#(also worth noting that the reason women complaining about their experiences are seen as bad actors is because of the bad actors themselves

[martensite-triangulation]

.

[wolf-queer-discourse]

Adventures in Aphobia #1

So I was scrolling through Tumblr the other day (a regrettable mistake as always), and I had the great pleasure of seeing this joyous post.

*deep breath*

Not gonna lie, posts like this make me real pissed. Pissed because the person who posted this exists in a space where they feel comfortable enough to post this online. Pissed because these posts are so common and often face little backlash. And pissed because there’s nothing better than allosexuals condescendingly explaining to asexual people why they’re dirty attention whores who invent their own oppression. Ace people deserve to be defended against this horseshit. Young people see these posts, and it’s extremely damaging to have your identity be nothing more than fuel for people in discourse to mock you and demand you bled in order for them to notice your pain.

Anger aside, many people do not see why this post is wrong, so why is it? Let’s unpack this clusterfuck of bigotry:

“would love to see substantive evidence of systematic “aphobia” that isn’t actually just misogyny, toxic masculinity, or rpe culture.”

God damn, we are not mincing our words here XD. A few things: systematic in bold, which tells you if you do not make a blood sacrifice on the altar of queer pain you will not be taken seriously. Potential nitpick, but systemic and systematic are not the same thing. I believe systemic is the word they’re looking for. Systematic implies a lot more intentionality that can be hard to prove. Systemic merely means that systems, in their current state, do aphobic things, which they absolutely do.

“Aphobia” in quotes is absolutely rich. Not only will this person refuse to acknowledge systemic aphobia, which is only one type, but this poster casts clear doubt upon the mere concept of aphobia in and of itself. We love to see it.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The statement, as clearly condescending as intended, is sort of correct, though it doesn’t mean a whole lot. Systemic oppression is about the systems in a society (government, healthcare, etc) discriminating against people. Systemic oppression is not bigotry faced on a person-to-person level. In short, systematic oppression is something a person experiences in their overall life, while personal discrimination is experienced on a personal level by people who are not singularly in control of the systems. This post boils down the negative comments ace people face into being called “weird”, which is an understatement for sure, but calling a gay person weird isn’t systemic oppression either.

It’s still bad and discriminatory.

This is such a snotty way to dismiss aphobia as some mere, insignificant comment with no meaning as if it doesn’t reinforce society’s painful aphobic views in the same way casual homophobic comments reinforce heteronormativity and society’s hostility toward gay people.

Ace people face discrimination in healthcare, most notably, which is systemic discrimination, but the systemic discrimination of asexuals really ought to be its own post if I’m to nosedive into it. Even if ace people faced no systemic discrimination, it wouldn’t make this point anymore correct. Discrimination is a perfectly valid reason to feel disregarded by society, and often only ace people are denied the right to feel this way and are instead gaslit into admitting what they face is no big deal and they’re just making it up for attention.

The experience of being pressured to have sex when you’re allo vs ace is very different. The vast majority of allo people do not plan to be celibate their whole lives. Many ace people do not want to have sex, ever. “Waiting for sex” in much of western society and in Christianity is seen as pure and honorable. Yet being asexual and never wanting sex is seen as a deviant disorder and people are accused of robbing their partner of sex forever.

There’s really a specific flavor of sexual pressure that is unique to ace people. Sex being to “fix” someone or because they “just need to try it”.

In this respect, aphobic sexual pressure is better compared to that faced by gay people and lesbians. Lesbians especially often can face this same struggle, men pressuring them to have sex because they think lesbians just need to “try it” or to “fix them”. I can imagine this poster would have no issue acknowledging lesbophobia being the root of lesbians coerced into sex with men, yet she does not give ace people the same.

Imagine if someone said (and knowing our fucked world, someone probably has): “Lesbophobia doesn’t exist. It’s just misogyny. Straight women are coerced into sex too!”

It’d be pathetic bullshit. Toxic masculinity, misogyny and many other issues can all tangle into combined messes with other forms of bigotry. Lesbophobia is an experience that deserves to be recognized apart from misogyny, even if the two are linked. Please stop erasing ace people’s experiences with this when it’s not the same thing.

Honestly, though, this post, as trashy as it is, if anything, is perhaps, really asking: Is there any type of aphobic experience that’s inherently exclusive to ace people?

I still wager to go say, yes, yes there is, but I must make an important point first:

Most experiences of queer discrimination are not limited to queer people.

Homophobia and transphobia are both experienced by cishets in certain instances. Feminine straight men can be victims of homophobic harassment. This does not disprove the fact that it’s homophobia just because a straight man is the victim of it. A tall cis woman with broad shoulders and a lower voice may be the victim of transphobic remarks or comments. The basis of these comments is rooted in transphobia, however, so the fact that the victim is cis does not erase the transphobia.

People who argue that experiences ace people complain about can be experienced by allosexuals are not poking a legitimate hole in doing this. Certain experiences related to aphobia can and are experienced by allosexuals. If you do not acknowledge this, then homophobia and transphobia aren’t real because cishet people have sometimes experienced them.

Despite cishets sometimes experiencing queerphobia, most of us acknowledge that their experience of that bigotry, however unfortunate, is not the same as that experienced by actual queer people. It’d be quite homophobic for a feminine straight man to claim he knew just as much about the gay experience as an actual gay man. Similarly, when allosexual people relate experiences that were rooted in aphobia, it’s overstepping a line when they claim asexual discrimination isn’t real because they experienced elements of it too.

Cishet (cishet including allosexuals) people do not experience their doctors telling them their sexuality might be a disorder or caused by trauma. Allo queer people can experience this with their sexualities too.

“using sex appeal to sell products is misogyny, it is not engineered to gross sex-repulsed people, it is meant to objectify women.”

This is a strawman thinner than my last nerve. Uh, what? What ace people are you seeing that literally think sex appeal was engineered to gross-out sex-repulsed people?? I don’t think this is a core argument??

Yes, sex-repulsed ace people sometimes complain about sex appeal in media being uncomfortable. But that’s it. Every time an ace person shares a discomfort of theirs doesn’t mean it’s the entire basis of their oppression. For the love of God, let ace people discuss their experiences without being blow-torched over not being oppressed enough with an individual discomfort. 

BONUS ROUND

(This was in the tags)

“Completely vilifies celibate individuals” 

...no…? What…? Huh…? 

The most charitable interpretation of this vague accusation is that the poster means celibate people face aphobia as well, due to not wanting to have sex. I have no idea how this “vilifies” anyone, but that aside, as said before: people who are not queer can face aphobia. Also worth noting that society treats celibate people way better than ace people, which is really another example of aphobia. Celibate people can be told they’re missing out (which could be at very least related to aphobic ideals), but they’re rarely called broken. Celibacy is seen more as a respected, controlled ideal in allo people, but when ace people want to do it, they’re just mentally ill.

Anyway, the post was aphobic trash, and it needs to be debunked more often. Mocking ace people online is not a good look anymore, guys. Don't be ugly.

[donnerpartyofone]

i just got a whole bunch of new followers on letterboxd, and checking out who they all are really reminded me of why i don’t follow too many people on letterboxd. bad amateur writing is hard to enjoy even ironically, but there’s something about bad film writing that’s really harmful. i have hate-read so many of this one guy’s reviews that i feel embarrassed about it now. he describes himself as an “arthouse manager”, which i assume means he runs a theater, but it bothers me because nobody says “let’s go out to the arthouse tonight” without the word “theater” in there, it’s just unnatural and pretentious. so that’s red flag #1 right in his description, which is followed by red flag #2 about how he hates modern media, as if being a luddite or nostalgia freak automatically means you’re a sensitive genius. it’s probably worth mentioning a sub-red flag, which is that he also says he’s 27 years old, which has to mean that he either wants to be congratulated for being precocious somehow, or he thinks he’s going to get laid off this movie website where you can’t even post pictures of yourself, or both, i mean who fucking cares how old you are anyway, for what reason? then the first review is of DAYS OF BEING WILD, in which he describes Wong Kar-Wai as “seeking to understand what draws women to shitty, emotionally unavailable men”; i mean imagine being so full of shit that you project your own sullen incel-y “UGH WHY DO GIRLS ONLY LIKE BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH” garbage onto whatever revered works of art show up on your tv screen? this guy goes on to reveal himself in almost a strip tease fashion across many of his reviews, breaking up his pompous analyses with macho mindbenders like “i have often said that being horny is the point of life” and biographical information like about his manipulative alcoholic father. i’m not trying to say that everybody with a delinquent or dysfunctional parent is destined to have idiotic and serial killerish attitudes about intimacy, because that would condemn pretty much all of us. but, i am sadly familiar with solipsistic assholes who brandish their alleged intellectual superiority in one fist while beating the dust out of their childhood traumas with the other, and just seeing his smug letterboxd reviews tells me everything i need to know about him. hopefully he just followed me in a spammy way to get attention and will never interact, or maybe i’ll say something he finds politically disagreeable and he’ll go away.

honestly finding anybody worth following on letterboxd is kind of hard. it can be nice to read stuff by people who are just having fun and shooting straight about what they’re watching, but the site is filled with wannabe J Hobermans and Lester Bangses who are just out to prove that they own a thesaurus. they’re practically all dudes, you can smell the old spice and maker’s mark wafting out of your laptop fan when you read some of this chest-pounding nonsense. not all of them have such toxic things to say as the aforementioned douchebag, but there’s a real preponderance of users who seem to think they’re reinventing the language. the sad thing is when they really like MY writing. there’s this guy i follow who i think used to write fairly clearly, but now everything he posts looks like a burroughs cut-up with really avant garde ideas about punctuation and adjectives, and unfortunately, i think it’s on purpose. i’d unfollow him, but i feel like i can’t, because he is as nice as literally anyone has ever been about my writing. he goes so far as to give me a hard time about why i’m not a professional film critic, he’s like a ~fan~...and then i gotta ask myself, how much is my writing like HIS writing? this is where the difficulties of letterboxd start to feel worth while, in a masochistic kind of way. like, how often do i write in the same wanky bombastic fashion as these shitty little internet valedictorians who i hate so much? probably a lot! i don’t like feeling that way but i have to admit that i’m grateful for the opportunity to check myself, and possibly improve.

however good or bad i am, letterboxd is still a better place to write than tumblr. i mean tumblr is less than optimal for long form writing anyway, but it’s also a question of who the majority population is here. the other day i got a comment on a pretty old post i wrote about ANNIHILATION, a movie i found kind of smarmy and shallow. the commenter said that my points about the movie were good, BUT they would all be negated by the content of the novels on which the movie is based, and they wanted to know why i deliberately omitted this material from my analysis, as if this were a conspiracy to be unraveled. they actually asked me what the point of my post was, like what was my goal in writing only what i wrote and leaving all kinds of things out. basically. this person COULD NOT UNDERSTAND THE IDEA OF A MOVIE REVIEW. i answered them, because they had tried hard to be polite, that my movie review blog is just for movie reviews, in which i talk about what i think about movies i watch. i’m not pursuing everything related to certain intellectual properties, nor am i invested in the logic and content of Extended Universes of whatever individual movies i’m watching. i’m not mad at this person, who was asking an honest question, but i was completely dumbfounded by the question itself. i mean imagine being SO INVESTED in fandom as like a type of lifestyle that you don’t know what a movie review is anymore? like every piece of media is regarded as some sort of municipality, that belongs to a state, and is governed by certain people, and its characters are like Real People who are available for friendship, dating and more. no piece of media is just entertainment, or even an artistic statement anymore. for this person, watching a movie is something like studying civic infrastructure, except with more DIY alterations and more fetishizing of gay men. i keep trying to imagine reading three paragraphs about some middling hollywood movie that amounts to something like “i did not enjoy watching this film,” and just having no personal frame of reference AT ALL for what it means when somebody writes that down. like just not knowing what a movie review is at all, and asking the author to explain the meaning of the bizarre behavior of saying you thought some movie sucked.

why DOES anybody write about movies though? if i don’t find it normal or desirable to watch everything with an exclusive filter for who do you want to fuck and who do you want to see fucking each other, then what else am i getting at? surely i don’t see myself as a potential roger ebert or leonard maltin, especially considering the extremely limited number of celebrity film critics in the history of mankind. i’m also not Pro- the idea of sorting all movies according to some rigid standards of technical quality and deservingness, like anybody needs me to grade them after they’ve performed the nearly impossible-seeming task of even making one single movie to begin with. sometimes i stupidly start complaining about stupid responses to my writing that i get once in a while from the internet, and my shrink asks me, “what are you up to when you post this writing?” she always says i’m “up to something” when i seem to be following but willfully ignoring my subconscious drives, which i think is pretty funny. but i don’t think i’m pursuing feelings of superiority, over movies or other writers. i think i’m just trying to figure out what movies are trying to say about human existence--and they all are trying to say something, are motivated by some angst, even the really insulting ones that only offer up wish fulfillment pablum. i’m constantly trying and failing to figure out my own existence, and i must sense that attempting to decipher movies is one way of getting closer to decoding my own experiences.

and on that note, now i have to complain about the fact that Lyft’s driver rating system includes “fun conversation” as one of the four factors in giving someone five stars. i rarely want a stranger to try to force me to talk to them, especially at 4am when i’m headed to the airport under a miserable pile of luggage. even so, i recently got into a car in such a state, with a guy who was clearly going for that five star rating, babbling loudly and convulsively at me all the way to my terminal. it would be one thing if he were just trying to be nice, but he was giving me shit about everything from my pickup location to what i had done in his fair city for a week and a half. i did not immediately volunteer how many movies i had seen at the festival i attended, because i probably intuited that when he did make me tell him, he would inform me that he doesn’t need to watch movies, because “I WATCH *LIFE*, MAN!!!” the irony was that this guy clearly didn’t watch life at all; he didn’t even have the ability to discern that i didn’t want to talk, or that i didn’t want him to insult my favorite leisure activity, and that probably NOBODY wants to listen to him talk about his shitty generic blues rock band for half an hour before 5am. so that’s the one thing i can say for even the most obnoxious reviewer on letterboxd--that probably they are TRYING to hone the art of observation, a dying skill. probably they are TRYING to train themselves to be an active audience that engages thoughtfully with the movie instead of just hucking rotten tomatoes at the screen OR passively allowing it to wash over them. even if i often hate the results, at least some of these guys seem be making an effort.

[erikismybitch]

Drillmonger conclusion

Part 2

There will be a Part 3 because it was too long for 1 mobile post .

-

Candy didn’t call him , he called her and sent several messages. It took a lot of convincing but eventually she caved in.

Who better to show you around than me?

