door to his room and storming into it and slamming it shut behind him.

Before the door closed, Logan swore he could see the room in disarray.

He felt his eyes burning.

#Sanders Sides #Thomas Sanders #Roman Sanders #Logan Sanders #redrosellawriting #avarice #sanders sides fanfiction

10 notes · View notes

spamzineglasgow · 4 years

Text

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

youtube

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order.

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

#review #reviews #music reviews #album review #The 1975 #Matty Healy #Maria Sledmere #music criticism #Scott Morrison

0 notes

mothermaidenclone-blog · 7 years

Text

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 or Sisters Are Doing it For Themselves

I came into Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 expecting an irreverently fun film filled with witty quips and near constant mild violence, and I was not disappointed. However, I was caught unawares by how emotional some parts of this film are and also by the complexity of the characters in a franchise whose main selling points involve swearing animals and eighties tunes. Just because the eponymous guardians now share a mythical destiny it doesn’t mean that all of their relationship issues and personal traumas are immediately fixed, which was important to see.

*Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 spoilers follow*

The film starts with yet another beautiful female alien falling head over heels for Peter (Chris Pratt) for no real reason, and I thought that was going to set the tone for the rest of the story, but thankfully it was an isolated incident. Peter’s affections are focused solely on Gamora (Zoe Saldana), whose own feelings seem somewhat more complicated. She obviously likes Peter, but it unclear to what extent exactly, and due to her horrific history of abuse at the hands of Thanos, it is no surprise that she is unwilling to open herself up to that kind of intimacy and possibility for further pain. Therefore, it makes complete sense that she remains guarded and I’m personally very glad that she doesn’t end the film in Peter’s arms.

The person that Gamora chooses to pursue a relationship with in this film is her sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan). At the end of the film, Peter gives a speech in which he says, “Sometimes, the thing you’ve been looking for your whole life is right there beside you all along.” He turns to look at Gamora, obviously as an expression of his romantic feelings towards her, but she immediately leaves to try and reconcile with Nebula, realising that she is the most important person in her life. Her parting words to Nebula are, “you will always be my sister.”

Sister, however, is a very loose term here for the birth-daughter of a genocidal maniac and the girl he took prisoner after murdering her real parents, both of whom were subject to mental and physical torture at his hands. In the first film, Nebula was a bit of a one-dimensional vengeance machine, a ready made antagonist running on the vague fuel of jealousy and hatred, but the specific horrors of her past are revealed in this sequel, making her motives clear. It turns out that Thanos pitted them against each other as children and every time Nebula lost a fight to Gamora he replaced a piece of her with machinery. Gamora managed to escape these horrors and find herself a new family but Nebula, having been disappointed by Ronan in the previous film, has been left to rattle around the galaxy alone with nothing to do but stew in her own anger and single-mindedly pursue vengeance. Therefore, it is no surprise that she spends most of the film trying to blow Gamora up and only after another cosmic apocalypse is narrowly avoided does she have the strength to face Gamora and admit, “I just wanted a sister. You were all I had, but you just needed to win.” Once again, this is a realistic representation of someone who has experienced dire and repeated trauma - of course she isn’t going to run to Gamora with open arms straight away, nor is she going to immediately take her up on her offer to join the Guardians of the Galaxy. However, they do share an embrace, which shows the beginnings of a recovery, leaving the audience not with an and they all lived happily ever after - there is no magical instant healing, but the arguably more satisfying resolution that things are organically starting to get better.

The other main female character (we get three? What a treat!) is Mantis (Pom Klementieff). Seemingly not wanting to break the streak of everyone having a turbulent past, Mantis has been living alone on a planet with a man literally called Ego (Kurt Russel) who has been using her pretty much as a tranquilliser and forcing her to abet him in repeated entrapment and murder. Unsurprisingly, she appears to have basically no self-esteem. Once again, a road to recovery is presented, this time in the form of Drax (Dave Bautista), with whom she begins to develop a friendship - possibly the first of her life. Drax is very supportive, telling her, “You don’t have to believe in yourself because I believe in you”, as well as asserting that she is beautiful on the inside. However, the latter is because he also calls her “disgusting” and makes retching noises at the thought of a sexual relationship with her. Their platonic friendship is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t need to be justified like this - two adults of different genders are allowed to have a loving friendship separate from sex for reasons other than finding each other physically repulsive.

In addition to being presented as three dimensional people, the women in this film are also well represented visually. None of their costumes are too ridiculous by superhero movie standards and in fact we see more male semi-nudity due to Drax being constantly shirtless and Peter taking his top off at one point for no real reason other than a display of his body apparently. Furthermore, Nebula and Gamora (particularly the latter) repeatedly show remarkable displays of physical strength and Mantis has the unique and valuable power of being an empath - they all have skills and abilities that the men simply do not possess.

Overall, the women in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 are presented as complex human beings. They are recovering from traumas in their past, meaning that sometimes they make bad choices, but sometimes they save the day. They are strong and capable but also allowed to show emotions, and not just romantic love for the leading man but sisterly affection and platonic friendship. The same can be said of the men; everyone is treated as a three-dimensional human being with flaws and feelings, even the talking raccoon and sentient tree.

And now for some asides:

I was not expecting to cry at this movie, especially not at the line, “I guess David Hasselhoff did kinda end up being my dad after all.” I can tell that one’s going to get me every time, it’ll be up there with, “I am no man” in Return of the King.

I cannot wait to see the lady Ravager gang, please do not tease me with that then leave me hanging.

I love how much of a point they made of not killing people at the beginning because the whole gold fleet was remote controlled, then they straight up murdered everyone on that Ravger ship, nice try keeping it child friendly.

