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written-on-the-trees · 4 years

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Strawberry Necklace Part 1 - Yungblud Fan Fiction

Word Count: 2175

Warnings: None, for this part. Smut, fem-dom, and prostitution for the whole story.

Summary: Nova was right; Dom is more interested in her than he probably should be...just as she is in him.

Where else can you find this: Ao3 | Wattpad

Take It Easy, Boy | Part Two

"You have a last-minute appointment this evening." Robert poked his head around the door to Nova's dressing room, raising an eyebrow at her semi-dressed state: "I know it's a little late, but I didn't think you'd mind when you found out which client it was."

Nova forwent getting ready for her next client entirely - even though she was technically already behind schedule - to twist in the mirrored vanity's chair to grin at Robert: "Is it my favourite little punk sweetheart?"

Robert rolled his eyes: "You're the wrong side of thirty to be calling him that."

"Rude." Nova pointed a French manicured nail at her friend: "Remember, we don't discuss ages, lest I remind you that I am the younger one of us."

Robert flipped her off, laughing openly at her 'telling off': "Better hurry if you're going to be ready for your two o'clock."

Nova laughed as Robert slipped away, his stockinged feet silent on the floors.

As fun as it was to bicker with him, though, he was right - if she wanted to be ready on time, she would need to get a move on and stop being distracted. Which meant putting her favourite punk boy to the back of her mind for now.

She deliberately didn't think about him as she slid into an ivory satin underwear set, garter belt, and nude stockings. She left the gauzy ivory robe off for now, hanging on the wardrobe door above the nine-inch crystal-encrusted stilettos, wandering around in the stockings and a fluffy dressing gown while she did her hair and make-up. Thankfully this particular client preferred a 'natural' look, so although she wore more make-up than he would ever realise, it didn't take her as long as some of her more elaborate looks, and her hair could be left how it was: wavy from where it had just been released from the braid she'd had it in over-night. A little hairspray and she was good to go, fifteen minutes early and now with plenty of time to go back to thinking about the person she was trying not to.

She was failing. Miserably.

Dominic Harrison was starting to take up residence in her mind quite a bit recently - so much she was considering starting to charge him rent, as well as what he paid for her services.

He'd probably pay it too.

It was sad, but true.

Nova wasn't inexperienced - she knew how to read people, and Dom liked her a lot more than he should. Most of the time, when clients got like that, Nova gently pushed them out of her schedule until she didn't see them anymore, but not with Dom.

Because she liked him more than she should, too.

A lot more.

If she was being fair to herself, Nova knew there was only so much she could help it. Dom was likable in almost everything she'd seen him in, swinging between enthusiastic and earnest all with so much love and passion it was hard not to be charmed - and that was even before she thought about their personal interactions. It wasn't even just the sex (although she couldn't deny his particular brand of eagerness didn't affect her a little more than other clients' did) it was literally everything about him.

He was a genuine sweetheart - it was hard not to like him.

Since he'd been coming around more often in the last few months, he’d really started to relax and open up to her about his life: the songs he was writing, the things his agents had booked for him, the places he was going. It was all a little bit vague (secrecy was important: Nova understood that perfectly), but even that vagueness couldn't hide how excited he was. It was clear that he enjoyed what he did, and it always made their conversations stand out to her.

And he wasn’t the only one sharing. Even though she kept her own secrets just as Dom kept his, that didn't stop her from mentioning inconsequential things about herself like her favourite type of fruit or that, that foxes were her favourite animals, or the fact that outside of work she never wore rings (nothing he could use to ever link her to her real life; after all, secrecy was important)...and as if just having him listen wasn't enough to make Nova smile, every now and then he would bring her gifts that always seemed to be linked back to one of their conversations. That always tugged at Nova’s heartstrings.

Dom wasn’t the only client who brought her gifts - she had a few that were into financial domination, and even without them Nova had a room in her flat full of expensive clothes, shoes, and jewellery, perfumes, and just about everything she could think of, all bought for her by clients - but Dom’s presents were the only ones that were in any way personal to her.

A bottle of strawberry and cherry rosé - a lot cheaper than what she was used to, but all the more delicious because Dom had bought it because he thought she might like it after she mentioned she liked sweet wines, not to show off how much he could drop on a bottle of wine for a hooker. A punnet of nectarines, before he passed through a market on his way to their appointment, and they looked nice and ripe and colourful, and 'sweet like you are'. A bar of Cadbury’s ‘Marvellous Creations’, because apparently he’d recently tried chocolate with popping candy in for the first time, and wanted to share the revelation with her.

Small, but truly sweet presents. The kind of presents that people bought for people that actually gave a shit about, and that was the bit that bothered Nova - because that kind of thing never ended well.

When she'd been young - and stupid - she'd fallen for a client that had fallen for her.

It wasn't exactly unusual; sexual intimacy, especially on a regular basis, paired with supposed 'friendliness' that was really just good customer service, could often be misconstrued for romantic feelings, especially developing ones. Nova's client had made that mistake, and when he'd started caring about her, she'd made the mistake of caring back. It had gone from a business transaction where he paid her for sex, to him paying her for sex and bringing her presents he thought she would like, to her taking him home: her real home, not the flat she had been working out of. He'd stopped being a client, and became James.

At first, it had been great...a year later she was alone, penniless, and homeless. James hadn't liked her, he'd just liked the idea of her, and once that illusion had been dispelled by the pair of them living together, and her dropping her 'Madam' persona, he'd lost interest and started resenting her for not being who he thought she was.

Dom would be the same.

Even if he wasn't...Nova wasn't the same naive - the stupid - girl she'd been at twenty-two. She wasn't going to risk going back to that hopeless position of broken, heartsick, and destitute, not even for someone as sweet as Dom. At the end of the day, he was a client, and when you stripped away all Nova's airs and graces, she was a prostitute.

And just in case she ever forgot, she heard the doorbell ring, signalling her next client had arrived.

Nova slipped out of the fluffy robe and slid into the gauzy, pearlescent one, before stepping into the diamanté shoes. She checked her hair in the mirror, and fixed her face into the contemptuous sneer this made this particular client so hot under the collar.

It was time to go to work.

Nova climbed into the shower two hours later, fighting the urge to scream in frustration.

In truth, she had no reason to be so dramatic. Her session had been an easy one; all she'd done was stalk around the dining room in her diamanté high heels, snarling and sneering while Mr Snow sat at the table with his phone, buying her all the expensive things she could think to command him to. Then he'd sat there while she put on the diamond necklace he'd bought her last time, making sure to touch the inner curves of her breasts plenty as she did it, stood next to him and propped one foot on the table so he could see the shoes he'd bought for on her feet, and spritzed herself with perfume he'd paid for, moaning dramatically as she did it.

He'd come untouched, and thanked her for putting him in his place, before she told him he was disgusting and to get out of her sight. Mr Snow didn't like her breaking character; he was old fashioned that way, so even though Nova would've liked to have checked on him, she didn't. He was paying her to be a bitch so she'd forced him to leave without showering while she hid in the bathroom and tried not to feel like she was going mad.

It was proving slightly difficult.

Thinking about James had put her in a bad place, and comparing him to Dom had done her no favours, especially since he was constantly invading her thoughts. Now she couldn't think of the sweet way Dom smiled without seeing James' charming smile just behind it, and that was fucking with her.

She wasn't hurt by what had happened with James anymore; it had been ten years ago, by now the hurt had faded and the confusion had cleared, leaving Nova with nothing but memories and the knowledge that he had been a prick and she had been an idiot. Now that relationship was a lesson - a warning not to get involved romantically with clients, no matter what a good idea it might seem.

Even thinking about it was pointless.

At the end of the day, she was a dominatrix, and Dom was a client: he paid her to indulge his kinks. Even if that wasn't the case, he was so young, and so painfully eager to please - more than just in the bedroom - and so inexperienced that Nova honestly wasn't sure she wouldn't be taking advantage of Dom if they started having anything other than a business transaction. Just like James had taken advantage of her.

Nova never wanted to put someone in the position she had been put in. Especially not someone like Dom.

Dom wasn't a bad person - far from it. He was just an enthusiastic and inexperienced kid who was in over his head when it came to their relationship - or, rather, the lack thereof. He thought just because they liked each other, that things could work out. That love would conquer all. Nova had seen it before, and she had no doubt she would see it again...but that didn't make it the truth. Love couldn't conquer everything, and sometimes it was better to just leave it alone.

For his own good, and the sake of protecting her own heart, Nova needed to make sure that things remained professional...or she needed to stop seeing him. Anything else would just be unfair on both of them.

Which meant no more moping around in the shower.

Turning the hot water off, Nova twisted the excess water out of her hair and stepped out of the shower. Dom's preferred look was mildly complicated, allowing Nova to focus on drying her hair enough so it looked dry and she could pull it back into a perfect bun at the crown of her head, before going straight into doing her make-up. Red lipstick, neat black eye-liner, subtle contouring, no time to think about anything but what she was doing. She changed into another pair of nude stockings, a black pencil skirt and crisp white shirt, sliding her feet into the eight-inch Louboutins with the narrow strap around the ankle that Dom seemed to like so much, before looking at the clock.

Six fifty-eight.

Nova watched the second hand ticking away, until at seven on the dot the doorbell rang.

She counted to sixty, keeping time with the second hand on the clock, before she rose from the chair in front of her dressing table and before heading out of the room, her eight-inch Louboutins clacking on the polished tile of the hallway.

"Look at you, pretty boy, exactly on time." she teased: "Tell me, were you waiting on my doorstep for the clock to hit seven?"

Dom blushed - but that was all the answer Nova needed to know she was right. And not just about him being waiting outside until it turned seven before he rang the doorbell. The look in his eyes wasn't just embarrassment; he was happy to see her. More than happy, even. He was overjoyed, and she had been right.

He was in way over his head.

#The Trees Writes #Yungblud #Yungblud imagine #Yungblud fanfic #Yungblud fan fic #Yungblud fan fiction

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son-of-alderaan · 5 years

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There’s a desert valley in southern Jordan called Wadi Rum, or sometimes “the Valley of the Moon.” There are stone inscriptions in Wadi Rum that are more than 2,000 years old. Lawrence of Arabia passed through there during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. More recently, J. J. Abrams went there to film parts of the latest Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, because it’s largely uninhabited and starkly beautiful and looks plausibly alien, and one of the things that has always made the Star Wars movies feel so real—as if they had a real life of their own that continues on out beyond the edges of the screen—is the way they’re shot on location, with as few digital effects as possible. George Lucas shot the Tatooine scenes from A New Hope in southern Tunisia. For Skywalker, it’s Wadi Rum.