To Candy’s knowledge Erik was sending a driver to come and pick her up . The two of them would meet and explore . But she wasn’t the least bit surprised when Erik pulled up to her hotel. How devious of him, she didn’t reason with her true feelings . Either Candy was blinded or she simply didn’t know it was a tactic to win her back . She got into the car , it was odd though . She had never been in his passenger seat nor outside of a room with him . Restaurants and pools inside of hotels but never anything like this .

They drove on the opposite side of the road in Wakanda , Erik seemed to navagate just fine , in fact , he knew the roads well . Candy told him that she was hungry and he knew the perfect place to bring her . She insisted it be a Non-Touristy place .

“I know , believe it or not ... I do know things about you Candy“ he pulled into a spot parallel to a small run down restaurant. It had a half built wooden porch in the front of it . Where a few old men sat at a card table playing dominoes and drinking country branded alcohol. Blocking the semi opened door were two small boys wresting. Erik snapped at them , speaking a few words in Xhosa. They stopped fighting eachother right away. Candy smiled because that was the first time she heard him speak his native language. She would often try to make him speak it in the past but he refused. Erik pushed open the frail door and lead them into the restaurant . Instantly they were welcomed by the cool air from the raggedy air conditioning.

Wakanda was hot .

They were also welcomed by the wonderful smell of garlic and sizzling sounds of simmering meat. “Njadaka!”

The woman’s voice carried through the room . It was deep , and if Candy hadn’t seen where it came from she would have assumed she was a man. The woman was short and round, and had those big arms that flapped when she held them up . Her coarse hair was braided neatly in a crown . “Njadaka?” Candy repeated lowly under her breath.

“It’s my name-name”

Erik walked over to who he called “Auntie” And kissed her cheek . She stood behind the food counter and they spoke to each other in Xhosa . They both looked over at Candy and smiled . His aunt waved and Candy waved back . Which made her feel awkward more than anything . So Candy took a seat , she figured they were talking about her . She found a small table that wobbled and the three chairs didn’t match . Candy didn’t complain, she was extremely humble and appreciated every experience .

A little time had past when Erik and “auntie “ walked over to the table . He placed two bottles of water down and told Candy that he had ordered some food . Her stomach growled with anticipation. Besides having sex with Erik , eating was her favorite thing to do . Candy introduced herself , the woman was a family friend and had known “Njadaka“ since he was born . That was the reason he called her auntie . Candy was taken by surprise when she hugged her , nice and tight . Which made Candy’s eyes bug out in shock and caused Erik to laugh .

“He looks nice and healthy. He used to be so skinny !” His auntie slapped her calloused palm onto Erik’s belly .

“Well , I make sure he eats when he’s with me” . Candy said in a way that insinuated something else . Erik mouthed a “wow”, thanking god that his aunt didn’t catch on. Candy sipped on her water, while the two began to speak Xhosa amongst eachother. Again Candy could tell they were talking about her. His aunt could speak fluent English . She found it to be a little rude , but this was the local dialect . Candy made a note to mention it to Erik later .

“N’jadaka... is he your boyfriend no?” the aunt blurted this almost as a statement , rather than a question . Candy had forgotten about his real name and almost said “who ?” But once she caught on , she looked to Erik for help . She didn’t know where they stood , but a couple was way far fetched.

“Umm” Candy mumbled . Erik looked straight ahead, avoiding her gaze on purpose . His aunt threw him off guard too “No, just friends “ she answered.

His aunt yelped a loud “Ah!” And slapped Erik’s back hard . And as strong as he was, she made him hiss in pain . “Well, I have a son who needs a good wife!”

Erik interject by yelling in Xhosa. Loudly . With his nostrils flaring in anger . His aunt gave him a few choice words herself that Candy did not of course understand , not before she hit his back again and walked off .

Candy rubbed the exact spot his aunt struck, she tried her best to hold in her giggles . She could tell that one hurt worse than the first one .

“Wish I could hear you speak your language more often” Candy stopped comforting Erik and sipped her bottle of water . “I like it”

Erik digressed and took a sip of his water. To him, his language wasn’t a big deal . Besides , he was a little embarrassed at the scene that just unveiled.

“You guys we’re talking about me ” she spoke in an apprehensive manner . She didn’t want to hear the actual answer . She just wanted Erik to know that she noticed. Erik didn’t answer her right away so Candy’s attention turned towards the two boys who were still fighting outside . They were filthy from the dirt roads , Candy knew their mothers would be pissed when they saw them . She figured they weren’t brothers, they looked nothing alike .

Her gaze reverted back to Erik, on account of his fingers turning her chin towards him. “Don’t trip“ he told her . She rested along the back of the chair, therefore his hand couldn’t touch her anymore . Don’t trip? She crossed her arms .

“She said you’re pretty... which is true “ Erik tried to sweeten up the mood. Candy gave him an expression of disbelief. He and his aunt talked for a while , that wasn’t the only topic .

“And you yelled at her when she mentioned me marrying her son”

Erik blinked a few times as if he was chasing a thought . He drew his plump lower lip into his teeth before he spoke . “I told her that was my job “ he smiled as if his words were some kind of joke.

“Yeah whatever, Young Kill” Candy hid the delight that wanted so badly to spread across her face .

The food came , thank god . It was tension between the duo . Nothing bad , just two people who couldn’t quite express how they really felt about one another . Well, more so Erik in that manner.

He told her about everything he had ordered . Rice , fried fish , a wet chicken dish and some kind of bowl filled with stew . Erik taught her how to eat it . Some of the dishes called to be eaten with their hands. Erik spoke about the traditional way to eat . He told Candy that the women fed the man. Candy informed him it would be “over her dead body” before she would feed him in public .

“What about in private ?“ he joked . They were Seemingly enjoying things . So much so that Candy peeled off a fatty piece of fish and put it to Erik’s mouth . Feeding him caused him to boast and she promised to never do it again .

“What does her son looks like” Candy refered to the son that Erik’s aunt was sure her match. Erik stopped chewing and peered over Candy’s shoulder.

“He’s right over there “ he pointed his nose over to a man sitting near the kitchen area. He was short , round and bald . His eyes were crossed and as soon as he noticed Candy looking at him, he smiled. Revealing that his front left tooth was half gone .

Candy turned back to Erik, buggeyed holding in her laugh . Erik couldn’t help it , his laugh was loud and obnoxious. Which broke Candy and she wailed out too . So hard that tears fell from her eyes .

Erik stopped laughing for a moment and watched her . How beautiful she was when she was carefree and not trying to be . He had grew in that time period of them being apart . Erik knew he couldn’t lose her again. In the midst of her amusement, Erik quickly squeezed out a question .

“You wanna meet my people ?”

Candy took a deep pause , and tried her best to gain composure. She took a huge bite of food to buy her time. Twenty four hours ago Erik was the last thing on her mind . And now she was being faced with the decision of meeting his family.

“We can go to the hotel and get your stuff” he began ranting like a child . Candy quickly shook her head, but it didn’t phase him at all . “Come on, my parents have a really big house , it’s clean , you can even sleep a guest room”

She held her hand up in defense and finally swallowed her food to speak . “I don’t think that’s a good idea”

Erik picked off a small piece of the fried fish , slowly he held it up to her mouth . When she wouldn’t open up , He opened his mouth to show her what to do. When she laughed , he tried to put it in her mouth . When he missed the fish smashed amongst her chin.

“If you not feeling it , I’ll bring you back” Erik wiped her chin with his hand.

“Straight back ? “ Erik’s sudden act affection made her giddy , and it toyed with her logic .

Erik took her question as an indirect yes . Erik could still read her , as if no time had passed at all . Candy agreed to go, but staying the night was out of the question . Erik would have to work harder for that .

(Sorry it’s so short , the last add will be worth it!)

And sorry for typos . I’m sleepy .

[cosmicpopcorn]

Captain Marvel (2019): Feminism, Diversity, and the 90s, oh my!

Warning: Spoilers, possibly. I always like to warn a nigga just in case.

Note to Readers: Yes, Cosmic Popcorn is back up and running! Last year, I went on an impromptu hiatus due to life being...well, life. Now I’m back and determined to pick back up where I left off on my journey of providing informal movie and TV reviews and discussions on astrology and all things cosmic. 

Without further ado, let’s get into Captain Marvel. 

If ya’ll remember the post credits scene from Avengers: Infinity War, Nick Fury sends one last message to someone, somewhere on an old ass looking communication device right before he turns to dust...and we see a star-shaped logo confirming that his message has been sent. 

He was sending that message off to good ol’ Captain Marvel aka Carol Danvers. Captain Marvel has a very diverse, interesting history in the comics...in fact, Carol Danvers is the 7th Captain Marvel in the comics. To read more about that dope history, check out this article here: The Weird and Diverse Comic Book History of Captain Marvel. 

Now, the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) do divert from the comics in a lot of ways. So MCU Carol Danvers is a former air force officer who was under the mentorship of physicist Dr. Wendy Lawson, who was actually a Kree scientist who disagreed with the Kree’s war with the Skrulls and had fled to Earth. Dr. Wendy Lawson (her alias) aka Mar-Vell (her real name) was using the Tesseract (Space Stone) to create an engine that would have helped the Skrulls to live beyond the reach of the Kree empire and she had enlisted Danvers’ help in this mission. But they are discovered by Yon-Rogg, a Kree commander who is the leader of Starforce (a Kree military task-force). During the fight between Mar-Vell and Yon-Rogg, Carol shoots the engine in an attempt to prevent Yon-Rogg from getting it and it explodes in her face, causing her to absorb the Tesseract’s energy/powers, thus making her Captain Marvel. Her memories of who she is and her life on Earth are mostly altered/erased and she becomes one of the members of the Starforce, under Yon-Rogg’s direction and mentorship. 

The movie was directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel is played by actress Brie Larson. I first remember seeing her in United States of Tara and really enjoying watching her character on screen. She has also played in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Community, and Room (which she won an Oscar for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role). Obviously, she’s been in a ton of other shit, won a bunch of awards and been nominated for others but I am not about to lay this woman’s resume out for y’all - just know she’s been here for awhile and she’s accomplished. Lol.

Nick Fury is obviously played by the wonderful Samuel L. Jackson, and y’all should damn well know who he is. He’s one of our national treasures in my opinion, right along with Terry Crews. Not to mention he’s already been present in the other MCU movies. He’s the character with the second most screen time in the movie outside of the obvious Captain Marvel. 

Other actors worth mentioning: Talos/Keller is played by Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law is Yon-Rogg, Annette Bening is Dr. Wendy Lawson, and we have Lashana Lynch as Maria Rambeau, with Akira Akbar as her daughter Monica Rambeau. The cast overall is very diverse - comprised of people of color and women in starring roles. And based on what I’ve personally read on Captain Marvel’s comic book history, this is the essence of her story - breaking through barriers and giving power to a range of different people who may not have had it before, who were not usually represented in certain roles and positions of power.

I’ll be honest, it’s difficult for me to review and critique Marvel movies because the quality of their movies these days is usually pretty high...even the mediocre or bad ones are significantly better than other mediocre/bad non-superhero movies. I go into these movies with a bias towards them and it’s hard for me to see flaws unless they’re extremely obvious and detract from the overall quality of the movie in a major way. I will always try to be honest about a movie...but how I feel is how I feel and I feel Marvel movies are usually pretty great. So when it comes to these movies, I’ll present my thoughts on various aspects of them instead of the usual pros vs. cons approach unless it calls for it. 

I basically really liked and enjoyed Captain Marvel. I don’t regret the experience at all and feel it’s worth the movie ticket. Here are some thoughts on the movie: 

Brie Larson was a good choice for Captain Marvel: I’ve heard people complain about the decision for Brie Larson to play Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel, with some of the main reasons for their complaints being that she appeared to be too stoic, didn’t smile or laugh enough and that her portrayal of Captain Marvel was bland. I felt that she expressed the appropriate amount of emotion for the character and for the scenes she had. We must also keep in mind that Carol Danvers was an air force officer on Earth, a member of Starforce on Hala while being with the Kree, and also had been taught to not be emotional and that her emotionality was a weakness. So...why the fuck would she be super emotional and expressional?! I’m not sure what was expected - did they want lots of crying and giggles? We don’t ask for Captain America, Iron Man or the Hulk to be more emotional or smile more and this specific critique reeks of sexist undertones to me.

Captain Marvel was portrayed well in this origin movie and Brie Larson did a fine job. Yes, I am saying this as someone who did not grow up reading the comics. We are discussing the MCU Captain Marvel, not the comics. And we already know that when converting books or comics to movies, shit gets changed. They have the same source, but they are still different.

As a 90s baby, I enjoyed the blast from the past: This origin movie is set in 1995 and has things like pay phones, Blockbuster, slow ass internet, internet cafes and the music, oh my, the music. I loved it all. I don’t miss any of that, except maybe the music, but it’s nice to wax nostalgic sometimes. 

Nick Fury and Captain Marvel are cute AF: I loved watching Samuel L. Jackson and Brie Larson on screen as Fury and Marvel. They had just the right amount of chemistry and played off of each other very well. I know Fury has gone to dust, but maybe we’ll get to see a nice, cute reunion in Endgame? One can only hope. 

They did well at helping Samuel L. Jackson go back in time as Fury: I was pleasantly surprised how good Sam looked as young Fury - usually aging actors and actresses, whether younger or older is something that has a high possibility of not being done well and they did a fantastic job here. My man looked good!

I loved that Nick Fury got a lot of screen time: We got to learn a lot more about the character, his past, and really see his personality shine here. We also learned about how he lost his eye. Once again, I really do hope to see more of Fury in Endgame. And with Fury and his eye in mind, shoutout to Goose the cat, that’s my nigga. 

Captain Marvel doesn’t have a strong villain and it doesn’t need it: One of the complaints about the movie was the lack of a strong villain like Killmonger or Thanos. However, with this being an origin movie, I see it being more focused on how Captain Marvel comes to being and how she becomes a hero, any villain present is only there to showcase her powers and as a plot device. That’s not how it is in all origin movies - Black Panther had a very strong, well-developed villain, but here, it appears the villain almost takes a backseat to other aspects of the movie. Her “villains” are more of society’s sexism, her own self-doubt, identity struggles, and her rejection of the emotional parts of herself. The people around her either enforce, support and/or represent those “villains” (e.g. Yon-Rogg) or push her to break against those barriers and embrace her power (e.g. Nick Fury). 

Captain Marvel has a diverse cast and clearly wants to empower young women and girls: I loved the fact that our main character was a woman, her main supporting character was a black man, and the other important supporting characters were a black woman and a beautiful black girl. Yes, there were white men and other white people all around, lol, but a good amount of the ones with a lot of screen time were not. The movie also rejected sexist ideas such as: emotionality and being emotionally expressive being a negative trait, women having to smile for men and always appear pleasant or pretty, women not being capable of being in traditionally male-dominated fields and not being capable participating in male-dominated or traditionally male activities. It says a giant FUCK YOU to all these things. It also hints towards Marvel’s first African-American female superhero, Photon. 