I don’t care how much of a marketing ploy it is to sell tiny plastic trees, baby Groot is the cutest thing in the universe.

#guardians of the galaxy #guardians of the galaxy vol 2 #spoilers #guardians of the galaxy spoilers #Film Review #movie review #feminism #sci-fi #science fiction #women in cinema #mothermaidenclone #tw: abuse #tw: trauma

4 notes · View notes

emma-what-son · 7 years

Text

Beauty and the Beast: feminist or fraud?

From TheGuardian March 2017: Has Disney really turned Beauty and the Beast into a feminist fairytale? Or is it all just posh frocks and women’s work with a slice of Stockholm syndrome thrown in? We delve beneath the furry facade.

Beauty and the Beast was billed as a great feminist retelling of a fundamentally regressive fairytale. It was so feminist that Emma Watson, its eponymous Beauty, has been pilloried on social media for the hypocrisy of such unfeminist acts as having breasts and being attractive. This, naturally, rallies the right-thinking sister to Watson’s defence, and thence to defend and applaud the entire film. But is this a trap? How feminist is it really? I dunked it in some water to see if it would drown (this witchcraft analogy does not stand up to close scrutiny, move on).

1) Incomplete subversion of the genre

The main – indeed the only – stated piece of feminism is that Belle has a job, so escapes the passivity and helplessness that has defined heroines since Disney and beyond. Eagle eyed feminist-checkers noted even before the film’s release that Belle’s inventing is unpaid – so it’s not a job, it’s a hobby. I don’t mind that. The future of work is automation, and even feminists will have to get used to finding a purpose outside the world of money.

I do, however, feel bound to point out that Belle’s invention is a washing machine, a contraption she rigs up to a horse, to do her domestic work while she teaches another, miniature feminist how to read. The underlying message baked into this pie is that laundry is women’s work, which the superbly clever woman will delegate to a horse while she spreads literacy. It would be better if she had used her considerable intellect to question why she had to wash anything at all, while her father did nothing more useful than mend clocks. It’s unclear to me why anyone in this small family needs to know the time.

Later, the trope of transformation – girl in rags trussed up in finery by supernatural cupboards or birds or whatnot – is subverted, as Belle finds herself encased in silks, only to liberate herself immediately after a defiant: “I’m not a princess.” However, for the climactic ballroom scene, she is transformed with a pretty dress. So it smacks of that tinny, 1990s inconsistency: rebelliously rejecting frilly conformity one minute, wallowing in it the next. I did, however, like the accent on her bravery, even if her only weapon of any efficacy was a kiss.

2) Glorification of male domination

There is more than a whiff of Fifty Shades about this film, though not in the savagery of the Beast, who – locking people in cages aside – is more cantankerous than violent. Instead, there’s the drooling over the castle’s opulence, the visual caress of every chandelier and gold-leaf dado rail. This is very zeitgeisty, the sense that wealth has an erotic charge of its own and, furthermore, that nobody that rich can possibly be bad.

However, the book that kept coming back to me was not Fifty Shades but John Fowles’s hideous novella The Collector, in which a butterfly enthusiast turned sexual predator kidnaps an art student and keeps her in a cellar until – spoiler alert – she dies of pneumonia. It’s actually incredibly hard to turn this story into an equality morality tale: the Beast can release her, she can come back of her own accord, all kinds of agency for the heroine can be filleted in at key moments, but the core proposition is that it’s possible to fall in love with someone who’s holding you prisoner. It’s not love, is it? It’s Stockholm syndrome.

The teapot, played by Emma Thompson on a one-woman mission to start a class war with her magnificently weird cockney accent, announces, apparently sagely: “People say a lot of things in anger. It’s up to us whether or not to listen.” This is a CBT reading of domination, where you take back your own power by choosing whether or not to respond to it. I’m not sure it entirely holds for a person who’s trapped in a castle.

3) Surrendered filial relationship

The father is meant to be a bit useless. We knew that. He is descended from a long line of fairytale fathers placing their daughters in dire jeopardy because they simply had to steal a lettuce or a flower or some stupid spoon. Yet this makes Belle’s ardent love for him – creepily illustrated by the anticipatory duties she performs, guessing what tools he needs for his timepiece-mending before he’s even realised he needs them – a bit uncritical and uncurious. They could have resolved this by making him 15-20% less useless.

4) The great lacuna where Belle’s character should be

So, you take a classic heroine and you strip her of her stereotypes: she is no longer weak and pliable, pleasing and emollient, cute and girly. But now you have to put some other stuff in there and – presto! – she is an adventurer and a bookworm, a dreamer, a nurturer, a person who may not be able to pick a lock on her own but can definitely put her hands on a tool for when a man wants to pick a lock. The problem is that all her new traits are pretty saccharine, so she still reads as a traditional heroine, just with bits missing. The opposite of a damsel in distress is not a damsel with a plan, it’s a damsel with a sense of humour.

5) Palpable fear of ugliness

It’s not an obvious feminist element, since it’s the beast who’s supposed to be grotesque. Nevertheless, I think we could all agree that the plot rather hinges on the idea that people can be ugly without and beautiful within, which idea has implications for womankind generally even if not for this particular woman, who is beautiful within and without. The problem is the Beast isn’t beastly. He’s actually fabulously handsome. He could quite easily, in another film, be the hero whose superpower is being furry. He is much better looking as a Beast than he is as a prince, which Belle explicitly references by asking him to grow a beard. Feminism aside, it rather misses the point. Watching this film as a feminist fairytale is like listening to someone who claims to be able to speak German, then realising that they have only mastered one phrase. They can ask for directions, but if you actually told them the way to the Bahnhof, they’d be stumped. Still, hats off for trying. It’s better to speak a tiny bit of feminism than no feminism at all.

