#David Lean - A Self Portrait

[haverwood]

David Lean: A Self Portrait Thomas Craven USA, 1971 ★★★ I was gonna say something about these old-timers' big ears and magnificently bushy eyebrows but kinda lost my train of thought there…

[justforbooks]

How Deborah Levy can change your life

From her shimmering novels to her ‘living autobiographies’, Deborah Levy’s work inspires a devotion few literary authors ever achieve

Last August, the author Deborah Levy began to sit for her portrait. The starting point was a selfie – eyes penetrating, lips sensuous, head topped by a tower of chestnut hair. The artist, her friend Paul Heber-Percy, used Photoshop, then a pencil and tracing paper, to reverse and multiply the image of her face, until he had a drawing, neatly laid out on a grid, that satisfied him.

Then it was time to paint. He liked to work in the mornings, in hour-long bursts, in his tiny attic studio. When Levy came for sittings, he’d bring the painting down to the dining room, and the two of them would drink tea or wine, and talk. Not that these were sittings in the traditional sense, but “times I could observe her without feeling self-conscious”, he said.

Sometimes they’d discuss Levy’s new novel, August Blue, which she was finishing; but mostly it was “everyday things – friends, the news, exchanging recipes, how to unblock a sink”, said Levy. But, Heber-Percy said, nothing about these conversations was really everyday. She is the sort of person who makes the mundane remarkable. Even “going down to the bakery with her to get a baguette becomes a slightly magical thing”, says her friend the novelist Tash Aw. When her friends talk about her, they say things like this: “she is an event”, “she is a personage”, “she is a whole world”. People often remember the first time they met her. For Kate Bland, an audio producer, it was at a party at a Shoreditch warehouse. Levy was sitting on a high windowsill; Bland was leaning on it. The author’s rich, slightly breathy voice was coming over Bland’s shoulder. Talk unwound in a sequence of dazzling vignettes. “It seemed that there was a necessary theatricality: we had to hoist ourselves out of the ordinariness of chat and have a conversation that was going to be memorable,” she recalled. “I was quite thrilled by it.”

At the time of that party, in 2008, Levy was 49. Her life had contained one immense dislocation: when she was nine, her family emigrated from South Africa to the UK, after her father had spent three years as a political prisoner. After school at a London comprehensive, Levy took a theatre degree at the pioneering, avant-garde Dartington College of the Arts in Devon, and first forged a path as a playwright. Her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, was published in 1989, the year she turned 30. Twenty years on, at the time of the Shoreditch party, she wasn’t famous, and hadn’t sold more than a modest number of books, though she carried herself as if she had. She was teaching, adapting Colette and Carol Shields for the radio, raising two daughters, and living with her husband, playwright David Gale, in a semi-detached house off Holloway Road in north London. She was working on a novel, her first since 1996. Her previous books were out of print.

Four years later, Levy’s life was transformed. Her novel, Swimming Home – a sun-drenched story about a family holiday on the French Riviera, beneath whose glinting surface runs a Freudian riptide of wartime trauma – was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker prize. That sent sales flying. At the same time, her marriage fell apart. “By the time I went to the Booker dinner in December I knew I would be moving house and I was packing up,” she recalled. “It was very turbulent and very painful.”

The following year, she published Things I Don’t Want to Know, the first in a trilogy of what she calls “living autobiographies”, to convey their selective, fictive nature. Over the next few years, she alternated two more novels, Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, with two more volumes of living autobiography, which spoke of how, after her marriage ended, she recomposed a life for herself and her daughters in her 50s, outside the old patriarchal structures. All of these books, flew out of her “like a cork coming out of a bottle”.

Levy’s novels are popular and critically acclaimed. But it is with the living autobiographies that her reputation has transcended the literary. At events, readers tell Levy that her books make them feel less lonely, or ask her what to do about a life crisis. (One can’t quite imagine readers doing this with, say, Rachel Cusk, who also anatomises female experience, but in a somewhat chillier style.) At one of Levy’s online readings during the Covid pandemic, an audience member posted in the chat: “I’m 41 with two kids and sometimes I don’t feel I’m at home at all … Did it work for you, coming out of an unhappy marriage?” Levy answered: “It did work for me. You have to make another sort of life and gather your friends and supporters to your table” – which is pretty much the story of the second and third of her living autobiographies, The Cost of Living and Real Estate.

Levy’s writing has a very particular quality: it seems to infiltrate the mind. You absorb her way of seeing and start to perceive the world in Levy-ish ways. In her stories, seemingly trivial moments take on political force: an encounter with a hairdresser in The Cost of Living becomes a story about the camaraderie of women and what they reveal to each other; a scene about sharing a table on the Eurostar becomes about how men, literally and figuratively, fail to make space for younger women. In the new novel, August Blue, the narrator, having been insulted by a young man in a cafe, tells us, “I think he was expecting me to respond, to reply in some way, but I didn’t care about him or his problems.” I’ve used that in my own life more than once, since first reading it. The books become “almost a guide to life”, said Gaby Wood, director of the Booker Foundation. “She trains you to become your best self.”

Part of the appeal of Levy’s writing is that it is shot through with unpatronising sympathy towards younger women – both the hesitant, tough young female characters who populate her novels, and those who appear in her living autobiographies, often negotiating sticky situations with older, entitled men. In Real Estate, there is a passage in which she describes her joy in cooking for her daughters’ friends: “I liked their appetite – yes, for the dish prepared, but for life itself. I wanted them to find strength for all they had to do in the world and for all the world would throw at them.” She is not just talking about her daughters’ friends. Levy is also in the business of feeding and strengthening her readers. And they feel it.

The plays and the novels Levy wrote in her 20s and 30s are collage-like, gravelly, spiky, and dense, marinated in the eastern European avant-garde influences she absorbed at college. She had a talent for epigrammatic, slightly surreal sentences. “I once heard a man howl just like a wolf except he was standing in a phone box in Streatham,” says a character in her first novel. But the work had not yet acquired the razored-away, spare quality that has given the later work such airiness, such ripple and flow, nor was there the emotional force with which readers identify so strongly.

It was in the late 2000s that she forged the style that transformed her reputation. She was working at the Royal College of Art at the time. Two days a week, she’d take the tube from the fumes of Holloway Road to green South Kensington. She was a tutor in the animation department, helping students learn to write and construct narrative. “It was a potent time,” she said. Her colleagues at the Royal College of Art were inspiring; so were her students. At nights, while her young daughters slept, she was writing Swimming Home. “I was somehow living closer to my own emotions and understood that I might be able to put them to work in my book.” She had always felt that emotion was frowned upon by her avant-garde art “family”, but “from Swimming Home onwards, I decided to totally up-end that”. Charging the story with feeling changed her writing – and her relationship with readers. “I knew I was on to something, and it rocked me,” she recalled. “There were times when I’d stop writing and I’d come down to cook my daughters spaghetti in the evening. There was a sort of cool place under the steps, and I was so on fire, I would just stand there and cool down.”

What Levy found in her writing was a way of giving her story a shimmering, attractive surface, while allowing her preoccupations with literary theory, myth and psychoanalysis to occupy its murkier depths. The novel can be taken as “a kind of holiday novel gone wrong”, she said – and it has been slipped into many a suitcase as a beach or poolside read. “I’m happy if the surface is read. Because everything else is there to be found. And I’m working hard for my readers to find it. But I don’t look down on readers who don’t. I think, ‘Something will come through.’” The “something” might include the Freudian desire and death-wish that suffuses the novel; its peculiar linked imagery of sugar mice and rats; above all the immense treacherous undertow of history – of the Holocaust, of 20th-century suffering and wars – that Levy sketches into the story with almost imperceptible strokes.

But Swimming Home was rejected by every major publisher it was sent to. Levy, in all her certainty that it was good, was devastated. The years following the financial crisis of 2008 were inhospitable to a midlist novelist who hadn’t been in print for a while. The publishing industry was in trouble; the powerful new wave of feminism of the 2010s was a whisper rather than a roar; and the kind of spare, experimental books by women that would come to define recent literary trends, such as Cusk’s auto-fictional Outline trilogy, or Annie Ernaux’s intimate unfurling of memory, or Elena Ferrante’s revelatory novels on female friendship, had yet to appear in Britain. At the time, she said, “your book was either going to sell or it wasn’t going to sell, and when they said it was ‘too literary’, they meant it wasn’t going to sell”.

Then, in summer 2009, something changed. A friend of Levy’s, the late Jules Wright, who ran an arts centre in east London, read the manuscript. She was organising a show on photographer Dean Rogers, who documented the sites of car crashes that had killed cultural heroes – the spot, for example, where Marc Bolan died. Swimming Home begins with a scene in which Kitty Finch, a young woman with a death wish, perilously drives an older poet, with whom she believes she has a telepathic connection, along a winding mountain road. Wright decided to have the first two pages of the book printed large and installed at the beginning of the exhibition. Not long after the opening, though, she called Levy and bluntly announced she was removing them. It was a disaster, she said – people were clogging the entrance as they stopped to read the text. “It was,” Levy said, “the first spark: that those two pages of this much-declined book were gathering a crowd around them.”

Eventually the novel did find its publisher, a tiny new press called And Other Stories. The literary translator Sophie Lewis was editor there. Levy’s pitch, remarkably given all the rejections, was supremely confident. “Deborah said: ‘This is the tightest book I’ve ever written, and it’s going to be a bestseller,’” Lewis remembered.

In autumn 2011, Levy’s friend Charlotte Schepke, who runs Large Glass gallery in London, hosted the launch party. They decided to project The Swimmer, the 1968 Burt Lancaster film, on to the wall. On the night, to Schepke’s immense surprise, “you couldn’t stand – the place was absolutely packed. It was rammed.” Her interesting new friend, who had written witty labels for the opening show at her small gallery earlier that year, was suddenly making waves. It was almost, said Schepke, “as if she’d done this grand thing of claiming to be an author – and then, suddenly, she really was an author”.

In her living autobiographies, Levy frequently refers to her rented shed, a writing space in a friend’s garden, on whose roof the apples used to fall in autumn with a dull thunk. These days, as she moves deeper into her 60s, the shed has been replaced by an attic in Paris, a few blocks behind the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, near the Seine. On a limpid blue February day, she had pinned a branch of yellow mimosa to her front door. Its flowering marked, she said, the “end of gloomy, rat-grey January”.