They don’t do it that way because it’s easy. Abrams and his crew had to build miles of road into the desert. They basically had to set up a small town out there, populated by the cast and extras and crew—the creature-effects department alone had 70 people. The Jordanian military got involved. The Jordanian royal family got involved. There was sand. There were sandstorms, when all you could do was take cover and huddle in your tent and—if you’re John Boyega, who plays the ex-Stormtrooper Finn—listen to reggae.

But in a way that’s the whole point: you’re out there so the world can get up in your grill and make its presence felt on film. “It’s the things that you can’t anticipate—the imperfections,” says Oscar Isaac, who plays the Resistance pilot Poe Dameron. “It’s very difficult to design imperfection, and the imperfections that you have in these environments immediately create a sense of authenticity. You just believe it more.” When Isaac arrived in Wadi Rum for his first week of shooting, Abrams had set up a massive greenscreen in the middle of the desert. “And I was like, ‘J. J., can I ask you a question? I notice we’re shooting on greenscreen.’ And he’s like, ‘So why the hell are we in the desert?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘Well, because look: the way that the sand interacts with the light, and the type of shots you would set up—if you were designing the shot on a computer you would never even think to do that.’ There’s something about the way that the light and the environment and everything plays together.” It’s that something, the presence and the details and the analog imperfections of a real nondigital place, that makes Star Wars so powerful.

It was powerful enough to bring 65,000 people to Chicago in April for Star Wars Celebration, a fan convention where you could see a giant Stormtrooper head made out of 36,440 tiny Lego Stormtrooper mini-figures, which is a world record of some kind, though I’m not sure exactly what, and where people were dressed up as Muppets who were themselves dressed up as Star Wars characters. But the main event was the launch of the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, which was held in a 10,000-seat arena and was such a big deal that even though the trailer was going to be released on the Internet literally seconds after it was over, I—an at least theoretically respectable member of the media—was not only tagged, wristbanded, escorted, and metal-detected, but sniffed by a K-9 unit before I could go in.

J.J. Abrams, alongside Stunt Coordinator Eunice Huthart, directs the Knights of Ren; elite fearsome enforcers of Kylo Ren’s dark will.

I sat down with Abrams a couple of hours later. For the occasion, he was wearing a suit so black and sharp, he could have been doing Men in Black cosplay, but his most distinctive feature is his dark curly hair, which is upswept in a way that is only slightly suggestive of devil horns. Abrams talks rapidly, as if he can barely keep up with the things his racing brain is telling him to say. When I told him that not only was Star Wars the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter, but that all 10 of the Top 10 trending topics were Star Wars–related, and that he personally was No. 5, he was visibly stunned.

Then he recovered enough to say: “Well, I aspire to No. 4.” (For the record, No. 4 was the late Supreme Leader Snoke, who frankly did seem beatable. If you’re curious, No. 11 was pro golfer Zach Johnson, who had just accidentally hit his ball with a practice swing at the Masters. Life goes on.)

Disney executives talk about how important it is to “event-ize” Star Wars movies; i.e., to make them feel not just like movies but like seriously momentous occasions. They won’t have much trouble with this one: The Rise of Skywalker isn’t just the last movie in the Star Wars trilogy that began in 2015 with The Force Awakens; it’s the last movie in a literal, actual trilogy of trilogies that started with the very first Star Wars movie back in 1977, which began the saga of the Skywalker family. The Rise of Skywalker will finally, after 42 years, bring that saga to an end.

FIRST LOOK Vanity Fair reveals Keri Russell as the masked scoundrel Zorri Bliss, seen in the Thieves’ Quarter of the snow-dusted world Kijimi.

We all thought the story was over in 1983 with Return of the Jedi, and then we really thought it was over in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith. But Star Wars has always been an unruly beast, too big and powerful (and profitable) to be contained in one movie, or even in a trilogy, or even in two trilogies, let alone numberless novels, TV shows, comics, video games, Happy Meals, and so on. Now Abrams has to gather all those threads and bring closure to a story that was started by somebody else, in an America that feels a very long time ago indeed. “That’s the challenge of this movie,” Abrams says. “It wasn’t just to make one film that as a stand-alone experience would be thrilling, and scary, and emotional, and funny, but one that if you were to watch all nine of the films, you’d feel like, Well, of course—that!”

Like a lot of things that we now can’t imagine life without, Star Wars came really close to never happening in the first place. In 1971, Lucas was a serious young auteur just five years out of film school at U.S.C. He had only one full-length movie on his résumé, and that was THX 1138, which is the kind of visionary but grindingly earnest science-fiction epic that only the French could love. (They were pretty much the only ones who did.) Everybody expected Lucas to go on and make serious, gritty 1970s cinema like his peers, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. At the time Lucas and Coppola were actively planning a radical epic set in Vietnam with the provocative title Apocalypse Now.

FORCE MAJEURE First Order leaders General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and Allegiant General Pryde (Richard E. Grant) on the bridge of Kylo Ren’s destroyer.

But Coppola would have to finish that one on his own, because Lucas went a different way. “I had decided there was no modern mythology,” he said in 1997. “I wanted to take old myths and put them into a new format that young people could relate to. Mythology always existed in unusual, unknown environments, so I chose space.” Lucas tried to acquire the rights to Flash Gordon (that would’ve been a dark timeline indeed), but when he couldn’t, he came up with his own original science-fictional epic instead. He called it The Star Wars. Like The Facebook, it would have to shed a direct article on its way to glory.

Even though American Graffiti had made Lucas a bankable director, Star Wars still came together slowly. In the first draft, Luke was an old man, Leia was 14, and Han Solo was “a huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills.” Fox executives were baffled by Star Wars, and they squeezed Lucas relentlessly for time and money. We forget now how jerry-rigged the first movie was: the cantina aliens weren’t finished, and the monumental Star Destroyer that dominates the opening shot is, in reality, about three feet long. The Death Star interior is basically one set re-arranged several different ways. To make Greedo’s mouth move, the woman in the Greedo suit had to hold a clothespin in her mouth. “What I remember about working on the first film,” says John Williams, the legendary soundtrack composer, “is the fact that I didn’t ever think there would be a second film.” (He also, like everybody else, thought Luke and Leia were going to get together, so he wrote them a love theme.)

But wherever real mythology comes from, Lucas had gone there and brought something back alive. People wanted movies that gave them something to believe in instead of relentlessly autopsying the beliefs that had failed them. We’d had enough of antiheroes. We needed some anti-antiheroes. “I realized after THX that people don’t care about how the country’s being ruined,” Lucas said. “We’ve got to regenerate optimism.” Like American Graffiti, Star Wars is a work of profound nostalgia, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate anthem of longing for the restoration of a true and just power in the universe—the return of the king. And at the same time it’s a very personal hero’s journey, about a boy who must put right the sins of his father and master the strange power he finds within himself, and in doing so become a man.

Star Wars is also an incredibly enduring vision of what it’s like to live in a world of super-advanced technology. Science fiction often ages badly, turning into kitsch or camp—just look at Flash Gordon—but Star Wars hasn’t. More than any filmmaker before him, Lucas successfully imagined what a science-fictional world would feel like to somebody who was actually inside it—which is to say, it would look as ordinary and workaday as the present. He even shot it like it was real, working close-in and mostly eschewing wide establishing shots, more like a documentary or a newsreel than a space opera. “It feels very grounded,” says Naomi Ackie, who’s making her Star Wars debut in Skywalker playing a character named Jannah, about whom she is allowed to say literally nothing. “There’s the kind of spectacular-ness, and the supernatural move-things-with-your-mind magic stuff, but then there’s also this really grounded, rugged nature where everything is distressed and old and kind of worn out and lived-in. And I think playing with those two ideas means that you get this feeling that it could almost be real. Like, in a galaxy far away, it could almost be the case that you could have this.”

When Lucas made the first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, he cheekily labeled it Episode V, then went back and re-labeled the first movie as Episode IV, as if the movies were an old-fashioned serial that the rest of us were all just tuning in to. Around that time, he also started talking about Star Wars as a nine-part epic—so in 2012, when Lucas retired and sold Lucasfilm to Disney, it wasn’t exactly heresy that Disney announced more movies. At the time, Kathleen Kennedy had just been named co-chairperson of Lucasfilm, and she tapped Abrams to direct the first Disney-owned post-Lucas Star Wars movie. It was a bit like saying, Make the lightning strike again, please. Exactly here, if you could. Oh, and could you also earn back that $4 billion we just spent to buy Lucasfilm? (Narrator voice: He could.)

At first blush, Abrams’s debut Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, looked like an elaborate homage to the original. Just like in A New Hope, there’s a young Force-sensitive person on a poor desert planet—that’s Rey, played by Daisy Ridley—who finds a droid with a secret message that’s vital to the Rebellion (or wait, sorry, it’s the Resistance now). There’s a villain in a black mask, just like Darth Vader, except that it’s his grandson Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), né Ben Solo, son of Han and Leia. Kylo has a planet-killing weapon, much like the Death Star but way bigger, which becomes the target of a desperate attack by Resistance X-wings. There’s even a bar full of aliens.

Abrams also insisted on keeping to the analog aesthetic of the original trilogy: those aliens had to be latex and yak hair, not bits and bytes, and everything possible was shot on location using film cameras, not digital ones. Even Lucas had abandoned that approach by the time he made the second Star Wars trilogy, but many fans consider those movies to be a cautionary tale. “Famously, the prequels were mostly greenscreen environments,” Abrams says. “And that was George himself doing that, and it ended up looking exactly how he wanted it to look—and I always preferred the look of the original movies, because I just remember when you’re in the snow on Hoth, when you’re in the desert on Tatooine, and when you’re in the forests of Endor—it’s amazing. If you put a vaporator here, there, all of a sudden almost any natural location suddenly becomes a Star Wars location.”

But the more interesting thing about The Force Awakens and its successor, The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson, was how they subtly complicated Lucas’s vision. Thirty years have gone by since the ending of Return of the Jedi, during which time the newly reborn Republic became complacent and politically stagnant, allowing the rise of the reactionary neo-imperial First Order, whose origins we will learn more about in Skywalker. “It was almost like if the Argentine Nazis had sort of got together and actually started to bring that back in some real form,” Abrams says. Just like that, the rules of the Star Wars universe changed. It wasn’t all over when the Ewoks sang. Obi-Wan Kenobi and all those Bothans had died in vain. Even Han and Leia split up. It’s all a little less of a fairy tale now.