#news #article

4 notes · View notes

loquaciousquark · 6 years

Text

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E15 (Apr 24, 2018)

Hello hello hello! As @eponymous-rose is away doing Important Science, I’m covering TM recap duty tonight! Tonight’s guests: Marisha & Liam. Tonight’s announcements:

This Saturday is International Tabletop Day! G&S is running special programming all day to celebrate.

VM Origins #6 is out at all available online comic retailers. The final touches are being placed on the comic collected edition; details to be released soon!

Wednesday Club airs tomorrow at 7pm PST.

826LA hit the $35,000 reward tier this week! This means Matt will be hosting another Fireside Chat soon. (Liam reveals that the vintage robe & a tiger ring Matt wore in the last chat were gifts from him after a certain jazz-hands-related event in the last campaign.) As a reminder, all donations are doubled up to $40,000 thanks to a generous critter matching donations.

Pillars of Eternity is out in two weeks! Reminder that the characters of VM will be playable as voice sets in this campaign; the new portrait art for Vax was released this week. Check it out at versusevil.com/criticalrole! Liam extols Travis’s voice acting and the “finesse” in his performance and hopes that fans will be very happy with it.

Reminder: Dani Carr hosts Critical Role Recaps every week.

CR Stats for Episode 15

48 natural ones this campaign so far ($4800 from D&D Beyond to 826LA!)

67 natural 20s so far, even without a Lucky rogue!

Over both campaigns & 51 initiative rolls, Ashley averages only 9.5 on her initiative rolls. :( However, she’ll be on Talks next week! Yay!

Beau is super into working for the Gentleman right now. As long as she makes friends in high places, she’s happy (in part because she knows they won’t last long).

Liam doesn’t miss trap duty at all. (He’s enjoying being a screw-up wizard.) That said, he still enjoys watching Sam bring his magic touch to his old class.

Beau fundamentally trusts that people will always act in their own self-interest, which is why she told Jester to take care of herself first. To Beau, selfishness & survival are synonymous--most people want to make sure they aren’t going to get caught or killed. That’s how she can trust untrustworthy people to work for the good of the group, and why she thought Caleb & Nott needed to be part of a bigger conversation.

Sam, of course, very briefly FaceTimes into the show with the knowledge that Liam called him a comedic genius. He wishes everyone to know that this is accurate, does a remarkable Howdy Doody impression, and leaves.

Caleb didn’t have any experience with the Zone of Truth spell before and paid close attention while it was being cast, but “nobody asked him any questions, so I guess it’s fine.”

Caleb’s one-on-one with the DM hasn’t changed his playstyle or character interpretation yet, since it didn’t reveal anything significant. He does think it might have given Caleb a mildly different outlook on certain things/his mood a little bit, but no fundamental shifts yet. Beau’s one-on-one shifted her perspective a lot--she doesn’t respect authority at all, so being put in her place was a good check on her personality & took the edge off her wrecking-ball habits. Both Marisha & Brian talk about respecting someone willing to call them out on their crap.

Gif of the Week: this glorious thing by @scottc_miller on twitter. Poor everyone. Poor drunk Nott.

Beau is officially warming up to Molly. Awwww, my heart. “I don’t know if Molly’s warming up to Beau, but...” Brian: “Self-preservation, guilty until proven innocent...an optimist!”

Molly’s amnesia reveal hasn’t really changed Caleb’s opinion of him. He does trust that Molly told the truth within the Zone’s context, but he knows that may not be the whole truth. The only person who’s changed in Caleb’s estimation is actually Beau; Liam talks about a low score he rolled on an arcana check on the magical symbols, which Beau surpassed, and in the moment Caleb realized that meant Beau must have had some formal schooling. “A little checkmark went ‘boop!’ in a box.”

Beau is aware of her own terrible flirting with women, & Marisha references Beau’s strong preference to be in charge in her interactions. Marisha also talks about some of her Meisner acting classes/acting methods in how scenes are structured and it’s actually really, really cool. Liam segues into his first week in NYU at his very first voice acting class where they laid on the floor and did “pelvic thrusts” to loosen the diaphragm. Marisha recalls her college voice acting teacher telling her she was terrible and shouldn’t pursue voice acting because she spoke from the back of her throat.

All of Caleb’s spells have been selected for RP reasons over functionality/utility. Liam knows it’s not the most optimal build &, as might be expected, doesn’t care in the slightest. You go, boo.

Liam and Marisha giggle over fighting such a classic old-school monster as a gelatinous cube. Liam honestly wishes Frumpkin could have been dissolved; Caleb emphatically does not. Marisha remembers finding the old cube mini with Matt which could be opened up so other minis could fit inside, and they sat in their living room for some time putting minis inside it. The pair that slays together stays together. Liam also remembers a Comic Con that had light-up gelatinous cube minis which he attended riiiiight after meeting Marisha.

Fanart of the Week: this by @sephiramy! Look at how good everyone looks, awwww.

Liam jokes that he personally excluded Quebec from the giveaways and it’s inexplicably hilarious, especially given Matt’s apologies for it on the regular show.

Beau’s hand going numb on the cube attack didn’t phase her at all; she’s still in the “adolescent” phase where she isn’t afraid of any bad things that might happen to her.

In re: screwing the DM with in-universe D&D choices: “Path of the Duck for the fuck.”

When it comes to HP management, the rest of the party is trying to make sure they can get people up when they’re down, especially since Jester canonically dislikes healing. Marisha reflects on the last campaign where she & Sam often filled the blanks around Ashley’s healing, and feels everyone’s trying to fill a similar role now. Liam and Marisha would ideally like another healer, but neither Beau nor Caleb are paying much attention to maintaining a balanced party comp.