Brie Larson was right in her Crystal Award for Excellence in Film acceptance speech: In her speech, she presents statistics regarding movie critics - bringing to light that a large, overwhelming amount of movie critics were older, white men and that white women, women of color and men of color are largely unrepresented when it comes to movie critiques. She explains the importance of reviews and the impact it has on what movies can be bought and seen, how much money a movie grosses and what movies are nominated for awards. Overall, she encourages more inclusivity and for critiques of movies to be done by a more diverse group of people - a group that includes more white women, women of color and men of color, especially since some movies are, let’s face, simply not made for white men or with white men in mind. Not mention, as she said, people other than older white men also like Star Wars. You can hear that speech here.

She ain’t say anything wrong and anyone who has a problem with this speech obviously has some unaddressed sexism they need to tend to. Because, I mean...are you saying only older white men like these types of movies? Are we saying their opinions on media are the most important? Do we not want to hear from white women, women of color and men of color...since we are, you know, also part of this world and consume this media? And considering the diversity present in Marvel comics and films, considering the messages about sexism, racism, feminism, etc. that are present in the stories of heroes like Black Panther and Captain Marvel...are you really trying to tell me these were only made for and primarily focused only on older white men? Get the fuck outta here. I don’t care what a 40-year-old white dude has to say about what he doesn’t like about A Wrinkle in Time either. 

All in all, I enjoyed this movie and it got me hype of Avengers: Endgame. Instinctually and based on conversations with others and hearing about flaws they felt were present such as pacing issues, actress choice, etc., I feel these flaws were mostly based on opinion (opinions that I don’t agree with) and in my opinion either are subtle (such as pacing issues) and/or simply don’t exist (such as actress choice being a problem). However, this isn’t Black Panther and while it doesn’t really have any cons (major or minor) that come to mind, it does lack the aspects of Black Panther that earned it a 5 Caramel Popcorn Pieces rating. With that in mind, I give it 5 Butter Popcorn Pieces. 

Rating: 5 Butter Popcorn Pieces

[cromulentbookreview]

Menstruation!

Yes, that’s right, menstruation! Something half the world’s population experiences on a monthly basis - the regular discharge of blood and mucosal tissue from inner uterine lining through the vagina and...are all the dudes gone? 

Sweet. 

Let’s talk about Mackenzi Lee’s fiercely feminist follow-up to The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue: The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy!

“You’re trying to play a game designed by men. You’ll never win, because the deck is stacked and marked, and also you’ve been blindfolded and set on fire. You can work hard and believe in yourself and be the smartest person in the room and you’ll still get beat by the boys who haven’t two cents to rub together.” - From the ARC of The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

For some reason, I have a terrible time writing about things I really, really like. I can go on and on about that one thing that I hate (and I do, often), but when I like something, I say “hey, I like that” and then not much else. My eloquence deserts me when I have to articulate why it is I love something beyond “aw man it’s the best” and then nothing else. Not sure why that is. What I do know is that I finished reading The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy on August 28th, actually, it was August 1. I know how dates work. I started writing a review as soon as I finished it, then just...didn’t. Perhaps it’s pure laziness. Perhaps its writer’s block. Perhaps it’s because I’m in the middle of another epic book binge (five books in, four to go, plus a novella and possibly an ARC of book 10!). 

Whatever the reason, I’ve come back to this review over and over, determined to be clever and such, but...man it’s just harder to write about things you love versus the things you hate. It’s very easy to criticize (fun, too), but writing endless praise gets boring fast.

So how am I supposed to describe how much I love Mackenzi Lee’s books?

Mackenzi Lee’s works are the book equivalent of a warm, comforting hug. A hug delivered directly to your brain, with words. The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue was one of the best books I read last year, and its sequel does not disappoint in the slightest. Lady’s Guide is 100% pure feminist awesomeness. If you’ve ever been angered by the patriarchy, then this book is definitely for you.

Since praise is hard and complaining is fun, let me take a moment to complain.

All girls, all women, really, know how it is to feel “less-than” for simply being female. That shit starts the minute we’re born and it’s pervasive as fuck. It never stops. Even in a world where a family cannot survive on just one income, women are expected to work two jobs: one for pay, and one for free. Women are described not as people, but as extensions of others: “Wife”, “Mother”, “Girlfriend”, “Daughter” - as if that is all we are, and all we’re expected to be. (On a related note, I am so tired of books with titles that end with “wife”, “daughter”, “sister,” etc. Also, describing women as “girls.” Fuck that shit, I’m an adult, don’t you call me “girl.”). All the bad things that happen to women are our own fault somehow. Rather than teaching men not to attack women, women are expected to take every single precaution in the universe to protect themselves from men. A single “lapse”? Well, then, anything that a man does to you is your fault. Ladies, have you ever had to fake a hypothetical male partner in order to avoid being harassed? Because men would automatically respect a non-existent male before a real human female?

I am so fucking tired of all of that shit. I am so tired of women being blamed for every single bad thing that happens to them. I am so tired of men getting away with harassing, demeaning and belittling women. I am so tired of male authors saying shit like “Mary Shelley didn’t really write Frankenstein!” I am so tired of women’s accomplishments being treated as “less-than.” I am so tired of a woman’s value being equated with whether or not she has a husband or children. I am so tired of a woman’s worth being equated with her appearance. I am tired of being paid less for the same work my male coworkers do. I am so tired of job interviews with loaded questions meant to suss out whether or not you’re planning on taking maternity leave (because it’s illegal to ask if someone is planning on having kids, but perfectly OK to ask “what are your future plans?” wink wink). I am so tired of all of it. It’s bullshit. All of it is bullshit, and the fact that being a woman means fighting an uphill battle every goddamn day just makes me tired.

And all I’ve described above is just a fraction of the bullshit women of color experience. It’s the fucking worst.

This is why we need books like Lady’s Guide. The patriarchy might not be as visible or obviously terrible as it was in the 18th century, but it’s still here, and still as toxic as ever. 

Ahem. Anyway. Ladies Guide! See, I can complain forever. When it comes to things I love I’m like “uh, I love it, you should read it” and that’s it.

Lady’s Guide takes place roughly a year after the end of Gentleman’s Guide - Felicity is living and working in a bakery in Edinburgh. She’s been trying, and mostly failing, to get accepted into medical school. But, this being the 18th century, and Felicity being a woman, she doesn’t get very far. After her coworker at the bakery proposes to her, dismissing Felicity’s desires for an education as nothing more than a phase, Felicity decides to take off and try again in London. She sets up shop with her brother and Percy, living happily ever after (because Monty/Percy forever, goddamn it!) and attempts to get into one of the London medical schools via subterfuge. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out. Felicity is on the verge of giving up when one of the hospital’s more enlightened board members gives her the contact info for Alexander Platt - a trailblazer in the medical field and Felicity’s idol. Dr. Platt might just take a woman on as a student, but he’s all the way in Stuttgart...

...about to get married to Felicity’s childhood best friend, Johanna Hoffmann. Sounds like a perfect way for Felicity to ingratiate herself with Dr. Platt, right?

Except Johanna and Felicity had a falling out years ago. As kids, Felicity and Johanna loved exploring and science and getting dirty, but, as they got older, Johanna started showing more interest in “girly” things while Felicity’s interests never strayed. Nothing like that painful phase of adolescence where you look around and see that all your friends have changed, gotten into boys and makeup and all that shit, while all you want to do is read Tolkien and watch Sailor Moon...

Such a classic episode. 

Anyway, Felicity decides to say “fuck it,” and head off to see Johanna in Stuttgart anyway, because this is her chance and she’s not going to throw away her shot.* So Felicity teams up with Sim, a friend of the pirates from Gentleman’s Guide, ditches Monty and Percy and heads off for the continent. 

And if reuniting with an ex-best friend who you haven’t spoken to or seen in years isn’t awkward enough, meeting your hero, who is about to get married to said ex-best friend, is even worse. Like all heroes, Dr. Platt isn’t exactly everything Felicity thought he would be. And his upcoming marriage to Johanna isn’t exactly a love match on either side...

Lady’s Guide is not only a massive brain-hug, it’s existence-affirming. Felicity writes herself a message, one she returns to time and time again throughout the book, and something all women and girls�� should hear: You Deserve To Be Here. Yes. Yes you fucking do. Felicity deserves to attend medical school - but men block her path. She deserves to be her own woman, an intellectual, a scientist - all of that, without being scoffed at. 

Lee also makes the point, throughout the book, that the patriarchy is not just men. Women perpetuate patriarchy as well by bullying and policing the behavior of other women. We’re kept down by our own infighting. We see this in the relationship between Felicity and Johanna, whose friendship fell apart because of their differing views on femininity. Felicity was keen to reject feminine trappings, like clothes, makeup, boys, etc., focusing instead on her books. Johanna wanted to embrace her femininity and be a scientist. Felicity looked down her nose at Johanna’s embrace of the traditionally feminine, and Johanna resented Felicity’s high-and-mighty-better-than-you attitude, and thus their childhood friendship fell apart.

The relationship between Johanna and Felicity and their views on femininity is very much like Sansa and Arya Stark. On the Sansa-Arya spectrum, Arya is all about rejecting traditional femininity - no frilly dresses or talk of marriage for Arya. No, she’s all about sword-fighting and vengeance and wearing other people’s faces as masks. Sansa, on the other end of the spectrum, embraces traditional Westerosi femininity, at first suffering it’s trappings, but then she learns to embrace it in another way. Sansa learns to wear her femininity like armor, and use it to her advantage. First, she uses it to survive in King’s Landing, where one wrong move would have gotten her killed, then she uses it to get the same thing Arya hopes to get with her assassin skills: vengeance. Independently, Sansa and Arya are both powerful women. Together? Aw, man. Shit’s going to go down.

I do have one nitpicky complaint, re: Lady’s Guide.

At one point, Johanna tells Sim: “I will drag you back to Bavaria by the ear and take you to court there if I must.”

OK, so in the novel, Johanna lives in Stuttgart. Stuttgart is in Baden-Württemberg, though so...why is Johanna threatening to drag Sim to Bavaria? In the early 1700s, Stuttgart was part of the Duchy of Württemberg which was definitely not in Bavaria. I’m not sure how the Swabians would take it if they were mistaken for Bavarians. Or vice-versa. And heaven forbid you mix up Bavaria and Franconia, even though Franconia is technically now a part of Bavaria…

Ok. Here’s the thing, though. Germany, as it is today didn’t exist until the 90s. The 1990s. Until then the 99.999999% of German history is trying to figure out the goddamned map. There was no unified “Germany” until 1871, and even then the borders didn’t mesh with what they are today. The area that we refer to as “Germany” historically was about 100,000,000 little Kingdoms/Grand Duchies/Duchies/Electorates/Principalities/city-states/what-have-yous tangled together by the Holy Roman Empire, until Napoleon kicked the Holy Roman Empire’s ass in 1805, leading to Francis II to dissolve the Empire in 1806 then it was the German Confederation with the same amount of Kingdoms/Grand Duchies/Duchies/Electorates/Principalities/city-states/what-have-yous … Jesus, just look at the maps. I mean, look at  Baden-Württemberg in the 18th century alone! 

I honestly don’t know how actual Germans sort this out. It’s easier to just be like “OK, we’re just going to start at 1871 and go forward, OK? Let’s just call everything that came before Germany and move on.”

Still, if you’re from Stuttgart and you show up in Bavaria to file a complaint, you’d probably get laughed at by a bunch of mustachioed dudes who’ve been drinking since 9 AM.  

But really, that is my only complaint. Read The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy. If you pre-order it, you can get a bonus ebook epilogue to Gentleman’s Guide!  So...go do that. 

RECOMMENDED FOR: Everyone, women especially.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Assholes, men’s right’s activists.

RATING: 5/5

TOTALLY UNBIASED FANGIRL RATING: 5,000,000,000,000,000/5

RELEASE DATE: October 2, 2018

ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR SEQUEL/CONTINUATIONS: Olympus Mons

AMOUNT OF TIME IT TOOK ME TO WRITE THIS RIDICULOUS REVIEW: 21 days.  Hahaha, no it took me 48 days. Because...fuck...I don’t know.

* (curse you, Lin-Manuel Miranda!)

[destroyyourbinder]

the girls not like other girls / coming home

One thing a lot of detransitioned and reconciling women have noted is that the only female-centric space they were permitted to have or felt comfortable in was a trans-specific one (i.e. a support group for transmasculine people) and I think this is extremely important to note, whether you are a female person who is trans-identified or an outsider to this whole experience.

As a child, I felt extremely alienated from straight-girl spaces and girl-socializing, even though I had no understanding of myself as a gay kid or as being attracted to women (even though I can see that I was attracted to other girls in retrospect) or even as particularly gender non-conforming. I figured I was "not like other girls", but I had only a crude understanding of this. I was not allowed to express my non-conformity through my appearance-- my mother forced me to wear my hair long and to wear typical girl's clothes, and I was only allowed a certain amount of token resistance before relatively severe abuse kicked in-- so I had little to appeal to in my young brain to explain why I was ostracized from girl groups or why I felt an affinity for boys or fellow strange girls.

I can see now as an adult that there was quite a lot at play: I was awkward and weird in general and had trouble making friends with kids for many reasons, especially with socially astute children who were beginning to learn about and focus on social hierarchy. I found socializing overstimulating and scary in general, and did not want to socialize in a way that involved testing social boundaries and exchanging social information, although I did enjoy the company of my friends. I preferred socializing alongside other children while we had a shared goal, like playing a game of some sort or building a structure. Because a lot of toys and activities intended to inculcate femininity in girl-children are intended to facilitate the former kind of socializing-- such as a jewelry game where girls display how well they can dress themselves according to status-rules and monitor each other's standing, or a kitchen playset where girls are intended to mimic not just making meals but making meals for family members-- I had very little interest in activities designated for girls. I also had a complicated relationship to boy children, where I often thought they were full of shit, boring, and little assholes, but since they were the only ones engaged in things I wanted to do (like jump off the swings) I had to interact with them. I sought out their company and input because even at a very young age I knew male attention and opinions were considered more legitimate, and I figured I could maybe be taken seriously if I spent time with the people who were, well, taken seriously. Maybe they would even approve of me, maybe I could even be better than them. Boy children have intense social structures as well, and they are complicated in their own right; I think some women who prefer or once preferred the company of boys/men like to say their socializing is "simpler" or "easier" or "without drama", but I don't actually think this is true. I think it's easy to forget when socializing with boys or men as a female person that you are not considered the same sort of being as them, and so the fact that it may be easier to interact with boys or men is not a property of men or male socializing in general, but the fact that you are only interacting with a truncated form of their socializing, since you are "only" a girl or woman interfacing with the male world. What I found to be true is that it was sometimes simpler as a female child to interact with boys given that you have no real social position with them-- you have avoided the hierarchy simply by not having the standing to enter one. Boys do not really know how to treat you if you are not readily submitting to a girl role and not easily sexualizable; you sort of fall between the cracks, which can be preferable to being the shittiest girl in a group of girls. I found I was not really at the "bottom" (boys never took me seriously enough to even consider me a true failure) but I could never enter their social structure no matter how hard I tried to play by their rules. I tried to make it clear I had standing with boys through competing with them and trying to outperform them at their own games. Prior to puberty, I tried to compete with boys physically, whether it was by playing bloody knuckles, doing backflips off of the playground equipment, holding races, or doing one-armed pullups. When this no longer worked, I switched primarily to competing with boys and men in intellectual domains, and invested a lot of my self-worth in how good I was compared to boys and men in traditionally male intellectual pursuits like math or logical reasoning, or by competing with the men interested in less masculine areas (but who were still considered the most serious and worthy contenders) like fine arts or writing. I maintained this mentality until I was in my early twenties. I can't say it was a good look.