The feather-haired godling Luke suffered the trauma of having a Padawan go bad on his watch. It’s an echo of what happened to his old mentor, Obi-Wan, with Anakin Skywalker, who became Darth Vader. But where Obi-Wan made peace with it, waiting serenely in the desert of Tatooine for the next Chosen One to arrive, Luke’s guilt curdled into shame. He hid himself away, so that his Chosen One, Rey, had to spend most of The Force Awakens searching for him, and then another whole movie convincing him with the help of Yoda’s Force ghost to keep the Jedi Order going at all. Star Wars arrived as an antidote to the disillusionment of the 1970s—but now, in its middle age, Star Wars is grappling with disillusionment of its own.

DESERT POWER Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Ridley, Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), and John Boyega (Finn) await the call to action for a chase scene.

By dint of advanced Sith interrogation techniques, I was able to obtain valuable advance information about The Rise of Skywalker. Here it is: common emblem.

Anthony Daniels, who plays C-3P0, is the only actor who has appeared in all nine movies of the Star Wars triple trilogy, so if anybody’s entitled to leak, it’s him. Daniels says he loved the script for The Rise of Skywalker, but he didn’t get it until the last minute, right before shooting started, and for some reason he just couldn’t memorize his part. “My first line would not go in my head!” he says. In person Daniels is like a C-3P0 whose preferences have been reset to charming and voluble. “The line that I couldn’t say was two words: ‘common emblem.’ Common emblem, common emblem—I would say them thousands of times. My wife would say it back. I just couldn’t say them!”

Fortunately C-3P0’s mouth doesn’t move, so he could add the line in postproduction. Anyway, there’s the big scoop: “common emblem.” I don’t know what it means either. (Also I 100 percent guarantee that they will change the line before the movie comes out so that this scoop will end up being fake news.) Daniels also told me that C-3P0 does something in this movie that surprises everybody—but he wouldn’t say what. “He keeps his clothes on. It’s not like he suddenly does this thing, but …”

The only other member of the old guard on the set this time was Billy Dee Williams, who plays the charismatic Lando Calrissian. At 82, Williams has lost none of his roguish charm, but now it comes wrapped in a kind of magisterial dignity. People tend to remember Lando for the deal he cut with Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, rather than for his redemptive comeback in Return of the Jedi, and Williams appears to have spent the last 45 years defending him. “He’s a survivor. It’s expediency for him,” Williams says. “You know, he was thrown into a situation which he didn’t look for and he had to try to figure out how to deal with an entity which is more than just a human.” And, he adds, with the weary air of somebody who has spent way too much time justifying the behavior of a fictional character, “nobody died!”

HOT TAKE Members of the crew shade and shine Daniels, the only cast member to appear in all nine of the Skywalker films, while BB-8 looks on.

Chewbacca is still here, too, but it’s not the same man in the suit. The original actor was Peter Mayhew, a seven-foot-three-inch gentle giant who was working as a hospital orderly in London when Lucas cast him in the first movie. Mayhew retired after The Force Awakens, and he died on April 30 at 74. His replacement is Joonas Suotamo, a fresh-faced former professional basketball player from Finland who always wanted to be an actor but was hard to cast because he’s six feet 11 inches tall. “When I first met [Mayhew] he told me I was a wee bit too skinny,” Suotamo says. “But we also had a Wookiee boot camp, which lasted for a week. He told me all kinds of things about the moves that Chewbacca does, how they came to be and his reasoning behind them.” Suotamo has now played Chewbacca in four movies and enjoys it about as much as I’ve ever seen anybody enjoy anything. “It’s very much like silent-era film, with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin,” he says. “He’s a mime character and that’s what he does, and I guess in that minimalism comes the beauty of the character.”

Other things we know about Skywalker: We can safely assume that the Resistance and the First Order are headed toward a final smash, which will be a heavy lift for the good guys because, at the end of The Last Jedi, the Resistance was down, way down, to a double handful of survivors. They’ll face a First Order who suffered a stinging but largely symbolic loss at the Battle of Crait, and who, I feel confident, have learned something from the previous eight movies. The Empire built and lost two Death Stars. The First Order has already lost one super-weapon in The Force Awakens. Presumably it won’t make the same mistake twice, twice.

But the stakes go even higher than that, cosmically high. Sources close to the movie say that Skywalker will at long last bring to a climax the millennia-long conflict between the Jedi Order and its dark shadow, the Sith.

HORSING AROUND Finn and new ally Jannah (Naomi Ackie), atop hardy orbaks, lead the charge against the mechanized forces of the First Order. “It’s extremely surreal to be in it,” says Ackie, “and see how it works from the inside.”

STAR CROSSED Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Rey battle it out with lightsabers in a stormy confrontation. Their Force-connection—what Driver calls their “maybe-bond”—will turn out to run even deeper than previously revealed.

The hottest area for speculation, however, is the identity of the titular Skywalker, because at this point there aren’t many Skywalkers left to rise. One is General Organa, the former Princess Leia, Luke’s sister—but Carrie Fisher, who plays her, passed away in 2016. That was a deeply painful loss for Abrams personally, but it also presented him with an impossible choice as a filmmaker. He needed Leia to tell the story, but Abrams didn’t feel like a digital Carrie Fisher could do the job, and there was no way Lucasfilm was going to re-cast the role.

But then a strange thing happened. Abrams remembered that there was some footage of Fisher left over from The Force Awakens, scenes that had been changed or cut entirely, and he dug them up. “It’s hard to even talk about it without sounding like I’m being some kind of cosmic spiritual goofball,” Abrams says, “but it felt like we suddenly had found the impossible answer to the impossible question.” He started to write scenes around the old footage, fitting Leia’s dialogue into new contexts. He re-created the lighting to match the way Fisher had been lit. Bit by bit, she found her place in the new movie. “It was a bizarre kind of left side/right side of the brain sort of Venn diagram thing, of figuring out how to create the puzzle based on the pieces we had.” Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd, appears in the movies as a Resistance officer named Lieutenant Connix, and at first Abrams deliberately wrote her out of the scenes in case it was too painful—but Lourd said no, she wanted to be in them. “And so, there are moments where they’re talking; there are moments where they’re touching,” Abrams says. “There are moments in this movie where Carrie is there, and I really do feel there is an element of the uncanny, spiritual, you know, classic Carrie, that it would have happened this way, because somehow it worked. And I never thought it would.”

The only other member of the surviving Skywalker bloodline—that we know of!—is Leia’s son and Luke’s former Padawan, the fallen Jedi Kylo Ren. Kylo probably isn’t capable of actual happiness, but things are definitely looking up for him: by the end of The Last Jedi he has taken control of the First Order and killed or at least outlived his actual father and both of his symbolic fathers-in-art, Luke and Supreme Leader Snoke. Sources at Disney also confirm that his long-rumored Knights of Ren will finally arrive in Skywalker. “And then he had been forging this maybe-bond with Rey,” Driver says, “and it kind of ends with the question in the air: is he going to pursue that relationship, or when the door of her ship goes up, does that also close that camaraderie that they were maybe forming?”

SANDBLAST Camera operator Colin Anderson readies a take for a chase sequence spotlighting the heroics of Chewbacca, BB-8, and Rey.

Darkness in the Star Wars movies tends to come from fear: for Anakin Skywalker, Kylo’s grandfather, it was his fear of losing his mother and his wife. After two movies it’s still not so easy to say exactly what Kylo Ren himself fears, even though he’s as operatically emo as Vader was stoic. He’s fixated on the past—he made a shrine to his own grandfather—but at the same time the past torments him. “Let the past die,” he tells Rey in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.”

Presumably whatever’s eating at Kylo started in his childhood: maybe being the kid of literally the two coolest people in the galaxy isn’t as fun as it sounds. Driver—who has obviously thought this through with a lot of rigor—points out that, as cool as they are, Han and Leia are both obsessively committed to lifestyles (smuggling, rebelling) that don’t leave much room for kids. He also points out that, unlike Luke and Rey, Kylo never got to go on a nifty voyage of self-discovery. Instead he grew up under the crushing pressure of massive expectations. “How do you form friendships out of that?” Driver says. “How do you understand the weight of that? And if there’s no one around you guiding you, or articulating things the right way … it can easily go awry.” By the emotional logic that governs the Star Wars universe—and also our own—Kylo Ren is going to have to confront the past, and his fears, whatever they are, or be destroyed by them.

Where Lucas’s trilogies tended to follow the roots and branches of the Skywalker family tree—their personal saga was the saga of the galaxy writ small—the new movies have a slightly wider aperture and take in a new generation of heroes. There’s Rey, of course, who sources say will have progressed in her training since the end of The Last Jedi to the point where it’s almost complete. With that taken care of, all she has to do is reconstitute the entire Jedi Order from scratch, because as far as we know she’s the Last One.

If Kylo Ren can’t be redeemed it will almost certainly fall to Rey to put him down, in spite of their maybe-bond. Their relationship is the closest thing the new trilogy has to a star-crossed love story on the order of Han and Leia: a source close to the movie says that their Force-connection will turn out to run even deeper than we thought. They’re uniquely suited to understand each other, but at the same time they are in every way each other’s inverse, down to Kylo’s perverse rejection of his family, which is the one thing Rey craves most. “I think there’s a part of Rey that’s like, dude, you fucking had it all, you had it all,” Ridley says. “That was always a big question during filming: you had it all and you let it go.”

PUNCH IT! In a historic reunion, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) retakes the helm of the Millennium Falcon, joined by Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Chewbacca, D-O, and BB-8. “He’s a survivor,” Williams says of Lando.

Rey is also, according to totally unsubstantiated Internet theories, a leading candidate to be the Skywalker of the title, pending some kind of head-snapping reveal about her ancestry. (For the record, the other leading unsubstantiated Internet theory has the “Skywalker” of the title referring to an entirely new order of Force users who will rise up and replace the Jedi.)

Rey seems ready for it all, or as ready as anybody could be. “It’s nice having that shot at the beginning of the teaser,” Ridley says, over avocado toast at a fancy Chicago hotel, “because I think it’s quite a good visual representation of where she is now: confident, calm, less fearful.… It’s still sort of overwhelming, but in a different way. It feels more right—less like inevitable and more like there’s a focus to the journey.” Focus is a good word for Rey: on-screen Ridley’s dramatic eyebrows form a wickedly sharp arrow of concentration. I asked Ridley what she’s thinking about when Rey is using her Force powers, and it turns out Rey seems focused because Ridley is actually seriously focused. “I literally visualize it. When I was lifting rocks I was visualizing the rocks moving. And then I was like, Oh, my God, I made it happen! And obviously there’s loads of rocks on strings, so, no, I didn’t. But I visualize that it’s really going on.” (That scene, which comes at the end of The Last Jedi, is another example of classic nondigital Star Wars effects: those were real rocks. “It was actually really amazing,” Ridley says. “It was sort of like a baby mobile.”)