The cat’s paw version of Caleb’s spell was always planned given his attachment to Frumpkin.

Liam talks about pre-stream puzzles from campaign one, including a complicated hydraulic puzzle that Taliesin’s dragonborn paladin sidestepped with one brute force elbow. He also remembers a child’s square puzzle that took “a group of adults an embarrassing time to solve.”

Cast- and staff-wide digression into puzzle-shaming Gandalf for flunking the Moria door riddle. Gandalf the Grey--more like Gandalf the Bad at Riddles, amirite

Beau’s ability to solve the magic puzzle feels to Marisha like the lessons your dad makes you learn as a kid, even though you never think you’ll use them--(such as being made to learn to change your own oil despite thinking you’ll always use AutoZone), but then you end up using the skill later on and resent it the whole time.

Caleb’s increased participation in discussions lately is an intentional choice on Liam’s part.

Beau’s improvement in dealing with the rest of the M9 is due to her becoming more comfortable with them.

Caleb recognizes Fjord’s arcane power, but doesn’t question it at all due to the magical nature of their world. (Neither Liam nor Caleb trusts Fjord to be neutral good: “He spat saltwater out!”)

Marisha makes a great point about how everyone in a D&D party is by definition magical and special, but everyone in the M9 right now feels like they’re still discovering what that means. Liam points out that VM very much felt like strong, special people with greatness thrust upon them; M9 feels like a troupe of random carnies.

Marisha on why she’s playing a human in D&D when so many possibilities exist: “Some people like playing ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.” She likes going from an all-powerful half-elven archdruid prodigy to a schmo who can just punch things really hard.

While discussing impostor syndrome, Brian quotes David Milch: “So much of the accomplishment in art comes not from the discovery of one’s gift but from its acceptance.” He likes that the leveling system supports the slow growth of a character in an RP sense and allows the character to learn and accept his or her strengths. He likes that it’s not straight escapism, it’s the combination of one foot in reality and one foot in fantasy.

Liam points out that since their group is very theater- and story-driven, they often use the leveling process to support story choices and character growth over class optimization. Marisha relates it back to the choices in Disney movies, where sometimes the protagonist discovers their innate power & embraces it in order to succeed, vs. where sometimes a protagonist must overcome an innate feature and rise above it in order to succeed. She loves that dichotomy. (Brian feels Scanlan represented similar principles in the last campaign.)

Liam’s favorite moment of the last episode was Sam’s small drunk goblin irritation.

In re: the rising from the floor at the end of the last episode, Liam hopes there’s a way to talk their way out of any upcoming fight, since Caleb’s pretty tapped. Beau: “This is fine.”

After Dark: I Know What You Did Last Summer Edition

On transferring from the relationship between Vax & Keyleth to Caleb & Beau--both Liam & Marisha have had some disputes about everything that went down in the High Richter’s house. Marisha: “I wouldn’t use the word ‘disputes.’” Liam: “What would you use?” Marisha: “...Clarifications?” They both are struggling with how much their in- and out-of-game relationships have changed over the course of the two campaigns.

The crew photoshops Liam’s hairy V-necked chest onto Marisha live. What even. How.

Marisha does miss some things about spellcasting, but enjoys watching everyone else struggle with concentration checks and saving throws.

Liam and Marisha both enjoy building characters and then assigning the classes that fit their story, instead of deciding what class to play first & building a character to that.

Brief aside where both Marisha (not Beau) & Caleb (not Liam) talk about how much they love Jester.

Liam discusses in- and out-of-player knowledge when it comes to Fjord. Liam knows there’s an eldritch horror behind him, but Caleb has no clue. Marisha sees him as the altrustic half-leader who’s hiding a lot. Liam hypothesizes that someone was about to die, and Fjord saved whoever it was by offering himself to Cthulu. Liam doesn’t think Fjord is good-aligned. Marisha doesn’t trust his smarts.

Marisha tells a story about Taliesin’s hair at C2E2. They were doing group photos when a family with a little girl came up who asked Taliesin his favorite hair color. He answered “I’m really into the peacock fade with the blue and the fade into green and the purple and the emerald,” and the poor girl was a little overwhelmed. (Marisha once answered her second-grade teacher’s question about her favorite color as “iridescent” and feels the teacher was more impressed with her vocabulary than her color choice.)

If they were pulled into Exandria today, Marisha would like to be a wild magic sorcerer or a paladin; Liam would be a wizard.

If the M9 were stuck in a cavern with no food, Marisha would eat Fjord first since he’s probably already a little salted.

Beau’s martial artistry is inspired by Ip Man.

Liam steps out for a moment after a coughing fit, then returns in order to stand very, very close to Brian. Close enough that Brian’s ear rests on Liam’s stomach. Close enough that Marisha feels left out and both of them cuddle on Brian’s lap to end the show. I’m glad I’m not kidding.

See you Thursday!

#critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina #talks machina spoilers #long post for ts

550 notes · View notes

argotmagazine-blog · 5 years

Text

No Gods, No Spirits, No Angels: The Religious Experience of Witnessing "Angels in America" as a Queer, Jewish Millennial

In Honor of World AIDS Day

“I watched my friends die,” the pep talk began. “I saw the inside of a paddy wagon more than once. I chained myself to the pews of a church.” This was coming from a theater professor, the day after the 2016 election. I had come into his office minutes earlier, shaken and despondent, telling him I no longer felt I wanted to continue pursuing playwriting.

“No. No. No,” he replied. “Now is when you must throw yourself into your art, full-speed. You cannot back down now. Feel upset today, fine. Take a break, whatever. But you have to get out there and fight tomorrow. I swore years ago I would never have to wear my ACT UP shirt again. But I dug it up this morning, and I’ll be wearing it out there at every protest and demonstration. I sure as hell better see you there, too.”