While I did have some female friends as a child and adolescent, I found it very hard to maintain these friendships, even with other weird girls. There is something inherently anti-supportive and destructive about a friendship with another girl based on how much not-like-the-other-girls you are. I found myself insecure and paranoid that my weird girl friends thought I was too "normal" or too "preppy" or too "girly" for them, that the criticisms and frustrations and vitriol they leveled at girls who ostracized them or who tried to coerce them into femininity work they didn't want to do or who simply made them feel bad were also things that applied to me. I found myself frustrated, too, at my friends for "betraying me" by buying into things or behaving in ways that escalated my insecurity that I was somehow actually, truly inferior for being a girl, and one who couldn't even girl right at that. We were all caught in a bind where we believed both that girls were stupid, but also that we were freaks for personally resisting what we thought was stupid about girls. I can now recognize this as the classic psychology of oppressed people, born of continual abuse by hierarchical superiors and horizontal hostility between people frantically attempting to avoid this abuse and make sense of their situation in a way that allows them to survive it without summoning punishment for resistance. Grooming girls, particularly those prone to be resistant to patriarchy, into this psychology is convenient: it prevents them from recognizing what is really going on and from having solidarity with and compassion for each other. Instead of fighting who was hurting us, we were occupied with fighting each other over who was too obsessed with boys and who was trying too hard to be cool. The trick about this thinking was this: it wasn't that Christina *wasn't* too obsessed with boys. She was, and it was hurting her directly, as well as damaging her long-term development into a woman with a strong sense of dignity and personal agency, and it meant she was willing to damage her friendships for the sake of a dipshit who would dump her in two weeks. We just took the situation as a personal affront to our insecurities about it being proved Cosmically True that girls were stupid sluts, rather than digging deep and giving a shit about Christina and putting the blame where it belonged: the teenage boy four years older than her. Ironically, the straight girly-types were in some ways more successful in resisting patriarchal pressures than we were: at least they had each others’ backs when they complained about boys with each other, at least they were able to share strategies for mitigating the worst of the misogyny they faced. We were left in the cold.

Bizarrely, when I started interacting with other female people who were basically the same Weird Girls, but who didn't call themselves such, those who framed their issues as a gender identity or gender dysphoria problem rather than in the misogynistic way I had framed it in my childhood, I got along much better with them and felt much more understood. It was partially this feeling, that of finally understanding other female people, not being severely ostracized, and having the relief of not being so paranoid of other female people that I was alienating them pre-emptively, that convinced me that my experiences were transgender experiences rather than "just" “regular girl” experiences. Because misogyny had been removed from the table almost entirely-- both in the sense that we were all female people together and that we were not framing all of our experiences, including with other female people, through a lens of potential sexist violations of our humanity-- I felt like I could relax for once in my life. I was no longer obsessive about policing myself and the female people around me. With no male people around, and no longer worried about whether my feelings and reactions had anything to do with my inherent inferiority or not, I was no longer afraid of what my interactions with others indicated about who I really was. Of course, if you stay in transgender community long enough, a lot of these anxieties will resurface in your thoughts and in social hierarchy. Who hasn't seen a literal dick-measuring contest on an FTM message board or trans men accusing other trans men of being "trenders"? But by then, you are no longer permitted to name what's going on, nor have an inkling of where it comes from. Because being transgender has nothing to do with sexism, it's just a medical condition. Or an identity. And men aren’t catty, they don't do that sort of social thing anyway... right?

Sometimes this is what I think people mean when they say discovering they are transgender is like "coming home". It's like taking your shoes off or sliding into bed. It's relief, a relaxation of something painful, annoying, constricting. But turns out I never knew a comfortable home, so I was easily able to feel at home in a home where I was afraid, confused, and never quite clear what was going on. Was I a trender or was the guy shouting about trenders a trender? Did I really belong with these other female people or was I a faker, a poser, a loser here, too? Did I have to believe that misandry was real and defend cis men's behavior to protect myself, or did I have to flagellate myself for having the "privilege" of failing to be feminine enough?

Sound familiar yet?

When detransitioned and reconciling women discuss how having relationships with other women is healing, this is a large part of what they mean. They mean both the good relationships-- healing, genuinely supportive female friendships-- and finally getting a radically honest perspective on bad relationships, too. I had to pop out of understanding myself as "not a girl" or "not a woman" to even acknowledge that I was having classic girl-girl, woman-woman, female-female dynamics in my relationships, nonetheless see how this dynamic played a role in my disidentification and general life course. I could not see that I held responsibility for how I behaved in these relationships, nor have compassion for both other women and myself, until I was able to first see that I was not a separate type of being from the girls for whom I once held contempt. I don't think disidentified and/or trans-identified female people are much different from female people who recognize themselves as women for this reason: female people who call themselves such still separate themselves into "bad women" and "good women", women who get into trouble and women who don't, women who sacrifice their own selfhood and the women who hold onto something. There are whores and madonnas, but also there's prudes and girls who actually put out; wives who take care of their husbands and wives who need to shape up and the wives who need a life; the boy crazy girls or the sad old cougars, the women who settled down, and independent women who have some self-respect; there's women who know how to do their face and hair, and women who don't take care of themselves, but there's the women who try too hard and they look like clowns, you know.

I catch myself doing this, even still, but I know we're all doing it, and I know why. I know I'm not not-a-woman for being insecure about how much femininity I've internalized-- that's universal-- I'm just one of the women who erred on the side of judging myself for giving up my self rather than judging myself most harshly for whether or not I stayed out of trouble.

[nappainanotherdimension]

SHIPPING INFO.       Answer the following for your muse(s) so people       know how shipping works on your blog. REPOST.       Don’t reblog. 

{Mun Note: Did this all the way back in July of 2017 and in January of this year. A lot of things have happened both within the fandom, new characters have been added to the series with new content, and I’ve had some experiences RP wise that impact my stance on shipping with Nappa, so I figured it’d be nice to update this meme!}

WHAT’S YOUR OTP FOR YOUR MUSE?:

Since late February of this year, I finally defined Nappa as a Single-Ship blog. Which means whoever his shipping partner ends up being would be his true OTP on the blog.

At the time of writing this, Nappa is still a single muse, and I still have no OTP for the Nappa I play here on this blog. I do have a crack!ship OTP but that’s for my fanfiction.

For a short time in the Summer of 2017, he had a fun time flirting with and developing a brief crush on someone’s OC named Poharu. Her mun and I had agreed that although they had fun flirtatious chemistry in the threads we had at the time, we both were not interested in doing a ship. Both Poharu and her mun are no longer with us due to their need to focus on real life matters. But she and I still talk once in awhile off Tumblr. I will mention Poharu from time to time when portraying Nappa in his Xenoverse mentor verse because I liked her character and she is fine with it being brought up. Her character was one of the first muses to interact with him in that verse, so naturally she played a part in his character development within that verse’s continuity.

Since Poharu, Nappa has not had strong chemistry with anyone. I have mentioned to someone else that I, the mun, can see potential chemistry with someone else’s muse, but our writing has not taken a romantic turn there. It might never go there either, which is okay with me. :3 Overall, I’m not in a hurry to hook up Nappa.

WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO RP WHEN IT COMES TO SHIPPING?:

I’m not entirely sure what all will happen if I end up shipping Nappa on this blog. I can only guess at what Nappa will want to do while in a ship or when he feels attraction to another muse. With my headcanons he’s not been in a relationship for at least 20+ years or longer depending on the verse being used in a thread.

I headcanon that Nappa is into tasteful PDA and is affectionate – both verbally, and physically – with women he’s involved with in a romantic way. He’ll have a bit of a Saiyan twist to his affections, but he’s a genuine person with how he feels so that part of his personality can easily lead to romantic fluff once he’s comfortable in a defined relationship. He just might be silly or awkward with it because Saiyans aren’t exactly romantic in conventional ways, especially in the beginning of their relationship. But I swear I will usually play this up for cute and endearing comedy. If things are uncomfortably awkward for either muse, that’s not a good sign and the ship probably isn’t gonna happen unless we figure out how to fix it, if it can be fixed.

Romance will be very experimental, because I headcanon that Nappa’s never been in love romantically (by our definitions) before. Nappa is proven to be capable of unconditional love in canon thanks to a cutscene in Extreme Butoden. It just has to happen with the right person for him, y’know? I’m also not opposed to one-sided feelings on either of our muses’ sides.

Because I’ve spent a lot of my roleplay experience writing Nappa in a situation where he’s left with unresolved anger and bitterness for what happened to him in canon, I’m not up for doing a toxic or unhealthy ship. He wouldn’t be happy, and that wouldn’t be fun for me to write responses for. That isn’t to say that a ship with Nappa wouldn’t have some problems come up, but I’m not gonna go out of my way to ship him with a muse who don’t seem like a good fit. (If it’s not that apparent I’m pretty protective of this muse in many ways.)

 HOW LARGE DOES THE AGE GAP HAVE TO BE TO MAKE IT UNCOMFORTABLE?:

A huge NO on anyone under 18, and even at age 18, that’s really too young for my muse. 20-30 year-olds may even be too young, unless they are mentally mature. Nappa can be childish sometimes, but he’s still a full-grown man who’s about 60 years old (or older depending on the verse) with lots of life-experience. If your muse is young enough to be his kid, that’ll be on his mind. He’s not going to be comfortable with anyone as a love interest if they act overly childish and bratty, especially for little to no reason. He’ll complain about that sort of person if they’re in his presence, even if there’s no shipping potential going on. If your muse acts like a child, he’ll treat her like one.

Age gaps are going to be a thing I have to deal with since few people play muses as old as mine, and if they are older, they don’t look it or act too differently from 15-30 year olds. I’m not fully against age gaps, in fact I think they’re interesting, so long as the characters can respect one another and are even with mental maturity.

Respect and maturity are two key things that have to be there for a ship with Nappa to work. It’s okay if the two bicker at first, or don’t always see eye-to-eye, but they need to get along. There has to be a strong friendship or at the very least some fair amount of kindness from the other person before Nappa can feel any sort of romantic and sexual interest he’ll think about or want to act on.

 ARE YOU SELECTIVE WHEN SHIPPING?:  

Yes, because my muse is selective about who he wants to be with, and I don’t want to force him into a ship for the sake of shipping. 

Nappa has an elitist attitude, and because he’s never experienced romantic love, he observes male-female relationships with the perspective of if he and the woman in question will make desirable children, and if she’ll make a good mother. That is just how his mentality works. It would take a lot of chemistry and a woman with a lot of desirable personality traits to make him overlook some of his hang-ups. The woman has to get to know and accept who Nappa is IC – the good and the bad – in consistent roleplay threads.

If things are rushed, there’s a high chance Nappa won’t feel the same interest as your muse and he’ll friend zone her. (But that’s not always bad because remember there has to be friendship before anything more can happen.) But it will make both of us feel uncomfortable TBH unless we’ve planned OOC for there to be one-sided feelings for a time.

In general, I’m still not actively looking for a ship to happen with Nappa on this blog. But if a ship happens it’d be a pleasant surprise.

 HOW FAR DO STEAMY MOMENTS HAVE TO GO BEFORE THEY’RE CONSIDERED NSFW?:

When it comes to talking, anything that starts to get dirty with graphic sexual activity details is what I’d consider NSFW.  Detailed descriptions of sexualized body parts, groping/stroking of genitals or breasts are things I consider NSFW. Also detailed sexual fantasy thoughts and emotions felt during physical activity can be too. Basically if you could get into trouble for getting caught reading it at work, or I don’t think the content is suitable for minors to be reading, I’d consider it NSFW, tag it accordingly, and may even use the Keep Reading cut.

Blatantly stating things like: sex, penis, vagina, kinky, “let’s fuck” or other such things, I wouldn’t think are worth labeling and tagging. Grabbing, smacking, or rubbing a butt isn’t NSFW to me unless said butt is bare and/or the muses are starting to do something sexual in nature.

 WHO ARE OTHER MUSES YOU SHIP YOUR MUSE WITH?: At the moment there is no ship for my muse with another muse. (He would only have one because his blog is single-ship.) @cruciatusxcervus has mentioned having an interest in shipping with Nappa, and she is currently involved with my other muse, Raditz. I’ve already mentioned that I’d need to see chemistry build up between the muses in our threads before confirming if a ship can happen or not. (And I’ve been on a hiatus for this blog this past Summer so the two still are only acquaintances as of writing this.) I mentioned to @ayekanaru months ago that I could see potential for a ship with our muses, but our writing has not gone in that direction, and she’s been on hiatus too. The chemistry they have as friends is very nice so if they stay that way it would be fine with me.  

DOES ONE HAVE TO ASK TO SHIP WITH YOU?:  

YES! OOC communication is important if you would like a ship to happen. Decent communication about our muses and the direction of our threads can help out a lot. It won’t guarantee that a ship will happen but it does more good than harm. (Unless I’ve already expressed that I don’t want to ship with you and your muse.)

I’m fine with playing things by ear, but this can also lead to our characters saying or doing things that might piss each other off and make it harder for a ship to happen.

I can’t be the only one putting in the work either. If you’re not going to put in any effort – be it IC and/or OOC – then you probably don’t care that much about it, and I’m not going to either.

HOW OFTEN DO YOU LIKE TO SHIP?:

Whenever I see potential chemistry. With Nappa, I’ve only seen natural chemistry happen like…once in all my years of roleplaying him.

Not kidding when I say he’s hard to ship with.

