#Noah Baker

[grrlmusic]

Lord Of The Isles & Ellen Renton - My Noise is Nothing

[pngjamie]

lil Animation of my oc Noah Baker :]

[itboytrends]

Antoni Porowski photographed by Damon Baker, 2018.

[awakenatmidnights]

one of my favorite ways to spend the time on this silly little app has to be looking up posts about songs or albums that i am currently obsessed with and see people sharing their love for them. i love it. i love seeing humans care so much about one song, each for multiple different reasons, to the point of writing so beautifully about their fondness for it and post it for strangers to see. it's like, you posted about this song in 2015 and your opinion about it resonates with me in 2024. i love it, please don't you ever stop.

[newlexlothario]

[slozhnos]

[calamitoustide]

Nothing's New

stay down - boygenius/‘nonchaloir (repose)’, john singer sargent/---/please stay - lucy dacus/growing sideways-noah kahan/Marya Hornbacher - Wasted/‘rest’, vilhelm hammershøi/how to never stop feeling sad - dandelion hands/The Last Day Of Pompeii//ocean vuong /favor - julien baker

[nestito702]

Noah Beck photograph by Damon Backer

[fairmoephelia]

I CAN’T LOVE YOU HOW YOU WANT ME TO

richard siken // boygenius // tumblruser cruellesummer // boygenius // mitski // noah kahan // richard siken

[image description: seven images that read and appear as follows.

1. “If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”

2. “I can’t love you how you want me to. I can’t love you how you want me to. I can’t love you how you want me to. I can’t love you how you want me to. I can’t love you how you want me to. I can’t love you how you want me to. I can’t love you how you want me to. I can’t love you how you want me to. I can’t love you how you want me to.”

3. an image of the salon d’hercule with torn edges, underneath it, text on lightly yellowed paper can be seen. on top of the image, there are separate words in capital letters with torn edges that read “always an angel, never a god”. the entire image is covered in small, yellow, reflective stars. in the corner, there is a label that reads “designed by @/cruellesummer”.

4. “I don’t know why I am the way I am, not strong enough to be your man, I tried, I can’t.”

5. “If you get to close and I’m not how you hoped, forgive my northern attitude. Oh, I was raised out in the cold.”

6. “Sorry, I don’t want your touch, it’s not that I don’t want you. Sorry, I can’t take your touch.”

7. “And no one can ever figure out what you want, and you won’t tell them, and you realize the one person in the world who loves you isn’t the one you thought it would be, and you don’t trust him to love you in a way you would enjoy.”

end ID.]

[chungledown-bimothy]

I love that The Great Gatsby sent Samantha Pauly and Noah Ricketts to the Pride stuff.

Featuring Nick and Jordan, not Gatsby and Daisy, for the first time for Pride feels like a point being made to everyone who's said that Nick and Jordan's relationship erases their queerness.

"Woe, bi4bi relationship played by queer actors who have both said they bring their own queerness into the characters be upon ye."

[vivitalks]

Last night I saw the Great Gatsby musical. Before I went, I reread the Great Gatsby book (for the first time since 11th grade!) to get a refresher on the source material and the original story. Having the book so fresh in my mind made seeing the musical really interesting, and now I am going to do something I never thought I'd do, which is post some lengthy meta about The Great Gatsby. If you haven't seen the musical, this post may still be interesting to read, but it does contain some mild spoilers, so I leave that up to you. If you also haven't read the book, godspeed lol.

There's a lot I could talk about here when it comes to the way the book was adapted for the stage. But there's one particular thing I want to zero in on in this post, and that's the "unreliable narrator" of it all.

In the book, Nick Carraway is our narrator. He's an unreliable narrator practically by default - the idea is that he's retelling events that occurred two years prior, from memory. But even knowing that Nick is probably not reporting all events and characters with complete accuracy, it's hard to know which parts exactly are wrong, or what might have happened in reality, because even though he's an unreliable narrator, he's still the only narrator and this is the only version of events we know. We're forced to take Nick as our surrogate and take him at his word. Until the musical.

(I wondered how the show was going to deal with the fact that the story of Great Gatsby is not only told by an unreliable narrator but also by an outside perspective - generally speaking the events of the Great Gatsby aren't happening to Nick, they're just kind of happening around him. Yet he's the voice of the story, so in that way he's central to it, and I was curious how they were going to balance that fact with the fact that Gatsby is functionally the main character.