In my desperate need to understand what he went through, I blurted out, “I’d love to interview you about your experience.” The conversation came to a halt. The pep talk ended there. I had breached the fine line between a curious outsider and an intrusive one.

I encountered this before. When you’re a storyteller, you want to be interested in everybody. You’re taught to ask questions and gather the stories that will inform your work. You can’t write about the human condition if you’re not bearing witness to its many facets. We all want the juicy gossip, the ghost stories, the too-gruesome-to-be-real tales of people overcoming extraordinary strife. Yet that can be dangerous. Growing up Jewish, we’re taught that to remember the Holocaust is to prevent its recurrence, but we’re also taught never to ask about a survivor’s experience unless it is offered. This is the paradox of knowing survivors of tragedy: so many of them want to educate, to prevent history repeating, but their own trauma is often too painful to re-live.

Time and again, I have found the AIDS Crisis, like the Holocaust, to be the great rift between generations. For Jewish descendants of survivors, like some of my friends growing up, the Holocaust was the elephant in the room; something that made family dinners and religious celebrations a point of anxiety. Even if they lived in the most Jew-friendly town in America, survivors are forever looking over their shoulder. Their descendants are taught to as well, even when they’re not sure why. There were days my Jewish friends would tell me about the Holocaust being used as a point of guilt, a way to say, “Stop behaving so selfishly, don’t you remember what your grandfather lived through?” Survivors of the AIDS Crisis will sometimes—maybe inadvertently—scorn queer Millennials for not understanding the agony they encountered. As many of us came of age in the new millennium, perhaps moved away from home or began frequenting gay clubs and bars, we’d each have our own stories of encountering elder days with one too many drinks in their system, ranting furiously about our privilege, our “never having seen true hardship now that AIDS is gone.”

Of course, HIV and AIDS are not gone, and my generation isn’t blameless for our ignorance. I can’t begin to count how many gay people my age have told me they had never heard of ACT UP or the AIDS Quilt or even the efforts of artists like Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz. However, many of us want to learn. We want to understand what it must have felt like back then so that we can build stronger bonds with our queer elders. More of us want to educate, because we know the deadly price of ignorance; of thinking that knowledge of our history doesn’t affect us as individuals. After the Pulse shooting, I dived in. I read books on the Crisis, and binged documentaries. Yes, my fury over the Reagan administration’s inaction increased ten-fold. I made it my mission to educate fellow members of the community. But I don’t think I could fully grasp, on a deeply emotional level, what the turmoil must have felt like, until this year.

In March, I returned to my alma mater to see a production of Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches. This is the first in a two-part, seven-hour magnum opus drama written by Tony Kushner. Millennium follows a cavalcade of characters: Prior, the former drag queen diagnosed with AIDS; Louis, the pencil-pushing boyfriend who leaves him; Joe, the closeted Mormon law clerk; Harper, Joe’s equally Mormon, agoraphobic wife who sees less of her husband since he started cruising for sex in Central Park; and Roy Cohn, the evil lackey to Joseph McCarthy, dying of AIDS and denying every word of it. It is a tale of how the AIDS Crisis affected vastly different people, evoked through a “Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” Angels’ eponymous subtitle complete with spirits and giants and fiery biblical set pieces.

I thought I knew what I was in for as I found my seat in the theater, having read the script two years earlier. I figured I would probably cry when Prior screams at Louis, “I’m dying! You stupid fuck! Do you know what that is!” Yet, I was nowhere near prepared. By the end of the 3.5-hour show I was a red-faced, blubbering mess. Something happened to me in that small college theater. Something that made my heart feel altogether light and heavy; something that made my eyes see more clearly. By the time I returned to Chicago, I had had two nights of deep sleep accompanied by vivid dreams of the production. In one dream, I was an actor, and I had to get on stage and deliver a monologue. All the cast and the audience were waiting for me, and I couldn’t remember my lines for the life of me. So I fled to a parking lot and cried. In the other dream, I was an audience member who wandered on stage during a pivotal moment. I couldn’t seem to find my way off stage, and Prior scolded me for not paying attention, for not listening. Coming back to my Midwest studio apartment, I only had one overwhelming conclusion circling my head: I had just had a religious experience.

Western religion and theatre go hand-in-hand. They both involve rituals of an audience congregating for a set time to look at costumed people on a stage and try to glean a message. Theorists like Jill Dolan have asserted that a theater event creates temporary communities out of total strangers experiencing a shared moment. That is what it sometimes feels like to be queer: a community of strangers, desperate to make our pieces fit, coming together through some shared sense of otherness with the world. Seeing Angels for the first time, with Millennial actors, did for me what religion is supposed to do: connect us to our ancestors. I watched my community suffering on stage, and it felt real. It felt more authentic than any other play I had ever seen. The painted-on lesions, the heavy New York accents, even the moment Prior shits his pants and raises his hand to reveal blood (evoking an audible gasp from the audience). For the first time in my life, I felt I could empathize with at least a fraction of what those who survived the Crisis experienced.

Some people laughed when I mentioned how Angels felt like an out-of-body experience, and I was beginning to feel a little silly. Then I talked to Jeffrey James Fox, who played Prior in the University of Michigan production. “I guess, in a way,” he said, “I had a religious awakening.” He started to get choked up as he continued.

“When you’re Jewish, you learn about Jewish heroes and the Holocaust and tangible things that happened. You learn a little about the history of your people. Gay people don’t have heroes for a lot of their life, especially when you’re in the closet for twenty years or more… Like reading about ACT UP, my God! Their own research, their own doctors. They made everything happen on their own, because nobody else would!”