 ARE YOU MULTISHIP?:

Not on this blog. For Nappa, I decided months ago that single-ship is what’s best for him.

I’m not against multiship blogs. However as I am multiship with Raditz, I have seen and dealt with the kinds of complications having multiple ships with others can create. There are more demanding expectations for thread responses, comparisons between shipping partners, and it can also bring out the worst in people who can’t control their jealousy/envy. Honestly, shipping drama between multiship blogs is a big reason why Nappa is single-ship along with how picky he and I are for a shipping partner for him.

 ARE YOU SHIP OBSESSED OR SHIP MORE-OR-LESS?:

I love shipping and crack!shipping with fandom stuff. When it comes to roleplay though, I like when ships happen naturally. It’s a fun surprise! If ships happen, they happen! Though I will admit, when I feel a lot of investment in ship I will be enthusiastic about working on it. 

I used to have a healthy interest in shipping, but I’m noticing that I’m becoming more protective and guarded, especially with my Nappa muse. I worry that I come off as too negative about it, even though I’m just sticking up for both his interests, and my own for him.

I’ve been through a lot of negative experiences regarding shipping in the last two years. I do my best to be very considerate of others’ feelings to avoid force-shipping from my end too. A ship between fictional characters is never more important to me than an IRL friendship or rp partnership.

 WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SHIP IN YOUR CURRENT FANDOM?:  

I do vicariously enjoy Raditz x Nappa (when they’re both adults) because of one of my friend’s older content. But outside of their stuff, the ship isn’t something that tickles my fancy much. In general though, I don’t *personally* see him having a lot of chemistry with other dudes.

For the heterosexual side of things, I didn’t used to see any canon women from DBZ who would be good with Nappa either. And I’ve seen some things. (It’s all pretty awful too, even if there could have been some good potential.) I will admit that Nappa x Android 21 is the closest thing to a canon character pairing I see happening, but I’m more in favor of a partnerSHIP rather than a romantic relationSHIP. (I wouldn’t want to ship it for RP either honestly. It’d be too unhealthy for my liking. I’d rather write my own one-shot or a brief fic if I get an itch for it. There’s nothing for it out there on the internet either, so it all pretty much happens in my head. Something I’m all too used to for a lot of my ships.)

TBH I’m more open to crossover ships or OC ships with Nappa. (Just please no Nappa x Ami…just no. That’s a NOTP for both Muse and Mun.)

 FINALLY, HOW DOES ONE SHIP WITH YOU?:

Talk to me about it and also roleplay for awhile with me and my muse before deciding if you really want to ship with us. As I’ve mentioned before, because of my headcanons and who Nappa is, he’s not really an easy person to ship with.

Thanks to anyone who sat through reading the second revision of this meme. There’s some old and new content here that’s worth reading if you’re interested in this dumb topic.

TAGGED BY. Nobody recently. Just felt like updating this since I’ve become single-ship and a lot of stuff has changed since January 2018. TAGGING.  Whoever wants to do this meme!

[mst3kproject]

616: Racket Girls

This one's bad.  Racket Girls may not have the towering reputation of things like Red Zone Cuba or Attack of the The Eye Creatures, but it's just as awful, and has a shamelessly exploitative sliminess to it that is the equal of anything in The Brain that Wouldn't Die.  This was one of the few odd episodes I hadn’t actually seen before watching it for this blog, and I will never watch it again.  Fuck this movie.

After a short that actually offers some pretty good advice presented in an only slightly creepy format, we start the movie with some wrestling.  I complained about the wrestling in Samson vs the Vampire Women, but while those scenes were way too long and contributed very little if anything to the plot, they were at least presented in some kind of context.  We already knew that Samson was a wrestler, so we were theoretically meeting our hero there.  In Racket Girls it's just bam, wrestling, featuring women we know nothing about.  It continues through the opening credits and consumes the first six minutes of this seventy minute movie.

Real life sports events come with a lot of features that you just can't replicate in a movie like this.  For starters, we usually know beforehand who's participating and which one we want to win.  This scene features A Blonde and A Brunette, and they're already at it when the movie starts running – we haven't even been introduced to them.  A movie also has a hard time reproducing the atmosphere of crowd enthusiasm that makes things like sports matches and concerts so much more enjoyable in real life than they are on a screen, large or small, and this one doesn't even try beyond dubbing some faint cheering into the background.  There is nothing interesting or dynamic about the way the scene is shot – just a couple of cameras above and far back from the action, watching passively.  It looks like the scene is being filmed for the six o'clock news.

Promising.

When the actual story starts, it does the same thing that annoyed me so much in The Unearthly, where it introduces us to somebody who is set up as if she's going to be our protagonist, and then does very little with her.  In Racket Girls our non-heroine is Peaches Page (no, it's not her real name – according to IMDB that was Margaret Evans), a naive but ambitious young woman who wants to be a wrestling champion.  She signs a contract with an agent named Umberto Scalli, and he introduces her to the rest of his establishment – too bad for Page and her dream, it's all just a front to launder money for the mob!

As the new person coming into this situation, it seems obvious that Page will be the character we follow and learn with for the rest of the movie – and for a while this appears to be born out, as we see quite a bit of her training.  We expect that Page will discover the shady goings-on behind the scene and try to do something about it, but Racket Girls is too busy sucking to do anything so obvious or effective!  Page's training, as it turns out, is nothing but eye candy.  We're shown extended sequences of her jogging, jumping rope, and getting massages from other women, none of which has any point besides giving us something to ogle.  At the climax, Page isn't even involved!  The movie has no interest in any part of her that doesn't bounce.

I have a nasty feeling that this was a case of life imitating art. Scalli assures Page that he will make her a star, but all he actually does is take advantage of her.  Racket Girls was Margaret Evans' first and last film role, although she did continue to wrestle under her stage name – I can imagine director Robert Dertano telling Evans that the film will be her big break into Hollywood, only to give her character nothing to do but jump rope and change clothes.  The irony's rich enough to give you heartburn.

All this leering male gaze does stand in curious contrast to the wrestling scenes, which, as I noted above, are distant and documentary-like, showing us women wrestling in the same detatched way as a movie might show us men working at desks or horses grazing in a field.  This obviously isn't a statement, since Dertano was happy to exploit Page elsewhere.  I think it's just that he and cinematographer William Thompson had no idea how to make the scene interesting even on a sexual level.

The actual main character of Racket Girls, as far as I'm able to tell, is Umberto Scalli.  As a movie character with a name that Italian, you know he's got to be a mobster.  He's been pocketing money that belongs to his bosses, and now they want it back, but he can't afford to pay them.  Somehow he's got to find the cash by their deadline, or he'll end up sleeping with the fishes.

This, too, could be a perfectly serviceable movie.  We could watch Scalli's increasing panic as the mob and the cops both breathe down his neck, as he realizes his employees are stealing from him, and as his racetrack bets let him down again and again.  A criminal who thinks he's on top of the world, only to find reality closing in, could be a main character in a comedy or a tragedy – but much like Page's story, Scalli's never really seems to get started.  Rather than presenting a narrative, the movie gives us bits and pieces of plot that don't seem to connect with each other.

What is the significance of Jackie and her swanky apartment?  Is she the reason Scalli has no money, or is that just Munck the book-keeper trying to win his trust by turning her in?  As far as I can tell, the incident never comes to anything but Jackie losing her job.  What's going on with the racehorses?  Why did Joe kill a horse and what does that have to do with anything in the actual plot?  Is the name Puncture Proof supposed to imply anything?  Who the hell are the Leopard Lady and the Panther Woman and why do we care about their wrestling match?  It feels as if the parts of a story are present but they expect me to assemble it myself, like the movie came from IKEA.

All the wrestling matches in the movie are exactly like the opening one.  They have no narrative, they have no sex appeal, we don't know the participants, and we don't care.

Finally, after all these disconnected goings-on, Scalli concludes that the only way he can get the money he needs is by loading a wrestling match.  He asks two wrestlers, Clara and Rita, to help him with this.  We met these two earlier, in a brief locker room scene in which they complained about what a jerk Scalli is, but we certainly don't know them well enough to care about their principles.  Both refuse to help Scalli cheat and stalk out on him, which leaves his fate hanging on the thread of chance but really means nothing to us.

I don't understand why Peaches Page is not herself a part of this climax.  The movie tells us that Page believes she's climbing the ladder to stardom and Scalli is wooing her with expensive gifts and taking her to fancy parties.  The other women try to warn her that Scalli is bad news but she's got too many stars in her eyes to listen.  Surely the climax of the film should see her realizing she's been lied to and used, deciding fame and fortune aren't worth it, and winning her final match even as she knows it will ruin the man she thought she loved!  That would not necessarily have been a good movie, but it would at least have been the movie promised to us in the opening scenes!

Not only do we not get an end to Page's arc, the movie wastes all the time it should have spent giving us the middle!  Page's rise to fame and her budding relationship with Scalli are things that go on in the background.  We're told about them, but what we actually see is all this stuff going on around Scalli, which may or may not have anything to do with the money he owes to the mob! In the end, the movie is just scenes of wrestling, scenes of bouncing breasts, and scenes of bad actors playing nasty, greedy jerks.  It never comes together into an actual story.  It's repetitive, it does not develop, it gives us nobody to focus on, and as a result we're just bored.  I spent most of the movie wondering what happened to Peaches Page and why we were shown so much of her when she turned out to be irrelevant.

Racket Girls is pretty much incompetent back-to-front, and it's not even incompetent in funny or interesting ways, like Starcrash or Manos: the Hands of Fate manage to be. It's just a movie made by a guy who didn't know how to tell a story, filmed by a guy who had no idea how to shoot a scene, and starring a bunch of people who didn't know how to act.  As a result, there's nothing in it worth seeing.  It's dull and frustrating to the point where it actually makes me angry by missing so many of the opportunities it sets up.  Watching it without Mike and the bots was a deeply unpleasant experience.  I hereby banish this one to hang out with The Starfighters and Invasion of the Neptune Men in the great Cornfield of Crap, and I hope it stays there!

[itschrissenpai]

♫ (dance!au with Miyuki)

     @thatbastardmiyuki Letme start with saying that I’m sorry that this took so long. I used to botheryou with this for a while, telling you how things kinda developed without meever finishing it - and now, probably half a year or even more later, I’mfinally able to show it to you. Man, I need to get over my own laziness, haha(and learn how to write other characters because omg have I failed at this). Also, I dare to saythis is not 100% what the prompt was about. But oh well, it’s ChrisMiyu withCEO!Chris and model!Miyuki and I’ll never stop loving this AU. I hope you’llenjoy it! ♥

  — 5 Times… Prompts ( Not Accepting )

♫ - Five times my muse swears it’s not a date, and the one time it maybe is.

I.

     The first time definitely wasn’t a date because of two reasons.

     First, there were too many colleagues around when they sat next to each other at that bar they had gone to after work - and to Chris a date was clearly something for two people in private.

    Second, things may or may not have ended with them having sex in Chris’ apartment, quickly turning this potential ‘date’ into an unexpected one-night-stand in the heat of a moment. Not that Chris minded much. Nor did he regret practically spending the night with a stranger who happened to be one of the most popular models in Japan. This wasn’t something that would go public either way, since they both had some sort of reputation to keep: Him, the soon-to-be CEO of a company worth a fortune. Miyuki Kazuya, the famous model probably everyone in Japan already heard of (and needless to say most women - and perhaps even men - considered attractive).

    They wouldn’t see each other again after that night; because Chris knew the rules of one-night stands without having any prior experience with them. And yet he had the decency to make some coffee for both of them the next morning, surprised by the fact that Miyuki had still been slumbering peacefully beside him when he woke up.

    Just because this clearly hadn’t been a date, didn’t mean he should forget his manners, right?

II.

     The second time was even more spontaneous than the first time.

    Miyuki had refused additional money for replacing a model that unexpectedly had been unable to attend the photo shooting for Chris’ companies’ new advertisement series. Of course he was thankful that he did the job (although it meant for Miyuki spending his free time with work again), but Chris was known to pay back his debts as soon as he could. And if there was one thing about him that one could always be sure of, it was that he was a man of his word.

    So after work, they ended up in a small café with Chris paying for both of them. It wasn’t really what he had in mind by repaying him, but he went with it as the model suggested it to him.

    Oddly enough, even before Miyuki ordered anything, Chris remembered that the model liked black coffee without sugar - and it slightly irritated him how much he could still recall from their small talk a few nights ago.

    “You don’t look happy”, he heard Miyuki say. “How come?”

    “Frankly, I didn’t expect you to suggest to come here. It doesn’t make up for the fact that you helped us out on your free day.”

    There was a teasing smirk on the other’s face - and Chris even remembered the exact same smirk from that night when they–

      “What if I told you that there might be a way to really make up for it, then?” Chris felt a foot nudging against his and amber eyes resting on him without any kind of shame, causing him to feel a weird tension in his gut. It didn’t feel bad, he had to admit, but he tried to not let it show too much. It would be a mystery to him if he actually succeeded, but it turned out to not really matter barely 15 minutes later when they left the café again.

      Two things were crystal clear for Chris the moment they entered his apartment again: First, this wouldn’t be a date, because he’d never end one with fucking someone into his mattress. Second, he didn’t date for the sake of repaying them, even if it was very tempting in Miyuki’s case.

III.  

     It was his birthday when Miyuki suddenly appeared for the third time, causing Chris to forget that the actual surprise was the chocolate cake and the neatly decorated office his colleagues prepared for him, not the model standing next to him.

    He wondered who had invited him in the first place since he wasn’t working regularly in his company. In fact Miyuki had only worked as a model for their advertisement posters twice, which had coincidentally been the only times they had seen each other to begin with.

    Perhaps this was Miyuki’s reason to wait until the other employees returned to their neglected duties before he dared to talk to Chris. Or maybe he just wanted no one to overhear their conversation.

    “I always thought you were just one of the co-workers here. Should’ve known that you’re higher positioned than this - according to your fancy apartment.”

    It made Chris smirk. “You never asked for my occupation in detail. I prefer not to talk about it.”

    Miyuki chuckled, leaning against the desk as his eyes wandered through the office for a couple of seconds before he pushed away again.

    “Well, I should probably go too”, the model mumbled suddenly. Chris turned around to face him, the obvious question of why he’d been here heavily hanging in the air, even if he never uttered it, doubting he’d get a response. There might’ve been some disappointment too though.

    Turned out his guess was true when Miyuki placed his index finger over his lips and gave him a playful wink. It left Chris in a state of confusion as the model went to the door with a nonchalantly spoken “See you, CEO-sama.”

    Of course this wasn’t even close to be considered a date and Chris wouldn’t have thought about it if it wasn’t Tanba who asked him when he had started dating the model barely an hour after Miyuki had left. There was some sort of harsh tone in his words, as if to complain about Chris being secretive although they had been best friends since high school.