There’s also Finn, the apostate Stormtrooper, played by the irrepressible Boyega, who in person practically vibrates with energy and speaks with a South London accent very different from Finn’s American one. In some ways Finn has gone through a complete character arc already: he confronted his past—by beating down his old boss, Captain Phasma—and found his courage and his moral center. He has had a tendency to panic, if not actively desert, in clutch situations, but at the Battle of Crait he proved that he was past that. “I think he’s just an active member of the Resistance now,” Boyega says. “Episode Eight, he couldn’t decide what team he was fighting for. But since then he’s made a clear decision.” (Cast members tend to refer to the Star Wars movies by their episode numbers: four is the original movie, seven is The Force Awakens, and so on.)

Finn still has to make a clear decision about his romantic situation, though. As Boyega put it at Star Wars Celebration: “Finn is single and willing to mingle!” The movies have been teasing his emotional connections with both Rey and the Resistance mechanic Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, with whom he shared a fleeting battlefield kiss in The Last Jedi. Rose seems like the more positive choice, given that she stops Finn from deserting early in the movie and saves his life at the Battle of Crait, and that the precedents for romantic involvements with Jedi are extremely bad. Tran is the first Asian-American woman to play a major role in a Star Wars movie, and she has been the target of both racist and sexist attacks online. But she has come through them as a fan favorite: when she appeared onstage in Chicago, she got a standing ovation.

Finally there’s Poe, who has mostly struggled with his own cocky impulsiveness, because he’s a loose-cannon-who-just-can’t-play-by-the-rules. Poe will have to step up and become a leader, because the Resistance is seriously short on officer material. In fact, some of that transformation will already have happened where The Rise of Skywalker picks up, which is about a year after the end of The Last Jedi. “There has been a bit of shared history that you haven’t seen,” Isaac says. “Whereas in the other films, Poe is this kind of lone wolf, now he’s really part of a group. They’re going out and going on missions and have a much more familiar dynamic now.” Star Wars has always been about friendship as much as it is about romance, and as of the end of The Last Jedi, Rey, Finn, and Poe are all finally in the same place for the first time since The Force Awakens.

The Rise of Skywalker introduces some new players, too. There’s a tiny one-wheeled droid called D-O and a large banana-slug alien named Klaud. Oh, and Naomi Ackie, Keri Russell, and Richard E. Grant have all joined the cast, though, again, we know practically nothing about who they’re playing. Going from being outside the Star Wars leviathan to being right in its belly can be a dizzying experience for a first-timer. “I actually tried to do this thing while we were filming,” Ackie says, “where I’d go one day, walking through London without seeing a Star Wars reference somewhere. And you can’t do it. You really can’t. So it’s extremely surreal to be in it and see how it works from the inside.

WELL MET Jordanian locals play the Aki-Aki, natives of the planet Pasaana.

If anything, Star Wars is only getting more omnipresent. The franchise under Lucas was a colossus, but he still ran it essentially as a private concern. He could make movies or not, as his muse dictated—he was beholden to no shareholders. But Star Wars under Disney makes the old Star Wars look positively quaint. Between 1977 and 2005, Lucasfilm released six Star Wars movies; when Skywalker premieres in December, Disney will have released five Star Wars movies in five years. “I think there is a larger expectation that Disney has,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, though, I think that Disney is very respectful of what this is, and right from the beginning we talked about the fragility of this form of storytelling. Because it’s something that means so much to fans that you can’t turn this into some kind of factory approach. You can’t even do what Marvel does, necessarily, where you pick characters and build new franchises around those characters. This needs to evolve differently.”

A useful example of that fragility might be the relatively modest performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. Solo was a perfectly good Star Wars movie that has made almost $400 million worldwide—but it’s also, according to industry estimates, the first one to actually lose money. In response Disney has gently but firmly pumped the brakes: the first movie in the next Star Wars trilogy, which will be helmed by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the duo behind Game of Thrones, won’t arrive till Christmas of 2022, with further installments every other year after that. There’s no official word as to what stories they’ll tell, or when a second trilogy being developed by Rian Johnson will appear.

But even as the movies pause, Star Wars continues to colonize any and all other media. In addition to video games, comics, novels, cartoons, container-loads of merch, etc., there are not one but two live-action TV series in the pipeline for Disney+, Disney’s new streaming service: The Mandalorian, created by Jon Favreau, and an as-yet-untitled show about Cassian Andor from Rogue One. I have personally tried a virtual-reality experience called Vader Immortal,written and produced by Dark Knight screenwriter David Goyer. At the end of May, Disneyland will open Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a massive, 14-acre, $1 billion attraction where you can fly the Millennium Falcon, be captured by the First Order, and drink a blue milk cocktail (it’s actually nondairy) and Coca-Cola products out of exclusive BB-8-shaped bottles at the cantina. It’s the largest single-theme expansion in the park’s history: Take that, Toy Story Land. The Disney World version will open in August.

You realize now that, under Lucas, Star Wars always slightly had the brakes on—we were always kept a little starved for product. With Disney driving, we’ll really find out how big Star Wars can get.

ENCORE Composer John Williams conducting the Star Wars score, drawing on themes and motifs he has woven across four decades. “I didn’t think there would ever be a second film,” he says.

When people talk about the new Star Wars movies, they tend to talk about how faithful they are to the originals. What’s harder to say is how exactly the new films are different—how movies like Skywalker keep their connection to the past while at the same time finding a way to belong to the world of 2019. Because regardless of whether or not Star Wars has changed since 1977, the world around it has, profoundly. “There’s a loss of innocence, a sense of innocence that existed in the 70s that I don’t think to any extent exists today,” Kennedy says. “I think that has to permeate the storytelling and the reaction to the stories and how they’re set up. It has to feel differently because we’re different.”

We know things, as a people and as an audience, that we didn’t know back then. For example: back then it felt sort of O.K. to like Darth Vader, because even though he was evil he was also incredibly cool, and the kind of fascism he represented felt like a bogeyman from the distant past. But now fascism is rising again, which makes the whole First Order subplot look super-prescient, but it also reminds us that fascism is not even slightly cool in real life. “Evil needs to feel and look very real,” Kennedy says, “and what that means today may not be as black-and-white as it might have been in 1977, coming off a kind of World War II sensibility.” In the Star Wars–verse, Dark and Light are supposed to balance each other, but in the real world they just mix together into a hopelessly foggy, morally ambiguous gray.

But the changes are liberating too. Star Wars doesn’t have to stay frozen in time; if anything it’s the opposite, if it doesn’t change it’ll die. It will turn into Flash Gordon. For Abrams, that means he can’t go through this process so haunted by the ghost of George Lucas (who is of course still alive, but you get what I’m saying) that he winds up doing a cinematic Lucas impression. At some point Abrams has to let Abrams be Abrams.

The Rise of Skywalker might be that point. “Working on nine, I found myself approaching it slightly differently,” he says. “Which is to say that, on seven, I felt beholden to Star Wars in a way that was interesting—I was doing what to the best of my ability I felt Star Wars should be.” But this time something changed. Abrams found himself making different choices—for the camera angles, the lighting, the story. “It felt slightly more renegade; it felt slightly more like, you know, Fuck it, I’m going to do the thing that feels right because it does, not because it adheres to something.”

There are a lot of small subtle ways that Abrams’s Star Wars is different from Lucas’s, but if there’s a standout, it’s the way that the new movies look at history. Lucas’s Star Wars movies are bathed in the deep golden-sunset glow of the idyllic Old Republic, that more civilized age—but the new movies aren’t like that. They’re not nostalgic. They don’t long for the past; they’re more about the promise of the future. “This trilogy is about this young generation, this new generation, having to deal with all the debt that has come before,” Abrams says. “And it’s the sins of the father, and it’s the wisdom and the accomplishments of those who did great things, but it’s also those who committed atrocities, and the idea that this group is up against this unspeakable evil and are they prepared? Are they ready? What have they learned from before? It’s less about grandeur. It’s less about restoring an old age. It’s more about preserving a sense of freedom and not being one of the oppressed.”

FROM THE ASHES Mark Hamill, as Luke, with R2-D2. Speculation is rampant about who will “rise” as the Skywalker of the movie’s title—and how that choice will reflect the way the world has changed since Star Wars debuted in 1977.

The new generation doesn’t have that same connection to the old days that Luke and Leia did. It’s not like their parents destroyed the Old Republic. We don’t even know who their parents were! They’re too young to remember the Empire. They’re just here to clean up the mess they got left with, the disastrous consequences of bad decisions made by earlier generations, and try to survive long enough to see the future. Is any of this resonating with 2019? Might there possibly be a generation around here somewhere that’s worried about the consequences of its own decisions for the future? Star Wars has never been and probably never should be a vehicle for political arguments, but to paraphrase Ursula Le Guin, great science fiction is never really about the future. It’s about the present.

You could even—if you’re into that kind of thing—imagine the story of the new Star Wars trilogy as a metaphor for the making of the new Star Wars trilogy. In fact, I was totally prepared—because I am into that kind of thing!—to try to push this overthought metafictional hot take onto Abrams … but I didn’t have to. Abrams got there ahead of me. “The idea of the movie is kind of how I felt going into the movie as a filmmaker,” he says, “which is to say that I’ve inherited all this stuff, great stuff, and good wisdom, and the good and the bad, and it’s all coming to this end, and the question is, do we have what it takes to succeed?”

Kylo Ren has it all wrong: you can’t bring back the past and become your own grandfather, and you can’t kill the past, either. All you can do is make your peace with it and learn from it and move on. Abrams is doing that with Star Wars—and meanwhile the Resistance is going to have to do that, too, if they really are going to bring this saga to an end. Because we’ve been here before, watching a band of scrappy rebels take down a technofascist empire, and it seemed to work fine at the time—but it didn’t last. The same goes for the Jedi and their struggle with the Sith. To end this story, really end it, they’re going to have to figure out the conditions of a more permanent victory over the forces of darkness. Their past was imperfect at best, and the present is a complete disaster—but the future is all before them. This time, finally, they’re going to get it right.