Most profoundly, he said, being in Angels as an openly gay man changed his thinking on how he wants his career to take shape. “I want to devote a good chunk of my career now to giving a voice to people who don’t have them. If I had seen a movie with a gay character when I was younger, imagine how much more comfortable I would’ve been with myself so much sooner! This whole thing…” He trailed off for a moment before concluding, “Yeah. I guess it is religious.”

We are a generation that feels more alienated and disconnected from religion than ever before. Millennials are distancing themselves from the religious practices with which they were brought up, choosing instead to forge bonds through pagan rituals or astrology. For some of us, theater offers a new religion, or at least a supplemental religious experience. It can connect us to the past, distract us from the present, and give us a glimpse into potential futures. For young people like Jeffrey, the history of ACT UP is the history of queer people’s resilience; of being backed into a corner, on the brink of extinction, and responding by rolling up our sleeves and solving the problem ourselves. Millennials, remarkably in tune with the complexity and fluidity of identity, increasingly no longer see themselves in religious stories and traditions. So we seek out other ways to connect to our past. We become the researchers of queer history, we find the forgotten stories, and we gather on stage or on Netflix or in movie theaters, and dammit, we tell the stories ourselves. We make our friends and family listen, so they will learn and fight alongside us for a better future. Out of pure necessity, we become the preachers of our own queer religion.

In October, a man entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire. I awoke to texts from friends offering sympathy, and read article after article of the “rise” of anti-Semitism in America (it’s always been there, it’s just emboldened now). I felt that creeping sense of guilt I know so well, for not having the “correct” amount of empathetic pain. I struggled to place why I was suddenly so void of feeling over the shooting. Of course I was upset to hear of the murder of fellow Jews, yet I wasn’t surprised. There wasn’t an aching loss and I felt overwhelmingly guilty for that. Why did the Pulse shooting break my heart, keep me in bed for two days, and force me to pen a new play? Why did the Tree of Life (whose alternative name, Simcha, is the same as my Hebrew name) come as no surprise?

Talking about this absence of pain with a friend of mine, I found myself referencing the Judaic aspects of Angels in America, which I had always ignored for the larger queer themes. Yet, I suddenly realized that the shooting didn’t shock me precisely because I was raised Jewish. The emphasis on always being aware—and always being prepared—that the world has tried to wipe us out for thousands of years has been ingrained in me. In a twisted way, Jews are always anticipating the next attempted genocide. There are two large groups that I can call “my people”: Jews and the LGBTQ community. I was shocked by Pulse because I had not yet had the history lessons of “my (queer) people” like the lessons afforded to me by Hebrew school, because queer studies are still “niche.” The culture that encouraged survivors to speak out about their time in the concentration camps had never existed for survivors of the AIDS Crisis or the Upstairs Lounge or Stonewall.

All of a sudden, I understood the religious aspects of Angels in America like never before. The depiction of Heaven as a place equally unfathomable and in disarray, in which Prior delivers a scathing speech that he’d rather live with AIDS than be healthy in Heaven, enforces the Jewish teaching of striving to do good on Earth for the sake of being good and helping others, rather for the sake of—to steal from The Good Place—an afterlife “moral dessert.” Then there’s Prior’s assertion that God must be dead. It is the play’s most direct reference to what many survivors of the Holocaust felt after they were freed from the camps: God is not coming back.

“And even if He did,” Prior says. “If He ever did come back, if He ever dared to show His face, or his Glyph or whatever in the Garden again. If after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century He returned to see … how much suffering His abandonment had created, if all He has to offer is death …

“You should sue the bastard. That’s my only contribution to all this Theology. Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He. He oughta pay.”

The monologues that precede both Millennium Approaches, and its successor Perestroika, are intentionally (sometimes literally) preachy. One is spoken by a Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, presiding over a funeral, and the other by Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, “The World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik.” Rabbi Chemelwitz waxes poetic on how the deceased immigrant laying before him reminds him of, “how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted.” He lambasts the descendants for giving their children “goyische names,” and assimilating to a kind of America that makes you forget your roots. In Part II, Aleksii’s monologue similarly curses us, for we could not possibly know the struggle he and his comrades overcame for a mere ideological future. That is what Jews and queers and the children of mass terror alike have always heard. The last survivors beg us to listen and to empathize and to never take for granted how fragile our freedoms really are. They make movies, write plays, and do whatever it takes to keep history alive and relevant, and to maintain the spark of hope that maybe we’ll be the generation that finally ends the madness.

My encounter with Angels at Michigan haunted me for days, and I needed a way to get back to that feeling. So, I made a pilgrimage. I found a way to see the show—all seven hours—on Broadway. By happenstance, I chose the day Tony Kushner was in the audience to celebrate the 25th anniversary of opening night. That’s how I knew I was exactly where I was meant to be; like at the end of Sister Act when the Pope shows up to listen to Whoopi’s whipped-into-shape choir. In this long journey to New York and back again, I realized something important: if theater is a religion, you don’t need to see a Broadway production to be transformed by religious text. Yes, Prior Walter’s monologue in Perestroika hit me like an oncoming train when uttered by Andrew Garfield, but that doesn’t mean the same feeling might not be achieved by a queer Millennial performing in a small theater anywhere else in the world. Like anything religious, it is all up to interpretation. As my life experience changes, so too does my understanding of Angels in America.