    “We’re not dating”, he answered calmly. “I didn’t expect him to know my birthday.”

    “You told him when we were out for a drink that night. It was shortly before you suddenly left with him.”

    Chris blinked at that. How could he not remember this ever happened?

    Tanba sighed and pat his shoulder as he stepped closer. “Be cautious around him. He seems twisted.”

    Yeah, I know, Chris thought. He was twisted and mysterious. But this was exactly what was so attractive about him. Although he did wonder what sort of hidden message was behind that little wrapped up box on his table. When he opened it, there was only a key inside of it and a cryptic note.

     ‘Thank me another time.’

IV.

     The fourth time had been what Chris thought to be the encounter that started to really set the cogs into motion.

    “I should really feel offended by how you expect me to have any kind of fashion sense. I’m a model. I only wear clothes others chose for me.”

    And yet he was still there, helping Chris choose a new suit without making the impression as if he didn’t want to. Surely, it was mostly because the owner of the shop wanted Miyuki to wear one of his suits in public to promote his clothes. They had been in the middle of measuring him up when Chris entered the very same shop.

    “Is that so? You seem pretty independent to me.”

    Chris earned a snort at that.

    “So, what do you need a suit for? Shouldn’t you already have a bunch by now?”

    “It’s for a wedding.”

    “Oh? Guess I should congratulate you then.”

    Chris knew that this was the part where he should correct him and tell him that this obviously wasn’t his wedding he’d attend but someone else’s. But Miyuki was also just teasing, knowing that Chris wasn’t involved with anyone else - aside from him for a few times by now.

    Still, something seemed off with the way he looked at him; He seemed a little tense, like he was concerned - and Chris wanted to know why. Shouldn’t he be glad that he was sticking to his freedom even after it seemed like they somehow got closer?

    “You want to look like an old man?”

    Chris furrowed his brows at the sudden question.

    “Pardon?”

    “Did you actually take a look at that tie you’re wearing? You look like a grandpa who’s visiting his family. Here, try this one.”

    He shouldn’t trust him so blindly with this, but Miyuki seemed to know what he was talking about and he actually chose a tie that Chris liked as well.

    “Maybe I should ask you more often about some fashion advice.”

    “That’s going to be expensive.”

    “But it’ll most likely be worth it.”

    This time, they both chuckled, and although it only lasted for a few seconds, it felt different to him than any other time.

    “I’m already finished with work for the day. If you want to book me, you better make it soon. I’m usually very busy.”

    “How about now?”

    There it was again: That teasing smile on his lips, so nonchalant as Miyuki tied his tie. And Chris wanted to kiss it away.

     “Have you decided on a suit yet? It would be a shame if you came here to find one only to get distracted and leave without one.”

     If Miyuki only knew that Chris had long decided on one - even if he looked like his other ones. “Actually, I think I did. Thanks to your helpful advice.”

     “You’re welcome”, Miyuki hummed. “Your place?” It wasn’t really a question and Chris didn’t bother answering.

     Not dating Miyuki Kazuya surely had many advantages. And just a few hours later, Chris would add another one to the list after he realized that holding him in their aftermath felt better, the more often he got the chance to.

V.

      “We’re not dating”

      “But he stays overnight, you’re fucking and meeting each other since months.Yeah. Definitely doesn’t sound like a date to me.” Isashiki gave him a look Chris could barely avoid, rubbing his temples. He was standing in front of his wardrobe, looking through his clothes while Isashiki layed behind him on his bed, reading through a manga without ever giving off the impression of being too distracted by it.

      “Why do you even know about it?”

      He regretted his own question but as soon as he opened his mouth to take it back, his friend was already speaking. “I’m living next to you, Chris. I’m not even surprised anymore whenever he walks out of your place in the morning. Also, Tanba saw you two at the convenience store on Christmas’ Eve. He said you were stressed because your Christmas plans with your family got cancelled, so he wanted to cheer you up. But after he saw you with your boyfriend, he crashed my place before the storm started. And… wait, did you really sleep with him…?”

      “He’s not my boyfriend”, Chris muttered, refusing to admit how right his friend was with practically everything.

      “I can’t hear you. Your voice gets too soft whenever you lie.” Weirdly enough, it was the truth - and the reason Chris preferred not to lie in the first place. “When will you ask him out again? Also, don’t put that on. That looks like it’s from your grandparents. Man, how are you even dating a model?” He huffed. “Well, guess he’s not after your fashion style.”

      “We’re not…”

      “Dating. Try again. I know a couple when I see one.”

      Why was he even trying? If anything, Chris had to admit that his friend had read enough love stories to read between the lines. Still, it would be wrong to call any of their encounters a date. But maybe–

     “Did you know that in the next chapter…”

      “DON’T CHANGE THE SUBJECT, CHRIS.”

      “But you might want to know that the heroine is going to… ”

     “DON’T TELL ME A WORD OF WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO HER!” There was a pause. “She’ll be fine though… right?”

      Chris only smiled amusedly, closing the wardrobe. 

VI.

      “I’msurprised…”, Miyuki said when they made their way back to the car. They’d been visiting a concert he had gotten two tickets for - because apparently the band’s lead singer had given them to Miyuki to ‘convince’ him to appear in their new music video. Of course mostly for a better promotion. As far as Chris knew, Miyuki hadn’t declined or accepted yet - but given that Miyuki had emphasized that he liked the band, he’d probably accept sooner or later.

      “Yeah?”, Chris replied when they reached red traffic lights, leaning back some as he gave Miyuki a curious look.

      “Yeah. I’m surprised you actually have other clothes than suits.”

      They stared at each other for what felt like half an eternity, a strange silence between them until Chris took a breath.

      “Did you… think that I’d wear a suit on a concert?”

     “Well, it was hard for me to imagine you in something else than a suit.”

     Chris huffed, his smirk giving away that he wasn’t upset. Granted, he’d never seen him out of his business clothes (aside from him completely naked at least). “I know it might seem strange to you, but I’m actually pretty normal. Most of the time.”

      “You mean, whenever you’re not leading a company?” The model chuckled. “Guess I’m no one to talk. Not with my occupation at least.“

      Not really, Chris wanted to answer, but kept it to himself when the lights turned green. Miyuki’s place wasn’t very far away from the concert hall, he reminded himself. Better not start any teasing or smooth comebacks, or it would end in disheveled clothes and sweat again - although Miyuki honestly didn’t seem too eager to push for anything that night. Or maybe he was and Chris just didn’t read him right.

      “Thanks. For driving us.”

      “It’s alright”, Chris replied. “I like driving. I just barely have any reason to do it on my own.”

      “I see.” He could see him tilt his head. “Does that mean you only drive if you have a reason to?” 

      It wasn’t obvious where this question would lead them, so Chris only slowly nodded. He didn’t have anything embarrassing or secretive to hide about this; although he knew that it wasn’t very normal to have a driver whenever he went to work (or back home), just because he could spend the time sitting in the car with looking through his daily schedules rather than dealing with traffic.

      “You could say that.”

       Miyuki didn’t reply immediately: “So if I need a drive, I could just give you a call and hope you’d pick me up?”

      “Perhaps.” Chris was pretty sure he didn’t sound nearly as relaxed as he thought he would. God knew why. “Depends on the occasion. I’m afraid I won’t be the right person if…” He stopped. “Under… certain conditions.”

     “Certain conditions?” Chris couldn’t shake off the feeling that the model had hesitated again, maybe because he wasn’t sure whether he’d wanted to hear a possible answer or not. Obviously his curiosity won that fight - much to Chris’ despair.

      “Well, I’d feel out of place if you wanted me to pick you up from a date.” Not that it would happen anyway, because first, Miyuki wasn’t the dating type, he’d made that pretty sure a few times. And second–

      Chris was probably the last person he’d call anyway.

      If there was anything he’d expect from Miyuki,it was definitely not a short laugh. 

      “Wow Chris. So mean.”

     Chris. He’d never called him by his givenname before. Nor shown any signs of being hurt by what he’d said.

      But it definitely rang a bell.

      “I didn’t mean…”

      “No, it’s alright.”

      Was it though? The weird feeling in his guts told him the opposite. But then again his guts were giving him very strange signals lately. Especially when he was around him.

      “I wasn’t referring to tonight.”

      It was definitely a weird coincidence that theyreached the street Miyuki’s place was in - now that Chris actually realized whatconversation he’d started. He let out a sigh when he turned off the engine.Weirdly enough, Miyuki unfastened his seatbelt but didn’t open the door.

      “Does that mean that this is a datethen?”

      Chris looked up from the steering wheel,seemingly baffled. They’d never dared to cross their boundaries and talkedabout anything related to dating.Well, at least not dating each other. Chris remembered that they once talkedabout past relationships, how difficult it was to find someone who’d be able to deal with their tight schedules and how they both came to the conclusion that it might be for the best to just take things easy.

      So there was definitely a chance Miyuki wasplaying with him now. Trying to force a reaction only to push himaway again. Just like he had after he’d helped Chris choose a suit for thatwedding he’d attended months ago; It had taken Miyuki weeks to text him back after that night and Chris had to be the one trying to actually initiate a conversation again.

      But then again; wasn’t this actually a date? They had been without a third party (except that one time when Miyuki had to talk to the lead singer of that band which - if Chris was brutally honest - really didn’t give the best performance; and he had already come with the smallest amount of expectations considering he wasn’t much into modern music in the first place). They also hadn’t spoken about spending the night at either of their places together, which made Chris assume that Miyuki might simply not be interested. He’d lie if he’d say that it didn’t somehow hurt his pride. And perhaps his feelings overall.

      Still, there was some hope left. He didn’t knew why or what he was actually hoping for on the long run, but it was connected to spending more time with him - even if it didn’t include any physical contact.

      “I see.”

      Chris didn’t understand Miyuki’s words at first, but when he opened the door to get out of the car, his body reacted on its own, grabbing Miyuki’s arm before he could turn and get out.

      “Yes”, he heard himself say. “It might be a date.”

      There was pure confusion and hesitation on Miyuki’s face, that fortunately Chris understood quicker than before, lips curving at the realization.

      “But I can’t decide this for both of us, can I?”

      First frozen in his position, Miyuki slowly sank back onto the seat. Which really wouldn’t have been a sign of a win yet, but when the model smirked back at him, he knew that he might’ve turned this around.

      “Fair enough”, he replied. “How about we get inside then? Would be a shame if we didn’t come to a conclusion, wouldn’t it?”

      Usually, Chris would assume that this was the beginning of another of their sexual encounters. But there was something different about the way Miyuki was talking, was offering him to stay over. He’d be damn stupid to not go and see where it would lead them this time.

      “Gladly”, Chris replied - and little did he know that this would be first time that they’d wake up very dressed the next morning yet happier than any time they hadn’t.

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 10th February 2019

Nothing happened, at all.

Top 10

For its third week, Ariana Grande is at the top spot of the UK Singles Chart with her single “7 rings”, from the recently released thank u, next album – which I personally think was pretty mediocre. Regardless, I don’t see this going anywhere, especially since nothing happened.

“Sweet but Psycho” is staying still, with Ava Max’s song still at number-two.

Similarly at number-three, “Dancing with a Stranger” by Sam Smith and Normani doesn’t move from last week.

Neither does Calvin Harris’ and Rag ‘n’ Bone Man’s “Giant” for that matter at number-four.

Finally, some movement – up two spots is Mabel’s “Don’t Call Me Up”, at number-five.

This means “Wow.” by Post Malone is down a spot to number-six.

Now, our first new arrival, as Billie Eilish debuts at number-seven with “bury a friend”, becoming her first top 10 hit in the UK, and her second Top 40. We’ll talk more about it later, but I’m impressed by how she’s been able to debut this high; definitely shows that new album will do big numbers.

“Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” by Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus falls down two spaces to number-eight.

At number-nine, up a spot from last week is Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved”

Also down two spaces is Post Malone and Swae Lee’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack cut, “Sunflower”, now at #10, slowly making its way off the charts.

FEATURED SINGLE: “Kids Turned Out Fine” – A$AP Rocky

Now, to interrupt your regularly scheduled programming is Featured Single, the segment where we look at a great song that is getting a single push of some kind but isn’t charting and spread some light on it briefly. Now this song in particular just got a really high-budget music video that combined some of its elements with Rocky’s other song “Changes”, which is all flashy but otherwise kind of unremarkable – but the song itself is great. There’s a catchy, psychedelic guitar sample that starts it all off, showered by scattered vocal samples and seemingly field recordings of playgrounds, before it switches to a slick trap beat that Rocky croons over, before everything slowly gets pitched down and slowed down as he mentions the drugs on his mind as a teenager, who is curious about venturing into substance use without caring about the consequences, and man, does it feel like it. This is psychedelic and confusing, once Rocky starts spitting and the bass actually appears, it just kind of explodes with only distorted guitar to accompany it, before a couple random “Yeah! Yeah!” ad-libs that cut it back to the beat as it was, and the verse continues normally as if nothing happened. Yeah, the album this is from, TESTING, is kind of like that, all of the time. Some of my favourite songs are trippy, chaotic messes, with moments like that random Diddy skit on “Tony Tone” about how he said something while her kids were listening that was vulgar, I suppose, that just cuts the song entirely and the transitions aren’t smooth, it’s just a miniscule interlude that takes place for no reason other than experimentation, and honestly despite lacking substance (Ironically), I love this song (Even though it is just vibe and nothing else, really) and how smooth it is in its controlled chaos, definitely one of the calmer moments on TESTING, but I can never see it being a hit, ever, despite how nothing happened. I think “Brotha Man” with French Montana, Snoop Dogg and Frank Ocean could have a better chance, perhaps “OG Beeper” with BlocBoy JB at a stretch. So let’s just get to the Climbers, Fallers and such.

Climbers

Did I mention nothing happened? This week was so dry and slow that Pinkfong rebounded with “Baby Shark”, up another five spaces to #19. That’s sad. It is alongside Kehlani and Ty Dolla $ign though, as “Nights Like This” is up 10 spaces from last week to #30, which is good because this is a pretty great song from two great artists, one of which I’m pretty sure is also serving 15 years in prison for cocaine possession. Yeah, okay, let’s get to the fallers.

Fallers

Now there’s a couple more here, to an extent. As expected, J. Cole’s “MIDDLE CHILD” is down five spaces to #14 – without a music video I don’t think this is a great lead single, sorry, Cole, I am excited for your next album but this song’s pretty boring. “Lost in the Fire” by Gesaffelstein and the Weeknd is down five spaces to #24, next to former #1 “thank u, next” by Ariana Grande down six spaces to #28 (This will rebound though, the album’s out now), while “18HUNNA” by Headie One and Dave is down nine spaces to #32. That’s it, though.