I think they struck a really good balance in the end. Nick's beginning and ending lines, lifted verbatim from his book narration, frame him clearly as the anchor of the story - I think that's the best word for it; the audience jumps from scene to scene, many but not all of which contain Nick, but we know that Nick is always going to be where the action is, or that he will at least know about it. He may not be the main character, but he's an essential character. But I digress a little bit.)

The difference between the way the story is imparted to the audience in the book versus in the musical boils down to this: in the book, Nick "plays" every character, so all their dialogue and actions, their mannerisms and the way they're described and reported, it's all informed by the beliefs Nick holds about them. Whether he means to or not, his biases paint certain characters in certain lights, and because he is our eyes and ears to the story, we have no choice but to absorb those biases.

But in the musical, every character is literally played by a different actor. Nick can only speak for himself. Nick can only tell his own parts as they happened. He may be "telling" the story, but we're watching the story. We have the benefit of an unblemished perspective on things - we can watch the events the way they actually unfold, regardless of how Nick believes or remembers they went down.

This difference - between Nick as the narrator and Nick as merely his own voice - is crucial in how the musical develops each character, some of them fairly different from how Nick described them in the book. And there's one book-to-stage change - a fairly small one, all things considered - that, to me, illustrated this difference perfectly.

There's a line towards the end of the Gatsby book. Something Nick says in narration, after his final conversation with Tom Buchanan, talking about how Tom gave away Gatsby's name and location to George Wilson (which ultimately led to Gatsby's death). Nick writes:

"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"

When I read this line in the book, I couldn't help vehemently agreeing. Screw those rich assholes! Money does corrupt! Tom and Daisy ARE careless wealthy people! It was easy to side with Nick, not only because he was the only perspective on the situation that I had, but also because he said this in internal response to a conversation with Tom, who, I think we can all agree, is a major jackass and a deeply unsympathetic character.

But in the musical, this line is spoken aloud by Nick. And he says it to Daisy, in her house, as she's packing up to skip town after Gatsby's death. In fact, he doesn't just say it; he shouts it, visibly and audibly outraged at her audacity to lead Gatsby on, ghost him, skip his funeral, and then move away to avoid the fallout. Nick is angry and highly critical of Daisy. But because we're no longer confined to his shoes, we also get to see Daisy's reaction - not as Nick remembers it, but as Daisy actually reacts. And because of that, we're able to really see, and confirm, that "Daisy is rich and careless" is not the full story.

I have to credit Eva Noblezada for a phenomenal performance (duh). Daisy in this scene is emotional, grieving, and it's clear she has been trying to contain these feelings for the sake of her husband and her own sanity. She's remorseful, not that Gatsby is gone necessarily, but that she allowed herself to entertain the fantasy of running away with him, only for it to be torn from her. She is trying to make the best of her unavoidable reality. And then Nick tears her a new one, calling her careless, accusing her of destroying things and being too rich to care.

And as I watched that scene, I was no longer wholly on Nick's side. I understood that this situation was so much more complex than Nick's chastisement acknowledged. Sure, Daisy wasn't innocent, but she also wasn't the callous rich girl Nick made her out to be. She did love Gatsby. And she also had a whole life with Tom. She had a daughter. She was a woman in the 1920s! That's a kind of life sentence even wealth can't erase.

The way Daisy responded may not quite have landed with Nick (if we consider the kind of fun possibility that the musical is the events as they happened and the book is Nick retelling those events as he remembers them two years later, then clearly Nick's disdain for Daisy's actions overtook whatever sympathy he felt for her), but the musical gave Daisy the opportunity to appeal to us. The audience. Having this omniscient perspective of things allowed us to draw our own conclusions, and I found myself a lot more sympathetic towards Daisy when I could both see and hear how she responded to Nick's verbal castigation.

In the book, Nick is the narrator. In the musical, Nick is a narrator. But he's no longer the sole arbiter of the story. The audience got to make our own judgements on the events as we witnessed them. Every one of us was a Nick - beholden to our own biases, maybe, but at least not beholden to his.

[grrlmusic]

Mount Kimbie - The Sunset Violent

[slut4slytherinss]

“I’m 100% okay and not ever sad.”

Also me:

[xjulienbakerx]

that Memphis comes out of her at the funniest times

[newlexlothario]

[slozhnos]

the gatsby brainrot has fully cemented itself in my mind forever