#star wars tros #the rise of skywalker #vanity fair #long post

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thebroadstreetdarling · 7 years

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I was tagged by @thegreatwhiteferret - thanks lovely!

87 Random Questions

1. Where do you live? Canada.

2. One cool item you own? An old typewriter given to me by my uncle.

3. Moon or stars? The stars.

4. Places you’d like to travel to? The Mediterranean or Vienna.

5. Favorite song? Must be dreaming by Frou Frou.

6. Do you have any fears? I am afraid of fucking dragonflies...ugh.

7. Do you feel different than you did last year? Oh definitely.

8. What is your race? I am

Metis-Cree Nation. So basically, Metis is a combination of Cree and French/Scottish people.

9. Pet peeves? Finding hair in food, I fucking cry every time.

10. Any siblings? I am the oldest of five siblings, so there’s me and my younger sister plus three younger brothers.

11. Are you a gamer? No, video games make me dizzy.

12. Sexual orientation? Bi-sexual.

13. Does a broken mirror mean bad luck? Nah.

14. What do you feel is your mental age? I feel older sometimes, always have.

15. How old were you when you started dating? 14, yeah it was gross.

16. Where do you do most of your online shopping? I don’t really shop online tbh.

17. Favorite animal? Foxes.

18. What’s one film from the 2000s that you like? Moulin Rouge! Is my absolute favourite film.

19. What’s your favorite scary movie? The Conjuring! I loved it, it was impressively thrilling.

20. Fun fact about yourself? I like eating burnt food, sometimes I burn some of my food on purpose because I like the charred taste.

21. Shoe size? 7.

22. Which fictional character(s) do you relate to the most? Suga from Haikyuu!! We’re literally the same person, it’s so weird.

23. Where do you see yourself living in ten years? Somewhere warm, probably Vancouver.

24. Ever wore clothes that were just wayyy too tight? No, I perfer comfort over everything else.

25. What’s on your mind? I hope my face clears up soon (Had an allergic reaction to shampoo).

26. Are you religious? In a way, kinda more of a traditional sense as far as my Indigenous background goes.

27. How tall are you? 5’6.

28. Favorite band? 65daysofstatic

29. Do you remember 2009? Yeah, I just graduated high school and got really sick that year, some days I was sleeping 15/16 hours because I got really sick and had no energy.

30. Cats or dogs? I’m allergic to both so I don’t care either way.

31. Fruit or vegetables? Fruits.

32. Do you want to get married? Nope!

33. Do you want children? No, but I wouldn’t mind adopting or fostering kids.

34. Flamingos or peacocks? Flamingos! They’re so much nicer.

35. What superpower do you wish you had? I wish I could fly, or have super strength.

36. Are you a germ freak? Yes. I have wipes to wipe down all surfaces all the time, and I organize every day.

37. Did swearing baby, ghost car, or ghost caught on tape scare you as a kid? No.

38. Do you prefer sweet or salty? Sweet.

39. Tea or coffee? Tea, I think of coffee as more of a treat to have every now and then.

40. Are you superstitious? In a way. I knock on wood three times if I say something that might jinx me.

41. Do you like stripes? Such a look.

42. Favorite shows as a kid? Digimon! And Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

43. Favorite shows growing up? Digimon and Fullmetal Alchemist

44. Favorite musical? Moulin Rouge!

45. Favorite movie? Moulin Rouge!

46. Birthday? October 31st. I’m a Halloween babe.

47. Are you a grammar Nazi? No, and that’s an awful term.

48. Ever gotten drunk? I’ve never been drunk in my life, true fact.

49. Do you have a carrier bag? I do! So much easier to carry stuff around.

50. What would you do if you were the opposite gender for a day? Probably nothing.

51. If you were the opposite gender what would you change your name to? Jude or Julian.

52. What song is stuck in your head? Seventeen for the Heathers Musical.

53. Celebrity crush? Don’t really have one tbh.

54. If you could live in a non-English speaking country, where would it be? Czech Republic, I’d go live in Prague, or Italy.

55. Are you a good dancer? I’m a great dancer! Many styles too!

56. Have any allergies? I have 15 different allergies, most of them food.

57. Any bad habits? I rub my eyes too much when I get nervous.

58. Ever broke a bone? I’ve never had the pleasure.

59. Are you a city or country person? City, I hate being in the country.

60. Do you like your home country? I give Canada a lot of shit, but honesty it’s not a bad place.

61. Sunflowers or daisies? Sunflowers.

62. Tulips or roses? Roses, champagne coloured ones are my favourite.

63. Oak or maple? Oak.

64. Disney or Nickelodeon? Disney.

65. WYR be obese or anorexic? This is an awful question what the fuck?

66. WYR be over 6 feet or under 5 feet? Oh! Over 6 feet for sure, and I would wear three inch heels and just dominate every where I go.

67. Rubies or sapphires? Sapphires.

68. Are you stubborn? Nah.

69. Have you been in scouts/Girl Scouts? Nope.

70. What type of music do you listen to? A little bit of everything.

71. Favorite vine? The get silly one with the little cat, I watch it late at night to help me sleep sometimes.

72. Beaches or castles? How bout a Castle on a beach? Because that would be fantastic!

73. Pick the closest book to you, and write the line you opened to:

“No,” he whispered with a sigh as his head rested on my shoulder. “No, I suppose I don’t.” - the heart’s invisible furies by John boyne. This is a fantastic book by the way!

74. Anyone in the same room as you right now? Yassine. My room mate, we cook supper together sometimes, and talk about our days, I can kinda tell he likes the company, he’s one of those social people who suddenly live in a place where he can’t be as social, poor kid.

75. Which is worse; throwing up or diarrhea? I haven’t thrown up since I was five, so that was 22 years ago, so I’m going to say diarrhea.

76. Butterflies or lady bugs? Butterflies! They’re so pretty!

77. Do you say “K” when you’re mad? I say oh-kayyyy, because I’m usually trying not to snap at someone and that’s how I calm myself.

78. How do you react when people purposely scare you? It’s kinda hard to sometimes, but when they do, I just startle and start laughing afterwards.

79. Most overrated celebrity? Cate Blanchett - she named her son after Roman Polanski people, that woman ain’t shit.

80. Do you have a globe in your room? No.

81. Do you have a dream catcher in your room? I don’t surprisingly, but I sometimes like my nightmares, they can give me story inspiration sometimes.

82. What do you see when you look out your window? My courtyard, it has a really nice tree and bench that I can’t wait to read on when it’s warm out again.

83. Have you been on an airplane? Yup!

84. Do you believe in aliens? I do! I used to kinda be terrified of them because of this Movie I saw when I was a kid, called Fire in the Sky. Like that movie made me cry I was so scared, and then my friend Princess told me she wouldn’t be scared of aliens, because in a way they’re like people, just beings from far off places, and why be scared of someone not from Earth, so I got over that fear pretty quickly.

85. Do you believe in ghosts? I do, mostly because I’ve seen plenty in my life. Good and bad ones.

86. Do you believe in God? Yeah man! I believe in all of people’s beliefs, because that’s important to them in a way. Much like I believe in Creator, why shouldn’t I believe in a god?

87. Do you believe in yourself? All the fucking time, it’s one of my many strengths.

I never know who to tag, whoops! I tag whoever wants to do this! :):):)

#about me #tag game #long post

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leftpress · 8 years

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It’s Time for Anarchists to Pick Up A Gun

From The Conjure House

Imagine for a moment you’re at a bar and there’s an immigrant in front of you.

He’s quiet, but not antisocial, casually dressed but not sloppy. He seems just like anybody else except he isn’t. What you don’t know is he’s been working as an aviation programs engineer and even helped design fly-by-wire planes, in which manual controls are entirely replaced by computers. Smart guy, very talented, “high energy” as Il Duce might say; a success story from India and right out of American mythology.

Now, behind him, a new sound; old, fearful, you hear a hellish cry: “GET OUT OF MY COUNTRY!”

Who the fuck was that? There appears to be a bit of a scuffle in the back, some guy hassling the immigrant you were just studying, but the bar manager seems to take care of it. The man, who appears to be just some old white dude, looks pissed. There’s something about him, but you can’t seem to place it. The man leaves, but in a few minutes comes back through the door. Perhaps he left something?

He shoots 3 people, two of them Indians who he mistakenly took for Muslims.

Maybe you’re at a protest this time, holding your sign and feeling the electric current of hundreds of other bodies joined in solidarity. A man emerges from the crowd, egging you on to hit him. He spits at you like a diseased raccoon and curses like a fucking sailor. Maybe he’s drunk you figure, or at least too high to really know what’s going on. Someone else pushes him away.

He pulls out a pistol and shoots them. He’ll only be charged with assault.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re not even a full year into the reign of a new emperor and already the political climate has become practically poisonous, a vile and noxious cloud not only choking the most at risk in our communities but the people seeking to defend them. People have called for Antifa to be declared a terrorist organization; state governments are writing bills that allow protesters to be run over and have their property stolen from them.

It’s a situation not unlike the one faced by French Illegalists at the turn of the century:

“Against us, all arms are good; we are in an enemy camp, surrounded, harassed. The bosses, judges, soldiers, cops unite to bring us down.”

To be a thinking person in this country of barbarians is to be a criminal and with ever-increasing fervor the tribes loyal to the new Emperor aim to make war upon us. There are millions of people sitting in front of televisions as I type these words that would see nothing wrong with a few hundred lives sacrificed every year to “keep people in line” and you can be sure that folks like you and I will be among them. The cops don’t stop them, they exchange racist texts with them; they console men who kill unarmed black children and tell them what they did was just.

To be an Anarchist, a Communist, an Anti-Capitalist or Intersectional Insurgent is to be potentially marked for death. This is not a metaphor. This is real life.

If you roamed the streets of Syria with nothing but a baseball bat you’d be thought to be suicidal; if your “war against the State” consisted of nothing but flames and gasoline every fire station in the country would be well enough equipped to handle even your most daring of raids.

The people who overwhelmingly support the policies and politicians that want to see you stuffed into a coffin are getting rather shooty as of late. I ask a simple question: do you have the tools to protect not only yourself but the people you care about?

The Great Misfortune

Let’s not kid ourselves: “radicals” are about as far from “revolutionaries” as turkeys are from the T-rex. Somewhere along the line the Left stopped being dangerous and almost went extinct. After the IWW was broken in the 30’s and Labor’s power was smashed, after the ALF-CIO denounced communists and dropping acid was a stand in for revolution, the only place you could find the same current that scared the living piss out of emperors and presidents became smoke-filled college dorms or momentary marches down half-way empty streets. In essence the Left’s ideas about human liberation from the chains of capital were so heavily hunted in the physical world it ran back into our heads; like Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers the Left was thought to be extinct, the sight of a Hammer and Sickle more like the discovery of a dinosaur bone that any kind of political statement.