The studio was as near to the platonic ideal of a Paris garret as you could imagine: reached by a winding stair through a courtyard, and with low ceilings and wooden beams. Kilim rugs were scattered on the floor, and her bed was covered in a fluffy sheepskin throw. There was a stash of red wine in the fireplace. Everything about the studio radiated her delight in objects and food and pleasure. If you met the author and saw the studio before you read the work, you might expect something more excessive and elaborate than the stripped-down, translucent prose she produces.

She poured coffee from a moka pot and passed me a dish heaped with croissants from her local boulangerie, La Maison D’Isabelle; pastries from the same shop turn up in the new novel. Objects from her real world often slip into her fiction. There was a biography of Isadora Duncan face-out on a shelf, perhaps the same book about the dancer she has her character Elsa read in August Blue. On a table stood a bowl of pearl necklaces, and at her throat were pearls – like the pearl necklace she has her beautiful, careless character Saul wear in her novel, The Man Who Saw Everything.

Things in her stories often hold the kind of powerful significance that Freud attaches to artefacts in dreams – such as the pool in Swimming Home, which, at its most basic, Levy pointed out, is a rectangular hole in the ground, and thus also metaphorically a grave. She loves the surrealists. The turning point of Hot Milk is the moment when her narrator, Sofia, discovers boldness through making bloody handprints on the kitchen wall of a man who has been tormenting his dog – a scene borrowed from a story told about the artist Leonora Carrington who, letting herself into the apartment of her prospective lover Luis Buñuel, smeared menstrual blood over his pristine white walls.

Motifs slip between books, too; in this she has something in common with a visual artist building a subtly interconnected body of work. The title August Blue, for example, is taken from the colour of the thread that, in Hot Milk, one character Ingrid uses to embroider Sofia’s name into a shirt. Horses, in particular, gallop through Levy’s work – from the tiny horse-shaped buttons that, in Real Estate, she kept from her late stepmother’s button box, to the moment Ingrid appears in the desert landscape on horseback, like a bellicose goddess, in the myth-infused Hot Milk. The whole of August Blue hangs on striking images of horses: it begins with her character, the pianist Elsa, watching jealously as a woman she thinks might be her doppelganger buys a pair of mechanical dancing horses in an Athens flea market.

Levy laughed when I asked her about her equine enthusiasms. “That’s a case for Dr Freud!” she said. She ponders, in Real Estate, what it is to be a woman “on your high horse”. Sometimes, she writes, you might find yourself incapable of controlling your high horse; at other times, people are all too eager to to pull you off it. She imagines a friend riding her high horse “down the North Circular to repair her smashed screen at Mr Cellfone”. When I think of Levy’s horses, I also think of her adoration of her small fleet of e-bikes, now famous from her living autobiographies, which she stables by her London flat and lends to friends when they visit; she bought her first when she moved out of her marriage and into her new life. When they start up with a little equine surge of power, she told me, “it’s hard not to whoop every time”.

When Levy was a small child in South Africa, and her father, Norman Levy, was imprisoned for his anti-apartheid activism, she started to speak so quietly that her voice became barely audible. What saved her from this state of virtual silence was her imagination: the dawning understanding that she could write other realities. “It was a question,” Levy told me, “of finding avatars.” The avatar she created for her nine-year-old self was a cat with wondrous powers of flight – perhaps unconsciously imagining freedom for her father, as well as liberation for herself. (In Real Estate, The Flying Cat is the name she gives to the ferry that brings her daughters to her for a holiday on a Greek island.) The characters in her fiction are still her avatars. “I’m in every one of them,” she said, “including the cats and including the horses.”

For a long time, in adulthood, she resisted writing or even talking about South Africa. The difficulties of her family felt irrelevant, when set against the struggles of black South Africans. But since she had decided to base the structure of Things I Don’t Want to Know on George Orwell’s headings in his essay Why I Write – one of which is “historical impulse” – she found herself obliged to tackle those repressed memories. Using a child’s eye view, she said, “I tried to convey, without using the old language of ‘the bloodstained regime of apartheid’, what it’s like to be told that you’re supposed to respect adults, while there are white adults who are clearly doing very cruel things to children of colour my age.”

Her mother, Philippa, through her husband’s imprisonment, coped alone, earning a living through a succession of secretarial jobs. Levy remembers her as capable and glamorous. “I loved the way she cooked, with her cigarette holder, and the way that she’d dance a bit to the record she’d put on when she came back from work.”

When Levy’s father was released in 1968, he was banned from working, and the family – Levy has an elder half-brother from her mother’s first marriage, as well as a younger brother and sister – had little option but to emigrate. Her father found work lecturing at Middlesex University, among other places. Money was tight. Her parents’ marriage ended in 1974.

After the “blue sky, and the bone-white grass of the garden” in Johannesburg, arriving in London felt “as if someone had pulled the plug out”. But despite England’s greyness, she loved it. She made, for the first time, proper friends. “I don’t have that narrative of exile, of wanting to return to the place that you left”. She adored the way people spoke, and she still delights in English turns of phrase: “Hello pet, hello lamb, hello duck.” As for her accent, “I had to lose it very quickly in the playground not to be beaten up.”

She often plucks her characters out of their familiar environments, partly in order to see their psychological foibles magnified on foreign shores. (She herself likes very much to be in a hot country, in southern Spain or a Greek island, swimming in the sea.) Sometimes these characters, like her, have been swept on the tides of 20th-century history – like the English poet Joe in Swimming Home, who is really Jozef, smuggled out of Łódź in 1943; or Lapinski in Beautiful Mutants, whose mother was “the ice-skating champion of Moscow”. Levy recalled of an interview in the news that moved her recently: it was with a Ukrainian woman from Kherson who had been lying in bed, thinking, when she was blown into her kitchen by a Russian shell. “Those were her words: ‘I was lying in bed, thinking,’” said Levy. “I do not take a place of calm, a place that is agreeable to think in, for granted.” Levy’s senses are finely tuned to the fragility of things.

After her A-levels, in the summer of 1978, she would walk past the Gate cinema in Notting Hill, timidly noting the thrilling, eccentrically dressed people who hung out there. One day, she saw an ad in the Evening Standard for front-of-house staff. For the interview, she put on a pair of big, gold platform wedges; as she left the house, her mother yelled, “‘You’ll never get a job dressed like that.’” Those gold wedges are the ancestors of the shoes that have carried her female characters on to victory, or else to triumphant defeat: the silver gladiator sandals that Ingrid, like the goddess Athena, straps high up her calves in Hot Milk; the sage-green Parisian tap shoes that get her into a scrape in Real Estate; the brothel creepers that, to her younger self, “marked me out for a meaningful life”; and the “scuffed brown leather shoes with high snakeskin heels” that we meet on page three of August Blue.

She got the job at the Gate. Her new colleagues were “either at drama school or off to university, and all way cooler than me. I was a nerdy writer” – of poetry, at the time – “with a great love of Bowie.” The cinema was screening Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, “and he would come in, and he was curious and charismatic and friendly and cultured and he didn’t feel above talking to this 18-year-old making the popcorn, tearing the tickets and scooping the ice cream”. It was Jarman who told her she should apply not to university but to Dartington, where she’d learn about improvisation and dance and avant-garde theatre and art.

It was at this time, not having the kind of parents who dragged her round galleries at weekends, that she encountered contemporary art for the first time. It was an exhibition of the work of Joseph Beuys. She remembers, a grand piano muffled and covered with cloth marked with a cross; other objects made of gold leaf; dried plants tacked to the wall; things scribbled in pencil. “I remember almost not being able to breathe. And there was this voice inside my head, saying, ‘This is it. This is it.’ And I had no idea what it was.”

The Cost of Living opens with the narrator witnessing an encounter between a young woman and an older man in a bar in Colombia. The man, whom Levy calls “the Big Silver”, invites the young woman to his table. After she tells him a strange story about a perilous diving expedition, he remarks that she talks a lot, and carelessly knocks her book off the table. Levy writes: “It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character.” It is a very Levy-ish story, in its wry observation of dynamics between men and women, and with its implicit call to arms to women who have, as the critic Dwight Garner has put it, “come to sense they’re not locked into their lives and stories”.

Levy herself is without doubt a major character – and is intent on expanding the role. She has an immense appetite “for experiencing the strange dimensions of living and the absolutely practical dimensions”, she said. We were sitting, at the time, outside a cafe near the Panthéon in Paris after a good lunch, and Levy was smoking a roll-up. “I’m not endlessly open to experience. I am easily bored and impatient. I want to keep things moving, keep thought moving. I want to make something new of the old story. How do you make the novel as complicated as life, as interesting as life? That’s what I want to do.”

She has many plans. She wants to adapt her two most recent novels for the screen. (Swimming Home and Hot Milk are in other scriptwriters’ hands.) She knows exactly, how the opening scene of August Blue will go, and she has the perfect idea of how to tackle the temporal complexities of The Man Who Saw Everything, which slips, through its main character’s fractured consciousness, between the Berlin of 1988 and the London of 2016. In The Cost of Living, Levy fantasises about living in California and writing scripts by her pool. When I teased her lightly about the unlikelihood of this, she said, “You never know. I just might be there in my swimming costume at 80, writing films. I’d have a river now – with a little rowing boat tied to the jetty, and I’d smoke, drink coffee and write my scripts, I think probably in France.”

In the meantime, now that her daughters are in their 20s, she comes from her London flat to work in her Paris studio for weeks at a time. She is taking French lessons, though presently her literary enthusiasms outstrip her linguistic ability. “I say, ‘Shall we translate this poem of Apollinaire together?’ and my teacher says, ‘I think today, Deborah, we will try to master être and avoir.’” Her most natural creative affinities are in fact French – Godard, Duras – rather than British. To her evident delight, Levy has won one of France’s most important literary awards, the Prix Femina Étranger. She has not yet won a major prize in Britain, despite multiple short listings, perhaps because British prizes tend to favour large, self-sufficient, discrete slabs of fiction.

She begins her days early, with a walk by the Seine. After work there might be an exhibition, or dinner – which she might depart, more than one friend told me, with sudden decision, announcing that she is back off to work. She looked abashed when I mentioned this habit, worried she might appear rude to her friends. “I’m immensely sociable and then I really need to be on my own. I do like to write after a dinner party,” she said. (She herself loves to cook – “delicious mountains of cream and garlic, and the kitchen is like a bomb site,” Charlotte Schepke said, “but it’s like being in the finest restaurant. Her presence makes it an occasion”.)