It’s not that Millennials don’t feel we need organized religion as much anymore. It’s that we’re learning there is an inherent religiousness to simply being human and wanting to fight for a better life for ourselves and for those who come next. Our forebears—professors, mentors, the older queers we meet in bars—may never have the words to express their stories of the AIDS Crisis, or the Holocaust, or the Next Terrible Thing. It is our duty to make ourselves understand. But it seems as though proactivity only comes from awakenings. I hope my fellow Millennials have the kind of religious experience I did. Let it change you. Let it fill your heart. Let it bring us closer to the generations before us, so that we may finally bridge this unnecessarily bitter gap. May you all find something that gives you the courage to scream and shout and demand—as one singular being—the right to a better life.

Eric Grant is a playwright, essayist, and theater-maker based in Chicago. He was an artist-in-residence at The MITTEN Lab in Bear Lake, Michigan, and his work has been presented at the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice and most recently at Second City's De Maat Theater. You can find him on Instagram and at www.eric-grant.net

#theater #queer #activism #AIDS #Eric Grant

0 notes

citizentruth-blog · 6 years

Text

It’s 2018, and CEOs Are Still Saying Very Dumb Things - PEER NEWS

New Post has been published on https://citizentruth.org/its-2018-and-ceos-are-still-saying-very-dumb-things/

It’s 2018, and CEOs Are Still Saying Very Dumb Things

For the love of God, Mark Zuckerberg, don’t try to defend the intent of Holocaust deniers. (Photo Credit: JD Lasica/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

In an era in which companies and their executives are under more scrutiny than ever, and when a climate of political correctness beckons accountability for every faux pas uttered—deservedly so, I might add—it is yet astonishing that corporate leaders continue to make very public statements that espouse very dumb viewpoints. As tends to be the case, these officers are public faces for their organizations, if not namesakes. In the name of protecting their brand and avoiding bad optics, one would think these influential figures would make it a priority not to do or say anything that could generate negative publicity.

Of course, it may simply be that these individuals can’t help themselves. While not a chief executive, Roseanne Barr ran into this situation recently when, not long after a successful reboot of her eponymous ABC show got underway, she went and blew up her opportunity by tweeting disparaging comments of a racist and Islamophobic nature about Valerie Jarrett, businesswoman and former Obama White House official. Essentially, all Barr had to do was not make disgusting remarks like the one that got her show canned. And yet, she felt compelled. The real downside of this, as some might argue, is that a show with working-class appeal that could have helped further a discussion about race and politics in this era was cut short. For Roseanne’s sake, few but her staunchest defenders were sympathetic.

To be fair, and while not to in any way excuse likening a black person to an ape, it’s often in a comedian’s job description to say things that are off-color or to behave in somewhat of a subversive way. With CEOs, however, it is not, and this what makes their lapses particularly alarming. Granted, they might not be particularly well-versed in the intricacies of HR guidelines and PR campaigns. Still, given their prominence within their organizations—frequently accompanied by a salary and benefits that more than compensates them for their time, effort, and expertise—one would think they would use the resources at their disposal to better guard themselves against negative outcomes. Or better yet, rely on their business savvy and common sense.

Instead, we get John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s Pizza, dropping an N-bomb during a company conference call. Schnatter did own up to using the epithet following reports of this incident, if we are to give him any semblance of credit, and there was a context to his utterance of the slur—though even with this in mind, he probably could’ve done without it.

The problem with this context is that it doesn’t make Schnatter seem any less reprehensible. His employ of the term occurred when trying to make an analogy about his criticism of the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell in failing to adequately address player protests of the National Anthem (specifically, as a problem to be “nipped in the bud”) and hurting the company’s bottom line versus Col. Sanders, iconic founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, using the epithet in his own right. As Schnatter seemed to suggest, there was a measure of unfairness about him being singled out for his criticisms of the NFL while Sanders didn’t catch the same flak.

This comparison is a problematic one for multiple reasons. For one, while any deep-seated prejudices held by Harland Sanders’s can only be guessed, and while he may have been slow to adopt less offensive terminology for African-Americans or even contributed to the likes of pro-segregation presidential candidate George Wallace, his use of that word appears largely based on conjecture. Besides, trying to exonerate yourself by contrasting your actions with those of a man who dressed like a plantation owner through the Jim Crow era isn’t exactly a terribly high bar to clear. More than a quarter-century after Sanders’s death and in an age in which corporations are more cognizant than ever about their public image, this much should be more or less an afterthought.

It should be stressed that John Schnatter stepped down as CEO back in December after the backlash he and Papa John’s received following his comments about the NFL and player protests, so technically he is no longer serving in that function. In the wake of his more recent admission of using the N-word, Schnatter has also resigned as chairman. Although now he considers resigning a mistake. And the remaining board members have adopted a “poison pill” provision to try to avoid attempts by Schnatter to make a power play and reclaim his position atop the board. Simply put, it’s a mess, one that may have predated these controversies, but one which was magnified by them.

You may or may not have high regard for the Papa John’s product. I live in an area in which there is no shortage of local pizzerias, let alone Domino’s and Pizza Hut, so I personally could take or leave it. Regardless of one’s judgment of Papa John’s taste and overall quality, with over 4,500 locations worldwide, it’s not as if one can easily dismiss the restaurant chain. With other companies related to technological advances, there is perhaps a greater sense of demand or interest based on the novelty of their goods or services. This not withstanding, they too are subject to their founder/CEO going rogue in an era and in industries where public perception arguably should dictate more responsible behavior.

Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off a very public scandal involving the possible exposure of up to 87 million Facebook users and their data to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, recently was interviewed by Kara Swisher of Recode fame, and while the interview touched on a number of different topics, on the subject of whether or not conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones should have a platform, Zuckerberg said something rather befuddling about Holocaust deniers and whether they deserve to be banned. The relevant segment of the interview, as copied from the transcript:

Okay. “Sandy Hook didn’t happen” is not a debate. It is false. You can’t just take that down?