But times ain’t what they used to be.

Enraged by Trump’s actions and betrayed by the Democrats, the specter of radicalism has returned like an angry ghost hellbent on revenge. Millennials are tired of capitalism yet Bernie’s “political revolution” failed to deliver on anything worthwhile. Non-violence has shown itself as only a great way to get arrested.

Yes, the militant Left seems to be emerging from the ground like cicadas in the Florida summer, hisses and noises slowly building to an unshakable chorus. Signs from the previous generation still remain on the still wet wings of these new militants however. Black Bloc is back but we’re still battling over protests, people joined arm in arm around buildings are generally just a nuisance and not a blockade.

The Anarchists and Militants of all stripes have become neutered, putting us in a dangerous predicament not faced in other countries. Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to be members of a gun-owning household and about six-in-ten gun household members (64%) say they “often feel proud to be American”; roughly half of all the guns in this country are possessed by just 3 percent of American adults; many of the cheapest firearms to produce (ones with open bolt actions) are specifically banned under the NFA and the Hughes Amendment, effectively keeping self-protection out of the hands of the working class.

This is not Europe, this is the United States of fucking America, a morose fiefdom where people can walk into a goddamned Starbucks with 30 rounds of armor-piercing bullets.

What this amounts to is a tangled web of dark implications too dire to think about, a hidden threat of wealthy and well-to-do patriots fully armed and very capable of destroying any gains a revolutionary movement might make in a matter days. They can afford to laugh at riots because they know when the chips are down any effective means of self-defense are firmly in the hands of one class and one ideology.

There is no specter haunting any continent besides the FAI and even then only in small spontaneous camps. Cops and Nazis alike(but I repeat myself) have stormed protests and proceeded to beat the shit out of whoever they like because they pose no threat to the ones doing the beating. Police still want to go home at the end of the day; the minute they are faced with somebody more than capable of inflicting even worse harm they can commit they suddenly become negotiators and peacemakers. Recall the inbreds at the Malthur Wildlife Reserve were treated like honorable enemies because they had fully automatic weapons that could slice a pig up in a matter of seconds.

Recall also they were all aquitted by juries and served almost no jail time.

Compare that with the protests at Standing Rock, where State forces have literally blown people’s arms off without any repercussions besides being prayed at. The camp, now in shambles, is done. The DAPL will be built, the people have failed, and all they have to show for it are bruises and injuries.

But what if the cops hadn’t been so eager to permanently maim protesters, or rush into camps? What if they had been afraid? What if Anarchism and Anti-Capitalists really were something to be afraid of again?

What if the resistance was armed?

The God That Lied

Source: happinessforall.files.wordpress.com

Modern protesting, a hold over from liberalism, assumes a few things:

The people in power care about what their livestock have to say.

There is some imaginary field surrounding all of us called “human rights” that these people feel morally obligated to respect.

The Enemy can be persuaded or guilted into giving up all its power to form some grand utopian cabal that spans the globe without any violence.

These ideas are ridiculous, some religious fantasy stillbirth from the 1960’s dragged around and paraded at every “demonstration” as if they were some patchouli-soaked Christ-child sent to heal us. It’s all lies. All of it. Just ask any black person.

These concepts are nothing more than implanted fictions given to you by the State to keep you docile and obedient, and were recognized as such one hundred years ago. Do bosses care about the food or shelter of the workers they fire? Do the police wonder if someone’s “rights” have been violated when they beat them with batons or shoot them on sight? They scream to you about non-violence while they steal almost every dollar you generate with the threat of force and starvation looming above you.

Rights are a fiction, a spook, and the sooner you realize the only “rights” you have are those you are willing to enforce the sooner you can join the rest of the planet in what we call life.

Enzo Martucci wrote:

“The freedom of an individual ends where his power ends. If I want, and my power permits, I can command others. But in this case the power exercised over them is not authority because they are not bound to recognize and respect it. In fact, if they would rebel and use their power to impede my attempt at domination then all would remain free without anyone threatening to lord it over them.”

Anarchism has in effect relied on coercion: we will not work unless you do this, we will not stop rioting unless you give us this.

We can impede power plenty of ways, and lord knows radicals have learned an assortment, yet we never seem to make the idea of attempting domination a dangerous one. We walk the streets naked everyday with the sincere hope in our hearts that our weakness be respected as if our frailty was a virtue.

We protest laws that allow people to run us over and smash our skulls underneath one-thousand pounds of steel; we beg that the same people smashing us with batons eventually respect us; we don’t demand dignity, we whimper for permission to be treated as if we had any.

Is this the Anarchism we want, a tradition of asking to be human rather than demanding it? The majority of what passes for “direct action” nowadays is nothing more than calling upon the Enemy to be a better ruler instead of making ourselves ungovernable.

This tactic has never worked and the idea that any people, themselves surrounded by violent men and women defending imaginary lines carved from the corpses of millions, would believe them speaks more to strength of mass hallucination than any matters of politics.

As I write this a cop has pulled somebody over outside my window, his flashing lights a silent roar that he has caught his prey. If he does not forcibly detain his victim he will at least rob her to pay for the use of his protection racket. We will drive by, even if he beats or punches this young woman with sandy blonde hair because we are too weak to live without him.

If he killed her right now what would happen? Why shouldn’t he? What’s he got to lose? What would he even risk if he spread her brain matter everywhere in an orgy of foaming neurons and shark tank adrenaline? Nothing from her, nothing from the community around her. The slave cabins will remain quiet and after the protests are over he’ll be right back on the job.

Because he, and his entire department know they have nothing to fear. That we rely on them.

Pick Up YOUR Weapons and Declare YOUR War

Source: Pinhouse. Patch available for purchase here.

I’ll say it plainly: an armed person is in command of themselves. They can not only defend themselves and thus be free from the “protection” of the police but move to enforce their own values on the world around them. When a cop tells you to take off a shirt he finds offensive(say, a Black Lives Matter t-shirt) you obey because the mere threat of violence and death is enough to make you comply. You are not sizing up the cop and wondering if you can out box him or pin him to the ground because you know no amount of muscle will stop a 9mm hollow point from ripping through your face like chemotherapy in a cancer patient.

There is no reason Anarchists can’t do the same.

Klansmen get awful scared at the sight of a loaded rifle, Nazis seem less likely to flex their muscle when they know a .357 is set to demolish in 2 seconds what took 2 years to build. To point a gun at a cop is a death sentence(unless you’re white of course), yet the mere idea that a shootout could occur is often enough to keep them on their best behavior.

Robert F. Williams was a classic example of this tactic being put into action.

“Robert F. Williams would become the leader of the Mabel, NC chapter of the NAACP and organized a black militia to fight against the Klan, much to the dislike of moderates in the Civil Rights movement. Williams was a WWII veteran and shared the skills he accumulated with his fellows to fight back against the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils. This was shown to have quite a high level of efficacy; by simply being armed black militias were able to scare Klansmen out of action.”

Where the FUCK did THAT kind of politics go? When did we start asking for anything instead of taking it? Why have we let the enemy dictate what is acceptable for us? Why have we huddled together in weakness when we can proudly stand under our own authority?

“Revolution and insurrection,” said Max Stirner, “must not be looked upon as synonymous…The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions.’”

When we begin to make ourselves free we pave the way for the freedom of others.

Guns may be the great leveler: they don’t have to be expensive, they don’t have to be fancy and they can be wielded by the sick or healthy, young or old, by any sex or gender. Anyone can use them to arrange the world around them.

Firearms are Anarchism in action, a tool that instantly frees you from relying on hierarchical authority. YOU can repel a burglary, YOU can stop a rape, YOU can keep racist scum from even showing their face in the neighborhood either individually or collectively; no authority is involved, no 911 to call or infrastructure to uphold, effectively making the State obsolete without relying on the spooks of “rights” or “laws” or some religious belief that “deep down everybody is good.”

When it becomes clear that threatening the life of an Anarchist by driving a car through a protest or pulling a gun at a rally becomes potentially deadly the aggravation will end. When police know they risk much more than a two-week paid vacation when they rampage through a neighborhood the harassment will cease. When it becomes clear that a rapist won’t live long enough to beg for mercy from a sympathetic judge the patriarchy will retreat.

Every anarchist with a gun in her hand is Anarchism made real, a potent force capable of holding the world accountable and demanding autonomy, the same world currently hidden behind walls, fences, badges, and uniforms that you and I have built for generation upon generation with our bare hands only to have it stolen from us by the diktats of the “markets” and the owners who treat us like cattle!

Well comrades, will you continue to let them steal from you? Will you continue to live as a peaceful and pacifist herd? Will you continue to let the State and the bourgeoisie steal your value, your time, your bodies, and your lives all while they ransom your safety for continued obedience?

Or will you begin to steal them back, one by one…

…at gun point?

If you can steal no other property from the State…

…at least steal back yourself.

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Essays

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fightblissfight · 8 years

Text

Crisis of Confidence

I’m having the worst time writing. Like many of us writers, I think that my writing is shit. When this happens, I turn to fan fiction. But even now, I’m dying over this.

So here’s a snippet. I normally wouldn’t do this, but I I’m posting an unfinished piece to see what people think. This is my first attempt at a Reader narrator, and I think that’s throwing me off. Thoughts?

Seth RollinsXReader

—————-

You’re in the middle of a mixed tag team match. Your partner, Seth Rollins, currently had a choke hold on Chris Jericho. Charlotte glared at you from across the ring. You were the new number one contender to the women’s championship. The match was weeks away, but this would be the first time in months that you were paired against Charlotte. She was more than intimidating. You were determined not to let your fear show.

Jericho broke the choke hold, wiggling away from Seth quickly enough that he tagged in Charlotte. Because of the stupid rules, that meant you were in.

“You got this,” Seth said as you switched places.

You vaguely registered the fact that he was especially attractive when he was sweaty. The thought completely drifted away when you locked eyes with Charlotte.

Her smile was smug. And for good reason. You slowly circled each other. You felt like prey being stalked. The feeling didn’t sit well with you.

You attacked first.

In a blink, you were on the ground. Charlotte had the cover. You kicked out at two.

You scrambled away on your butt. You needed to focus. You needed this win.