At the moment, in a sharp change of gear, she is researching a biography of the young Gertrude Stein, to be titled Mama of Dada. She is concentrating on the writer’s early training under psychologist William James, brother of the novelist Henry. Levy wants to think about how this academically brilliant American – who’d be late for her medical lectures because her bustled skirts were weighted down by horsehair-stuffed hems – moved to Paris, ditched the corset and became the pioneering modernist who dressed in monk-like robes and filled her house with Picassos.

It’s a characteristic way for Levy to build character. But while the books are rooted in the physical, they also make room for the uncanny and the unexplained, for the sudden intrusion into a person’s consciousness of unwelcome memories or dark imaginings. “It would be very sad to have all the possibilities of the novel, this hot-air balloon, but to say, ‘I only write social realism and the hot-air balloon must never leave the ground,’” she said. “That’s not how people’s minds work: people have very strange dreams, and thoughts, and daydreams, and associations.” She is, she said, very careful not to let her hot-air balloon float away into the clouds of fantasmagoria. It is all in the balance and control.

What also earths Levy’s work is her wit. “She is so amused, diverted and delighted by life,” said the actor Tilda Swinton, who is a fan. Her jokes, often wryly commenting on her own failings, make for a kind of intimacy, even complicity – “the kind of complicity that many of us can only relate to the dry land of childhood companionship”, said Swinton. Levy’s women, especially the “I” of the living autobiographies, fail as well as succeed; they have good days and bad. They are neither “feisty” and “gutsy” – those tiresome cliches – nor are they self-saboteurs, who put themselves down to ingratiate themselves with the reader. They are both real and offer an example of how to live well. When Levy was finding a way to write her living autobiographies, she searched for a voice that “was immensely powerful, immensely vulnerable; immensely eloquent and totally inarticulate. Because that’s all of us.”

In March, I went back to Paul Heber-Percy’s house to see her portrait finished. It renders Levy’s face in triplicate, as if seen through a kaleidoscope, and her hair, piled on her head, soars upwards like Medusa’s snaky locks, dissolving into abstract, Rorschach-like patterns and repetitions. It gave the impression of a presence with many selves, in constant movement of thought. In the portrait, Levy has five large, wide-open, scrutinising eyes; but one of her tripled faces disappears into the world outside the frame, and the sixth eye is unseen.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[pynkhues]

I've loved that scene with the twins, i'm glad i'm not the only one who felt some sexual tension between the brothers and Lestat lol. I don't know if it was because Lestat was really hungry and just wanted to eat them or was actually attracted to them but there was a vibe- and they totally were into him too lol. (Someone needs to write a fic when Louis changes his mind and instead they have foursome with good Matthew and Mark hahaha).

But yeah, i agree we can't rely on the books wrt the types of relationship they will have. Book Lestat definitely was not "a monogamist at heart" as Sam called him. One of his more endearning traits was his ability to love so intensely and falling in love with everyone and everything. The fact that he loved David and Armand didn't take anything from his love for Louis. I think he genuinely loved them just as much-even if in a different way. Imo, all the book vampires are capable of the true polyamory in a way that very few humans are capable of practicing. Adding a sexual element change a lot about these characters and their dynamics.

I think the show vampires are way more human than the book ones: they can eat, smoke and have sex so it makes sense that they'd be less forgiving and more prone to jealousy. I admit that i'm a little disappointed that the show seems to downplay every other relationship to prop up loustat (they did it with loumand and i'm sure it'll be the same with lesmand and nickstat) but Rolin wanted to base the whole show on the gothic romance between two vampires and it is what it is. So yeah, I don't expect Lestat to have any other love interests besides Louis. I also don't think Louis will stay single for as long as everyone think haha.

(x)

Oh, I think he was definitely attracted to them, and I think the show was also kind of using it as a bit of a tease / set-up to the future incest of the show too - same with Armand's threesome with the father-and-son within the coven. It's just a neat little detail to wink to where we're going. I also think the Mardi Gras Ball was always planned as a night of all out depravity to farewell New Orleans, so leaning into the sexuality / carnality of feeding ahead of - - y'know - - all the murders, haha, makes sense to me.

And yeah, I agree about the books having more of a genuine sense of polyamory to them, and other relationships being downplayed (although I think Nicki might not be, if for no other reason than the fact that he's dead and marks no threat to Lestat and Louis' love story). It's an interesting thing in a lot of ways, because so much of the Rue Royale era in the books is Louis still being so close to his human life and Lestat trying to live one on Marius' instruction after never really having gotten to live one in his mortality. It lends itself to a more quote-unquote 'traditional' romance and family unit with Claudia, even if that family wasn't actually traditional at all between Louis and Lestat both being men, and then the incest between Louis and Claudia. It kind of goes back to the perversion of the family unit as a vital part of both gothic horror and the Milton's Satan character archetype that I've talked about before.

In that sense though, the books move further and further away from 'traditional' romance and relationships as the characters are moved further and further away from their humanity. They transcend a human existence, and a need for human ideologies, and honestly, I just don't think that's a thread that Rolin and the writers are super interested in, at least not in the way the books were? In fact, so far, I think what the writers seem to be most interested in is how you do find the human within the monster, and a lot of that seems to be about grounding them in relationships, not just to one another but to places and things. It's why Louis' return to New Orleans resonates so much, as well as his hanging of Paul's portrait and Claudia's dress - it's that reconnection to his own humanity and self that Louis denies himself in his isolation in Dubai.

It's a departure from the book in a lot of ways, and it's a tricky one because I think we gain as much as we lose as viewers? Like we are going to miss out on things like the polyamory and exploration of different romantic relationships, but I think we're also going to get an enriched exploration of who these characters are in this version of the story and as a result a really passionate, heightened gothic love story. Like God, look at the difference already between book Louis and the show's Louis, but yeah, I totally get being disappointed too - there's definitely parts of me that are, even though I'm overall pretty content with the changes if not outright happy. It's the nature, I think, of a good adaptation.

[thenwethrowitonthefire]

hello. here a unhinged but fun ask. if you could give these characters below a song(or songs. no limit of course) what song would it be?

Lilith Clawthorne

Shelley Byron

Mary wardwell

(and just to make sure I am being clear the songs can be anything. it can be a song you think character would enjoy or relate, can be a song you feel describe the character or part of their arc)

*and take your time if you need to :)

Hi! I love that you said "or songs", because of course I am *not* going to be able to just go with one song each 🌞 I am obviously going to be shoving a lot of odd little songs in your face :> I'll put one song each to start with, and I'll write & link more below the cut. (It's going to be quite a lot.)

Lilith Clawthorne (aka Bad Girl Historian):

Shelley Byron:

Mary Wardwell:

Lilith Clawthorne: I once saw someone headcanon Lilith as someone who would enjoy metal, and I *agree*! My knowledge of metal isn't very extensive though so I can't list a lot of that. I think she might also enjoy steampunk music (see the song at the top, bad girl historian), (emo-leaning) rock music, dramatic classical music and anything with a poetic quality. (...I can see her having a phase of going to a poetry nights in some dark basement where everyone wears a black beret.) She probably listens to some silly stuff here and there too but nobody better call anything she listens to silly, she's not ready for that... 😂

Songs: if we pretend we don't know anything about Star Wars I feel like The Imperial March matches her vibe quite well for when she was still a respected coven head. I think Surface Pressure (from Encanto) and Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat are lyrically good matches for her perfectionism, her constantly having to prove herself, and never really being seen or appreciated for all she can do and who she is. I think she might enjoy listening to Nemo (by Nightwish) and Corpo-Mente. Final one: Nemuro Memorial Hall from the Utena soundtrack. It's very "prissy little Lilith", I love this track very much. (I'll be throwing in a track from Utena for all 3 of them because that soundtrack is amazing and very varied. More people should know about that.)

Shelley Byron: I expect Shelley would have a very interesting music taste. I think she'd enjoy cabaret music, Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill, experimental music (all sorts, and I think she herself would also enjoy messing around with synths and generating music from organic material like for example hooking up different kinds of plants/mushrooms to a synth to see how they'd sound), new wave, perhaps also some jazz. She'd definitely enjoy lyrics with a poetic quality, too, music drenched in deep feelings.

Songs: I listed a David Sylvian song and I could list so many more David Sylvian songs for Shelley, I think she might really enjoy his work. (Or maybe it's just me who's the big fan of David Sylvian, which I obviously am. Listing songs for characters you relate to is of course a self portrait in a way.) So here's another one by Sylvian: I Should Not Dare. (The lyrics are a poem by Virginia Woolf, geesh the emotional load.) Here's one for a sisterhood silent film: Black And White Rag (which was written by Winifred Atwell). The next ones are songs that make me think of the safe space that she's built for herself and others who had to seek refuge for their being different, I haven't double checked the lyrics for full accuracy but the vibe is certainty there. Disenchanted by The Communards and Confide In Me by Kylie Minogue. I could list quite a few songs that would be a good fit for "Shelley The Absolute Charmer" but that would make me personally feel profoundly awkward, so I'll stick with listing just the one Correspondents song. I think early Correspondents overall is a good match, see for yourself: Washington Square. (*chuckles* that song is actually probably too forward 🤣 ... This specific song may not be the right choice. Oh well.) Next up: Shelley getting her heart broken. Love Will Tear Us Apart by Evelyn Evelyn (though the original is great too, I think she might like Evelyn Evelyn for its very much an art project - a bit dark, but still) and Why Did You Make Me Care? by Sparks. (If she's at some point feeling angry or apathetic enough within being heartbroken to destroy the salon over it somewhat... Tearing The Place Apart by Sparks.) I've already told you about Klaus Nomi in the past, but Klaus Nomi - After The Fall (either for surviving the war or in an "After The Eternal Flagellation" kind of way). (I'm going to put this one below just because it's such an amazing song.) I also think Shelley would enjoy Laurie Anderson's work, especially the Big Science album. Some more new wave she might enjoy (not very original choices): Visage - Fade To Grey, and Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams. And here's my choice from Utena: Radio Waves.