Dropouts

“Baby” by Clean Bandit, Marina and Luis Fonsi is out from #29 (That’s been kind of a flop overall, I’m just surprised it lasted this long), while other than that, we have “Comfortable” by Yungen and Dappy out from #32, “Think About Us” by Little Mix featuring Ty Dolla $ign out from #34 and 15 years in prison for cocaine possession, “Psych Out!” by AJ Tracey out from #36 (I guess the album didn’t do all too well?), “Mo Bamba” by Sheck Wes out from #37, and surprisingly due to recent circumstances, “Advice” by Cadet and Deno Driz out from #39. Rest in peace to Cadet – tragic he died so young in a car accident, and just in his prime time to release more material, sucks that his life was cut short at this point in time, and we only have limited music from the guy, he was only 25. On a lighter note:

Returning Entries

Actually, this isn’t a lighter note at all, this song sucks. “Grace” by Lewis Capaldi is back at #40 (Who cares?). Maybe the new arrivals will be better, there’s four of them so there’s got to be something good there.

NEW ARRIVALS

#39 – “i’m so tired...” – LAUV and Troye Sivan

So, uh, LAUV’s back with another song, huh? I thought he’d end up a complete one-hit wonder but I suppose he’s attempting that second hit, and you know what, I’m not complaining, I loved his last one (More on that when I post my best list; it’s concerningly high). Troye Sivan is okay, I guess, none of his stuff except perhaps “My My My!” has really grown on me all too much though. Sigh, what do these boring pop dudes have to say? That they’re sick of love songs? That all these fairy tales are full of it? That if they hear one more stupid love song, they’ll be sick? That they’re at a payphone trying to call home? Yeah, alright, enough playing around. This is LAUV’s first ever Top 40 hit in the UK (Congratulations) and Troye Sivan’s fourth, and is it good? Well, I can agree with the title’s message on the surface, I guess. Not that I’m tired of love songs, I’m just tired. The song itself? I mean, it is generic, but it’s quicker-paced than his last hit, and it seems to have some more energy, but that guitar strumming just kind of gets on my nerves, same with that mind-numbingly repetitive hook. There is a lot of genuine groove in the production though, especially the janky percussion, and Troye Sivan’s melodies are sonically sound. I can see this growing on me like LAUV has succeeded in before, but I could equally see myself hating this after hearing it more than five times (Because you know the radio will play the most bottom of the barrel stuff after the rise of trap-rap). It’s okay, I guess. Next.

#36 – “a lot” – 21 Savage featuring J. Cole

It’s about time this appeared, and I know exactly why. Back in late December, 21 Savage dropped his album as pretty much a Christmas present, with i am > i was being slightly inconsistent but there’s still a lot of quality there, and fun to be had, especially with the powerful opening track. Now that there’s a music video and now that 21 Savage has been detained by ICE for overstaying his Visa (Apparently he’s actually from the UK, but he’s been freed now), I can only see this rising from now on, and that’s good because it was going to be my Featured Single for this week if it didn’t appear. This song is fantastic, all three versions of it. It starts with a few different 21 Savages just repeating ad-libs while that great soul sample croons in the background of the trap skitters, “I love you for so many reasons, I love you for all seasons”. The bass hits behind 21’s insanely catchy hook with that multi-tracked, “A lot” playing after every line, until 21’s verse, which gets fittingly, broken down, for an unidentified sample to repeat, “I break it on down”, with random vocal samples and sound effects playing in between. While 21’s meaningful subject matter is arguably more important, and the section is totally filler, I love those little touches that show the layers of the production. 21 is essentially playing the underdog who’s seen and been through traumatic gang violence and experiences with women, who has still succeeded. But then you hear J. Cole drunkenly and tiredly say, “Yeah”, before going on a ramble about how 21 Savage had his kids in the studio or something, I don’t know, and then he goes off.

Some n****s make millions, other n****s make memes

Yeah, it may seem like I hate J. Cole’s guts from how all his charting stuff is really boring and always gets negative reviews from me, but he’s definitely one of the best rappers out when he really wants to bother. This whole verse is essentially a complete ramble, but he did warn us, although he does keep a general theme in his rapid flow and charismatic yet calm delivery, which is how the new-wave rappers and overall new-wave black society in the modern Internet age should have more guidance, and now that the older legends in that society are getting older and more mature, much like 21, he feels they should have more responsibility and that he feels bad for the even newer, younger wave of SoundCloud rappers who will regret all their decisions, including 6ix9ine, who I may add he doesn’t defend – he just feels bad for him as he knows at some point, Tekashi’s going to look back at what he did and ask himself, “Was it worth it getting myself into prison for essentially life?” I wonder if Ty Dolla $ign is thinking that while he’s serving 15 years for cocaine possession. 21’s alternate verse on the physical, live and music video versions also discusses people getting blocked at the border, and that families in ghettos still don’t even seem to have a right to clean water and are constantly stuck in financial situations and struggles with no way to escape, and it honestly seems like an anthem for 21, who’s gone through all this, with his verses combined probably being better than Cole’s, honestly. This song is like six minutes (At least the best version of the song is) so I’m surprised it’s gone this far, but it deserves it. Check this out if you haven’t already.

#15 – “All I Ever Wanted” – Fredo featuring Dave

Now, back to some British stuff. Fredo and Dave are close friends, and honestly the chocolate frog and its mundanely-named partner are people I initially was just confused by, and you can tell during my review of “Funky Friday” months ago, which is a song I know oddly admire and adore for all its odd quirks. I didn’t think it was anything special at the time, but it’s slowly become one of my favourite songs of the past year. After listening to more stuff, though, as more from both has crept up on the charts, I’ve started to love them both, and seeing as this is the only song to enter the top 40 from the three Fredo album tracks entering on the top 100 this week from his album Third Avenue (That I’ll check out immediately after this episode), this is of course the one that left the most impressions on listeners. I’m really into British rap, especially the trap and the more low-key, soul and R&B stuff (Check out Tom Misch, he has some beautiful songs like “Good to be Home” and “Movie”, in fact the Free Form official Spotify playlist has some fantastic British hip hop, listen to some of it if you can and give these guys support), so hopefully this’ll be good, and, yeah, it is. It starts with a glittering piano and twinkling leads that are cheap but definitely symphonic and almost video game-like, with producer tags ham-fistedly appearing as the bass slowly creeps ominously. In fact, the whole song is really ominous as even when the hi-hats come in, there’s no real bounce and Fredo just yells at us. It’s pretty intimidating, and when the beat finally drops, we have that classic stock “Oh!” sound you hear in songs like “Leave Me Alone” by Flipp Dinero, “Dilemma” by Nelly and “3500” by Travis Scott, but here it has so much reverb that any other voice than Fredo’s troubled gang mindset feels distant. Dave is great here, referencing... Lil Baby of all people, with a more stable and serious flow, mentioning the people close to him who he’s lost to both prison and death, in a really long and fantastic verse. The emotionless vibe of this track makes it so much more full of emotion, and although it sounds slightly dated in its production, this is a dark and menacing yet almost sombre banger, pretty similar to one of Dave’s other songs, “Hangman”, and definitely deserves to be Dave’s sixth top 40 hit and Fredo’s fourth.

#7 – “bury a friend” – Billie Eilish

I’ve heard two other songs from Billie Eilish in full, and I love both of them; “when the party’s over” is a genius piece of songwriting from her brother Finneas, and “lovely” is a beautiful ballad with Khalid. Those were slow, minimalistic piano-lead songs, though, so what happens when she lends her voice to, uh... industrial funk? Yeah, this one is bouncier and this one is more danceable, and that’s why it debuted this high, especially with Eilish’s hype at an all time high right now, not because some British rapper cameos in literally less than one second at the start of the song. His name is Crooks, and I figured he would have an uncredited rap verse when I saw it had additional vocals from him,  but it’s literally just him whispering, “Billie”, and a couple ad-libs. Eh, okay, but how does the music stack up? It’s brilliant, of course. With Kanye’s “Black Skinhead” as a point of reference, the minimalistic 808s and claps only accompany Billie’s multi-tracked and pitch-shifted vocals, before the verse starts and sound effects are scattered everywhere, with pained shrieks, glass shattering and moans adding to the lyrics. Seriously, I love little details where musical elements actually relate to the lyrics directly, but then that bass hits slowly and that one 808 just keeps going on with a shrill synth, and then it just ends entirely, pretty abruptly. This song is eerie and honestly pretty scary, and Crooks’ ad-libs and backing vocals contribute to that greatly. Eilish’s sing-songy melodies make it even weirder, even, making the song feel like a possessed toy box. That intense moment where it’s just that ear-piercing synth and the 808 is such an interesting musical moment, man, this is pop brilliance. It’s creepy art pop not designed to be an indie darling, but designed for the radio (This is insanely catchy as well) and that hits a soft spot for me. The best art is made for mass consumption. That new album’s coming in March by the way, and I’m incredibly excited.

Conclusion

That was a really freaking good week, actually, so I’m only having to force Worst of the Week out on LAUV and Troye Sivan for “i’m so tired...” (The song’s not even close to bad, it’s just my only option), with Best of the Week going to Billie Eilish again for “bury a friend”. Tied Honourable Mentions go to the equally amazing yet only somewhat flawed songs, with 21 Savage, J. Cole, Fredo and Dave all picking them up for “a lot” and “All I Ever Wanted”, respectively. See ya next week, but it won’t top this.

[bellyofkorea]

Hot hands, cold heart

Wow, what a crazy few days it has been! I staged at Flower Child on Friday, the 15th of September and then proceeded to work there for the following 5 days straight. I have only been in Korea for two weeks, but it feels like I’ve been here for much longer. 

Heres how it all went down. After my stage, Jamie and I sat and talked about the coming two months that I’ll be in Korea. I explained that I technically have a job copywriting, plus I want to be able to still be a tourist in the Seoul, especially once Chris gets here. We agreed on me working 3-4 days max and she also offered to compensate me for my work. 

I guess it was something like the stars aligning for both of us - I was looking for some fun/learning in a Korean kitchen and she was desperately looking for some helping experienced hands for recipe development, photo shoots, and events coordinating. It just so happens that those are some things that I’ve done a ton of in all of my recent work. 

Anyway, the idea of me working part time did not make sense for this first week. Jamie is being featured in two Korean magazines - a great opportunity for promoting the restaurant and herself, however, the catch being that the dishes she presents must highlight cheese in some way. Koreans do not use a lot of cheese in their diet, so the Korean culinary world is trying to promote cheese by having chefs present dishes that make cheese enticing and exciting. This meant that Jamie had to create new dishes entirely from scratch. The first photo shoot was just for one dish - a dessert featuring bleu cheese. The second photo shoot (which we are doing on Tuesday next week) is going to feature an entire menu of completely new dishes featuring cheese. 

So that’s what I’ve been doing. We immediately hit the ground running and Saturday, Sunday, Monday were devoted entirely to recipe concept design and plating and testing out the bleu cheese dessert, with Monday being the actual day of the shoot. 

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we had to bust out an entire menus worth of mise in order to get most of our concepts down for the full menu. We have 3 amuse bouche, 1 cold app, 1 hot app, a main, and then the dessert is the same we did for Monday. The photoshoot for the full menu is on Tuesday the 26th, but the photographer asked for photos of the plates ahead of time so that she can prepare herself for how to set up the shoot. Those rough draft photos were due yesterday, Thursday the 21st. 

The sous (the one wearing glasses) and one of the cooks tasting the burrata dish - the cold app plate. 

All this on top of regular lunch and dinner prep and service and they only have one small kitchen to work from. This has meant that I’m both doing prep for the line cooks, plating food, and recipe development/photo shoot prep. It’s been very fun, but a lot more hours than I had expected. 

The three cooks don’t speak any english (fortunately Jamie speaks perfect english and the manager/FOH guy also speaks english). However, we’ve all be able to communicate fairly well. The guys are all super goofy, yet very hard/serious workers. They attack their work with tenacity and thoroughness that you rarely see in line cooks in NYC. Their level of discipline is unbelievable - the kind of discipline you have to scream into some low level cooks in the US. Part of this might be that all men in Korea are required to do two years of military service. I remember a friend from Betony, who was from Singapore, saying how his own military experience helped him hone in his discipline and organization skills. 

I’m embarrassed because I still don’t really know their names that well - they are slightly difficult to pronounce and their names all sounds exactly the same with slight variations. Their names all sound somewhat like the english word “corner” so I constantly think they’re announcing themselves coming around a corner, when really they’re just calling out to one another.

They also make killer family meal. The youngest, an intern from a cooking school in Seoul, is responsible for most family meal prep but everyone lends a hand. He busts out these delicious giant pots of various Korean cuisine. The first day I was there we had cold-buckwheat noodles. One of the other days we had this giant rondeau of stew. All meals are paired with different types of kimchi and rice. I found out that the kimchi is not made in the restaurant - its actually more often then not provided by the cooks moms :) (adorable). 

The guys, as I said before, were very upfront to ask me my age and if I had a boyfriend. Ever since they found out my age (29) they started treating me like an older lady.... which makes me feel so self conscious and sad. In Korean, age is a huge deal, especially when it comes to women. An unmarried 30 year old Korean woman might as well be a spinster. Jamie laughed and told me that they refer to me in the formal now, essentially saying “Ms.Sophia”. They also make sure that both Jamie and I eat first, are served water first, and they try to step in and prevent me from doing the dishes. While endearing and kind of funny, it’s also annoying because it reminds me of my frustrations of being treated differently because I’m a woman in a US kitchen - to have agism layer on top of that feels insulting. The difference is that here, despite what they’re doing is some sort of discrimination, they treat me really kindly and respectfully. In the US I had to claw/scream/push/muscle my way into a position where people didn’t disrespect me or treat me differently. And even then I was labeled as rude and bossy. Even after 2 years of working at Betony, one of my fellow coworkers made a remark that set me over the edge - he said that the reason I was being so mean was because I was probably on my period. 

So I have no real reason to complain - except that I don’t want or need the “special” treatment. Koreans seem to have these ridged rules and superstitions about everything though. My favorite was when I tried to help them portion out their bread for service. The dough kept sticking to my hands and we were laughing because I was so bad at it. Then the sous came over and grabbed my hands and inspected them. They all came over and touched my hands and nodded agreeing with whatever he was saying. Jamie laughed and explained that he said that I had hot hands, which were no good for working with dough. She also said that koreans have a saying about “hot hands, cold heart.” So they all have also made that judgment on me as well - that I have a cold heart. Little do they know - I don’t just have hot hands, I have extremely sweaty hands. What do the Koreans say about that???