“Get up, dammit,” Seth yelled.

You growled in general annoyance. Using the ropes as leverage, you pulled yourself to your feet.

You could do this.

You charged Charlotte, grabbing her around her middle. The crowd roared as you flipped her over your head in a suplex. You hooked her leg.

Jericho broke the cover by dragging you away by your leg. You flailed, kicking at him. Seth appeared, superkicking Jericho, who let you go as he fell.

Fuming, you started kicking Jericho’s middle.

“Whoa, whoa,” Seth grabbed you by your middle and dragged you, flailing, away from Jericho. His bare chest was slick and warm against your back. For a moment, you didn’t hate the skimpy sports bra you were wearing.

“Put me down!” You shrieked. You elbowed him in the stomach, rolling away when he dropped you. You turned on him, fuming. He was bent over, clutching his stomach. “I don’t need your help!”

When he straightened, his face was set in anger. He started to say something, but you pushed him as hard as you could. The crowd reacted with “oooh”s.

Seth barely budged. His jaw clenched as he glared at you.

Then an arm was around your middle and Charlotte pulled you into a small package. Surprised, you didn’t react in time.

One, two, three.

The bell clanged and Charlotte let you go.

You covered your face with your hands. Once more, you let your temper get the best of you.

When you opened your eyes, Seth was standing over you. His hands were clenched into fists.

“What was that?” He demanded.

You slowly climbed to your feet and ignored him. Charlotte and Jericho were already down the ramp, celebrating their victory. You watched them, angry and defeated.

“Hey, hey, hey. Y/N, I’m talking to you.” Seth’s voice suddenly came over the arena. You turned to find him with microphone in hand. “What’s wrong with you? You claim to be a fighter, huh? You’re the best thing to happening to the women’s division, huh?”

Without a microphone, you raise your chin, glaring at him the best you could.

“You’re nothing but a pain in the ass. A whiney little girl.”

Your anger boiled. You stomped over to Seth. He didn’t move when you pushed at him again. Damn his strength.

You grabbed the microphone out of his hand. “I’m a pain in the ass?! That’s rich, coming from the cockiest jerk in the company. Tell me, Seth, when was the last time you won a match when it mattered? Huh, ‘champ?’ When push comes to shove, at the end of the day, you can’t. Get. It. Up.” The crowd went crazy at that.

You dropped the mic at his feet. In your haze of hurt and anger, you made the stupid mistake of staring at him and taking a step closer. The look on his face was dangerous. You didn’t care. You weren’t going to take his brand of shit anymore.

That’s when he wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled you against him. Then his mouth was on yours and your head was spinning and the crowd was roaring or was that the blood in your ears?

You kissed him back because damn if you haven’t thought about it. And like everything else, he knew what he was doing.

He broke the kiss first. His self centered smirk turned your passion back into rage.

Two can play this game.

Bracing yourself with his shoulders, you jumped up, pulling his face back down to yours as you wrapped your legs around his waist. The bastard held you as if you weighed nothing.

Then you maneuvered so your legs were at his shoulders and your head was near the ground. And you threw him in a hurricanrana.

You left him, stunned, in the middle of the ring.

Everyone stared at you backstage but no one talked to you. You stormed into the women’s locker room and punched one of the metal lockers. The wrap around your knuckles numbed the pain.

“You ok?”

You looked up. Bayley, Nia, and Sasha were in the locker room. You didn’t even know that they were still here.

“Peachy.” Your cutting tone proved that you weren’t so peachy. You swung another punch at an open locker. It slammed shut with a satisfying bang.

The door to the locker room swung open. You glared at the entrant.

Seth FREAKIN Rollins. With his bare chest and his drying hair and his god damn arms.

“Get out,” he growled, casting a glance at the three other women.

You ignored everything around you as they left. You started unwrapping your knuckles, really pulling at the tape.

“What the fuck was that?”

You continued ignoring Seth, turning your back on him. One hand was free from the tape. You worked on the other hand.

“Don’t fucking turn your back to me.” His hand on your shoulder. It took all your effort to not flip him over your shoulder. Or try, anyway. You knew he only sold that hurricanarra because it would look cool, because the audience would pop, because his reputation could take it.

That pissed you off even more.

But you let him spin you around. You slapped his hands away.

“Don’t touch me, Rollins,” you said.

He grabbed a fistful of your hair, right at the root. “You don’t talk to me like that.”

“Let. Me. Go.”

He leaned in so that his mouth was right next to your ear. His hair tickled your cheek. “Make. Me.” He whispered, his breath hot against your neck.

You snaked your fingers into his hair, scratching at his scalp as you pulled tight, and tugged at his hair. Hard.

It surprised him enough that he released his hold.

You put a good five foot distance between the two of you. He was bigger, but you fought dirty. There was a reason most of the fans hated you.

“What is your problem?” You yelled.

“My problem?” He cackled there, that infuriating cackle. “Sweetheart, you’re the one with the problem.”

“Yeah, and that problem is named Seth Rollins.”

“Please.” He oozed attitude. “I’ve seen you look at me, babe. You’re just pissy because I won’t fuck you.”

Won’t. That one word hit you in the stomach like a bullet.

Won’t.

You weren’t like most of the women in the division. You didn’t care about looking sexy or being sexy or pretty or anything. You wore pants and boots, not cute bright ones like Bayley, but dark ones. You didn’t wear skimpy tops. You wore sports bras and a tank top. Your hair wasn’t long and curled. You kept it shoulder length and out of your face in two french braids. You were here to kick ass. To dominate. To show them that the women could be just as good as the men.

But it worked too well.

Because even Seth Rollins won’t look your way twice.

You felt tears prickle at the corners of your eyes but you refused to cry, especially not in front of him.

Instead, you ripped off the last of the tape from around your hands.

And somehow your anger grew even more.

“Why did you kiss me in the middle of the ring, then?” You asked. Calmly. Too calmly.

Smug. Egotistical. You needed a thesaurus to describe his smirk. “Because I needed to shut you up somehow.”

You smiled. But it was your crazy smile.

“So you’re a tease,” you said.

“I’m not a tease.”

You sigh. “Then I was right. You really can’t get it up.”

He laughed. “This is your plan? This is how you’re trying to seduce me?”

“Rollins, if I were trying to seduce you, you’d be on your back and I’d be sitting on your face.”

“I don’t think so.”

You stepped toward him. “Is that a challenge?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, stepping closer to you.

“Why?”

You were chest to chest now.

“Because,” his lips hovered over yours. “I’d have to be interested.”

Your breath hitched as his lips grazed yours, soft, barely there. More like a whisper than a kiss.

“And I’m not.” His heat was gone suddenly. You blinked, unable to focus for a moment. When you did, he was smirking again, across the room, arms folded, biceps bulging. Then he was turning, walking away, leaving.

“What?” You asked. Everything was confusing for a moment. He had that effect on you.

“I said,” he spelled it out slowly, as if your english wasn’t too good. “I’m not interested in you.”

And then he was gone. Final words and all.

You tugged at the last of the wrist wraps and pretended that your eyes weren’t blurry with tears.

#wwe imagine #seth rollins #seth rollins imagine #wwe fanfiction #wwe fanfic #in progress

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xkillcrsx · 11 months

Text

Head Canon | All

None of the killers should ever be hired as a camp counselor. The only person who would be remotely close to good for the job is Delia Loomis, and she'd rather not deal with a bunch of children (she already deals with her younger brothers.)

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dlahtou · 7 years

Text

The Inner Ring, by C.S. Lewis

The following is a lecture given at King’s College, University of London, in 1944 May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy’s War and Peace? “When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood—what he had already guessed—that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system.”

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralising. I shall do my best to gratify it. I shall in fact, give you advice about the world in which you are going to live. I do not mean by this that I am going to talk on what are called current affairs. You probably know quite as much about them as I do. I am not going to tell you—except in a form so general that you will hardly recognise it—what part you ought to play in post-war reconstruction.

It is not, in fact, very likely that any of you will be able, in the next ten years, to make any direct contribution to the peace or prosperity of Europe. You will be busy finding jobs, getting married, acquiring facts. I am going to do something more old-fashioned than you perhaps expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to issue warnings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial that no one calls them “current affairs.”

And of course everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with today. The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realise the truth of the old proverb that he who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. As for the Flesh, you must be very abnormal young people if you do not know quite as much about it as I do. But on the World I think I have something to say.

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. And if you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six weeks’ absence, you may find this secondary hierarchy quite altered.

There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible people at this place.” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.

Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognised the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the Russian Army, or perhaps in any army. But you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the school ring was almost in touch with a Masters’ Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of an onion. And here, too, at your University—shall I be wrong in assuming that at this very moment, invisible to me, there are several rings—independent systems or concentric rings—present in this room? And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.

All this is rather obvious. I wonder whether you will say the same of my next step, which is this. I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.

People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.

Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.

I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an Evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together. And it is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organisation should coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people held the highest spots, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. It is necessary: and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous. As Byron has said: “Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet The unexpected death of some old lady.“

The painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is not an evil. But an earnest desire for her death on the part of her heirs is not reckoned a proper feeling, and the law frowns on even the gentlest attempts to expedite her departure. Let Inner Rings be unavoidable and even an innocent feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in?

I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of you may already be compromised. I must not assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable.

I will ask only one question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. IN the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most.

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.

I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. But you may have an open mind on the question. I will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I do.

It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.

Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.

And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well know. You yourself, once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in senses I can’t now explore. But in another sense there is much truth in the schoolboy’s principle “them as asks shan’t have.” To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. It is like the house in Alice Through the Looking Glass.

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katybudgetbooks · 7 years

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Beach Reads for Fans of Women’s Fiction

The After Party by Anton DiSclafani: From the bestselling author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls comes a story of lifelong female friendship - in all its intimate agony and joy - set within a world of wealth, beauty, and expectation. Joan Fortier is the epitome of Texas glamour and the center of the 1950s Houston social scene. Tall, blonde, beautiful, and strong, she dominates the room and the gossip columns. Every man wants her; every woman wants to be her. Devoted to Joan since childhood, Cece Buchanan is either her chaperone or her partner in crime, depending on whom you ask. But when Joan's radical behavior escalates the summer they are twenty-five, Cece considers it her responsibility to bring her back to the fold, ultimately forcing one provocative choice to appear the only one there is.A thrilling glimpse into the sphere of the rich and beautiful at a memorable moment in history, The After Party unfurls a story of friendship as obsessive, euphoric, consuming, and complicated as any romance.