Mary Wardwell: I think I would have the least in common with Mary when it comes to music. Obviously she may be surprising with her music taste (as she usually is surprising), but I expect she enjoys different music from the 30's to 70's than I do, or it's music I may not know. (Bad Moon Rising which she was jamming to in the car in the first episode isn't to my taste, but it does show she enjoys music and enjoys music of the time, too.) I do think she'd like the song I put before the cut, and that might be a song we have in common. I expect to have a different taste in classical music as well, I like extremely bombastic classical music and I expect she'd be more likely to go for the soothing classical pieces. I think she would have a fair share of "silly" songs that she'd enjoy, odd radio jingles from the past for example. ...I'm not thinking of the old chiquita banana jingle that Russell likes, I am not thinking of the (...) I am thinking of the chiquita banana jingle. Dr. Cee's shop might actually have a thing or two in common with Ron and Russell's mum & stepdad's shop, and we know Mary enjoys Dr. Cee's... So there's a connection to strange little songs that my brain just made. ...Maybe she would have also enjoyed listening to horror movie soundtracks, Before Hell. (I've spent a lot of time over the years specifically thinking about pre-Hell Mary. After Hell some of her more odd/dark interests might not be fun to her anymore. I like guessing at who she was before the big trauma, and who she could have been had the story treated her better. #justiceformary)

(I feel like bringing up religion is important here, too. Mary grew up in such different times and I suppose she would have her religious background also influencing what she had access to music wise in her formative years, though we can't know for sure exactly how devoted she truly was Before Hell. The cross was on the fireplace obviously and she was engaged to Adam, but she also really enjoyed horror and knew about witches being part of the village's past. I personally take those as activities deviating from the religion she's part of, and not as like... Witch hunter qualities from an extremely devoted Christian. (... Which she was turned into later. Damn you, caos.) My personal take is that she perhaps prayed more After Hell in hope to find answers and perhaps also safety, no longer "messing around" because she's got a real concept of hell. But what I wanted to say about that is that maybe she has affection for certain hymns. I don't know much about hymns though so I can't list any that would have Mary vibes. Also I've mostly been spending time in the AfM verse, where her relationship to religion changes.)

Songs: one somewhat light-hearted choice that I find describes her well, before we go into darker subjects (I'll put cheerier ones at the very end): Self-Effacing by Sparks. TAKE UP SOME SPACE, QUEEN. YOU DESERVE IT. Okay, here we go... My choices for "dealing with holes in her life and having returned from hell". Rock'N'Roll Suicide by David Bowie. I think the lyrics are actually a really good fit and the end of the song brings some comfort ("OH NO LOVE, YOU'RE NOT ALONE", let someone please hold her hand throughout all this holy shit). I think that's a song that would have her back in dealing with everything. Which Way To Turn by Bryan Ferry, another song for the ones lost in life... Then we have Mary dealing with the mystery and loss of Adam: Don't Go Away by Sparks & Max Richter. (Geesh okay I'm having no mercy on myself here, that song gets me emotional anyway and now I'm mixing it with Mary's suffering. But okay, in a similar vein: Irreplaceable by Sparks might also apply.) I'm being very Sparks heavy here, because also I'm going to mention the Give Me Something collaboration by Yoko Ono & Sparks. Onto some cheerier ones. A song that makes me think of her doll collection (I love her for this, whether she intended them to be creepy or not. I think her doll collection is pretty badass): Wicked Little Doll by David Byrne. (It's not really a song with ultimate Mary vibes or anything, but it matches how I feel about her having those dolls hehehe.) Here's one that's entirely about the lyrics: With All My Might by Sparks. I've linked to the song but what you should really do is read the lyrics. It's a song of ultimate devotion and determination, and those are very much qualities Mary has in abundance. It's very much who Mary is, you'll definitely feel that if you end up reading AfM. (I am certain Adam was that way about Mary, too.) You may find more songs that Mary likes when reading Ro's fic, she actually put proper research in to figure out what songs fit the timeframe and what songs Mary would like. Here's my last one for Mary, from the Utena soundtrack. I simply think Mary would like this song:

(As a little bonus (you didn't ask but I'm telling you anyway) some Sparks songs that I felt were a good match with some other characters you know: My Other Voice for caos Lilith (this is purely about the lyrics, the sound is not a match with Lilith, but the lyrics are A Threat). I Married Myself for Missy/The Master at the end of S10 (...I am easily amused, I had considered making a video edit). Left Out In The Cold for Crowley (apply it to the fall). Onomato Pia for Aziraphale (I think he'd enjoy the song, but also they sing about "angelic hair" and a charm that surpasses the inability to speak a language, and Aziraphale is both very charming and terrible at French.))

[ogradyfilm]

Recently Viewed: The Dead Zone

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

Does a film truly need to slavishly adhere to a traditional three-act structure? Judging by his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, David Cronenberg certainly doesn’t seem to think so. Whereas a conventional thriller would probably conclude shortly after the clairvoyant hero’s final showdown with the sadistic serial killer he’s been pursuing, the director of Videodrome and Naked Lunch has barely gotten halfway through the narrative by that point; before the end credits roll, the protagonist—mild-mannered schoolteacher turned reluctant psychic Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken, distilling his oft-parodied on-screen persona into a genuinely compelling portrait of trauma and vulnerability)—still has to reconnect with his estranged former fiancée, protect his young protégé from an emotionally abusive father, and thwart the political ambitions of a deranged megalomaniac (Martin Sheen, voraciously devouring scenery in an apparent effort to beat Walken to the punch).

That Cronenberg manages to fit an entire miniseries’ worth of material into a lean 105-minute running time is nothing short of miraculous. He accomplishes this by adopting a simple yet elegant episodic framework: each of the movie’s approximately eight acts (by my admittedly rough estimate) is relatively self-contained, featuring its own fully-developed conflict, climax, and character arc. Collectively, these interconnected subplots orbit one unifying thematic question: Can precognition be used for the benefit of mankind, or is the very existence of such supernatural abilities inherently harmful?

The result is a beautiful cinematic paradox, simultaneously epic in scale and economical in design. Cronenberg has more than earned his title as "The Master of Body Horror,” but The Dead Zone clearly demonstrates that this label is also quite reductive; he is, above all else, a ridiculously talented storyteller.

[beatiewolfe]

Forbes profile imPRINTING by Beatie Wolfe at Museum of Science Boston

Pick Up The Phone And Listen In On Artist Beatie Wolfe’s Brain

Leslie Katz, Senior Contributor

Jan 29, 2025,08:00am EST

What’s it like to step inside someone else’s mind? That’s the question conceptual artist and composer Beatie Wolfe invites visitors to explore with her installation “Imprinting,” a sprawling sonic self-portrait of her brain getting its U.S. debut at Boston’s Museum of Science this week.

The installation features listening stations where participants tune in to “channels” that broadcast Wolfe’s original soundscapes — mosaics of conversations, music, poems and random sounds, each representing different regions of the brain and their respective functions. One station, for example, focuses on the cerebral cortex, which is involved in complex tasks such as reasoning and problem solving, while another highlights Wernicke’s area, considered key to language comprehension.

The channel for the limbic system, a part of the brain that gets activated when we listen to music, plays Wolfe’s own compositions, from her first taped demo as a 9 year old to present songs that lean toward folk and indie rock. For the channel connected to the hippocampus, the brain’s primary memory center, the Anglo-American artist recorded herself reading many hours of old journal entries spanning her adolescence.

“If you were to listen to that, you’d hear essentially someone aging from 11 to 19 — these inner monologues, thoughts, reflections, poems, rants, transmissions, breakdowns, breakthroughs,” Wolfe said over Zoom from London, where she lives when not in Los Angeles. “The way I think about it is if that area of the brain could speak, that’s probably what it would sound like.”

“Imprinting,” which premiered at the 2023 London Design Biennale, opens at the Museum of Science on Thursday and runs through the end of the year. The piece is both deeply personal and universally resonant, offering a window into Wolfe’s inner world while inviting visitors to reflect on their own.

“By creating a sonic brain self-portrait, it’s almost as if you create a way for other people to think what their own sonic self-portrait would be,” Wolfe said. Those unable to attend the exhibit will be able to call in to each listening station by phone using the numbers listed below.

Breaking Down Neuroscience Barriers

The stations connect wall-mounted vintage phones to a retro-futuristic data-encoded aviation cap fitted with eight glass data discs, each tied to audio from a different listening station. The bespoke hat, stored behind glass at one end of the installation, was designed by Mr. Fish, the iconic U.K. fashion brand that dressed David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger in the 1970s. Mr. Fish also created a wearable jacket for Wolfe’s 2016 album Montagu Square that let people hear its songs by tapping their phone to fabric embedded with short-range wireless technology.

For each “Imprinting” channel, Wolfe edited hundreds of hours of audio to ensure no listener hears the same sequence twice, and she collaborated with Microsoft Research Labs to encode the vast aural landscapes in the “thinking cap” connected to the phones.

For most people, clinical terms like medial prefrontal cortex won’t immediately evoke the intricacies of emotional regulation and social behavior that that part of the brain influences. The Museum of Science says “Imprinting” transforms these concepts into relatable, sensory experiences.

“The installation breaks down barriers around neuroscience and terms that can be intimidating or sterile by connecting them to our everyday experiences,” James Monroe, the museum’s creative director of programming, said in an email interview. “Our ability to collaborate, the way we communicate and build relationships, our artistry, the moments we hold dear to us throughout our lives… all of these treasured aspects of being human are directly connected first and foremost to our brain, and I think Beatie illustrates this in a singular and profound way through ‘Imprinting.’”

Inspired By An Oliver Sacks Book

Wolfe became fascinated with the mysteries of the brain after reading neurologist Oliver Sacks’ 2007 best-seller Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which she now calls her favorite book. In it, Sacks investigates the power of music to move and heal us.

“Even if you read a couple of case studies it changes your whole perspective on what music is,” Wolfe said.

When the artist’s father-in-law was diagnosed with dementia, the book’s insights inspired her to see what would happen if she performed music for residents of his Portuguese care home. Standing at the front of the room with her guitar playing original new songs — tunes the residents wouldn’t have recognized, and in English, a language most didn’t speak — she didn’t anticipate much of a reaction.

Instead, “I was seeing people waking up and singing along in their version and clapping,” Wolfe said. “At the end of the performance, the director of the care home said, ‘In the 16 years I’ve been here, this is the best I’ve ever seen the group. This is amazing.’”