I agree that it is false.

I also think that going to someone who is a victim of Sandy Hook and telling them, “Hey, no, you’re a liar” — that is harassment, and we actually will take that down. But overall, let’s take this whole closer to home…

I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened.

I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think-

In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.

It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, “We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.” What we will do is we’ll say, “Okay, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.” But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.

Swisher makes an all-too-valid point, as the majority of us would agree. Sandy Hook was not a hoax. There is no debating the merits of whether it happened or not. The same goes for the Holocaust. There simply is no place in regular discourse for litigating its legitimacy. Unless you are, say, a child who is just becoming able to comprehend what the Holocaust was and the devastation it wrought, any meditations on the intent of deniers is ridiculous. They intend to deny these events as a function of their anti-Semitism. There’s no leeway here.

Zuckerberg would soon after E-mail a clarification to Swisher about how “deeply” offensive he finds Holocaust denial and that he “absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.” But, Mr. Zuckerberg, Mark, if I may—you pretty much just defended it by saying it’s hard to “impugn intent.” It’s like President Donald Trump saying there was room for blame “on both sides” related to the unrest and violence in Charlottesville after a group of white nationalists rallied. When there are Nazis holding freaking torches, you disavow them. This is basic stuff.

In Zuckerberg’s case, he made comments that, at best, signify he is out of touch with the impact Facebook has and how it can be used to influence people to join in destructive causes. At worst, they signify that he understands this impact full well, but he and his company are actively choosing not to censor dangerous content because it affects the company’s bottom line.

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only high-profile tech-oriented CEO to meet with criticism, only to take his foot and jam it squarely into his mouth. For the longest time, Elon Musk and Tesla Motors have seemingly gotten a free pass from news media because their product is not only sleek and sexy (and hella expensive), but lends itself to optimism about a future in which electric cars have greatly reduced our consumption of fossil fuels and autonomous driving can reduce costs and fatalities in vehicle crashes.

More recently, however, as Tesla has tried to produce its vehicles on a larger scale, it has met with production delays and quality issues, not to mention a well-publicized death involving the use of autonomous vehicle technology and concerns about injuries at company facilities being underreported. Understandably, the organization has received a fair amount of negative press in this regard, and Musk has taken it upon himself to criticize the media and even suggest creating a service by which users can assess the “core truth” and “credibility” of editors, journalists, and publications.

Musk isn’t entirely out of bounds with his defensiveness in the face of criticism at the hands of major media outlets. This is to say that, when the demand to generate clicks or potentially to satisfy corporate donors within the fossil fuels industry is ever-present, coverage of Tesla Motors’s doings can easily be skewed. Going after Reveal, a publication by the non-profit Center for Investigative Reporting, meanwhile, for a story about the aforementioned workplace safety concerns at Tesla and labelling them an “extremist organization” carries less weight, and connotes a sort of thin-skinned petulance, if not signaling a rising desire among corporate and political leaders to intimidate or invite violence against journalists who don’t play nice for the sake of playing nice.

Musk caught flak again when he volunteered a child-sized submersible in the midst of the rescue of the Thai soccer team cave rescue that drew a worldwide audience. Right then and there, the Tesla CEO merited criticism for offering a solution based on an incomplete understanding of the logistics of the rescue, an act many saw as a PR maneuver designed to distract from his company’s failings of late. When Vern Unsworth, a British diver involved in the rescue, was asked about Musk’s “contribution,” he panned it, saying that it had “no chance” of working and that Musk could kindly “stick it where it hurts.”

Musk, because he is a CEO of a major corporation and highly attuned to the workings of social media, took this comment in stride. Kidding! He promptly tweeted and called Unsworth a pedophile, and then apologized for calling him a pedophile—while at the same time justifying his defensive snipe based on Unsworth’s “several untruths” and because the diver told him his idea was terrible.

That’s the kind of thing you shouldn’t say even if you’re not the face of Tesla Motors—and if you are, all the worse. Musk should know better than to throw a hissy-fit over Twitter. And yet, he doesn’t, or at least didn’t. If his apology is any indication, he’s sorry only because it brought him and Tesla more bad press, not because he’s genuinely contrite about making callous, unjustifiable accusations about a man trying to rescue young children.

What’s so unsettling about the awful words of Elon Musk and the above-named individuals is that they are accompanied by a lack of true remorse and/or excuses for their questionable choices. Roseanne Barr claims she didn’t even know Valerie Jarrett was black when she made her infamous comment, and that it was her vote for Donald Trump which doomed her show. John Schnatter, already in the habit of making excuses by blaming the NFL for lower earnings, has tried to justify his use of the N-word on the basis that he didn’t use it as a slur. Mark Zuckerberg professes he never meant to defend the intent of Holocaust deniers—except he totally did. These explanations ring hollow and arguably exacerbate the controversy in each case. Don’t try to hedge. Just admit you messed up, say you’re sorry and hope that people will forgive you.

Likewise disconcerting is the idea that these antics either have or continue to run the risk of overshadowing a great product. What’s more, if there is a lesson to be gleaned from the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, it’s that no one should be considered impervious to consequences for their actions. Whether the damage people like Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. have done to their careers is truly long-term remains to be seen, but either way, theirs is not the kind of potential damage to one’s brand and career that one wishes to invite. In a day and age when corporate social responsibility is more than a passing concern, and when privacy seems to be on a continuous decline, the same can be said for the likes of Musk, Schnatter, and Zuckerberg.

On the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing (and No, It’s Not All About Automation)

#corporate social responsibility #Elon Musk #Facebook #John Schnatter #Mark Zuckerberg #Papa Johns #Roseanne Barr #Tesla Motors #Valerie Jarrett

0 notes