Another favorite moment I’ve had this past week was making gnocchi. Jamie and I were working out a dish that would pair gruyere with kimchi for the hot app dish. I suggested we do something that mimicked the Korean dish “tteok-bokki”. The gnocchi would mimic the texture of the rice cakes and be made with potatoes and gruyere. We’d also make a sauce and some rice crackling to add similar korean flavors to it. I ended up getting a recipe for gnocchi from my friend from Betony, Michael Pini. He went and traveled all over Italy this summer and spent some time learning pasta from the experts - elderly Italian women. He gave me a recipe he had been working on at home and we texted back and forth about technique and concept. 

When I went in the next day and tested it out, it turned out perfectly. And, the guys on the line were very impressed. They do this thing where - when I “pull off” some technique or make something surprising, they slow clap. So as I started making the gnocchi, they came over and slow clapped while I rolled out the dough. The sous worked in Italy for a few years after finishing culinary school, so he immediately jumped in and started shaping the gnocchi for me. It was a really wonderful moment for me. 

And then, finally, Jamie and I went to the market one day. The market happens to be pretty close by and I’m so surprised I never stumbled across it in my many meandering in this neighborhood. It was super fun to be able to go with a Korean and get to watch her interact with purveyors and pick and choose product for the kitchen. The markets in Seoul are unlike anything I’ve seen on the east coast of the US. They have crazy ingredients, and of course, an abundant and wide range of sea food. 

I think thats it for now on kitchen stuff. I also made family meal one day - I made fried chicken. I got another slow clap from the guys for that one. I’m going to write another post about things I’ve done outside the kitchen - I’ve surprisingly found time to do stuff other than work in a kitchen too. 

The most mindblowing thing for me to think about right now is that last week, my only plans were to stage at Flower Child and then maybe go on a bike ride with Inhee by the Han river. This week I’ve helped create an entire coursed out menu. 

(side note - sorry for spelling errors in all my posts, I try to proof read, but admittedly am usually too lazy to be super thorough)

[neostarstudios]

7/7/17

While the last few years of Warped Tour have, to varying degrees, seemed to course-correct the festival’s reputation for chasing the latest trends, 2017 may have hit a high water mark. While different regions had some bands jump on and off (West = Goldfinger, Midwest = The Suicide Machines, for examples), Camden’s lineup was certainly packed with a load of heavy-hitters. There was some of the expected fare for the younger crowd (Attila, New Years Day, Beartooth and personal favorite Dance Gavin Dance, among many others) but veteran acts may have outnumbered the newer ones, which is a shocking change.

Having different experiences at the show, we decided to share both JJ and Henry’s experiences here. Sometimes they’ve crossed streams, and sometimes they were at different parts of the venue.

JJ: On a side note, this was my first time seeing the event at this location as Scranton is my usual location of choice. While that location has its advantages (my familiarity with the layout, easy and free parking, short lines to get in, and just a generally laid-back experience) this location had its own appeal. After getting the layout figured out (which did take a little while), the navigation here was easier than Scranton as stages were less spaced apart.

Henry: I’ve been to Camden a number of times. In fact, the first few Warped Tours were held at the parking lot of what was Wachovia Spectrum. I think they moved it to Camden back in ’97-’98 and have been setting up here ever since.

JJ: Anyway, after figuring out where the Hard Rock Stage was, I knew it was where I was going to largely camp out. I made it into the venue in time to see Bad Cop/Bad Cop, one of the bands I was most excited to see, take the stage. They plowed through their set which had a ton of new material from their just-released album Warriors. The new material really blended nicely with their older songs and, if anything, upped the intensity. If you didn’t pick up the CD at their merch tent for only $5, it’s time to start kicking yourself. As good as they are musically, they are even better as people.

Henry: Bad Cop/ Bad Cop was a band I definitely wanted to see. I’ve become a fan ever since seeing them play with Masked Intruder on the 25th Anniversary Fat Wreck Tour. I’ve even forced a few of my friends to watch their set and they loved every second of it!

    Henry: I headed out towards the Mutant North Stage to check out Silent Planet. They’ve been a band that has played a bunch of shows here locally for years but for every chance they were in town, I’d end up missing their sets. I was happy to see that they’ve blown up over the last few years.

JJ:  I wandered inside to the Skullcandy stage to see War On Women as they shouted their message of equality and making concerts safe spaces for everyone. This was followed by Save Ferris next door at the Journey’s Right Foot Stage (the stage placement is one bone I have to pick with this venue). Anyway, SF put on a tight, energetic performance that made everyone in the crowd move even if a lot of them weren’t even alive during the band’s initial run. Now THAT is how you come back bigger than ever. This seemed to an even peppier show than when I saw them in a club earlier in the year. After they finished, I had enough time to get my bearings and plan my next move which was right back to the Hard Rock Stage for….

Municipal Waste! I had never seen them before but it was everything I hoped for with maybe 15 songs being played in 25 minutes. You really get your money’s worth with them. It was nice to see drum-deity Dave Witte in person. A recent addition on second guitar, Nick Poulos really bolstered their attack and maybe it was because I was closer to his side of the stage, but his leads really were highlights of the set. It didn’t hurt that I was able give him a thumbs up and a fist bump later.

Henry: Inside, to tried to cover Memphis May Fire. Literally ever since they’ve been appearing at Warped Tour, for some reason, they always end up playing inside. I hate shooting inside. It’s dark. Very dark.

After a few feeble attempts, I gave up and decided to try and catch The Ataris on the Hard Rock Stage.

Henry: It’s been ages since I’ve seen The Ataris live let alone listen to any releases beyond ‘So Long Astoria’ (sorry, ‘Welcome the Night’ just never did it for me.) The band had just released a new record and is selling it at Bad Cop/ Bad Cop’s tent. No doubt was I curious. One of the highlights of their set was when they finished with the Don Henley cover of “Boys of Summer” and they replaced the line “Out on the road today I saw a Black Flag sticker on a Cadillac” with “…Dickeys sticker on a Cadillac” in reference to the band that stirred up controversy earlier on the tour.

  Henry: The entire point of Warped Tour is to check out the bands that you’ve never heard of. Going with that notion in mind, I decided to run back inside to check out a Manchester, UK band that was pitched to me called Sonic Boom Six. They had an upbeat ska sound that you can totally skank to (do people even know what “skank” even means anymore!?)

JJ: After walking around some more, I came back to the Hard Rock Stage to see Sick of It All and….wow. Being familiar with their recorded material forever but never seeing them, these guys may have won the MVP award for the day. Despite being in the game over thirty years, their energy is beyond compare. They have a tight, loud, massive sound live that the early records, for all of the quality of many songs, don’t really capture. It’s hard to imaging them being able to keep that intensity up for an hour, but maybe they can or maybe they just go all out and make the most of their 25 minutes. No matter what, it was impressive and I got to shake frontman Lou Koller’s hand afterward and express my gratitude.

Henry: I’ve been a huge Sick of it All fan ever since I picked up a copy of ‘Scratch the surface.’ It’s weird to think that I was 13yrs old when I bought that. But music has been a rather huge part of my life. The last time I saw them live was literally 20yrs ago at Warped Tour 1997.

Henry: While walking around, I noticed my friend Sean up on the Full Sail University Stage with Courage My Love. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been clueless to the fact that I’ve been conversing with Mercedes Arn-Horn off and on in FB comment threads for a while now. I’ve always just figured she was a friend-of-a-friend amongst my other music industry friends. It was actually rather cathartic to see her on stage performing with her band since I only knew her from chat threads.

JJ: I ventured over to the Journey’s Left Foot Stage (see what I mean about the layout?!) to see CKY. They are local favorites and the entire Margera family came out to introduce the band. After watching them on TV for years, it was a little bit of a thrill. Bam even came out late in the set to sing a G.G. Allen song. The real story is how the band has recalibrated with the departure of frontman Deron Miller. It’s Chad Ginsberg’s voice at the forefront and…the approach is different. Instead of Deron’s smooth croon, Chad has the vocal approach of a stoner-rock dude who just rode into town and is looking for a fight. After a few spins, the new album The Phoenix is a short and sweet tour of a lot of what the band does just with a slightly different approach. They only played one track off of that “Replaceable” but mostly stuck to tracks from Vol. 1 and Infiltrate. Destroy. Rebuild. Everything was enjoyable and the crowd was into it but the performance seemed a little listless. The band and their layers of sounds are probably best-suited to an intimate club.

Henry: I killed a little bit of time right after CYK. I needed to reorganize myself after all the running around I’ve done. I managed to catch up with a few tour friends along the way. Most were complaining about their lack of sleep (something I knew too well after my short stint a few years back). I caught New Years Day‘s performance over at the Journey’s Left Foot Stage. It’s funny. I can recall a time before they became a household name, when the band would hang out in the press area simply out of boredom and would sit-in during interviews.

JJ: More wandering ensued before circling back to the Hard Rock Stage for the Adolescents. Even though they’ve been at it longer than I have been alive and influenced even the mighty Bad Religion, they were still sharp live. Sure, it’s basically Tony and Steve bolstered by some younger musicians, but those two were always the engine of the band anyway. They had a great new album last year (Manifest Density) and showed that they can keep going as long as they want.

Henry: The Adolescents were one of those bands I didn’t bother photographing. I just wanted to be able to stand back and enjoy their set. I think the only song any of the younger crowds recognized was “Amoeba” made famous by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 game that we all obsessed over.

Henry: Back inside, one of the acts I was looking very forward to was William Control. I’ve seen him perform a number of times and in different configurations. Starting off with “Monster” and “Kiss the Girl”, he addressed the crowd “I know a band with synths is probably the last thing you’d expect to see here today at Warped Tour. But think of us as a bit of repreive. First we’re going to romance you, and then when Beartooth comes out after us, they’re going to fuck you all in the ass!” According to a few old-school Warped attendees, William Control was one of the new acts that they saw and fell in love with. Also worth mentioning was that ‘Revelations: The Red EP’ just came out today and is available at their merch tent for only $5 and is worth every penny!

Unfortunately, I had to run as the band was starting to launch into “Beautiful Monster” as blessthefall was about to start at the other end of the venue.

Henry: After fighting my way through hordes of Warped attendees, I finally made my way to the Mutant North Stage. The sun was starting to set and “golden hour” was upon us. As the band took the stage, frontman Beau Bokan sprayed the crowd with a bottle of Monster’s Mutant soda. I managed to dodge most of the spray but my camera wasn’t so lucky.

JJ: After this, I made my way over to the Mutant South stage to catch a little of Silverstein’s set. They had gotten a shipment of their new album Dead Reflection in a week early (it was officially released on July 14th) and were selling it at their merch tent. Don’t tell anyone. A few songs in, Beefcake The Mighty “killed” Billy Hamilton and took over on bass for a few songs. I wasn’t able to stick around long because….

Strung Out took the stage at the Hard Rock Stage! I’ve been crossing paths with them a lot over the last few years and as always, good stuff. Vocalist Jason Cruz’s voice sounded stronger than it had the last few times I had seen them and they can really do no wrong in my book.

Henry: By the time Silverstein came on, I was beat. I knew JJ had to run to catch Strung Out but he totally miss the greatest part of the set when GWAR’s Beefcake The Mighty “killed” Billy Hamilton and took over bass for “Retrograde” and “Still Dreaming.”

JJ: It was at this point in the day with clouds threatening and giving way to sun for so many hours before, that the rain finally delivered on its threat. A drizzle became a full downpour with gusty winds creating havoc as I tried in vain to put on my poncho. If it was just me, I wouldn’t have minded, but I had signed merch with me and was already down a backpack and pair of earplugs that evening. It was with a heavy heart that I had to miss the band’s last song as I ran inside for shelter to dry myself and assess the damage. Once solving this and realizing my poncho was torn and therefore mostly useless, I looked out to see the rain even heavier than before. It must have been an experience for those at the Mutant Stages who saw Hatebreed and GWAR through that.

Henry: I was caught in the rain during Hatebreed and GWAR. I tried to photograph Hatebreed’s set but by the time they took the stage, the clouds were overhead and it looked like it was night to my left, and still daylight to my right. I watched as production staff tried to keep the stage together as strong gusts of wind kept knocking over banners and they hastily tried to cover up speakers before the onslaught that we were about to receive.

JJ: I waited it out inside at the Skullcandy Stage again and was happy to realize this detour brought me right to the Street Dogs, one of the bands I wanted to see anyway. They burned through some familiar numbers including a cover of Joe Strummer’s “Coma Girl”. The crowd in front of their stage which included me, was modest but frontman Mike McColgan worked hard to win everyone over. In fact, he worked so hard, he spent just as much time if not more so in front of the crowd waiting in front of the Journey’s Right Foot Stage next door. They may have been there for Never Shout Never but they got a healthy dose of Street Dogs and I could see a lot of people in that crowd also really into it.

After the Street Dogs closed up shop, I headed back outside one last time to happily see the rain had ended. I took the walk back to the Hard Rock Stage one final time and was able to see all of Anti Flag.

There was something appropriate about them closing things out, especially given the state of the world.

Henry: I had to make a choice. Go see Anti-Flag, or stay and see GWAR. I decided to stay and watch GWAR. Words just aren’t enough to describe their clash of comedy theater/ rock show. It’s one that everyone has to experience first-hand to comprehend it. Like if I were to say to someone that I had a great time getting blasted in the face by Blothar’s four penis’s, I’m pretty sure I’d be met with confusion and disgust. Still worth it!

JJ: All in all, it was an odd experience for me not being consumed by press and only able to get a sampling of performances. This is the exact experience a normal Warped Concert-goer would have and while different, was nearly equally enjoyable. I had already interviewed most of the bands I was there to see (in some cases multiple times) anyway, so with a few elusive exceptions, I was fairly up to date with a lot of them, anyway.

Henry: It was a marathon for me to try and cover as many acts as possible. But overall I was happy to see fans young and old showing up and actually having a good time together. I watched as men in their late-40’s/ early-50’s throwdown in a circle pit with kids half their age during Sick of it All. I saw concert goers in their mid-30’s develop a new love for new acts. Acts that they’d never be exposed to on their own accord if it weren’t for what this tour was built on: comradery and unity. I saw numerous collaborations on stage that made me scratch my head (Big D and the Kids Table with American Authors, GWAR and Silverstein were the two big ones that came to mind) but they’ve made it all work.

JJ: Let’s also applaud the tour itself as it managed to strike an impressive balance of old and new which should make it a viable, relevant festival for even more years to come.

Written by: JJ Ellis and Henry Chung Photos by: the unstoppable Henry Chung

    Warped Tour 7/7/17 While the last few years of Warped Tour have, to varying degrees, seemed to course-correct the festival's reputation for chasing the latest trends, 2017 may have hit a high water mark.