That experience led Wolfe to conduct extensive research with Stanford University scientists into music, memory and dementia. “Music is so beyond entertainment,” she said. “It is key to our sentience as human beings in ways we’re only just beginning to understand.”

“Imprinting” is a centerpiece of the Museum of Science’s 2025 offerings related to the theme “Being Human.”

“We will explore all aspects of humanity,” the museum’s Monroe said. “Our brains and bodies, our communities, how technology has impacted and improved our lives, and what is inside that connects us all.”

How To Call Into The Listening Stations Remotely

Here are the numbers you can dial to hear each soundscape in “Imprinting.”

“Conversations” channel (representing Wernicke’s area): 617-589-0001

“Collaborations” channel (representing the medial prefrontal cortex): 617-589-0002

“Inner Self” channel (representing the hippocampus): 617-589-0003

“Outer Self” channel (representing the cerebral cortex): 617-589-0004

“Memory” channel (representing the neocortex): 617-589-0005

“Sounds” channel (representing the primary auditory cortex): 617-589-0006

“Music Rewind” channel (representing the limbic system): 617-589-0007

“Music Forward” channel (representing the limbic system): 617-589-0008

Journalist Leslie Katz, a Forbes contributor since October 2023, covers science

[lucysautblog]

David Uzochukwu

Uzochukwu is a very talented photographer who in my opinion in more creatively driven through his photography creating surreal, emotive images. His Self portraits have so many concepts behind them which creates question behind his pictures. He uses light to illuminate himself as the subject through warm light.

The composition of himself seen in the pictures above is often using the rule of thirds placing him in the centre and having probs around him. I think the composition of him laying in the grass is especially emotive and interesting because of its simplicity yet the depth of the picture and the way he is positioned leaning backwards creates an emotional piece.

[denimbex1986]

'Looking back, 2023 was a year of wild swings. And two big strikes (if you’ll forgive the pun) — first the Writers Guild and then the Screen Actors Guild took the studios and streamers to task, forcing production to a halt. Yet whatever was going on behind the scenes, Hollywood had a grand-slam year, asserting its audacious cultural relevance with the historic double-header that was “Barbenheimer.”

Variety’s two chief film critics agree that Christopher Nolan’s portrait of the man behind the Manhattan Project is one for the ages — a “Lawrence of Arabia”-level feat about a turning point in human history, as seen through the haunted blue eyes of one of our finest actors...

Peter Debruge’s Top 10...

2. Oppenheimer

I admit to being underwhelmed by “Oppenheimer” on first viewing. (Hard to imagine, considering the scale, but it didn’t help that the Imax print broke at the film’s press screening, forcing the theater to switch over to a lower-res backup projector — a twist that must have horrified control freak Christopher Nolan.) Grand as anything David Lean ever directed, this massive, awe-powered biopic had been marketed as the making of the atomic bomb, the detonation of which occurs at the two-hour mark, with a third of the movie still to go. Turns out, that last hour holds the (moral) key to why Nolan had to tell this story. After racing to beat the Germans, Manhattan Project super-brain J. Robert Oppenheimer (a never-better Cillian Murphy) faces the terrifying ramifications of what he’s wrought: We now live in a world of nuclear weapons, whose secrets inevitably fell into dangerous hands. I should have known that “Oppenheimer” would demand multiple viewings, as that was true of “Memento,” “Inception” and nearly all Nolan’s films. My advice to you: See it as big as possible as many times as it takes...

Owen Gleiberman's Top 10

1. Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s mesmerizing drama became a testament to the promise that serious movies for adults can, and will, have a future in movie theaters. In the wake of its success, however, many have asked: How is it that a densely packed three-hour movie about the father of the atomic bomb became a big-ticket blockbuster on the level of films featuring superheroes, avatars, and Tom Cruise? The answer lies in Nolan’s wizardry as a storyteller. He stages “Oppenheimer” as a coruscating light show of history, dazzling in every detail. It’s a film that draws you in with centrifugal force, even at it both celebrates and interrogates the fabled figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy as a charismatic mandarin whose scientific genius is matched by his self-justifying insolence. If you think the movie falls off in its last third, you haven’t watched it closely enough. Long after the bomb has been dropped, Nolan uses both the extended 1954 security hearing and the amazing performance of Robert Downey Jr. to place Oppenheimer in the crosshairs of judgment, revealing that his delusions were nearly as large as his heroism...'

[j--mno-art]

Orym

[image description

The image is a digital paint over of an old painting. Only the figure has been changed. The original is included below.

Seen waist up, Orym is a halfling man wearing green armour decorated in leaves. There is a green piece of fabric draped over one arm. He is leaning forward on his tattooed right arm and looking directly at the viewer. There is a simple green and red drapery background.

end id]

Paint-over of Self portrait by Anselm Feuerbach

and David with the Head of Goliath by Simon Vouet

[image description 2

The basic pose and background are the same as the paint over above. Pictured is young man with a mustache and short hair. He has a white shirt with large lapels. His jacket is black and has poofy sleeves

end id 2

image description 3

A half clothed David sitting with the head of Goliath. His bare right arm was used in the paint over above.

end id 3]

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/30/2022: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

I love this movie.

I hate making top 5-type lists, or being forced to name a favorite thing within your favorite field. If you really care about something, wouldn't your feelings about it be deep and wide, and not attached to a single monolithic example of it? So when pressed, I usually answer on instinct, and just say that David Cronenberg is my favorite director. It's more or less the truth. His imperious intelligence, polymorphic perversity, and his embrace of all god's creatures—even the pathological and parasitic—as the heroes of their own narratives, all add up to a form of satisfaction that I just can't get anywhere else. He's simply the best, and too smart, too hip, and too original to be imitated despite his indelible influence on the horror world at large.

Portrait by Jean Ber. Hubba.

But, if I'm being completely honest, when I think about him, I tend to think of the Cronenberg from the before-time. The horror films that he made between SHIVERS and CRASH are what characterize him for me as an artist. These are stories about evolution, whether humans are obliterated or uplifted by it, and the way some of us crave to accelerate evolution through personal and political means when it doesn't come fast enough to keep up with our evolving ambitions. Max Renn's indoctrination into the revolutionary cult of VIDEODROME, Seth Brundle's overhaul of his own genetics in THE FLY, and the underground war waged by post-humans in SCANNERS are probably the boldest and best-remembered representations of the artist's ethos. However, viewers like me may remember 2002's eXistenZ, a spy thriller about viscera-based video games, as the last truly Cronenbergian film—not that he stopped making good, even great movies, but thereafter he leaned into literary adaptations and psychodramas that explore social dysfunctions and deformations of the mind more than they do the possibilities of the flesh. I enjoyed those movies, but I also missed the classic Cronenberg, the experimental one who used the body as an allegorical battlefield for the struggle between old and new ideologies. I figured I wouldn't get him back, either, thinking of William Gibson's retort to readers who wish he still wrote the way he used to when he said (approximately) that Neuromancer is a young man's novel, and if he were still doing exactly what he did decades ago, then something would be seriously wrong.

Ronald Mlodzik as subversive dermatologist Adrian Tripod in CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970), about to be set upon by a hot piece of rough trade with webbed toes.

Anyway. I'm thrilled to be able to report that the old Cronenberg is alive and well in this sensational update of his 1970 short film CRIMES OF THE FUTURE. Many have been careful to note that the 2022 release is not a remake of that early project, but I would refute the assertion that the two movies have nothing in common beyond their sharing one of the greatest movie titles ever written. In CRIMES '70, a rogue dermatologist seeks a way to preserve humanity in the face of a gynocidal plague caused by toxic cosmetics. In that world, traditional heteronormative, masculine pageantry has all but evaporated, leaving the surviving males with increasingly androgynous forms of self-expression, contributing to the creation of rival factions with their own sociopolitical agendas. In order to protect the human race from extinction, the protagonist is faced with the decision to do something appalling to a small child. In CRIMES '22, the human race as we know it is threatened by Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, in which certain bodies rapidly produce new organs and new abilities that are incompatible with the old way of life. The government is taking oppressive steps to preserve the standard qualifications for human taxonomy, but the mercurial state of biological affairs is changing everything, including the expression of sexuality and desire. Ultimately, the ability of the new people to retain their human status will hinge on the protagonists' willingness to do something radical with the body of a child. With all that said, it is clear that the early short film planted the seeds of this late vintage masterpiece that is among the finest and most distinctive works of David Cronenberg's entire career.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022) focuses on Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, who is the new Rutger Hauer) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a pair of performance artists making the most out of Saul's acute case of Accelerated Evolution Syndrome. Saul's condition makes him dependent on a variety of high tech, Gigeresque orthotic devices, including a bed that shifts his body to ameliorate its painful inner workings, a chair that rearranges him in effort to support his waning ability to eat, and a special sarcophagus originally designed for autopsies that is now the chief tool of Saul and Caprice's artmaking. For their fevered fans, Caprice vivisects her partner, who experiences a post-sadomasochistic ecstasy at being penetrated and fondled from within. For many ordinary people, pain and infection are things of the past, so self-mutilation and body modification are now popular pastimes—or, as twitchy government spook Timlin (Kristen Stewart) puts it, "Surgery is the new sex." Embedded in this ever-expanding subculture are dissidents who seek to defend their status as human beings from the state's attempt to track and constrain the anatomical changes cropping up everywhere, which places Saul and Caprice in a moral quandary when they meet Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman). The rebel leader requests that the couple make a political statement by publicly performing the autopsy of his mutant son, who was slain by the child's phobic mother. This lands the artists in a world of espionage and identity politics with no lesser stakes than the fate of the human race, and the rules for who is allowed to partake in it.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE really has it all. It's beautifully designed, atmospheric, blackly funny, sexually subversive, profoundly disturbing, and most of all, timely. It takes place at the end of the world as we know it—a place many of us feel we already inhabit—but it holds out hope for a future in which being who you truly are, both privately and on the record, is a radical action in and of itself. Mutation and adaptation are the way forward, not conformity and foolish sentimentality, and these things are as good for the world as they are for the individual. But of course, Cronenberg doesn't apply this balm in the pat, corny way that I just did; the path to his ambiguous yet oddly optimistic ending is fraught and full of ambivalence as it orbits around one of the most shocking images that anyone has ever filmed. Somehow, in his late 70s and in our decadent age when explicit sex and violence dominate popular prestige television, David Cronenberg is still pushing buttons and violating our remaining boundaries with the skill and deliberation of a surgeon, and like a surgeon, he can change you if you let him. Surgery is the new sex. Long live the new flesh.