The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson (due out 7/11/17): With empathy, grace, humor, and piercing insight, the author of Gods in Alabama pens a powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South that confronts the truth about privilege, family, and the distinctions between perception and reality---the stories we tell ourselves about our origins and who we really are.Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs’ weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic novelist is swept off her barstool by a handsome and anonymous Batman.It turns out the caped crusader has left her with more than just a nice, fuzzy memory. She’s having a baby boy��an unexpected but not unhappy development in the thirty-eight year-old’s life. But before Leia can break the news of her impending single-motherhood (including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional, Southern family, her step-sister Rachel’s marriage implodes. Worse, she learns her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Birchie, is losing her mind, and she’s been hiding her dementia with the help of Wattie, her best friend since girlhood.Leia returns to Alabama to put her grandmother’s affairs in order, clean out the big Victorian that has been in the Birch family for generations, and tell her family that she’s pregnant. Yet just when Leia thinks she’s got it all under control, she learns that illness is not the only thing Birchie’s been hiding. Tucked in the attic is a dangerous secret with roots that reach all the way back to the Civil War. Its exposure threatens the family’s freedom and future, and it will change everything about how Leia sees herself and her sister, her son and his missing father, and the world she thinks she knows.

The Duchess by Danielle Steel (due out 6/27/17): The incomparable Danielle Steel breaks new ground as she takes us to nineteenth-century England, where a high-born young woman is forced out into the world—and begins a journey of survival, sensuality, and long-sought justice. Angélique Latham has grown up at magnificent Belgrave Castle under the loving tutelage of her father, the Duke of Westerfield, after the death of her aristocratic French mother. At eighteen she is her father’s closest, most trusted child, schooled in managing their grand estate. But when he dies, her half-brothers brutally turn her out, denying her very existence. Angélique has a keen mind, remarkable beauty, and an envelope of money her father pressed upon her. To survive, she will need all her resources—and one bold stroke of fortune. Unable to secure employment without references or connections, Angélique desperately makes her way to Paris, where she rescues a young woman fleeing an abusive madam—and suddenly sees a possibility: Open an elegant house of pleasure that will protect its women and serve only the best clients. With her upper-class breeding, her impeccable style, and her father’s bequest, Angélique creates Le Boudoir, soon a sensational establishment where powerful men, secret desires, and beautiful, sophisticated women come together. But living on the edge of scandal, can she ever make a life of her own—or regain her rightful place in the world? From England to Paris to New York, Danielle Steel captures an age of upheaval and the struggles of women in a male-ruled society—and paints a captivating portrait of a woman of unquenchable spirit, who in houses great or humble is every ounce a duchess.

Good Karma by Christina Kelly: A charming, heartfelt tale of love lost and regained in a gated community in Savannah, Georgia. After almost forty years in New Jersey, Catherine, Ralph, and their beloved Boston Terrier Karma are hitting the road, relocating to a gorgeous, serene island off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, where Catherine can work on her backhand and Ralph can hit the links. But upon their arrival in the Seven Oaks gated community, it becomes apparent that Catherine and Ralph’s visions of retirement couldn’t be more different. While Catherine is intrigued by their quirky neighbors, Ralph’s golf-and-poker routine seems to be interrupted only by his flirtations with their zealous real estate agent. As the pair drift further apart, Catherine cannot help but sense her marriage is at risk. Then, she meets recent widower Fred at the dog park. United by their dogs, they embark upon a friendship that could be something more—until she discovers that he’s not quite what he seems. As she sorts out fact from fiction and discovers what sorts of secrets might be hiding behind Seven Oaks’ pristine picket fences, she’ll have to make a decision affecting her future happiness and her chance at newfound love.

Leave Me by Gayle Forman (paperback due out 6/27/17): Every woman who has ever fantasized about driving past her exit on the highway instead of going home to make dinner, and every woman who has ever dreamed of boarding a train to a place where no one needs constant attention--meet Maribeth Klein. A harried working mother who’s so busy taking care of her husband and twins, she doesn’t even realize she’s had a heart attack. Surprised to discover that her recuperation seems to be an imposition on those who rely on her, Maribeth does the unthinkable: she packs a bag and leaves. But, as is often the case, once we get where we’re going we see our lives from a different perspective. Far from the demands of family and career and with the help of liberating new friendships, Maribeth is able to own up to secrets she has been keeping from herself and those she loves. With bighearted characters--husbands, wives, friends, and lovers--who stumble and trip, grow and forgive, Leave Me is about facing the fears we’re all running from. Gayle Forman is a dazzling observer of human nature. She has written an irresistible novel that confronts the ambivalence of modern motherhood head on and asks, what happens when a grown woman runs away from home?

One Less Problem Without You by Beth Harbison: Meet Prinny, Chelsea and Diana. Prinny is the owner of Cosmos, a shop that sells crystals, potions, candles, and hope. It’s also a place where no one turns down a little extra-special cocktail that can work as a romance potion or heal a broken heart. But Prinny is in love with her married lawyer and she’ll need nothing short of magic to forget about him.Chelsea works as a living statue at tourist sites around Washington, DC. It's a thankless job, but it helps pay the rent. That, and her part-time job at Cosmos. As her dream of becoming a successful actress starts to seem more remote and the possibility of being a permanently struggling one seems more realistic, Chelsea begins to wonder: at one point do you give up on your dreams? And will love ever be in the cards for her?Diana Tiesman is married to Leif, a charismatic man who isn’t faithful. But no matter how many times he lets her down, Diana just can't let him go. She knows the only way she can truly breakaway is if she leaves and goes where he will never think to follow. So she ends up at Cosmos with Leif’s stepsister, where she makes her homemade teas and tinctures as she figures out whether she'd rather be lonely alone than lonely in love.In Beth Harbinson's One Less Problem Without You, three women suddenly find themselves together at their own very different crossroads. It will take hope, love, strength and a little bit of magic for them to find their way together.

Same Beach, Next Year by Dorothea Benton Frank: New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank returns to her magical Lowcountry of South Carolina in this bewitching story of marriage, love, family, and friendship that is infused with her warm and engaging earthy humor and generous heart.One enchanted summer, two couples begin a friendship that will last more than twenty years and transform their lives.A chance meeting on the Isle of Palms, one of Charleston’s most stunning barrier islands, brings former sweethearts, Adam Stanley and Eve Landers together again. Their respective spouses, Eliza and Carl, fight sparks of jealousy flaring from their imagined rekindling of old flames. As Adam and Eve get caught up on their lives, their partners strike up a deep friendship—and flirt with an unexpected attraction—of their own.Year after year, Adam, Eliza, Eve, and Carl eagerly await their reunion at Wild Dunes, a condominium complex at the island’s tip end, where they grow closer with each passing day, building a friendship that will withstand financial catastrophe, family tragedy, and devastating heartbreak. The devotion and love they share will help them weather the vagaries of time and enrich their lives as circumstances change, their children grow up and leave home, and their twilight years approach.Bursting with the intoxicating richness of Dorothea Benton Frank’s beloved Lowcountry—the sultry sunshine, cool ocean breezes, icy cocktails, and starry velvet skies—Same Beach, Next Year is a dazzling celebration of the infrangible power of friendship, the enduring promise of summer, and the indelible bonds of love.

The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jeffries: #1 International bestselling novel set in 1920s Ceylon, about a young Englishwoman who marries a charming tea plantation owner and widower, only to discover he's keeping terrible secrets about his past, including what happened to his first wife, that lead to devastating consequences.

We Could Be Beautiful by Swan Huntley: A spellbinding psychological debut novel, Swan Huntley's We Could Be Beautiful is the story of a wealthy woman who has everything—and yet can trust no one. Catherine West has spent her entire life surrounded by beautiful things. She owns an immaculate Manhattan apartment, she collects fine art, she buys exquisite handbags and clothing, and she constantly redecorates her home. And yet, despite all this, she still feels empty. She sees her personal trainer, she gets weekly massages, and occasionally she visits her mother and sister on the Upper East Side, but after two broken engagements and boyfriends who wanted only her money, she is haunted by the fear that she'll never have a family of her own. One night, at an art opening, Catherine meets William Stockton, a handsome man who shares her impeccable taste and love of beauty. He is educated, elegant, and even has a personal connection—his parents and Catherine's parents were friends years ago. But as he and Catherine grow closer, she begins to encounter strange signs, and her mother, Elizabeth (now suffering from Alzheimer's), seems to have only bad memories of William as a boy. In Elizabeth's old diary she finds an unnerving letter from a former nanny that cryptically reads: "We cannot trust anyone . . . " Is William lying about his past? And if so, is Catherine willing to sacrifice their beautiful life in order to find the truth? Featuring a fascinating heroine who longs for answers but is blinded by her own privilege, We Could Be Beautiful is a glittering, seductive, utterly surprising story of love, money, greed, and family.

Whispering in French by Sophia Nash (due out 8/1/17): Award-winning romance author Sophia Nash makes her women’s fiction debut with a beautifully crafted, funny, and life-affirming story set in the Atlantic seaside region of France, as one woman returns to France to sell her family home and finds an unexpected chance to start over—perfect for fans of Le Divorce and The Little Paris Bookshop. Home is the last place Kate expected to find herself…As a child, Kate Hamilton was packed off each summer to her grandfather’s ivy-covered villa in southern France. That ancestral home, named Marthe Marie, is now crumbling, and it falls to Kate—regarded as the most responsible and practical member of her family—to return to the rugged, beautiful seaside region to confront her grandfather’s debts and convince him to sell.Kate makes her living as a psychologist and life coach, but her own life is in as much disarray as Marthe Marie. Her marriage has ended, and she’s convinced that she has failed her teenaged daughter, Lily, in unforgiveable ways. While delving into colorful family history and the consequences of her own choices, Kate reluctantly agrees to provide coaching to Major Edward Soames, a British military officer suffering with post-traumatic stress. Breaking through his shell, and dealing with idiosyncratic locals intent on viewing her as an Americanized outsider, will give Kate new insight into who—and where—she wants to be. The answers will prove as surprising as the secrets that reside in the centuries-old villa.Witty and sophisticated, rich in history and culture, Sophia Nash’s novel vividly evokes both its idyllic French setting and the universal themes of self-forgiveness and rebuilding in a story as touching as it is wise.

#beach reads #women's fiction #general fiction #Anton DiSclafani #Joshilyn Jackson #Danielle Steel #Christina Kelly #Gayle Forman #Beth Harbison #Dorothea Benton Frank #Dinah Jeffries #Swan Huntley #Sophia Nash

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