[light-is-typing]

Would you be down to write an Escape at Dannemora inmate sweat fic? I feel like it would be so hot to have jail Paul fuck a guard on a night shift or something 🙊. He acts so hard it’s definitely has me feeling some type of way!

Quiet

David Sweat x GN!AFAB!reader

Word count: 1.5 K

Summery: Reader wakes David late at night for a little help at the sewing room

Tags/warnings: NSFW!! Finger sucking

A/N: first time writing smut imma curl into a ball and hide away

It had been a very quiet night.

David Sweat was sitting on his bed, trying to draw an unsuccessful self portrait, when soft footsteps made him freeze in place. It wasn't that he was scared per say, but he couldn't deny the cold sweat damping his forehead.

He slides the canvas and his pencil under the bed with skillful speed and lays down, trying to soften his light panting.

"I know you're awake inmate Sweat." A whispery voice taunts at him. 

David can feel his slight annoyance at the know it all voice.

"I've got something to show you." the voice is tempting. David sighs and rolls around to look at the figure standing on the other side of the metal bars. He's trying his best to keep his temper down but something about this.. Surprisingly beautiful guard? screams danger.

Your fingers play with the keys in almost humorous manner. David shifts his body into a sitting position again. Your face lighten with a satisfied smile, and you put the keys in the cell's door, turning them around slowly as to not make a sound.

The door opens slowly, and you move out of the way, signaling him with you hand yo get up and follow you. He doesn't know why, but he does.

You guys walk silently, without exchanging any words, until you get to ta place he knows very well - the sewing room.

You walk around the sewing machines, and David follows you, his hand caresses them gently, it looks like being here gives him confidence, and his back straightens, his steps become heavier.

You stop in front of a big closet and turn around to face him, he doesn't stop in time and bumps into you.

"Woah, easy there" you chuckle.

"Sorry" he mutters, but he isn't really.

"Well," you squirm back. "I was informed that you're the best of the best in sewing here." A cocky smile stretches his lips. "And I was hoping you could help me with a special little project I'm working on" You finish.

"Hmm.. Let's see it" he gestures to the door, and you open it. Kneeling down, you take out a carton box full of cut out fabrics. You then look up at him. "I've been trying to make some bunny plushies for my little niece" you explain. David raises an eyebrow. "Bunny plushies?" His tone is almost mocking.

"Well, yes." You're slightly annoyed at his cockiness. "And as the best here, I was hoping you'd help me, but if you don't feel like it I can just put you back in your cell" you puff. 

"Hey, relax" he hand out his hand, suggesting his help; you take it, and he pulls you close.

you suddenly feel very small.

"I was just wondering what I get out of this." His hand hasn't left yours. In fact, his hold is firm, almost uncomfortably so, but instead of being scared, you feel a certain warmness forming in your stomach.

"Well.." Your voice breaks. "Ughm, well, what would you like?"

He doesn't answer immediately, instead, his pulls you in even closer.

"Can I ask for anything I want?"

"We'll see."

You try to back away, but even he notices it is an embarrassingly lazy attempt.

He chuckles, and you notice how white his teeth are, it makes a certain pulse go through your stomach and travel down to your panties. You swallow thickly. His eyes pierce you, a faint trace of a smile rests on his lips as his eyes travel all across your body, almost hungry looking. They then return to your eyes, and he looks directly at you when he says "I want to get to know you better."

"And just how are we going to do that?" You question.

"Well," David's hand leaves yours and slides up your thigh, making you gasp. "I think you have a slight idea." You swallow again, and lean against the table in the closet. David pushes you backwards, so now you're sitting on the table. Your legs open by themselves, and David takes on the invitation to get closer to you. He's just a bit taller than you, but with you sitting you seem much shorter than you are.

David leans down, and you feel his breath on your skin; it surprisingly smells minty, and you feel another tingle in your clit, which makes you shift your eyes down shamefully.

Then you feel a warm hand under your chin, and David lifts your head up so your eyes lock up again. He leans in even closer and thumb traces your lips - which part automatically. He smirks and shoves his thumb in slightly and a quiet moan escapes your lips, and makes you go beet red, which seems to only make him cockier. He pushes himself against you, and the brush of his surprisingly hard cock against your clit, even through your pants, brings a slight relief to your ache; you take in on the offer and grind against him, now getting used to hearing your whimpers bounce around the closet. David shoves his thumb deeper and it makes you gag, but he doesn't seem to mind, he's too busy focusing on how good your cunt feels against him. He leans down and bites your ear, before whispering to it softly "you better stay quiet" before backing away. A disappointed whimper leaves your lips, only to be cut away by a strong hand groping your cunt. You then hear another chuckle. "You're so wet already" he whispers against your ear, and you shamefully realize your slick has already wet your pants.

"Sorry" you murmur, having a hard time speaking with his thumb still pushing on your tongue. 

"No need to apologize," he scoffs, "I like it."

And with that you melt into his hand, grinding your pulsing clit against him eagerly and making stifled sounds. His hand wettens with your slick until the movements are sloppy and fast, you squirm under him and your breaths become short and stuttered. "I think I'm gonna-"

He backs away again, and you look at him, confused. "Why'd you stop?"

"You think you're the only one allowed to have fun?" He asks half seriously.

"Oh."

His wet hand leaves his belt shiny as he unbuckles it. His hand disappears inside his pants, and he storkes himself a few times before taking his cock out, and you gasp at the size of it. It's not too big, but it's definitely not too small. He shifts himself closer to you again, and his now free cock brushes against you. His hard form is even better feeling against you and a loud moan breaks from you.

"Please David" you breathe out, and he doesn't need anymore encouragement.

A firm hand slides down your pants, then your panties, and an experienced thumb brushes gently at your clit. 

"Fuck-" you practically scream at the touch."more. More!" You beg, but his hand leaves you needy and wanting more, as it goes back to stroking himself. He then guides himself and lands at your entrance, only to tease it, pushing in slightly, then coming back out, sending electricity all through your body. Finally you've had enough, and you push down at it, moaning satisfyingly as he hits a good spot. The feeling of your walls against him changes something in his actions - they become sloppy and almost compulsive, as he groans and holds you down by your chest, pushing even deeper. His hand travels upwards as he starts fucking into you, and lands on your neck, holding it to balance himself. Two fingers lay on your chin, touching your bottom lip, and your pink tongue greets them, as if to ask - "can I taste you?"

He agrees to the silent question immediately and shoves them in again, moaning as your wet tongue explores them, and you can feel him twitch inside you; and you wonder if he's already so close to cumming.

Your thoughts are cut with the feeling of his strong thumb rubbing you again. 

"God- David-" you bite down at his fingers.

"Shhh" He hushes you aggressively, a slight trace of pain on his face. As you look up, you explore them. His high cheekbones are colored red and are shiny with sweat, even his buzzed hair his all shiny.

Him quickening his movements brings you back to the feeling in the lower part of your body, and his thumb matches his pace, sending pulses of pleasure through your body.

He doesn't stop this time, and you're surprised to hear a high pitched whimper slipping out of his mouth, and he shivers.

You try to, but you can't help but smirk at how desperate he got so fast; but then again, the throbbing in your core argues in his defense.

Suddenly his movements stop, and he's panting, trying to catch his breath.

"I'm sorry, if you want me to last longer I need to-"

You're having none of that, and you push down into him, taking control as you fuck yourself into him again and again. 

"Please, I'm serious if you keep doing that- fuck!" And you feel a familiar hoteness filling you as he twitches and shivers and rutts into you. 

The hotness against the right spot pushes you over the edge, and a hushed scream echoes in the closet.

"Hello?" A muffled voice outside the closet cuts your orgasm, and as your wide eyes meet David's, both your hearts sink as you come to the same realization. Oh no.

[youarestellarverse]

@starlightshadowsworld tagged me in a thing about sexuality headcanons!

For the actual canon, my general feel is that it started at a period of time when having a main queer character in a series for young people that wasn't specifically a Queer Series was unacceptable. This has fortunately started to change in recent years (partly because of Nico— I cannot overstate the impact it had that a hugely popular author who could afford to take that risk insisted on taking that risk; the difference in post-HOH mainstream queer youth characters is so massive it makes my fourteen year old self weep as she keyword searches "gay and lesbian" on her library network because David Levithan and Annie On My Mind were her only options). The books seem to be adapting from "everyone is straight because Hyperion Publishing is owned by Disney" to "young teenagers are still figuring things out". I like that method, personally!

So that's why I'm answering this over here on my ficblog instead of my main @stillneedsmorekissing. I present the sexualities I am using in my fic (plus a few kink roles for the ones I've actually considered):

Percy is a sub who uses both "bisexual" and "pansexual":

"You know I think you're breathtaking."

"Against all odds, yes, I do."

"How do you feel?"

Percy blinks, like he hadn't been expecting it.

"I feel...pretty," he says, after a long minute of quiet. Then he smirks, and Jason gets where he's going with it a second before he makes the West Side Story reference. "And witty. I have too much baggage from the 'that's so gay' craze to use it as an umbrella term for myself, but 'bi' rhymes with 'guy', so it almost works if you swap it in and moosh two stanzas together."

"Are you still using pansexual too?" Jason takes another photo, watching as Percy relaxes into the pillow again, his eyes closing.

"Yeah. They both fit, they're both comfy, so why not?" He half-shrugs. "Pan is probably closer if we're going purely by definition, but they're similar enough that I don't care about making a firm distinction for myself. Plus I got most of my pride stuff secondhand from Paul, and he got most of it, like, a decade before pansexuality was coined. He even gave me a couple vintage bi-angle pins."

Jason immediately pictures a set of two tri-tone portraits, one for each flag. That's a project he'll definitely have to use Rachel's studio for; he'll need oil paint and a large canvas to do it justice.

"I wonder how he'd feel about you calling them vintage."

(From Here in Our Bed, chapter 12)

Jason is a bisexual dom.

Nico is a gay switch.

The rest are under a cut because they spoil some plans.

Reyna is biromantic and asexual/sex-neutral (she's not bothered by doing it, but she wouldn't seek it out for fun). She is, however, very much a domme...which can be a tiny bit of a problem, because:

Piper is a lesbian, and also a domme-leaning switch.

This is set up for the bisexual Annabeth to figure out she thought she was a domme, but she's actually a sub-leaning switch— she was misinterpreting her bratty streak. She and Piper are both allosexual and she doesn't mind getting ganged up on and losing fights, which balances out the relationship and gets it running smoothly again!

Hazel is straight.

Frank is straight with one (1) exception.

Leo is the exception, and isn't actually sure how he identifies, because it doesn't occur to him until many years down the line when they enter a V with Hazel and he eventually has to come to terms with the fact that at some point he acquired a boyfriend and made the V a triangle when he wasn't looking. Tentatively, he ends up landing simply on "queer", because nothing else seems to fit exactly right and that's what it's there for!

I'm still considering gender, because I'm undecided on whether my current Brand New Genderfluid Awakening Process is something I want to work through fictionally yet, but I suspect Percy will ultimately decide he's a guy with an asterisk.

(Also, the mental image of Jason using drag as a vehicle for self-expression after a lifetime of being molded into the Paragon of Masculine Ideals will not leave me alone, so there's that.)

That's about all I got so far!

[soracities]

do you have any posts on saying 'I love you'? a little more specifically on a hesitation or struggle to use those words and their bigness...if that makes sense

“Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West

“I’m sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me. The words, like moist fingers, appear before me full of promise but then run away to a narrow black room that is always dark, where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold, devouring the thing I feel. I want the force of attraction to crush the force of repulsion and my inner and outer worlds to pierce one another, like a horse whipped by a man. I don’t want words to sever me from reality. I don’t want to need them. I want nothing to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom, or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond, or the sound of water poured in a bowl.”

— Henri Cole, “Gravity and Center”

— Sufjan Stevens, “Futile Devices”

“Do you remember the way the girls would call out "love you!" conveniently leaving out the "I" as if they didn't want to commit to their own declarations. I agree that the "I" is a pretty heavy concept.”

— David Berman, ‘Self-Portrait At 28′

“You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.”

— Richard Siken, ‘You Are Jeff’

“Because my love for you Is higher than words, I have decided to fall silent.”

— Nizar Qabbani, from The Book of Love (Untitled Poem #4)

— Emma (2020), dir. Autumn de Wilde

“More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street — which was, of course, I love you.”

— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds.”

— Katherine Mansfield, excerpt from a letter

— Margaret Atwood, “We Are Hard”

“...and I want to tell you something, come close I want to whisper it, to pour the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you, listen, it’s simple, I’m saying it now, while I’m still sober, while I’m not about to weep bitterly into my own glass, while you’re still here—don’t go yet, stay, stay, give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don’t let me drop, I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up.”

— Kim Addonizio, from “Glass”

“I never call your name, but you are in me like the song in the nightingale’s throat even when it’s not singing.”

— Dulce María Loynaz, “LVII”

“…forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language — “

— Emily Dickinson, letter to Susan Gilbert  

— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

[fava9]

The Beauty of MichaelAngelo’s David Sculpture

“David” by Michaelangelo is recognized to be one of the most remarkable sculptures in history as it represents the High and Politics Renaissance. This sculpture is a 17.0 ft marble Renaissance sculpture that was built in the 1500s and was placed in the Palazzo Vecchio where it remained until 1873. It depicts the Biblical hero David before his battle with Goliath, a first amongst famous portraits of David. He is sculpted to be standing still in a classical pose known as the contrapposto but he remains to exude self-confidence with the slingshot he carries.  

According to (Accademia, 2021), the sculpture was initially crafted in 1464 by two Renaissance sculptors, Agostino di Duccio and Antonio Rossellino. Unfortunately, the sculptors rejected the continuation of the sculpture due to the enormous amount of effort they had to put in in order to perfect the sculpture. This led the Cathedral of Florence to ask Michaelangelo to finalize the sculpture for their collections of tribunes. 

The structure on Michelangelo's statue was a unique concept. Despite the fact that the Biblical story on how David triumphed over Goliath was a popular subject in Renaissance art, Michelangelo’s sculpture depicts David before his battle. This is because during the Renaissance era, there have been famous works on David such as Donatello and Andrea del Verrochio’s bronze of David. However, both works capture David after the battle given that the sculptures hold the head of his killed foe. This is one of the reasons why it makes the sculpture unique. Michaelangelo strayed away from the common depiction of David’s victory over the Philistines. Instead, he captured David during the moments before his battle when he was in deep thought. It only confirms that David did not defeat Goliath with sheer force, but it was out of his cleverness with the usage of his slingshot.   

Michelangelo's David appears restless and battle-ready. His brows are furrowed, his neck is tense, as are the muscles in his nose and lips, and his eyes are fixed on something distant. Despite his attentiveness, he stands in a relaxed contrapposto stance where his sling lazily flung over his left shoulder. This strident stance and relaxed look are designed to portray the brief period of time when David is contemplating to fight.

Comparing Michaelangelo’s sculpture of David to other sculptors, his depiction of David is older.  For comparison the sculpture of Donatello’s David and Michelangelo’s David, differ in material that is used, Donatello makes use of bronze and Michaelangelo uses marble besides this Michelangelo depicts David to be older as compared to the young male that most artists depict David as (Richman-Abdou, 2021).

However what these two sculptures have in common is that both integrates contrapposto to their work. The sculpture of David by MichaelAngelo, we see that David leans on his right leg while the left leg is bent, we also see his left arm flexed towards him and his right arm resting on his right leg. This also reflects the balance that the sculpture has as it represents a living being and on the sculpture we can see which parts of the sculpture are ‘relaxed’ or have ‘tension’. The sculpture itself, however, is disproportionate as some of its features are slightly larger than the others, the head and hands are bigger compared to the rest of his body. (David by Michelangelo: Renaissance Marble Statue, Florence, 2021).  The sculpture also integrates scale as it stands at 17 feet tall, since its intended location is on the roof of the cathedral. 

Compared to the Michelangelo statue of David, well-known statues of David by Caravaggio ( David with the head of Goliath) and Donatello (“David '' bronze sculpture) focused more on the moment after he had slain Goliath.  Michelangelo is more interested in portraying David's reaction and movement before the fight. 

We now see the other side of the story before the battle. Michelangelo’s David looks stiff and ready at this apex of concentration. His eyebrows show anger; his neck stretches; his muscles in the lips and nose are somehow tight, and he seems to look at something in a distance. In comparison, he stood relaxed. The invisible sling carried over his shoulder shows us his victory is not won by force but cleverness. He decides to either fight or flight. Therefore, he demonstrates extraordinary self-confidence and concentration. His eyes are gazing and targeting his opponent. While male nude is seen in the Greek art of the High Classical Period, Michelangelo refocused his attention on the mental aspect of the story of David's victory against Goliath.

References

Accademia, 2021. Michelangelo's David: Admire World's Greatest Sculpture at Accademia Gallery. 

[online] Accademia.org. Available at: <https://www.accademia.org/explore-museum/artworks/michelangelos-david/> [Accessed 18 November 2021].

Visual-arts-cork.com. 2021. David by Michelangelo: Renaissance Marble Statue, Florence.

 [online] Available at: <http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/sculpture/david-by-michelangelo.htm> [Accessed 19 November 2021].

Richman-Abdou, K., 2021. Why Michelangelo’s ‘David’ Is an Icon of the Italian Renaissance. 

[online] My Modern Met. Available at: <https://mymodernmet.com/michelangelo-david-facts/> [Accessed 19 November 2021].

My Modern Met. 2021. Why Michelangelo’s ‘David’ Is an Icon of the Italian Renaissance.         

             [online] Available at: <https://mymodernmet.com/michelangelo-david-facts/> 

             [Accessed 19 November 2021].

[unabashegirl]

Where David and the reader have a tennis match and she beats him. LOVE YOUR WRITING BTW!!!!

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 

—Sure! I am sorry it took me so long to finish! 

masterlist

“Are you actually recording this?” You exclaim as you watch him bring out his camera from across the net. Everyone in the squad has come out to watch the competition between the couple unfold. 

“I have to! Have you seen what you are wearing?” He asks just before switching on the camera and shoving it to your face. Your cheeks tint red as all of your friends cheer at you from the sideline. You are wearing a skirt and a tight top that accentuates your breasts making them look bigger than they truly are. The outfit looks cute on you.

You cross your arms across your chest feeling a bit self-conscious from everyone’s prying eyes. It feels nice having everyone’s attention you, but you are not used to it. 

“Come here and let me get a better look at you” He reaches out with his opposite hand. He wears a mischievous smile only causing you to feel hotter under the Californian sun. You carefully walk up to him, using the net as a barrier between you. “Remind me, why we haven’t played tennis before?” 

“You’ve never asked’ You shrug, rolling your eyes at him. “You always ask the boys especially Jason. Plus, I would had embarrassed you” He chuckles at your comment; amused by your sudden playful attitude. He is fond of this side of you. David rarely gets to see it especially in front of his friends. You are usually a giggling, blushing, and shy mess. 

“What are we betting on?” He purses his own lips making eye contact with you. “Jase — come over here”. 

“Are you sure you want to do this babe?” You probably shouldn’t be betting with the devil himself, but it all too tempting. Either way, what could go wrong? He is your boyfriend and he has proven to you that he would never hurt you. Plus, you would love to beat him at his own game. The simple thought is too satisfying to forget or ignore. 

“What’s up, guys? Are you starting or what?” Jason, out of breath asks, completely entertained by the idea that had been proposed by David. It was he, who had come up with it. It all started because you had brought your high school yearbook to show David your senior portrait. He had looked through it and found an old picture of you playing tennis in the varsity team of your high school. He was instantly fascinated. 

“We are betting on the game and we need a witness” David keeps his gaze on you. He hasn’t torn his eyes away from yours since you had approached. Jason throws his head back, laughing heavily at his friends. He can only imagine how badly all of this can end. 

“Fine” He exhales, “Are you sure this is smart?” Jason knows how unbelievably in love each of you is to one another and he would hate to allow this type of shenanigans to ruin anything. David’s lips part open, but before he can respond, you interrupt. 

“We are both adults...” You shrug, “I am sure we can handle it, right babe?” 

“Took the words right out of my mouth, baby” David smirks, “What’s it going to be then? — I already know mine” 

Jason exhales loudly and pushes his hair back as he feels the tension growing. 

“You go first” You shrug as you hold your tennis racquet close to your body. 

“If I win, then I get to blindfold you and put it on the vlog” A broad smile that reaches his eyes appears across his face. You raise your eyebrows and pull them together, breaking eye contact in the process. He knows what is your biggest fear, you had told him after he promised to never blindfold you. David watches your expressions and your uncertainty arising. For a second, he thinks you are going to back out of the competition. 

“Fine” You agree after you pull yourself together, “Then if I win I get to give you a haircut at home” It’s David’s turn to act surprised and scared. He hates getting a haircut and only allows one person to cut it — an actual professional. 

“That is not fair! The damage to my hair is permanent! And people will see it!” He complains followed by a slight laugh. 

“You are putting a live animal on me!” You fire back. 

“My hair is permanent!” David argues, “You love my hair!” 

“It will grow back” You roll your eyes, “You are such a drama queen” You and Jason laugh at him. 

“It’s still not fair!” You sigh heavily, not believing his cowardness. 

“Then I guess you better not loose” You raise an eyebrow and stretch out your hand for him to shake. 

“Fine. I don’t want to hear you whining or begging for forgiveness when I am done with you” David points at you and even if he tries to act all tough and confident in his performance —he can’t hide his sly smile. He takes your hand and gently shakes it before breaking off. 

“Good luck honey!” You yell out for everyone to hear as you walk back towards your right side of the court. 

“Beat his ass, Y/N!” Natalie yells from the side court followed by a few loud whistles. You can see David’s head shaking as his head is down. He stands diagonally from you, behind the baseline, dribbling the fresh tennis ball that he has just pulled out of his pocket. You do the same and stand behind the baseline knowing that his serves are long and fast enough to easily reach you. 

In matters of milliseconds, his feet rise from the floor and he swings at the ball in the air. The sideline goes quiet as they watch the competitive couple play against the other. The ball travels quickly and bounces exactly where you had predicted it, giving you the perfect opportunity to receive it and swing it back. David is too shocked by your agility and skills to swing back at the ball. The ball is out of bounce before he can blink. The sideline goes crazy, cheering and yelling for you, only busting your confidence. 

David bites his tongue and refrains from complimenting you and gawking at your ability to play tennis. He honestly just wants the game to end so he can take you home and have his way with you. In his defense, you are also craving the same thing. He looks too good in white especially when he wears his tennis hat backward. 

“Not bad, Ms. Y/L/N” He exclaims causing your smile to grow bigger. He walks across the court as he prepares himself to serve again. 

And so it begins again; the back and forth of the ball, from one court to another. The only prominent sounds come from the swinging, hitting of the ball, and their shoes being dragged against the floor. It’s a hot day in Los Angeles making it harder for the couple, but the two of you are too competitive to ever forfeit. On the sixth game of the third set, both of you are dripping in sweat. You had won the first set whilst David the second. This last game determines the winner but both can barely make it to the baseline without gasping for air. 

“This is ridiculous!” Corinna yells as she fans herself. “Just give up already David!” 

“Why should he give up?!” Jonah responds, “He has played just as well as Y/N”.

“His hair is going to grow back!” Natalie backs up Corinna as they all sit under the shade. 

“Tell that to his confidence if he lets his girlfriend win!” Jeff puffs as he leans over, his legs are spread out trying not to over sweat. “And don’t get me started on his ego”. 

“I think we can all live without a little bit of his ego” Zane rolls his eyes as he pulls his shirt over his head.

You and David look at each other from across the court. It’s the first time that you get a good look at him since the game has started. Everything is always so quick that it doesn’t allow you to have a good look at him. His hair is dripping wet, his hat even has a sweat stain from his forehead. His high cheekbones are tinted red, probably sunburned since he had refused to wear any sunscreen when you had offered. His lips are slightly parted just like yours; trying to catch his breath. 

He flashes at you a small smile as he wipes the sweat off his forehead. You look just as messy and sweaty. Your ponytail has gotten saggy. A few strands of hairs are sticking out in different directions. Your cheeks are tinted from the rise in temperature. You smile weakly at him as you feel his eyes on you. You can still hear your silly friends fighting from the sidelines. 

“Okay, let’s finish this” You stand straight up and make your way to your starting position. Once again, it’s David’s time to serve. Therefore you stand at the baseline and hope to win. 

The others finally quiet down as soon as David servers. His serve is a bit less strong due to his exhaustion. You run-up to the ball and hit it back with the only energy and stamina left in you. David runs up to the ball and hits it; aiming to the opposite side. Before you run-up to the ball on the other side, you already can see that it’s out of bounce. It touches the ground just a few inches out of the white line giving you the winning point. 

You look over at David who keeps blinking repeatedly, repeating the play in his head, wondering where he had gone wrong with his swing. A stupid mistake had caused him the game. His head drops as you walk back to the sideline in search of water. Zane is the first with his hands on you. 

“YOU WON!” He yells as he lifts you off the floor and spins you around. You laugh lightly when he sets you on the floor and hands you an ice-cold water bottle. Everyone who had bet on you hugs you tightly as you rummage through your bag for a hand towel and sunblock. 

“Thank you guys” You smile then make your way towards David who sits on the floor, looking defeated and exhausted. You use your cold water to wet the clean water while you walk towards your boyfriend. He looks up at him and gives you a lazy smile. “Hi” 

“Hey, baby. Congratulations”  You kneel beside him and take his hat off, revealing his messy, drenched in sweat hair. You take the water bottle and pour some cold water on top of his head, trying to refresh him and lower his body temperature. The last thing you need is for him to have a heat stroke. Jeff who sits nearby and the rest of the squad watches the interaction silently. 

You fold the wet towel and press it against the nape of his neck instantly making him sight in relief. 

“Hold it—right there,” You say as you open the sunscreen and squirt some, on the back of your hand. David remains quiet and just watches you. You gently apply sunscreen on his face. You know it’s a little bit too late, but it could prevent him from continuing to burn his face. Just when you are done you run your fingers through his hair, getting it out of the way and his eyes. “How do you feel?” You ask as you replace his hand, holding to towel for yours. “Can anyone bring me another water bottle?” 

“Better” He smiles, “You know— you are too selfless” His heart swoons for you and your kindness. “How come you always take care of me before worrying about yourself?” 

“Because I love you” You whisper as you watch him starting to recompose. “You take care of the people that you love” David smile grows, he reaches out and grabs your forearm. He tugs you down and presses his lips against yours. 

“I love you more” He responds after he pulls away. Jeff interrupts the sweet moment with two bottles of water. 

“Your hair looks great like that man” He compliments David on his slick back. 

“You better enjoy it and say goodbye to it cause it’s going” Jeff chuckles and shakes his head. “Y/N is cutting it”. 

“I’m actually not going to do so” His mouth hangs widely opened— shocked and somewhat confused. 

“But you won...” You shrug while you take a sip out of your water. 

“I wanted you to actually play as if I was one of the boys. I didn’t want you to let me win just because I am your girlfriend” You explain after feeling the satisfying contrast of ice-cold water running down the inside of your throat; cooling you instantly. “Plus, I love your hair”. 

“What the fuck am I going to do with you, Y/N?” A mischievous smile appears as he gazes at you. You only smile back at your boyfriend. Your plan had worked according to the plan. 

[grandhotelabyss]

Though I don’t really understand him or any other philosopher, I did enjoy writing a little essay on Heidegger after perusing the popular volume of his aesthetics, Poetry, Language, Thought. I took it as an opportunity to watch one of Michael Sugrue’s Great Books lectures since I’ve run across several references to them lately, most recently in David Perrell’s long essay, “Saving the Liberal Arts.” How do we save the liberal arts? Through Heidegger’s own most persuasive recommendation: to slow down and accept the human validity of what is not rationalizably productive. The legendary lecturer Sugrue is more skeptical, from what alternate ideological position I haven’t yet divined. (Does he criticize Heidegger’s crypto-religious discourse from the perspective of a believer or an unbeliever? In preference to Heidegger, he quotes both Eliot and Carnap.) For our audiovisual Monday, I offer you Sugrue’s eloquently prosecutorial lecture—and an extraordinary comment under it. A characteristically self-satisfied viewer accused the professor of mispronouncing Dasein in the French style, and Sugrue’s offspring, who appears to control the account, responded with a transcription of father’s brilliant riposte:

Dad laughed and said, "Yes, he right, and he doesn't even mention my other evils. I've always had an impulse to feign competence to Americans, despite the fact that their nuanced examination of academic lectures for creeping Frenchification left me open to summary judgement as a poseur. However, since the election of Mr. Trump and Mr Biden, proving competence to Americans seems a rather low bar to set, like jumping out a basement window. An inclination to undertake study with the Jesuits implies a well established cultural constellation prior to matriculation. Not just anybody applies to or gets admitted to a Jesuit school. Read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man if you need to find out how saturating such a Catholic tradition can be. One of the funny ironies of 20th century literature is found in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain with the character Naptha. Naptha was a Jesuit Jewish Communist who battled against Enlightened humanism in the person of Settembrini. Mann noted wryly that his friend, Georg Lukacs, the foremost Marxist cultural critic wrote effusively of Mann's novel to Mann himself, never raising and apparently never seeing the point Mann thought obvious: that the extravagantly contradictory Jewish Jesuit was a portrait from real life of Lukacs himself. The mad, self destructive casuist for a witches brew of mysticism and nihilism and bloodlust that Naptha turned out to be (in perhaps the greatest single scene in 20th century literature) could just as easily be modeled on Heidegger as Lukacs. Consider that Stalin spent only a year in a Orthodox seminary, but the influence of Orthodox culture is everywhere in his career. His cynical willingness to accept no limits on his pursuit of transhistorical ends situates in the line of pseudo secular political Gnostics: the Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge. Mythically inflated political fanaticism gave both  Stalin and Heidegger a blank check for eliminative violence, drawn on a depraved indifference to human life."

“[P]seudo secular political Gnostics”: I’m no philosopher, but this, if I’m not mistaken, is the sign of a conservatism informed by Eric Voeglin (and though I have read Voeglin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, I found it through a work of comic-book criticism by Peter Y. Paik). My own essay, by contrast, leans less on Heidegger’s political misdeeds and more on his failure to generate a properly poetic philosophy; I couldn’t help in the end but link the two faults, however, so tempting, even to me, is the thesis that bad taste is immoral.